Dark Age Of Camelot News Letter 2015

Solic Archers

Can't get enough of FH
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Greetings!
3494918e-3994-4927-bbb0-e1b45136124b.png

Welcome to Broadsword's very first Dark Age of Camelot Newsletter. We're excited to kick things off and look forward to updating you all on a regular basis.

The newsletter's goal is to outline Camelot's happenings as well as hint towards our future plans. If you don't have a chance to read every Herald or Facebook post but still want to know how the game is doing, this newsletter is for you!

Newsletter-exclusive announcements and rewards will abound so make sure you and your friends are signed up!

May you always find courage,
John Thornhill
Producer
In this newsletter...
  • News on the current Rites of Spring event
  • 1.117E is on the way to Live servers!
  • The Casual Group Finder status and planned update
  • Realmwar Updates
  • Meet our Twitch Streamers
  • Changes to the Knight program
  • Hints of what else is to come!
I. The Harbinger of Spring returns!


From March 30th to April 3rd the Harbinger of Spring marauded around the roof of Dun Killaloe! The rare Gem of Harbinger one-time-drop given to any who defeated him! At one point there were over 850 players inside the battleground zone: intense!

Fear not! If you've missed the action in Killaloe, the killer bunny has hopped his way to Agramon in the Frontiers and will still grant the Gem of the Harbinger for those who can defeat him. If you didn't last year, you can get a Bracelet of Springtime Folly from him too! He will remain there until Friday, April 10th. As always, you can check the Herald for more information.

II. 1.117E Patch

The 1.117E patch went up to the Live servers this week. It's a small, bug-fixing update that also prepares several things behind-the-scenes for future updates. We'll have more info on those updates in the coming weeks!

Check the Herald for the announcement and notes!

III. The Realmwar

Carol, our Community Lead, has weekly updates on the status of the perpetual realmwar available on our facebook page. The action has been phenomenal in the frontiers with relics changing hands frequently and no one realm dominating.



Let the screenshots speak for themselves.

IV. Twitch Streaming

For the past couple months we've begun hosting several volunteers on our Official Twitch Channel to live stream themselves playing DAoC. It's been a huge hit and is a lot of fun to watch, not to mention rewarding for the winners of our game time card giveaways! Our schedule is listed on the right sidebar if you're interested in watching.

An archive of ALL of the previous streams is available on our Youtube Channel.

We wanted to take the time to thank those players who have volunteered their time to help showcase DAoC, because without them, this would never have worked! With that, we'd like to introduce and thank our streamers:
Yaycarol
DAoC's Community Lead, Carol Kenny, streaming mostly from her official game account - Eye in the Sky! A different perspective on the game.

Nerf
A DAoC Knight and streams mostly from his Ranger in RvR, solo.

Saxona
A DAoC Knight and streams from the Gaheris PvE server.

Bolaksa
Bola enjoys leveling and playing the Battelgrounds so switches between realms each stream.

Dante
His Solo Shadowblade stalks the frontiers during the day and streams all the action.

Exorbiant
Streams battlegrounds and small man RvR.

Obelisk
A DAoC Knight and streams solo and group (8v8) RvR.

Haatcore
One of our German streamers! Streaming mostly group RvR but sometimes hops on his solo toons for some 1v1 action - Midgard.

Shileah
Another of our German streamers with her Hib group.

Amurdora
Amudora stream Monday night PvE raids on Albion and from his Solo Inf on Tuesdays.

Puppiluppan
A master of the Mid RvR BG streamers and entertains while sieging the realms!

Jay
Enjoys group and zerg RvR and streams both on Fridays from either Alb or Hib perspective.

Havendust
Solo stealther Havendust hops between his Inf and Nightshade on Sunday evenings bringing us all the 1v1 action.

Smakadop
Solo visi RvR'r streaming late nights or early mornings.

Grobo
Late night/Aussie time streamer with group RvR.

Cyrric
Runs small man and group RvR on the weekends, mostly Albion.

Tenemortem
Sometimes solo, sometimes grouped with friends. Hib Stealther RvR

Thanks again guys. A big thank you all of our viewers as well!

Interested in joining the streaming ranks? Contact our Community Lead, Carol (Beibhinn), on the Postcount forums about getting setup.

V. The Casual Group Finder

With patch 1.117, we launched the Casual Group Finder feature. Unfortunately, it's not being used to the extent that we hoped.


We will be spending some time to make it easier-to-use; but what exactly does that mean!?

For starters, we'll be adding it to a more conspicuous place on the UI rather than having it just on the rarely-used default group window. Next, we're also looking at dynamically popping up the window to characters when they first login to the game (with a toggle to disable the pop up). Finally, we're looking at some core changes to how it works that would allow players to queue for both RvR and PvE groups at the same time.

As always, we welcome your feedback and greatly appreciate what we've already received on this feature!

VI. Knights of the Roundtable

The Knights of the Roundtable program has been a great avenue for feedback and player-to-developer communication over the years but has perhaps not engaged the community to the extent that it could or should have.

As such, we are announcing the following changes to the program:
  • Knights will still be a great mouthpiece of the player base in terms of feedback and class balance but this is no longer their major focus.
  • Knights will instead be expected to lead scheduled in-game events, host Q&As, create written or video guides, stream, and be generally more involved with the community as a whole.
Some recent examples of this new involvement are the first ever Knight's Podcast that aired Sunday evening, as well as these video guides created by Saxona and Luvly. Several updates to the Camelot Herald's guides and content, which we outline in the next section, have been made by the Knights as well.


Due to the new focus of the Knight program and the time commitment now required, some Knights are unable to fully participate and have stepped down. The remaining Knights still form a very solid nucleus, but we're going to be opening the program up to new members. Applications for this program will be announced on the Herald in the coming weeks.
VII. What's Coming

Traveling Merchants
The rumor mill can be a fickle and tricky thing to navigate but all the rumors point toward the famed traveling merchants making their way to the realms' capitals again. The word is that they're only a few short weeks away!

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Pathing Adjustments
We're currently hard at work putting together the finishing touches of a new pathing pass on the New Frontiers. Once it's ready, we hope to have eliminated most, if not all of the problem areas for pets! We hope to have this update ready for our next major version!

User Interface
We're still in the initial planning phases but are looking at some significant adjustments to our UI, starting with a port of the famous custom interface, Bobs UI, into the game client, and potentially ending with several entirely new UI features. You can expect to see the first batch of changes towards the beginning of the summer!

New Account Center
Most, if not all of you are familiar with the Account Center website. Well, we're very happy to say that there is a brand new one on the way! This new A.C. is completely revamped from the ground up in look, user-flow, and features. We hope to roll this out sometime next month and are excited to make returning to the game easier than ever. Make sure to invite your friends back!

Camelot Herald
As mentioned above, we have lots of content-focused updates to the Herald already out and a few more coming in the next few weeks. We are excited to announce that we're also working on a complete revamp and re-skin of the website which will include many of the requested features from the old Herald. We're aiming to have this new site up and running by the end of the year!
 

CorNokZ

Currently a stay at home dad
Joined
Jan 24, 2004
Messages
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UI update!? Hopefully it will be aimed at resolutions higher than 800x600 :p
 

Mabs

J Peasemould Gruntfuttock
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
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still no news on fucking macro groups in RVR, or general radar etc :(
 

CorNokZ

Currently a stay at home dad
Joined
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Ye, just heard from a friend who sold his account that the radaring got to a point where it was unplayable without and people openly admitted using it.

Can't see how it can be so difficult to implement a piece of software which is capable of detecting these sorts of cheats. Uthgard had it, and people who used it got insta kicked, deleted their account and IP banned.

Macro groups are easily dealt with, from my experience, but they do ruin the pve a bit
 

BloodOmen

I am a FH squatter
Joined
Jan 27, 2004
Messages
18,091
still no news on fucking macro groups in RVR, or general radar etc :(

They don't care that's why. As long as they continue paying its fine, not as if they can afford to lose the subs at this point :p
 

Mabs

J Peasemould Gruntfuttock
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
6,869
so far this morning :
1 persons' 2 macro groups taking keeps
radaring crossrealm radar group killing everything that moves

yea sounds about right for most days
 

Ctuchik

FH is my second home
Joined
Dec 23, 2003
Messages
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They don't care that's why. As long as they continue paying its fine, not as if they can afford to lose the subs at this point :p

Or they don't know how big a problem it is because too few actually bother to tell them?
 

Gwadien

Uneducated Northern Cretin
Joined
Jul 15, 2006
Messages
19,900
lol macro groups on live.

That's 8 accounts.

That's £80 a month.

LOL.
 

BloodOmen

I am a FH squatter
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Or they don't know how big a problem it is because too few actually bother to tell them?

You should check postcount more often :p its their unofficial - official forum. You see threads daily there (which the developers and community manager check on a daily basis) they just don't care. They don't even bother replying to such threads saying they're doing something, you just see the same groups everywhere for months and months.

lol macro groups on live.

That's 8 accounts.

That's £80 a month.

LOL.

And that is exactly why they aren't being banned. It's quite funny really, they do live DAOC streams on Twitch quite regularly now (sometimes its just the knights discussing the game, other times its the community manager flying around invisible in RvR showing fights) no reason said manager cant be flying around looking for macro teams or speedhackers.
 
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Mabs

J Peasemould Gruntfuttock
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
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rumour is:
2 CSRs per session, US time only

only ban IF CSRS WATCHES YOU DO IT. they dont accept screenshots/chatlog/-videos- as proof

Macro groups are "bannable", apparently the target of the recent banwave, -however- they are rampant in RVR - 2 of them took mid relics last week, was /appealed by loads of people, nothing was done
 

Raven

Fuck the Tories!
FH Subscriber
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Dec 27, 2003
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44,767
Its a tough situation. There are so many cheating that if they were to ban them then they would lose half their revenue.

What they could do is say "Look, we know most of you are cheating scum and we are going to draw a line under it, if you cheat from this point on we will get rid of you"

1 week ban for getting caught the first time
1 month ban for getting caught a second time
Complete account character deletion for 3rd offence
 

Mabs

J Peasemould Gruntfuttock
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
6,869
perma bans only occur under one of three situations :

1- a trial account caught doing anything dodgy
2-an account with a history of warnings/temp bans/etc
3-an account that was banned before and re-opened in an amnesty

some acquantinces of mine were caught RP farming in ML10 3 weeks ago.
5 day ban each
no RPs removed
one got a new toon to RR5

its mental
 

BloodOmen

I am a FH squatter
Joined
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18,091
They need a no nonsense approach, if you get caught doing something shady, your out, game over, no second chances. Giving people constant slaps on the wrist is just encouraging people to do it more, because they know they can get away with it with minimal punishment.
 

Mabs

J Peasemould Gruntfuttock
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
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6,869
thing is the argument "oh we need the subs" is farcical

Option 1: ban cheaters, reduce player base a bit, keep it going. id even pay a bit more in sub to cover this cost
Option 2:dont ban cheaters, legit players get fed up and leave. you end up with a handful of people radaring with macro groups, they get bored cos theyve lost their advantage, and leave. game closes.
 

Ctuchik

FH is my second home
Joined
Dec 23, 2003
Messages
10,463
thing is the argument "oh we need the subs" is farcical

Option 1: ban cheaters, reduce player base a bit, keep it going. id even pay a bit more in sub to cover this cost
Option 2:dont ban cheaters, legit players get fed up and leave. you end up with a handful of people radaring with macro groups, they get bored cos theyve lost their advantage, and leave. game closes.


You sure it'll just be reduced by "a bit"?

We're not talking about a semi-popular MMO that's making an acceptable profit here.

It is possible that there are so many cheaters in this game that banning them or not might have the same end result...

I doubt that it's THAT bad, but i'd be surprised if it weren't that far away...
 

Mabs

J Peasemould Gruntfuttock
Joined
Dec 22, 2003
Messages
6,869
You sure it'll just be reduced by "a bit"?

We're not talking about a semi-popular MMO that's making an acceptable profit here.

It is possible that there are so many cheaters in this game that banning them or not might have the same end result...

I doubt that it's THAT bad, but i'd be surprised if it weren't that far away...

possibly, but without evidence either way, almost impossible to tell, BUT im reasonably sure:

100 players
50 are cheating
ban 10
30 go "fuck that" stop cheating
10 go on cheating
ban them


BUT they dont ban people, so people who are sat on the fence are going "meh, fuck it, dont care"
 

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