After downloading the 248mb Frontiers open beta, I decided to log onto Pendragon and take a look, I ran through Ligen gates to be zoned into the new frontiers, to my shock and horror the first thing I see is that the gorge is no more, my wonderful gorge, ripe with infils and SBs to hunt down gone, instead I was greeted with a beautiful plush hilly green landscape, how nice. There's a bindstone and a port stone to port to keeps there, so I ported to Dun Crauchon to take a look from the port stone, I crashed. Okay, it's a beta so no problem, I logged back in and all was okay, quite honestly the new keeps look stunning, the lords tower looks absolutely amazing, the animations on the new seige kit look amazingly realistic. The new hookpoints for buying NPCs rock, you can choose to place a Celt Guardian, an Elven Eldritch, an Elven Ranger, a Celt Druid or a Lurikeen Nightshade, so you make your choice, decide if you want to make the purchase with gold, bounty points or guild bounty points and click buy, the NPC then tells you to interact with him, you do so and have various options, not played with them all but the Eldritch gave me a choice of assigning him to nuke, CC or poison (DoT maybe? Didn't get to see it in action) enemies. The nightshade allowed you to make him sit there and fight, poison, or roam the keep and fight, again didn't see him in action though.
I then left the keep and went for a stroll, had a look at the small towers, essentially they have one door, the tower lord is red con and the guards are blue con, they seem pretty easy to take - easier than an unclaimed level 1 keep is right now. One thing I did notice is a lack of climb points for assassins on both towers and keeps, is climb walls now useless? possibly. If it isn't though, you'll certainly need more than safe fall 3 to safely jump off keeps now, if you plan to jump off a level 10 keep, expect to need to spec 50 stealth for safe fall 5. The tower had a slightly damage door, which was pretty cool, the door was bent inwards and partly broken, the tower also had a boiling oil pot above the door, so although a small force of 2 - 4 people could easily take the keep, a single person could also likely defend against those 2 - 4 people.
So then I went for a wander again, I decided to check out the frontier dungeon. It looks pretty interesting, better than the copy and paste Treibh Cailte rip off that was Marfach, instead it's apparently a copy and paste ripoff of Krondon according to the Albs - I've never been there so can't say. Still it's not even textured yet, it was all one colour and one texture repeating itself on the floor, so it's gonna change a fair bit. Mobs in there were orange - purple con, all basically Hib player races, aggro of course, still funny to kill a shar mob as a shar (don't ask why, just think of the rawr fest), they may just be temporary mobs, no idea. Got bored, suicided.
Back to Crauchon, got a group (Yes a group, as a ranger! imagine that!), we went to the pier and decided to grab a "fast" attack boat to Mid, so off we set, a group of 8 of us on our "fast" attack boat (I'll explain my emphasis on fast in a second). We arrived at the Mid coast, jumped, swam to shore,
This area is too steep to climb!
This area is too steep to climb!
This area is too steep to climb!
Oh dear, so we swam downstream a little, only to be ganked by 2fg of Mids, and he's where the bad parts of Frontiers starts- it's impossible to establish a beachhead. The only ways to get into enemy frontiers is to own a keep there and the surrounding towers, to catch a boat, or to go via the frontier dungeons, now the problem is, you can't establish a beachhead when the so called fast attack boats don't move faster than speed 5, so groups of enemies can watch you come into the rivers at the bottleneck gap in the coastal wall where all boats arrive from, trail you down river, and obliterate you the second you get off the boat. Add to this the fact the zerg seems to have relocated from AMG to the coast, and have the backup of a level 10 keep behind them and landing on the coast becomes a real difficult problem, oh dear. This is IMO, right now Frontiers biggest flaw, and hopefully as it's still in beta has some way to go on this issue, but basically if it remains as is, Frontiers will kill RvR, no realm will be able to land on the enemy beach because they'll get zerged in the water the second they jump ship. This means everyone's going to sit at their own coast, not wanting to get farmed, making RvR stagnant. I guess the option is to take enemy keeps early in the morning and hold a beachhead through the day, but AM raids, they really really suck, we all know that. The other option is the frontier dungeon when it's joined and attached, however I can see this meaning a lot of RvR is going to happen in the frontier dungeons as it's the only real option into the enemy realm, that's okay, until we find 10fg of Albs vs 10fg Hibs or whatever bumping into each other in the middle of a god damn dungeon.
My only other real problem is there's still nothing to help underpopulated realms, on the contrary it's as bad if not worse than before, because the underpopulated realm can't breach the zerg at the beachhead and the underpopulated realm (Hibernia in a lot of cases) is going to find itself the other two realms playground (Ring any bells? <cough> emain <cough>). Hopefully this too will be rectified before live.
To sum up, if the above two problems are resolved Frontiers is going to rock no doubt about it, gank groups needn't worry - if you can find your way into frontiers you'll get plenty of action, at the same time random groups can have just as much fun seiging towers and keeps. Travel times was a problem of the previous Frontiers and has been resolved for sure, it's much easier to get into combat now. So although some problems, including major ones have been solved, some other major problems still exist, and perhaps have even been made worse. If it's made easier to establish a beachhead in the enemy realm it's going to be fast paced keep/tower seiging, lots of fun and lots of action, gank groups can cut off players as they run from keeps to towers to defend or fight other gank groups trying to prevent that happening and such. The potential is most definetely there to make DAoC hands down the best MMOG there is with this, they just need to take strong action on the coast camping problem.
Will maybe post some screenshots I have later if I get round to it.
I then left the keep and went for a stroll, had a look at the small towers, essentially they have one door, the tower lord is red con and the guards are blue con, they seem pretty easy to take - easier than an unclaimed level 1 keep is right now. One thing I did notice is a lack of climb points for assassins on both towers and keeps, is climb walls now useless? possibly. If it isn't though, you'll certainly need more than safe fall 3 to safely jump off keeps now, if you plan to jump off a level 10 keep, expect to need to spec 50 stealth for safe fall 5. The tower had a slightly damage door, which was pretty cool, the door was bent inwards and partly broken, the tower also had a boiling oil pot above the door, so although a small force of 2 - 4 people could easily take the keep, a single person could also likely defend against those 2 - 4 people.
So then I went for a wander again, I decided to check out the frontier dungeon. It looks pretty interesting, better than the copy and paste Treibh Cailte rip off that was Marfach, instead it's apparently a copy and paste ripoff of Krondon according to the Albs - I've never been there so can't say. Still it's not even textured yet, it was all one colour and one texture repeating itself on the floor, so it's gonna change a fair bit. Mobs in there were orange - purple con, all basically Hib player races, aggro of course, still funny to kill a shar mob as a shar (don't ask why, just think of the rawr fest), they may just be temporary mobs, no idea. Got bored, suicided.
Back to Crauchon, got a group (Yes a group, as a ranger! imagine that!), we went to the pier and decided to grab a "fast" attack boat to Mid, so off we set, a group of 8 of us on our "fast" attack boat (I'll explain my emphasis on fast in a second). We arrived at the Mid coast, jumped, swam to shore,
This area is too steep to climb!
This area is too steep to climb!
This area is too steep to climb!
Oh dear, so we swam downstream a little, only to be ganked by 2fg of Mids, and he's where the bad parts of Frontiers starts- it's impossible to establish a beachhead. The only ways to get into enemy frontiers is to own a keep there and the surrounding towers, to catch a boat, or to go via the frontier dungeons, now the problem is, you can't establish a beachhead when the so called fast attack boats don't move faster than speed 5, so groups of enemies can watch you come into the rivers at the bottleneck gap in the coastal wall where all boats arrive from, trail you down river, and obliterate you the second you get off the boat. Add to this the fact the zerg seems to have relocated from AMG to the coast, and have the backup of a level 10 keep behind them and landing on the coast becomes a real difficult problem, oh dear. This is IMO, right now Frontiers biggest flaw, and hopefully as it's still in beta has some way to go on this issue, but basically if it remains as is, Frontiers will kill RvR, no realm will be able to land on the enemy beach because they'll get zerged in the water the second they jump ship. This means everyone's going to sit at their own coast, not wanting to get farmed, making RvR stagnant. I guess the option is to take enemy keeps early in the morning and hold a beachhead through the day, but AM raids, they really really suck, we all know that. The other option is the frontier dungeon when it's joined and attached, however I can see this meaning a lot of RvR is going to happen in the frontier dungeons as it's the only real option into the enemy realm, that's okay, until we find 10fg of Albs vs 10fg Hibs or whatever bumping into each other in the middle of a god damn dungeon.
My only other real problem is there's still nothing to help underpopulated realms, on the contrary it's as bad if not worse than before, because the underpopulated realm can't breach the zerg at the beachhead and the underpopulated realm (Hibernia in a lot of cases) is going to find itself the other two realms playground (Ring any bells? <cough> emain <cough>). Hopefully this too will be rectified before live.
To sum up, if the above two problems are resolved Frontiers is going to rock no doubt about it, gank groups needn't worry - if you can find your way into frontiers you'll get plenty of action, at the same time random groups can have just as much fun seiging towers and keeps. Travel times was a problem of the previous Frontiers and has been resolved for sure, it's much easier to get into combat now. So although some problems, including major ones have been solved, some other major problems still exist, and perhaps have even been made worse. If it's made easier to establish a beachhead in the enemy realm it's going to be fast paced keep/tower seiging, lots of fun and lots of action, gank groups can cut off players as they run from keeps to towers to defend or fight other gank groups trying to prevent that happening and such. The potential is most definetely there to make DAoC hands down the best MMOG there is with this, they just need to take strong action on the coast camping problem.
Will maybe post some screenshots I have later if I get round to it.
love it when theres 400 ppl around and inside one base 
