Guild Wars 2

I never played DAOC, but we often see people holding it up as the best example of large scale MMO PvP.

In its prime, how did DAOC deal with imbalances in population and coverage between its factions?

Are there any lessons there that might be useful for GW2?

Rieselle.5079:

I never played DAOC, but we often see people holding it up as the best example of large scale MMO PvP.

In its prime, how did DAOC deal with imbalances in population and coverage between its factions?

Are there any lessons there that might be useful for GW2?

I don’t think they did. People stacked on three servers and the game had no queues, so it lagged like hell. But it was equally laggy for everyone.

There’s just one issue with this debate. The great thing about DaoC was the amount of people, and the big zergs. That was new back then, but GW2 has alot of players that solo roam and roams in small groups. The GW team wants it to be equally rewarding to solo roam as training, which leaves them somewhere in between.

There’s really only two options to make RvR superb. Either you make a great game that evolves around zergs and large-scale teamplay. (Like DaoC) OR you make a great game about small group combat. If you try to do both it becomes ok at both but not great in any way.

The problem is that people want karma, money and badges for themselves, and to get them they zerg. They don’t get rewarded for teamplaying, only for their own achievements. There’s the counter-point. If you didn’t get anything from WvW except from an orb that your world needs to hold on to the game would be hugely different.

The fronteirs were also enormous. Significantly larger than any single borderland. Population imbalances were handled how you’d expect them to be in a 3 way fight… 2 sides would team up or the third side would engage after the 2 stronger forces engaged.

DAOC offered xp bonuses for characters in an underpopulated realm. You could also gain a level every 3 to 5 days if you were under the max level of 50. Also you would receive bonus Realm points and extra golds if you played in the Frontiers.

That is no longer used. If you have characters in every Realm you can switch right away.

Ask Anet. A good number of the team that made DAoC are in Anet.

Fuzzion.2504:

Ask Anet. A good number of the team that made DAoC are in Anet.

Mike Ferguson hasn’t posted since march last year, I doubt he still works at ANet.

DAOC didn’t address population balances (back when there where multiple servers) Their zones/maps were huge, with far more roaming space. This allowed more freedom for 8man groups, zergs, solo/small man etc. Population imbalance was an issue in DAOC during its heyday. I remember playing on BORs server. 55% of the population was Mid. They dominated every BG and every map. Night capping was also a huge issue in DAOC

Personally I think a great deal of GW2 WvW issue’s are caused by the tiny tiny tiny maps

cattylac.6512:

That is no longer used. If you have characters in every Realm you can switch right away.

What? Things must have changed. I only played first 6 months of DAoC and during that time you could only play on 1 realm per account. That was done to prevent spying, which GW2 copied.

Coverage and Population issues plagued DAoC in a similar fashion as GW2. Couldn’t go a few hours without some server complaining about not getting access to Darkness Falls.

Same thing happens in virtually every game that tries the server v server approach. It is an out-dated design method that creates more issues than it solves and it is an inexcusable blight on modern MMO development. Load balancing should be a paramount design consideration for all future WvW, AvA, RvR, etc systems. It doesn’t have to be perfect just put some consideration into it.

deracs.1762:

DAOC didn’t address population balances (back when there where multiple servers) Their zones/maps were huge, with far more roaming space. This allowed more freedom for 8man groups, zergs, solo/small man etc. Population imbalance was an issue in DAOC during its heyday. I remember playing on BORs server. 55% of the population was Mid. They dominated every BG and every map. Night capping was also a huge issue in DAOC

Personally I think a great deal of GW2 WvW issue’s are caused by the tiny tiny tiny maps

For the first couple of years, Bors was one of the most balanced servers. At one point, someone from another server who played Mid decided he didn’t like losing (mostly to Bors/Hibernia) and found a way to incent players to come to Bors (by handing them 300/500 gold for rerolling Midgard there).. sound familiar? Tipped the population heavily towards Midgard on Bors. About that same time the smite cleric nerf went in and Alb lost a lot of players. As Mid continued to grow/stomp Albion, even more Alb players left. That left Bors Mid in control. It also negatively impacted the original server the “pay-to-get-me-a-win” player came from.

Two things happened:

1) A huge group of players from Hib decided to get together and reroll on the original server the “young man in question” was from, in order to balance things out there. Some from Hib and Mid on Bors rerolled Albion, trying to preserve what was left of balance there.

2) Mythic ended up implementing leveling incentives to help spread the population by offering /level 30 on some specific servers/realms that were imbalanced. (Both Bors Hib and Bors Albion were offered /level 30.) /Level 30 gave players rolling on a new server an instant 30 levels - which was huge - in a game where endgame was level 50 and leveling mostly required grouping, special leveling spots (often with player-controlled “reservation/wait lists”), and dying would cause exp loss.

Transfers Didn’t Exist Then

Back then, transfers were unheard of. If someone wanted to play on a different server, they left everything behind (hard-won RvR ranks, any epic gear, etcetera) and rerolled from scratch on the new server. Leveling in PvE was basically a grind-fest for the general population. Moving to a new realm/server was a major decision, and not something implemented in a matter of minutes/hours.

Two things to remember

Night Capping: it was a different era back then when players could not easily get access across the internet to both US and EU at the time. (I know, kind of akin to thinking about rotary phones these days.. what’s that?) For the most part, most (not all), of the players on NA servers were from NA. Any “night capping” that occurred is similar to the “overtime” we see in GW2 today… in other words… players were either staying up late, or setting alarm clocks to get up at 3 AM or 5 AM to hit keeps and do relic raids when no one else was awake. (Which by the way, is a standard strategy seen in history.)

Also remember that classes on all 3 realms were not the same. Imbalances with classes (which were specific to the different realms – 52 classes in all spread across 3 realms) also played a part.

There was no question that there were population issues. Mostly player made. Which Mythic did attempt to mitigate at one point.

Trade-offs Need Consideration

Population imbalances have always been a problem, even in games with only 2 teams style PvP. I’ve yet to see a successful model implemented that can account for all the complexities inherent in player motivation and behavior. Every game, every solution has trade-offs. I’d agree though, that some solutions need more analysis.

Realms were way less unbalanced because there were no cross-realm transfers. You could re-roll on a different realm but it had to be on a different server and then you had to start from scratch.

Servers population are unbalanced here because Anet decided to sell out the quality of the game for transfer $$$. Simple as that.

Other things. Keeps were harder/took longer to take in general — losing half your frontier keeps usually took hours/days not 30 mins, mainly because keeps (and towers) were well defended. I can remember being in keep siege attacks/defenses that went on for hours.

Darkness Falls was a combined-PVE/PVP dungeon that was only accessible to the realm with the most keeps/towers, which effectively served as a counter-balance to any 1 side greatly outnumbering the other 2. IMO, DF was the real masterstroke behind DAOC’s RVR – in addition to its role as a RVR population balancing mechanic, when DF changed hands the race was on to clear the enemy realm out of DF, which provided some of my favourite PVP content in the game.

It’s also worth clarifying that DAOC was a game where a single, organised 8man group could wipe disorganised zergs by themselves due to no AOE cap, which also made any population disparity seem like much less of an issue. Also, no downed state in DAOC.

In short, DAOC had several counter-balances to population disparity or any 1 side becoming too strong, where GW2 has mechanics & incentives that strongly favour server stacking (tournaments, easily-taken & well-rewarded objectives, waypoints) and ever larger zergs (downed state, AOE cap).

As others have said here, DAoC was famous for “alarm clock raids” (yes, that’s a link to the official forum for DAoC EU).

The reason that alarm clock raids had to be planned was the extremely high level of guards at the relic keeps. These took a lot of killing and you didn’t need too many players to help them in order to wipe the relic raid – so most raids were either at night time or a big surprise and involved a lot of meticulous planning to pull off.

In short: YES! The lesson is to have VERY powerful NPCs guarding the most important structures.

BUT, it wouldn’t work in GW2 because it took weeks of planning and there is a reset every week in GW2.

Of course, in other aspects of the game: smaller keeps, where the NPCs were weaker, one server would dominate the others.

Ultimately, I can only reiterate my suggestion again and hope someone realises how good it is:

• Give each server a set number of guards at any one time. This number should be as it is now- BUT when a side captures another objective, they have to lose some guards from other objectives to guard the new one. This way, the more things you have, the fewer guards at each thing. The fewer things you have, the more guards at each thing. This makes it more and more difficult for enemies to capture objectives.

• The above could be complimented with a concept of group toughness. Like with Skritt intelligence, the more guards you gather together, the tougher and more powerful each becomes. This should be a secondary measure if the above alone is not enough to slow the blob.

Also, waypoints didn’t exist.

There was population and converge imbalance back in DAOC. In those days it was not server VS server but between the 3 different realms.

I’m surprised no has pointed out the main difference is that DAOC was not a conquest game like Guild Wars 2. The winner was not who had the most keeps but who can get the more kills. DAOC had no AOE cap and had long duration crowd controls that a small group (8 man) could take out large forces. It was fun and the imbalance was not as a big of a deal.

Couple of things for having more keeps were access to the huge dungeon of Darkness Falls, which at times it was great to let the other realm have so if your inside you could RvR with a never ending respawn of enemy players. Another was to add more super high level guards for the Relics which granted large damage bonuses depending on how many you had.

Problem we see in Guild Wars 2 is the current game mode is conquest and the majority of the rewards is for taking keeps/towers. Unlike DAOC the rewards were to killing other players.

Avadore.4196:

DAOC had no AOE cap and had long duration crowd controls that a small group (8 man) could take out large forces. It was fun and the imbalance was not as a big of a deal.

Don’t try to rewrite history. These long duration clipping-range AoE mez/stuns were the bane of the game and ruined the fun for many as they stood there looking stupid while an 8-man group used /assist macros to pick them off one by one or massive PBAoE spam to kill them as a group. This was horrible and unfun.

Anyway, back on topic…

Svarty.8019:

Avadore.4196:

DAOC had no AOE cap and had long duration crowd controls that a small group (8 man) could take out large forces. It was fun and the imbalance was not as a big of a deal.

Don’t try to rewrite history. These long duration clipping-range AoE mez/stuns were the bane of the game and ruined the fun for many as they stood there looking stupid while an 8-man group used /assist macros to pick them off one by one or massive PBAoE spam to kill them as a group. This was horrible and unfun.

Anyway, back on topic…

I take you were on the unfavorable end of that.

Anyways the point was that in DAOC, a smaller realm ( OR server Here) could be competitive in that game play. I do not see too many groups here beating the zerg odds of being outnumbered by a large margin. I would also include not seeing many smaller server beating larger ones at the end of the week.

The key to remember here is that DAoC didn’t have anything directly like PPT. In theory, the war was based around relics that gave bonus damage if your realm captured and held them. In Old Frontiers, taking keeps reduced the number of guards at the opponent’s relic keep… In New Frontiers, you needed to take a series of keeps to unlock the gates of the relic temple.

The only “coverage” type issues the game had were that during lower population times, the realms with more people could stage a relic raid, whereas typically at night the sides were simply too balanced. It became discouraging at times to win night after night and log on the next day to find that all of those gains were lost.

At some point though, the shine of “For teh Realm!” wore off and most people played to grind up their personal point totals. And as points were spread among the groups doing the killing, you saw a lot more 8-man groups running around in either an aoe bombing or assist train set up, killing larger groups of less organized and/or skilled players. Skilled small group play was VERY well rewarded, which led to both the skilled players and the wannabe skilled players to roam as smaller groups.

Of course, as Svarty says above, it’s not fun to be on the receiving end of that, and it’s not good for subscription levels to let small parties have fun while the zerg is getting mauled. Rewarding PvD keeps the zergs happy… And if Warhammer taught me anything, it’s that people will do whatever rewards them, even if it’s painfully boring, so it keeps people in zergs.

if anyone is not familiar with the zerg bombing "problem"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BxyNKATs2s

i admit, having absolutely no cap, well, it was a tad extreme at the end, but the AoE cap in GW2 is just ridiculously tolerant of huge blobs. moving the cap up to at least, let’s say, 10 for a meteor shower or sth similar, would improve the gameplay as a whole, i think. but anyway, back to topic

Avadore.4196:

…see reply to this below

There was population and converge imbalance back in DAOC. In those days it was not server VS server but between the 3 different realms.

I’m surprised no has pointed out the main difference is that DAOC was not a conquest game like Guild Wars 2. The winner was not who had the most keeps but who can get the more kills. DAOC had no AOE cap and had long duration crowd controls that a small group (8 man) could take out large forces. It was fun and the imbalance was not as a big of a deal.

Couple of things for having more keeps were access to the huge dungeon of Darkness Falls, which at times it was great to let the other realm have so if your inside you could RvR with a never ending respawn of enemy players.

• I would love Darkness falls in GW2. Once we get rid of EOTM. Or maybe convert EOTM into something like darkness falls

Another was to add more super high level guards for the Relics which granted large damage bonuses depending on how many you had.

• Guards in GW2 are just way too soft. Except seigrazor. Might be good to have a system where the underpopulated server in that map gets a signifiant boost to all yaks and guards.

Problem we see in Guild Wars 2 is the current game mode is conquest and the majority of the rewards is for taking keeps/towers. Unlike DAOC the rewards were to killing other players.

• Not Really true. GW2 gives WXP for taking both towers/keeps and players. DAOC gave us RealmPoints(RPs) for doing the same. The difference is the higher level abilities you got from daoc which made u more superior to a lower (rank) player. Yes i know in gw2 we have only 2 real usefull player v player masteries, and i urge Anet to increase those 2 to more.

Let us not forget that Anet is trying their best to make GW2 WvWvW better than DAOC RvRvR. This will take time and perhaps bring alot of players back.

by then, camelot unchained will be out and probably kicking every other RvRvR game out there in the kitten

tanztante.6532:

by then, camelot unchained will be out and probably kicking every other RvRvR game out there in the kitten

Word.

Fuzzion.2504:

Let us not forget that Anet is trying their best to make GW2 WvWvW better than DAOC RvRvR. This will take time and perhaps bring alot of players back.

I haven’t seen a clear indication that this is the case.

I have seen a clear indication to the contrary.

I understand the latest attempt at “improvements” is experimental, at best, and feedback regarding it might be taken into account for any potential further “improvements” in the future.

see posting:

Jessica Boettiger.2563:

Basically removing the achievement requirement during a tournament is an experimental step we took to reduce the incentive for achievement grinding. We want people to play WvW, and not focus too heavily on satisfying achievement requirements.

If we find that players prefer having numerous things to check off a list, then we would certainly take that feedback into account and consider it for future tournaments.

It is unlikely that ANet, given the amount of goodwill, trust and money (multiple thousands of dollars) that they have squandered, will ever be able to “bring me back” after the latest rounds of “improvements”. I cannot take them seriously.

I only posted above to correct the impression that Mythic had not made an attempt to correct population imbalances in RvR. Something I cannot say regarding ANet (regarding WvW).

my experience from daoc went a little like this . playing most of my time of the gweniver server for the hibs . we would get demolished by albs all the time and then it shifted to mids and then it shifted back to albs and then for a very brief time hibs owned every thing and then people stopped playing and went to wow or eq2 and then albs dominated for a very long time then mids came and dominated for a even longer time and then came xfers , " x realming " and people would pick and choose which side got to own who for the week , 1 week it would be albs and then mids and then hibs . then populations dropped big time and as a result of that you would find people just do small man groups or solo roaming mostly , no more zergs . after the cow expansion i stayed for a short while and left . and only returned recently just to see whats different and nothing has changed.

but back in the past the incentive was for darkness falls . once trials came out people stopped caring and left in droves. it was never a balanced game . people x realmed mostly in the end and that was that .

tanztante.6532:

by then, camelot unchained will be out and probably kicking every other RvRvR game out there in the kitten

Don’t be so sure. I’d like it to be true. I’d love WvW to be the central point of Gw2 and develop it to it’s full potential, but I’d take Gw2 any day over any other game atm because of the actual combat system. Unless they care to adress that I’m not interested.

well maybe its not on topic , but reading this thread i start think would be good for GW2 and WvWvW to have every boss encounter in every tower keep more challenging(maybe with some things to do before smash the lord,something like Lineage2). This will give wvwvw more strategy , longer fight,chance to turn the tide of battle , less karma train, maybe split zergs etc….

Svarty.8019:

Avadore.4196:

DAOC had no AOE cap and had long duration crowd controls that a small group (8 man) could take out large forces. It was fun and the imbalance was not as a big of a deal.

Don’t try to rewrite history. These long duration clipping-range AoE mez/stuns were the bane of the game and ruined the fun for many as they stood there looking stupid while an 8-man group used /assist macros to pick them off one by one or massive PBAoE spam to kill them as a group. This was horrible and unfun.

FYI what you said only applied to terrible players who didn’t pan, interrupt, or move in response to obvious tells, no unlike how baddies can’t dodge obvious telegraphed attacks in this game. Yes DAOC was far less forgiving to terrible players than current generation games are, no question.

Back on topic…

scerevisiae.1972:

FYI what you said only applied to terrible players who didn’t pan, interrupt, or move in response to obvious tells, no unlike how baddies can’t dodge obvious telegraphed attacks in this game. Yes DAOC was far less forgiving to terrible players than current generation games are, no question.

Back on topic…

In the early days, DAoC was troll heavy. It was possible for even the best players to be locked until dead. Don’t even get me started on the stealth kills. Lets also keep in mind DAoC was closer to a text based MUD in comparison to GW2. The combat was incredibly static.

There is a bit of revisionist history and positive spin applied to “the good ole days” of DAoC. For its time, it was a great game. Even with updated graphics, it would most likely bomb today.

ok as someone who played DaoC from lunch and none stop for 6 years I will tell you what I know.

At start DAoC had zerg problems, stealth problems, server crash problems, class imbalance problems. Yep it was bad when it started, as time went on things got much better and by the time they came out with classic server the game was just about ‘perfect’ or as good as I have ever seen before and since that time in any MMO.

Back to the answer to your question. The way DAoC dealt with pop and coverage are these.
1 There is no PPT the only thing that matters are the relics. There is little to no pt for the 2’nd place realm to go after the weakest realm who has 0 relics therefore nothing to lose. And the 2’nd and 3’d place team have every incentive to gang up on the realm that’s wining to take back the relics.
2. The map is huge, the dominate zerg simply can not reach everywhere within 5 mins like they can in GW2. This means a small team can run deep into enemy territory and cause havoc and force the zerg to waste 1/2 hr to 1 hr and back track to take stuff back.
3. The more relics you have the easier it is for people to take them which means it is very hard to stay on top.

let me explain the relic a bit as GW2 totally tried to steal the idea and screwed up royally.
There are 2 relics to each realm 1 for str 1 for power. Holding your own relics does nothing but if you manage to get 2 str relics then everyone in your realm’s melee attack does more damage if you get all 3 str relics your melee attack does even more damage. Same goes for power relics and spell damage.

But here is the key. Your own relics are kept in relic shrines that is guarded by uber guards. imaging a keep with 3x the guard in SMC and everyone of them as tough as the keep lord and they respwan non stop. Also the relic shrines are closed to attack unless you lose a specific set of keeps in your home land. So as defender you only need to hold on to 2 keeps that are closest to your spawn to keep your relic safe. Remember the map is freaking huge the defenders have a giant advantage when they can run back to battle in mins where the attackers will take up to 1/2 hr to get back if they died and not rezed. So you can see it is not easy to beat down any one side.

On the flip side when you capture someone else’s relic you can’t put them in the heavily defended relic shrine you have to drop it in a regular keep with regular guards and people can attack the keep any time they want.

In response to combat, DAoC combat is by far better than GW2 combat I won’t go into the details but let me just point out 1 thing, in GW2 80% of the combat is determined before the fight even started based on build and gear skill counts for 20% at most. In DAoC skill counted for a lot more.

DAOC did nothing to stop population imbalance.. however, they solved the problem with relics..

The server that controlled the most relics would have less NPCS available to guard the relics, thus allowing the underpopulated realm easier access at retaking them

testpig.5018:

DAOC did nothing to stop population imbalance.. however, they solved the problem with relics..

The server that controlled the most relics would have less NPCS available to guard the relics, thus allowing the underpopulated realm easier access at retaking them

Note: Easier but never easy. Relic keep guards were absolutely lethal and had to be pulled very carefully and a few at a time (but they stayed dead for ages).

Judging by this video, they nerfed the guards a lot as the game got older: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpPE3rTcXIA

Something to keep in mind is that players often had long runs to get into the action. If a player was running in a small group, they were frequent targets of stealthed players. Essentially really good players would take the long hike to the other side and pray on those that strayed. DAoC could be harsh mistress especially if you spent 5 minutes getting somewhere only to get killed by 3+ stealthers… and often most players would die before they even knew what hit them. Also players learned pretty quick that chasing some random solo player was very dangerous as it was often leading them right to an AoE bomb. The rage quitting in that game was pretty epic.