Hello and welcome to our forums. Hope you stay a while. I have heard a lot of people talk about the PvP in DAOC but I have never personally played it. What were some of the elements that stood out as being great?

The one PvP zone that stands out in my mind the most was an area where you would take a boat out to an island, or you could swim if you wished to be stealthy. The island had three towers on it, and a central keep. The main objective was to control the center keep. In order to control a tower you would simply need to walk into it stand there for a min or so, and it would suddenly be decked out in your factions colors/tabard, providing of course that the building was un-contested. Same for the center keep. Controlling these areas would allow you to respawn closer to the combat, as well as give your ranged classes and healers areas where they could take cover during the battle. In order to take a tower or the keep once it was controlled you could build rams, and trebuchets and the like. When used the realistic damage done to the towers, and keep, that was specific to the areas you had attacked.

What I think I liked the most about this zone, is that the battle never really "ended". The screen would tell you how long a certain faction controlled the center keep, and that would sometimes lead to some interesting alliances (unspoken due to the language barrier) on the battlefield, as DAoC had three separate factions.

I think what excites me the most is that in TOR something like what I mentioned above could easily end up taking place on several planets, leading to some very interesting World PvP.

PvP in DAoC... hmm, yes... a totally different barrel of monkeys compared to the dull and uninteresting PvP in WoW, for example. Zones with keeps, which were the objectives - capture and control the keeps; some keeps had relics which you could capture and return to you main keep - rather than a boring flag, Albion had Excalibur which could be captured, for instance.

As this was in the day before vent, all communication and planning was done in game, and many guilds had contacts with each other for planning and organising the keep raids. Most often, in my experience, the PvP wasn't just PvP for the sake of it, it happened as a by product of trying to capture or defend a keep. There was amazing co-ordination between groups (which made up the informal "raid"), where by agreement only the group leaders would give commands in group chat, to make coordination better.

The keeps themselves had to have doors destroyed to break in, and keep lords battled and defeated to capture the keep. Items such as doors could also be repaired and upgraded; repairs costing in material good (wood for example), and while a guild controlling a keep would have their guild logo on the banners, and the cloaks and shields of the NPC defenders and keep lords, it would require a cost to the guild in the form of guild points, which were gained from PvP (or RvR) activity. Furthermore, the keeps could be upgraded, which would grant tougher and/or more NPCs, more "health" to the doors etc, but would also spend guild points at a more rapid rate.

While the PvP aspects of the game allowed players to battle each other, the range of abilities they had would allow them to also perform attacks against a keep, such as being able to attack doors. While this was possible, the usage of siege weapons meant more damage was able to be done. These siege weapons were crafted from components, which were so heavy that many people were required to carry parts for them. Then in battle, the catapults, trebuchets and battering rams could be constructed, used and defended.

An important element to all of this is the time taken for all this to happen. A poorly defended keep could probably be captured in half an hour, if done at 3am against a level 1 keep. Most battles for these keeps were a lot longer, often taking at least 2 or 3 hours; attackers not only attacking, but defending themselves against reinforcements from 1 or possibly 2 realms, while keeping siege engines repaired, while the defenders use cauldrons of oil to defend, and try to repair gates etc faster than they are being damaged.

Due to the variety of spells and how they work, there was a lot of jargon used which has long since fallen out of use in other games, for example the distinction between PBAOE and GTAOE - PB being point blank (ie originating from the player character) and the GT being ground target (where you target and area on the ground - in most games now this is just AOE).
There was also a trend for buff bots to be parked AFK at or near the starting area for a realm, so that all groups could have all buffs. Not pretty, but effective.

The main problems with the DAoC RvR wasn't so much with the concept as with the physical - the raw computing power, both at the client end and the server end. Many times raids could fail due to people disconnecting from the lag generated both by the number of people, and from the number of spell effects. The server end could also have problems; many a raid failed when too many people entered a zone - the zone server would crash, effectively wiping the raid. There were times when this would also cause relics to reset back to keep where it originated.

While there were problems aplenty, from group communication and coordination, to server stability, on the whole RvR was fun. I'm not an awesome PvPer, but I enjoyed being able to go along and help take a keep for the glory of my realm. And since I left DAoC, all those years ago, this is one area which has never, for me, been topped by any newer game.

I agree with you on just about every point except communication within my guild. We did have Vent because I helped set it up. I was very familiar with it via my FPS days, playing Rainbow Six.

While most of what I was referring to holds true for most of the lifespan of DAoC, I was referring to when it was released and up to about the first expansion of Shrouded Isles (as this is when I was playing it) - I should probably have stated that above. As it was released in Oct 2001, and we in Europe got it a few months later, I'm sure that in 2002 if vent was around, it was likely to be very uncommon at that time.

Also, our guild had Dutch, Belgian, Danish and UK players - and I'm sure that a lot may not have been able to speak English as well as they could read it. GOA in Europe also played second fiddle to Mythic in the US, hence we only had a few servers in the EU.

Great episodes, fellas. I liked the setting better here, even though I'm sure your warm apartment was probably a lot more comfortable for you guys hehe. Also, I'm really glad to see the bloopers are continuing on your videocasts!

As for tanks in PvP, does anyone remember hearing about the designers looking for ways to make tanking a useful ability in PvP? As in, you could look at a leader board and see tanking scores of some kind. I want to say Brandon mentioned it on Torocast, saying he grabbed Gabe Amatangelo somewhere, but I'm not sure... Anyway, that would be very interesting.

My first MMO was Warhammer Online. I don't consider myself a PVPer, I joined the game because I knew most of the background from tabletop gaming, although I was more into the 40k stuff. My point is, they did PVP well enough that I spent a lot of time in their PVP zones, on a PVE server. I think they way they included the warzones within the world, with the occasional quest chain that required you to enter was excellent. If they learn from what Warhammer Online did well, I'm sure their PVP will be excellent.

I was :30 into the newest Open Bounty when I had an amazing realization... what if Brooks and Zach shaved their beards???


Great job, again!

Great Episode and I'll be looking for more. New forum member here and I just wanted to talk about PvPvE a little bit.

I'm really a big fan of it because the whole idea of combat that bioware has communicated to us was that it was supposed to feel heroic and the biggest moment of heroism I felt in the KOTOR games was in II when you were slashing through droves of NPC's on your way up to the Queen's palace in Onderon. It really felt like a massive battle that I was making a huge difference in. When I think about a big important battle in the star wars I think about what you said, a large number of seemingly unimportant people (NPC) and then takes the view of the heroes. I think that having large PvPvE would make give you a feeling of being a big boss in the game and I just feel that's what bioware has been hitting on.

Even though I am a fan of PvPvE that's not to say I wont be excited about some good ole PvP. I'd like to see if they completely separate PvP from storyline material or if PvP combat will be incorporated into your story. I would love to see it as a major part of the game and not just a side area that really doesn't have a large impact on your game aside from statistics.

Im a big pvp i quit and play games on weather or not the pvp is good and see pve as a side thing and ive also played alot of mmos.

On the subject of big battles i find these are always good however the numbers need to be made up by players and not NPCs, I played WAR for a while and in that game pvp was a big aspect. But the big problem apart from rubbish balance and massive amounts of bugs was; all the objectives had NPCs. When we just talked to the Destro and said come here on this day and fight purely for the fun of it it was always alot more fun i found NPC were ignored by players as they couldnt do the dmg of players but beacuse of healing aggro they just spent the whole fighting banging on your healers and not really adding the fight much.

Next big example of NPC in pvp was Aion i played an assassin in this and found pvp rubbish on so many lvls not helped by ppl just flying away from me and blowing me up kiting is annoying when they run away when they can go up and down aswell it makes u rage quit alot. But the main point of the pvp in Aion was all the pvp zone was full on NPCs and when your fighting and an npc jumps in on the fight and spoils it just feels totally fail, not helped when the Obj have loads of elite guards so player can run out shoot u abit then when u go for them hide behind guards which can destory you in about 2 secs.

In WoW i played up to abit of BC and did abit of arenas which was good and enjoyed the aspect of it. On the face of it fighting against ppl of your skill lvl in small battles is fun but i like to play in big groups with friends which dont always enjoy pvp as much as me and so dont go to the efforts of getting pvp gear like that and when u went into normal pvp with the top arena gear found it far to easy by far as a druid i could never die.

I think pvp needs to have lots of aspects but shouldnt go the way of WoW when small scale gives much better gear then just normal fun pvp