Vengence,
DAoC had the right of it in the following ways:
1) Realm based PvP. This is great, teams are an inherited part of the game.
2) 3 seperate realms with their own races with their own unique strengths and weaknesses.
3) Siege warfare and territory wars that make active guilds truly valuable.
They fell short when implementing... The first 3 corospond to the 3 \"good\" points above.
1) They locked each realm away from each other and only allow PvP in \'frontier lands\'. They should allow home territory invasions servers instead of the \'Hard Core-all-vs-all\" server that they did implement.
2) When the game started each realm had a strength or weakness in it. But then the players demanded that if Midgards main tank could do something so should Hibernias tank. This should not have happend. It should be Okay for one realm to be better than another in melee but make up for it in magic or stealth or speed. NOT all races should be created equally. Just balanced.
3) Then they added all these battlegrounds and Frontier combat lost its fun since half the server was safely locked away in battlegrounds that only a small percent of the server population could get into.
Okay, and this is the end all big reason why DAoC fell short.
COLLISION DETECTION!!!!!
Consider this. You have a tight mountain pass blocked by a wall with a gate large enough for about 4 characters abreast to get through.
The defenders put a line of tanks right in front of the door. Healers and support types behind the tanks and archers and mages behind the healers. Archers and mages on the walls as well.
It should take a much larger force to take the wall. EXCEPT.... No collision detection. The invading army charges through the gate, run right through the tanks slaughters the healers and mages on the ground, climbs the wall and kills archers and mages up there too. All because the enemy can run right through your tanks in-game model...
Rank and File strategy is worthless in DAoC but historicaly the tactics I described to defend the wall would hold against superior numbers for quite a while.
Well, there you go Vengence. You asked. hehehe.
Let me know if you want to hear me rant about something else sometime.
Sylk
