Snoogy wrote: ↑Sun 31 Mar 2019 8:13 AM
I was playing Phoenix so hard with any minute of free time for a month, haven't touched it in a week+. Abruptly lost interest.. I guess the endgame RvR was too zergy and the task that made one zone the hotspot and the teleporting that I had issue with finally led me to more or less stop playing. Started to feel like a gimmicky freeshard..may pop in again on my ranger and check things out. At least now I don't spend time arguing with people on the forum about how a good amount of players hate the Zerg V Zerg only availability of RvR and just stopped subjecting myself to it 😂 was fun for awhile
To quote you as a reference point for my perspective.......this illustrates a common problem with MMOs, or any online game these days.... people over play it to the point of premature burnout. Your first sentence pretty well says it all... "I was playing Phoenix so hard with any minute of free time for a month, haven't touched it in a week+. Abruptly lost interest"
While it may have been the zergy nature of RvR or the task system changes that you zeroed in on as your "reason" to stop playing, in reality.. when you play something so intensely as you admit you did.. you set yourself up to be triggered by something, anything really, as a cause to stop playing. In reality I think you simply went into an early burnout. This is not a knock on you personally, it is actually common with MMO game players these days.. any MMO really.
More specifically to your comments about the "zergy" nature of RvR... this has really always been an issue for some players where DAOC is concerned. As populations dwindled over time on the paid servers.... there was less zerg and more 8v8 or small group RvR for sure.. but this was an artifact of population decline coupled with the change to NF on the paid servers more than anything else. The reality is, over the long haul... more DAOC players enjoyed the unpredictability of the zerg approach to RvR then any other RvR derivative. For whatever reason... DAOC seems to thrive best in RvR when it is zerg driven. As a long time player of DAOC off and on over the years... 8 man premades and their dominance over time did more to turn players off of RvR then any other variation of game play since the game launched.
As for the task system and it's continuing evolution.. I really think players need to be more patient as the admins make adjustments to the game over time. Keep in mind this server has only been live for a few months.. and so far.. most of the adjustments made by the admins appear to have been for the better overall (though certainly not liked by 100% of players... because that is an impossibility in MMOs). I see the tension in discussions between zerg, small group, solo stealthers, etc that has always existed where DAOC RvR has been concerned. The tension will not go away no matter what the admins do or do not do, precisely because different players play different ways and have different preferences. From a stealthers perspective, there is valid concern about losing familiar choke points to ambush solo travelers due to the porting system.. but honestly I have heard this same complaint in one form or another for many years in DAOC. Stealthers, like very other class, simply need to adapt and be more creative rather then fixating on some easy ambush camp spots. And I say this as a person who has played a stealther for years and plan to do so again on Phoenix. Personally, I see stealthers thriving as 8 man stealth groups on this server, and at that scale they can in fact inflict a lot of damage, chaos, and disruption in RvR.
As to the topic at hand (player populations) as I write this post, there are nearly 3000 players online and there are roughly balanced between the three realms (+/- 5%). Of course that does not show the splits and numbers in RvR as it is a server wide metric, but my point remains... the server appears to continue stable in the 3000 range during the times of day and week when both EU and NA players are active in game.