Trials of Atlantis (and my gaming patience)

June 30, 2008 – 2:43 pm

This post was inspired by Travis, who left a comment in previous post (WAR vs. WoW - Expansion Philosophy). If you don’t want to read a rant about DAOC’s infamous Trials of Atlantis expansion, don’t go any further than this!

For the everyone else, “Abandon all hope ye who enter here,” because it’s a doozy. This is a perfect example of the kind of expansion I DO NOT want to see in Warhammer Online. Thankfully, Mark Jacobs has seen the error of his ways, so the possibility is doubtful.

The question was pretty simple:

What were the problems with ToA? I quit DAoC before that came out.

Yet it provoked such an urge to rant, scream and decapitate several innocent chickens, I felt it deserving of its own article. I tried to fit it into a comment, but golly gee, that would have been the longest comment in history. Well, probably not, but I didn’t feel like challenging the throne.

I won’t go over the nifty stuff like undersea adventuring, graphical improvements, and richly detailed zones that were an explorer’s dream. Those were actually the finer points of ToA and it wouldn’t be much of a rant if I spent a lot time fawning over them.

Let’s get down to the sticky icky of master levels, artifacts, and mudflation. Ooh-ee! Put it in the air!

Master Levels

As a concept, they were pretty cool. In execution, they failed miserably.

They gave each class two different paths of mastery to explore, and even though some paths were way better than others, making the choice pretty obvious, at least it brought more diversity to the game. Each Master Level was a level beyond 50 that you gained by completing various trials in Atlantis (hence the expansion name). There were ten trials per Master Level, meaning you had to do 100 of them to reach ML10. Some trials were pretty darn easy, while others were intense, requiring dozens of players working together harmoniously (no easy task in an MMO). Others yet were just plain bugged (taking months to fix).

Each ML granted you a new ability, and while the majority of them were craptastic, many were insanely powerful (Banespike? Fountain of Power? Forceful Zephyer?). In many situations, these abilities were “I-win” buttons, unless of course you had counters in place.

But that’s the problem - Master Levels were such a horrible grind, many people didn’t want to participate, or did so grudgingly. They were especially nightmarish for casual players because we didn’t have 3-5 hours to devote per session. Also, for a long time, you couldn’t do the various steps out of order to complete your ML. Oh, you logged on and they were at step 10? Well, you might as well not join because you won’t get credit unless you have steps 1-9 completed…

They eventually changed this… right around the time WoW came out and stole the majority of their subscribers.

Artifacts

Again, in theory not so bad, but executed horribly. Artifacts were probably the most painful implementation of an expansion feature I have ever seen (closely followed by MLs).

What were they? Simply put, artifacts were weapons and armour. Let me elaborate, non-exaggeratedly, by saying they were insanely powerful weapons and armour. Let me go even further by saying they far surpassed any item in the game before them in terms of how difficult they were to get and make usable.

There were two steps to getting an artifact and one more to making them usable in RvR.

To get the raw artifact, you had to kill a really tough boss in Atlantis. Many of these bosses were nearly the equivalent of the three realm dragons from the original zones. To do so, you needed to form up with a huge party of mediocre players or a smaller party of extremely decked out, high ML, skillful players. Once you finally managed to kill the boss, he would drop a raw - oh wait, I should add “sometimes dropped” - artifact. Doh, I should also add that if you did it with the mediocre group, you’d have to compete against several others with /random to see who won it. What could you do with this fine piece of treasure? By itself, the item was. completely. useless.

Books were the second piece of this puzzle. Actually, they were the the second, third, and fourth pieces because you needed three scrolls to make up a book. These scroll pieces would drop from various yellow-purple con monsters in Atlantis with varying, but always exceptionally low, drop rates. Once you were lucky enough to get all three and make a book, you could magically create your artifact! More often than not, you spent a few plat on the pieces you were missing but had already spent dozens of hours trying to get drop.

Hooray! You had an artifact! You could now dominate RvR, or you know, compete with all the other gits who had them!

Actually, you couldn’t just yet because the artifact you just made was level 0. Not level 1… the big freakin’ sombrero! Si señor - ZERO! After all the scroll grinding. After all the times you fought and bested the boss to earn your artifact. After all that, you were faced with ANOTHER grind: 10 levels to max out your artifact. A level 0 artifact was useless. It was just a weapon with no stats that did some pretty decent damage (Oh, wait - without the stats, the damage was actually quite gimp because the stat bonuses on these items were huge). “But what about buffbots!?” Srsly dude… don’t even get me started on that!

You could XP these items in certain zones in ToA, because the XP gained by most of these artifacts was regionally specific (for some unknown, exceptionally stupid reason), or you could XP them anywhere in RvR zones. I think they really wanted you to XP them by killing other players, unfortunately, you had no chance in RvR with gimped level 0 artifacts (especially if your set had multiple pieces). RvR was a game of min-maxing way before ToA came out and these items at level 0 certainly put you at a disadvantage. So anyway, back to killing more stupid mobs to XP these stupid things. *grumble*

Are you starting to notice the pattern here? Two key advancements in DAOC, a game that put RvR on the map, were completely PvE-centric in focus (MLs and artifacts). If people wanted PvE, they would have been playing Everquest. We were playing DAOC because we wanted to fight versus real, live opponents. *grumble x10*

Let’s get on to the final bit…

Mudflation

I’ve written about this a lot before, so avid readers will know that mudflation is an economic inflation in an MMORPG. It is also commonly associated with an inflation of power in an MMORPG. Remember when a nickel could get you five candies? Not anymore, right? Remember when that shiny broadsword was the pinnacle of godliness in PvP? Not anymore, because you can get the fiery broadsword now and it puts the shiny one to shame! Anyone with a fiery broadsword will skewer and roast the shiny broadsword lads and lasses! We might as well call them the Shiny Whineys cuz that’s all they’ll be doing! Boo Hoo, newbs!

Sorry, got a little off track there.

No other expansion before or after ToA introduced worse mudlation to DAOC. The introduction of MLs and artifacts meant they were absolutely necessary if you wanted to remain competitive in RvR. There is no argument for this statement. It is 100% truth.

For three weeks after ToA arrived on the scene, a fairly well-known Hibernian guild on my server quit RvRing. They didn’t quit the game… they decided to go play in the ToA sandbox. These guys and girls were skilled, large in population, and very knowledgable of ToA because they had members in the beta. In just less than a month they got themselves to ML10 with uber artifact sets. That may not sound like a huge amount of time, but these guys were hardcores, playing roughly 8 hours per weekday and around 24 hours per weekend. Way more than the average gamer, to say the least.

I’m sure it doesn’t come as any surprise that when they re-entered the RvR scene, they mutilated every bit of opposition thrown their way. Before ToA, they could take 1-2 groups on a very good day under very good conditions. With these new items and abilities, they could mop the floor with 3 opposing non-ToA groups. Put them in a keep and they could probably hold off half my server for a decent amount of time… Hyperbole? Yes. Did it feel that way? Yes again.

This, ladies and gentlemen, was the epitomy of mudflation.

In Conclusion

Trials of Atlantis ruined DAOC for me. The only reason I stuck around for as long as I did was because my guild was intensely resourceful, hardcore, and helpful. My friends would log me on in a new client window or second machine and take me along for the various ML raids. They would actually group me as I /stuck to the leader and went AFK for a four hour shift at my second part-time job in college. Without my guild, or a guild like it, I wouldn’t have lasted a month past ToA’s launch.

It also ruined RvR in general for me. Skillful players were given overpowered abilities to pwn me even faster than before. I could hold my own in most situations pre-ToA but worrying about which potions to quaff, which MLs to fire, and which artifact abilities to use became quite a mindfu** on top of my usual hotbar of skills and realm abilities. Before I got enough abilities to compete, I stood even less of a chance.

I welcomed World of Warcraft with open arms when it arrived in November 2004. My WoW guild was actually named Enmity because that’s what I felt towards Mythic for ruining such an awesome game (this sentence is false but included for poetic license). I would rather have done the 1-60 grind in WoW five times over than make a single new character in DAOC with all the MLs and artifacts overshadowing any (mis)perception of fun.

Ironically, I hear Mythic reduced the grind of ToA, which is kind of funny because for the ~12 months I participated in it, I was making dozens of suggestions for improvement on the forums. None of the devs either listened or cared it would seem until the mass exodus to WoW. I firmly believe that Mythic had good intentions but lost their way somewhere down the road. I can’t believe ToA ever made it out of beta unless their testers were no-life, no-job basement dwellers… or Mythic just ignored them too because they foresaw the riches of adding more grind to their game. Sadly, it took a huge subscription loss for them to realize that people played their game to grind RvR, not PvE.