I myself never was a PVP nut, spend 2 and a half years raiding, and eventually co-leading friday nights primetime epic raids before ToA. Then ToA hit the fan, and suddenly everyone had to raid, even the PVPers, because of huge interdependancy, not only because of MLs, but also Artifacts. Also some Artifacts only levelled in PVP, which in turn was a pain for the Raiders. (Tartaros Gift, the artifact staff with a nice mana restore (which was heavily needed in PVE/raiding) was one of these, for example.)

So suddenly everyone was forced into an endgame Mythic came up with, that they pretty much slapped in your face, instead of, as they’d done before, only providing the capability in the world for you to do the stuff you like. Mythic did have an In-your-face approach when it came to deciding what their game was meant to be before this, back then it was mainly about PVP or rather RVR. They did go that way a while after ToA again anyway.

So what i wanna say is, DAoC was a really great game, and it had, for a while, the best endgame i’ve yet encountered, (maybe next to UO’s hardcore RP shards, but that’s an entirely different thing) but that wasnt because Mythic came up with RvR and it was so great (which i’ll admit it probably was) but because you could do what you wanted and they did provide the stuff for it. They stopped that, released ToA, game went sour.

So while i would rather say the concept was choice than PvP, in the end i agree with the guy in reply #8, i wish WoW, or ANY other MMO, because i havent seen another one doing it right yet, would steal this concept.

Any of you know anything about that?

there’s another morpg out there that didn’t really have an “end game.” Meridian59 was this fantastic little world that didn’t even have levels. you started out with 20hp and were immune to pvp attacks (unless you attacked someone). at 30hp, your “angel” left you and you were open to being pk’d. for a while you could only go up to 100hp, i think an expansion allowed for 110.

there were plenty of 30hp pk’ers out there, which proved that you didn’t need to get all the way up to 100hp to enjoy the full content of the game. also, every time you died, you risked losing a hp, so constant pvp and pve warfare kept people needing to regain hp.

the game also had in game mail just like WoW, as well as a community message board in each city.

one of my favorite aspects of M59 – which probably couldn’t be duplicated on a modern mmorpg due to the much higher volume of players – was the Assassin Game. you climb through dangerous sewers to find an old assassin who hands you a dagger. then he mails you to let you know who your target is and when the game has started. someone has your name too. whoever is the last person standing, wins.

i could go on and on and on about how great M59 was. the pvp system was awesome. the guild halls, the schools and their karma systems, just… everything. it survived UO, but EQ eventually killed it. you can still play the game right now (it was bought back from 3do by its designers, i think, at Near Death Studios), but after being immersed in the rich art design of worlds like EQ, DAoC and WoW, it’s really hard to go back.

honestly, i think all game designers should spend a good bit of time in M59 before they go designing more level-grinding, sideline pvp, endgame repetition games.