This is a follow up to Baint’s story. The first part was about the problems of the design of the zones. The second part is about the rest of the message I’ve taken from the Vault and that underlines what is bad in the design of the quests and the actual gameplay offered in Catacombs.

We all know that this expansion has the main purpose to accelerate by a substantial margin the levelling pace. DAoC has always had relevant problems in its PvE aspect and most of the players have passed this type of judgement:

I see the PvE in DAoC as nothing more than the price of admission to RvR.

This perception is a fact and still today the treadmill in the game has been considered mostly as a burden to suffer before finally reaching the actual (unique, also) value that the game can offer. The RvR.

Catacombs confirms again the superficial attitude Mythic is keeping toward the game. A radical problem is trivialized and dismissed with a solution that can just glide on the surface without really solving anything and without offering any type of value.

In fact this expansion solves the aspect of “quantity” of the treadmill, but not its quality, where the real problem is:

Haemish:
As has been said before, the PROCESS of DAoC’s PVE treadmill is what makes it so grindy.

HRose:
That’s the point in fact. As I define it: a problem of quality and not of quantity.

DAoC’s treadmill isn’t longer compared to other games, but it is awful for the most part (especially now with a weak community).

In this thread someone brought the example of task dungeons as a relevent improvement to the treadmill. My point is that they are exactly the opposite. They BREAK the game. They are essentially corridors with a row of immoble mobs in the middle. You whack your way through them, one by one, with about a two minutes downtime between each kill till the end where sits the exact same mob you whacked till that point, just named. You kill the named and you get rewarded with money and experience.

Now the reward is good, this is true, and it makes the treadmill shorter since you can efficently level up in solo. But this is, in fact, the “quantity” aspect of the problem. The truth is that you are really playing an unashamed version of ProgressQuest that puts you in a corridor with a row of mobs you need to grind to increase the size of your e-peen. There is really NOTHING ELSE. Just repeat your easy kill 20x for each mob, complete the task, get another and repeat.

This CANNOT be tolerated. It cannot be tolerated for weeks or months as it cannot be tolerated for ten minutes. It’s one of those things that give you epiphanies: what the fuck am I doing? The game cannot be THAT dumb.

And you really cannot believe that the devs could be so unashamed to add something like that to the game.

The task dungeons are popular. They are the faster way you have to level and they represent a huge difference from the other hunting places. But again this is a refusal to solve the problem of the PvE. It’s another way to dismiss and negate it. To completely jump a part of the game as quick as possible. It’s the legitimation of the “burden” that is there just as a weight inherited from the past (and that noone cared to address properly):

The PvE needs work to be attractive, not to be just as quick as possible in order to forget it. It needs value.

“/level 20” was a superficial workaround that I believe damaged the game way more than the benefits it brought.

It’s not a case that I accuse Mythic of not acknowledging their errors. What they did with the “/level 20” command (the possibility to start new characters at level 20 once the player had at least gone till 50 once) follows the exact same patterns of Catacombs. It’s a *removal* of the treadmill, as much as possible. /level 20 allowed the players to jump a part of the game, the task dungeons are a new way to speedrun through the treadmill in order to get rid of it as quick as possible.

But again, where is the “quality” of the game? What does it have to offer? With both these solutions Mythic refused to offer real alternatives. They just seconded a problem:

Nebu:
HRose: I see the PvE in DAoC as nothing more than the price of admission to RvR. It’s not fun nor is it interesting.

HRose:
Firstly, I believe that DAoC shouldn’t ditch its PvE. I strongly believe that it IS possible to make it fun and not a burden. That’s why I HATE “/level 20” and those unacceptable task dungeons.

Those are, exactly like the new ruleset, ways to DODGE the problems. Nothing will improve if you do not SOLVE or at least TRY to address the problems.

“The PvE sucks, so no PvE” I do not accept that. That’s seconding a problem not solving it. When “Wish” was turned toward the GM content the excuse brought by the devs was: “we tried to go in the PvP direction but it wasn’t fun”.

OF COURSE it’s not fun. Because to make good things you need to work on them and expand their potential. The quality or the “fun” in general don’t fall from the sky, you need to hunt for them. So I don’t accept that DAoC has to become just PvP because PvE isn’t fun. It should instead START to work in order to offer something interesting. Because they definitely have the resources.

Here is described that superficiality I pointed out at the beginning. Instead of observing the game and understanding its true needs, what happens is a superficial glance. What I defined as: “The PvE sucks, so no PvE”. This is why I believe the game needs (and always needed) a creative approach to these problems. To offer something different instead of just walking around the issues. Legitimating its presence and tolerating it.

Now that I played Catacombs more at depth I can see the overall shape and all it has to offer. Not only we have these task dungeons with rows of mobs to be farmed over and over so you can finally exit and see the light of the day (the RvR), but even the other new zones in the expansion and the two new private instances for each of the old dungeons follow the exact same trend.

There seem to be more than 400 new quests added to the new zones (I don’t know if this number is cumulative between the three realms or not), but the large majority of these are designed as “mini-quest”. Essentially they are simple, soloable tasks that you get from random NPCs, sending you to kill a couple of mobs and then go back for a decent reward in experience and some coins.

So, isn’t that another form of pure grind? The players do not hate these games because they are more or less “long”. The grind is NEVER a problem of quantity. But of quality. This is why noone I know complains that the treadmill in WoW is too long. In fact I hear the opposite and the desire to prolong it (also because the endgame sucks so much that you hope to arrive there as late as possible).

Catacombs introduces an INSANE amount of task dungeons, new zones and private instances. From this point of view you could expect to have so much content to level at least five different characters before seeing the same place twice. But this is, instead, completely false. Becuase there’s nothing to see. All these dungeons, while pretty, are just recycled assets over and over with rows of mobs standing still and just waiting you to kill them.

The gameplay is not just “weak”, the gameplay is *ABSENT*. There is nothing to see, nothing to play with, nothing to discover, nothing to… learn. Which should be what these games are about. There’s just a gap between one level and another (now speed up) and some space for the socialization. Between farming “aurulite” (the new currency) in the private instances or farming directly experience in a task dungeon, there’s no difference. You can have the corridors of a different color, or the mobs of a different shape. But that’s all you get. Nothing else.

You have so many different possibilities just with Catacombs. You can level by taking these solo mini-quests in the new zones, you can farm aurulite in the new instances or the instances of the classic dungeons, or you can do task dungeons to farm directly the experience at an insane rate. But, no matter what you choose, the experience (of the player) is completely MISSING. You can trade between voids. Between empty experiences that are there just as excuses (and excusing what exactly?).

So why even add these multiple possibilities if they are just empty containers? Because they are balanced on the “purposes”. The task dungeons give insane exp and some money in no time (in particular when grouped), but you cannot find drops and item to use, the mini quests are best to solo but they give little money and no type of equipment at all, finally the instanced dungeons offer you aurulite that gives you the possibility to get decent equipment but that aren’t nowhere as efficient as the other two at delivering the exp. To this you can add the fact that the prices of the aurulite items are set so out of scale (as always) to require insane amount of farming to the point that even by doing exclusively this activity you will never be able to buy up-to-date equipment for your character without being twinked to death (so forget to mix these possibilities and hope to obtain acceptable results).

This is another demonstration that the only element of design at play here is the purpose of these different patterns. We have three different paths to choose, each with a particular advantage over the other. But this type of functional design has then NOTHING at all to offer when it comes to deliver an experience for the player. There is no gameplay to offer. The game can offer aurulite, or experience, or money. But it cannot offer THE FUN. It cannot offer gameplay with some variety.

So we are back to the original concept. The grind isn’t about how functional is an activity, but in the quality of the experience. A quality that, in DAoC, just isn’t there. There’s a hole, a gap in the gameplay. A missing block. New and old players trying the game may appreciate the fact that the grind isn’t slow as before. But it’s still the exact same grind. It’s the perfect definition of a grind: the fact that you have to rinse and repeat the same gameplay over and over and over, just because you need to reach the next step and, finally, the RvR endgame where the fun is supposed to be.

The game offers a suspension. A missing part. A lack of quality and interest. On this aspect the game isn’t changed in the slightest. We are still at the exact same archaic grindy treadmills. Maybe shorter, but still a grind. Another missed occasion to let the game express its qualities instead of trivializing it till a point where it has nothing anymore to say.