RIP DAOC Multiboxing 2002-2010

[HTeam]

I haven't played in a couple years, but I'd be surprised if a good portion of this problem isn't the animist class.

In my opinion, it was always a broken class which could deal damage from a safe location. Something which fit Mythic's own definition of an exploit prior to the introduction of the animist.

Stackable mushrooms that do 8-15% damage to a character. Then stack animists. Even if the mushrooms are getting killed, they can be replaced fast enough in number large enough to kill an character in seconds. There was also the problem that (when I left the game) mushrooms finished their cast even if a player left line of sight. So you could peek around a corner and jump back but if there were 20 mushrooms there, you were dead. The whole time the animist is some place unreachable.

There was also the matter of end game content being trivialized by the animist class.

I can see where there could be a problem with multiboxers considering the total population playing still.

I'd love to see another game in the spirit of DAoC. WAR need not apply (hey, let's flip some unattended objectives for realm points!)

[HTeam]

Edit: By the way, they aren't calling that new rule a "rule." They are pretending that they haven't changed their rules, and that they are only enforcing the same rules that have existed for years. They are claiming that the new rule, quoted above, is only an explanation that CSRs have been instructed to give.

If this all sounds confusing and absurd, it is. Compared to Blizzard's customer service department, Mythic's is a bunch of clowns. It's really unbelievable.

That's pretty standard behavior by Mythic, Verant, Blizzard and The Party. It is standard procedure to claim that the new way of doing this is the way it should be, even if they have denied for years that it was a problem.

[cryinsham]

I remember many a night pulling Jay out of towers or camping keeps with my animists ( Proud member of Brotherhood of Steel) then jay rolled banshees and and i had to side with him BAH!!!!. then vanilla iceee came along etc. But animist boxing was never that big it was enchanters and that ultra sexy PBAOE and banshee's with their cone aoe that made life sexy.

[JamieW]

I haven't played in a couple years, but I'd be surprised if a good portion of this problem isn't the animist class.

Prepare to be surprised.

Probably not too long after you stopped playing (and right about the time I went on about a 2 year break), Mythic placed numerical limits on the number of total pets that each Animist could cast, and a numerical limit on the number of total animist pets allowed in a single area. At the time, I believe that they claimed that it was for better server stability and performance, but when they echoed that change to the Theurgist class it made a strong case for the move to be a method of balancing high-end encounters by limiting the number of non-player attackers that a small group of people could generate.

No, mainly the issue has to deal with Mythic's path forward as population has dwindled. They started to "cluster" servers to provide shared RvR areas, since the RvR game suffers the most with smaller numbers. This was fine for the PvE side of the game, since most of the good stuff wasn't instanced, but it was at least duplicated across each server in the cluster (Dragon is down/camped on Server1? No problem, we can just port to Server2's Mainland area and check that Dragon spawn). But, apparently, the ability to PvE more efficiently and get to the real bread and butter of their game, RvR, put somebody's panties in a bunch at Mythic, and they pushed to eliminate the duplicate zones... again in the name of "server optimization". So every area became shared on a cluster. Still, populations were split between several clusters, so most of the population values were still not to the extreme where you could still expect to find a decent farmable mob uncamped if you were looking to make some in-game currency or get some items for your characters.

Fast forward to last year, and Mythic had to keep combining more and more servers together until there were just 3 clusters, and even on those clusters, 2 out of the 3 had < 100 or so players on at a time. So they came up with the grand idea to create a new cluster, force everybody to transfer from their current servers/clusters to that new one, so that all of the population would be together, and everybody could theoretically use any of their characters created. But now for the entire playing population in a particular realm, each decent encounter only has a single instance. And they've gotten to the point where they can be killed by a single person or pair of people running multiple accounts. So the population finds itself in a situation where it becomes nigh impossible to kill certain MOBs and obtain their drops without buying them from the multi-boxers that camp the spawns... most of those groups being from professional outfits that sell the in-game currency for real-life currency in the first place.

Rather than instance these encounters, as many people consistently have asked for, or provide anti-multi-boxer measures in the encounters, or just ban the activities of the anti-social outfits, Mythic has gone down this route. And every person that has ever had a single issue with a multi-box group is applauding them for doing the "right thing", even though it really is not the most optimal solution, and Mythic won't be clear on what is and isn't allowed, because of whatever reason.

Round-robin keypresses, key-press delays, alternate tools all seem like they may provide the answer. However since nobody can really be sure what Mythic CS does to detect what they describe as illegal in-game conduct, it's hard to be sure what will or won't be tolerated.

Me? I haven't actively multi-boxed in DAOC for a few months. Even then, I mainly did PvE with multiple Ice Wizards, but found that the end result wasn't of much use for what I wanted to accomplish. I played around with a pair Necromancers in the Molvik Battleground with a Minstrel for speed, and a trio of Necromancers out in New Frontiers. But nothing very serious like the Team Wizzie, Team Animist, Team SM, etc. that are in the game, and nothing as advanced as the 5-boxing I did when I tried out LOTRO. And while I think that its a stupid decision, I can't say for sure whether it will positively or negatively impact the game for me in the near future.

[Freddie]

Rather than instance these encounters, as many people consistently have asked for, or provide anti-multi-boxer measures in the encounters, or just ban the activities of the anti-social outfits, Mythic has gone down this route.

They ironic thing is, they are providing anti-multboxer measures in the encounters! One of the developers has been doing a ton of work on that, and the first results of his work are in yesterday's Pendragon patch. They didn't even give it a chance to get tested or go live.

[JamieW]

They ironic thing is, they are providing anti-multboxer measures in the encounters! One of the developers has been doing a ton of work on that, and the first results of his work are in yesterday's Pendragon patch. They didn't even give it a chance to get tested or go live.

Perhaps, but from my reading of the patch notes, they aren't targetting just multi-box players that use clone-setups (ie., 4 PBAE casters stacked on each other).

The patch notes say: " New mechanics have been put into place to target inattentive players." I haven't seen the changes in place on Pendragon, but I the wording of it makes me think that non-played bots, etc. may also be targeted with these changes.

[Freddie]

Perhaps, but from my reading of the patch notes, they aren't targetting just multi-box players that use clone-setups (ie., 4 PBAE casters stacked on each other).

The patch notes say: " New mechanics have been put into place to target inattentive players." I haven't seen the changes in place on Pendragon, but I the wording of it makes me think that non-played bots, etc. may also be targeted with these changes.

Your reading makes sense but my comment wasn't based on the patch notes. Additional info was given to me privately. Many changes were made specifically to stop multiboxers.

Edit: I'm not saying those are the only changes they made. I don't know what else they did. But they made a number of changes designed to stop multiboxing at those encounters.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I haven't played in a couple years, but I'd be surprised if a good portion of this problem isn't the animist class.

In my opinion, it was always a broken class which could deal damage from a safe location. Something which fit Mythic's own definition of an exploit prior to the introduction of the animist.

Stackable mushrooms that do 8-15% damage to a character. Then stack animists. Even if the mushrooms are getting killed, they can be replaced fast enough in number large enough to kill an character in seconds. There was also the problem that (when I left the game) mushrooms finished their cast even if a player left line of sight. So you could peek around a corner and jump back but if there were 20 mushrooms there, you were dead. The whole time the animist is some place unreachable.

There was also the matter of end game content being trivialized by the animist class.

Nah, that's long ago been nerfed into oblivion. In fact, the major neutering of the animist class happened well before Catacombs, even.

To wit:

• Nerfed number of shrooms per animist.
• Nerfed number of total shrooms/pets per 100-yard radius.
• Nerfed shroom health by 85% so that one wizard AoE (or hell, even a THANE aoe) could kill them all.
• Nerfed to-hit on shrooms.
• Nerfed shroom aggro so that aggregate aggro went to the animist instead of the shrooms. (This effectively killed animists soloing encounters where the mobs would last long enough to kill the animist, e.g.: dragons.)
• Nerfed shroom LoS so they became nigh useless on keep walls and around doors.
• Nerfed creeping spec CC turrets to be heavily affected by diminishing returns, basically killing the spec.
• Nerfed turret damage for off-spec shrooms, basically killing using creeping DD shroom stacks as damage while PBAOE'ing with your verdant tank shroom or bombing with arb.
• Nerfed verdant's main shroom PBAOE to-hit, damage and the survivability of the main shroom due to nerfs to verdant's "buff" shrooms.

Basically, the only viable animists left after all the blunt-stroke nerfs to a mechanic that was obviously not well thought-out, were arboreals. And those suffered severe issues with their "bombs" having stupid fucking problems like not being able to path into a keep or (LOL) not being able to catch sprinting players or someone running by you at an oblique angle using speed 5+.

It just got so damn silly that you ended up with a class that had roughly 85% of its original capability completely gutted, despite the fact that you could ALWAYS just AoE mezz a gang of shrooms and then forget about them as your entire raid just walked blithely by the sleeping, full-duration-mezzed pets.

I mean, I see why they did it, but the roller-coaster ride from "Hey, what's this new class all about?" through "Wow, this class is FUN!" to "OMG, my class...what have they done to meeeee??!?!" was depressing to live through as an animist.

These bludgeon-style nerfs to the last interesting class I played was what finally made me quit DAoC for good.

[Tonuss]

Round-robin keypresses, key-press delays, alternate tools all seem like they may provide the answer.

Not if they simply decide to outlaw multiboxing, which is what they seem to have done. They may not have covered every possible action with their "1 button/1 action/1 character" statement, but it looks as if they're saying that they'll take action against anyone who tries to play multiple accounts at once.

Sounds like a response to the shrinking population of a game that is on its last legs. They've probably got no reason to want to spend any more time or money on it, just milk it until it finally keels over.