Guild Wars 2 - Page 96

Basic Realm vs Realm
So there's a couple of things.First off each realm were vastly different in terms of lore and classes - despite having as many as 16 classes per realm -- they were all unique in their own right.

Hibernia (Celtic lore) vs Midgard (Nordic viking lore) vs Albion (Britain lore). This made you feel like you belonged to your realm and that the enemies were easily noticeable.

Everyone, regardless of level could help out in RvR combat.

There were 3 realms, so if one realm would dominate the others 2 could help eachother out either through gank groups or just massive zergs. Remember this is all non-instanced non-balanced PvP - FULLY Dynamic and ever changing. There's no reset button, there's no developer that decides to restart the entire RvR zone.

The game is driven by its players and their actions.

This balance also ties into the combat, siege and ganking capabilities that was unique for each realm which i'll bring up later.

Can't stress how important this is to keep pvp fresh and intresting - in essence you never TRULY know what to expect beyond that hill or inside that keep. Free information is bad for any pvp focused mmo, it removed the games longetivity and leads to stale and boring gameplay.

How the RvR map was layed out (Pre-NF expansion)

So each realm had the ability to port to an outpost keep for each enemy realm. Their own realms RvR zone was on the outskirts of their pve world.

This made it feel like you were entering enemy teritory - this is their land. This isn't some neutral fighting ground like Arathi Basin.

These zones were massive and epic but thanks to speed classes for each realm (Skald for Midgard, Bard for Hibernia and Minstrel for Albion) -- were able to travel through these zones with ease.


Community and its importance
Chat was important to communicate with your realm in order to capture/defend keeps, fight groups, zergs and to capture realm relics. The main source of intel besides your keep being on fire on the map was the chat system.

Deathmessages in chat - basicly this told you that one guy of your realm was killed by an enemy player and where; Bob has been killed by John in Pennine Mountains. Each message was color coded too - green for hibernian death messages, blue for mid and red for albion.

This would create suspense, how many are actually in pennine? What is going on over there? Will our keep be taken by the enemy realm? Maybe its just a stealther, I recognize that name. You see the sense of community in DAoC is still unmatched in the mmo world.

New Frontiers ( a pvp expansion ) destroyed this concept of intel and scouts by adding flaming swords to areas on the minimap where fighting was occuring.
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You played on ONE server, so you had to be social and willing to work together to succeed in RvR and you were constantly fighting against or with the same people so it added another layer of fun. You started to know the people you were playing with and against.

Take this scenario for example: you just had a forum chat with an enemy midgard player about that failed relic capture yesterday and now you're fighting him again the next day. You don't have that kind of interaction in modern mmos. vnboards was a big part of DAoCs success as a community focused mmorpg.

Camelotherald.com which was Mythics own site to keep track of stats and current RvR progress was also huge - you could look up any servers realm map and see the ongoing fight and who owned what relic or which guilds owned what keep.

You could also look up stats on any player or guild, their crafting profession, realm level, realm points gained last week, last month or total. It was just a massive information hub.

Relics and Keeps
So this was also a critical part of DAoC.

If a realm captured x amount of enemy keeps it would unlock the gates to the relic keep of which a relic was held. It would then need to captured and taken the entire way back to your own frontier, your own realm and placed in your keep to be able to give its effect. This was dangerous and requires an entire raid or zerg and often involved 100vs100 battles. Epic indeed.

If a relic would be captured it would give global damage bonuses to the entire realm that has it -- this was obviously big and made the RvR struggle relevant and important unlike any other pvp out there.

Keeps would offer experience bonuses and guild points. Keeps would also display your guilds emblem on both the keep itself and the guards roaming it.

Combat

This is huge, this is for me the single best feature of DAoC as a PvP game and also its downfall because it has a steeper learning curve and requires more of you as a team than most other mmos.

Hard CC

In the early days of DAoC, the knowledge of how to properly use CC was limited but as guild groups such as Free RPS and Lagged Again that with just 8 people killed entire zergs alone it started to appear to people that if you're organized and know how to work together you can achieve wonders against a disorganized group of people. This turned alot of people off - the people who weren't willing to get competitive or learn from their misstakes.

The CC time was a bit over the top at this time, this was before CC reduction through patches and items/ realm abilities purging or blocking the CC.

But it still remains important to this very day. The top groups in DAoC today are known for their ability to respect CC and cycle through CC immunities (Root, Mezmerize and stun).

A good player on a cc class (Healer/Sorc/Bard) would instinctively know when the enemies root immunity is about to wear off and can then re-root a target. Of course there are spells and realm abilities that cures these effects as ive previously mentioned. Its balanced that way.

Here are some videos that display the most famous oldschool DAoC groups in action:
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Here's a more modern take on a good DAoC grp - notice the difference in level of organization and CC control:

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A mid grp heavily based around 3 casters and just wiping zergs fast:
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Hard Interrupt system

If you as a caster or support get interrupted you get interrupted and you dont keep casting your spell like in WoW. This demanded proper positioning and help from your team to "peel" off of you. The melee tanks would use snare or stun on the enemy or the casters would CC them off of you so you can heal your team.

This encouraged organization and teamwork. Fights where people jump around like donkeys on top of eachother pressing their insta spells is bad gameplay in my eyes.

Of course there were realm abilities that allowed you to go cast through normal interrupts (not hard CC like stun or mez). I will touch on ways to cast through interruption next.

Realm Abilities

Another form to progress your character after reaching max level - massive variety and additional strenght to be had for your character.

You get realm points for killing enemy players or capturing keeps/relics. With these realm points you advance in realm levels and each realm level accounts to one point to spend in the specialized Realm abilities.

Purge - you purge alll CC spells.
Quickcast - cast one non-interrupted spell every 30 seconds.
Master of concentration - all casts are uninterruptable for 30 seconds.
Ignore pain - heals yourself for a large %.
Divine Intervention - heal battery - heals your group automaticly when taking damage for the amout in the battery.

Add to that passive that adds to your base stats such as dextery ( cast speed ) strenght ( melee damage ), constitution ( health ) etc etc.

Take a look for yourself http://darkageofcamelot.com/content/realm-abilities

There's so much more to the game than what I mentioned, but I tried to bring up the key points of the pvp system.