The MMORPG Character Lifecycle: RvR Graduation

Dark Age of Camelot offers a tremendous amount of content. After all, it’s been running for over four years, and it is about to release its next expansion — an expansion for which I have signed both of my accounts.

As with all MMORPGs on the market today, the primary evolution of a character for the casual gamer resembles this sequence of events:

1. You birth your character with a naive understanding of the game’s mechanics and biases
2. You spend time questing and murdering NPCs for experience points
3. You work to accumulate the best player crafted or NPC loot
4. You exhaust the base content, as most killing is the same with just variations on the 3D art that you are attacking and the attack style vulnerabilities of your NPC or monster opponent
5. You maximize your character’s combat capability against NPC or PvE (i.e. player versus environment) monsters. The challenge diminishes
6. You achieve sort of a boredom plateau. The game is the same, so you need something else upon which you can turn your achievement need.
7. You start the journey of Player v Player (PvP) combat.

I am in possession of much deeper thoughts on this topic, but the basic sentiment expresses itself here. Upon movement into PvP, the game mechanics and enjoyment really change. You still engage in PvE to help new players or replenish your supplies, but you focus primary efforts toward maximizing the “win” in PvP.

I’ve just passed this landmark in Dark Age of Camelot. I think it took me a little less than 6 months to get here. I estimate that I still have at least 1 year of solid game play left before I hit the boredom threshhold. However, at this point, I am just scratching the surface. With that said, let me give you my latest adventure:

I spent some time helping a Cleric level from 48 to 49.5 yesterday. I do this out at New Frontiers, as there are some items that drop from certain creatures that can be exchanged for XP. In DAOC, there are 3 factions. I belong to Albion. Our little group’s camp was assaulted by a Midgard player and we all died. He returned later, and we won the battle. This really sparked my interest.

So later that night, I shouted out on my /gu (Guild) and /as (Alliance) chat channels to try to take back one of our towers that Hibernia, the other DAOC faction, had taken. We put together a very small group. At least on the Lancelot server, the Albion personnel seem much less organized and willing to RvR (i.e. DAOC parlance for PvP is Realm versus Realm). My message met with some small reception, and our under powered little group went forth to meet the challenge.

On three different occasions we almost either brought the door down using a ram or a couple of trebuchets to bust down the whole bloody thing:

Now, we failed on all three counts after getting either the door down to 20% or the walls down to 40%. The Hibernians came out in force, and we were even assaulted by a roaming band of Midgards. It is now fixed in my mind that I need to take back those bloody towers.

The real message for gamer designers is this: people always need something to which they can strive. They also need to, like gambling, receive some form of periodic reinforcement so that they do not disengage from game play.

The real message for game players: are you an addict? Does your need to accomplish become a compulsion that propels you that additional hour upon additional hour until you realize that it’s 3:13 a.m. during a work or school night?

~ by xaviermorgan on September 10, 2006.