Tuesday 3 September 2002

Pic of the day: When it comes to sheer beauty, I still believe Midgard is the best. Then again, I was born there. (Screenshot from Dark Age of Camelot.)

DAoC realms in balance

This is another entry about the online game Dark Age of Camelot. Sorry to the rest of you.

After about 9 months of play, I guess my opinions have started to settle down a bit. Personally I feel that Hibernia is by far the easiest realm to play in. This boils down to my experience that there are always critters to fight at every level that you can kill with little risk. Leveling may be slow after a while, but it never becomes discouraging.

I admit that this is a subjective judgment, and there are at least 3 reasons why I may be more inclined to like Hibernia.

1. I had several months experience when I came to Hibernia. The realm I found most difficult is Midgard, where I started. Not only was I unfamiliar with the user interface, I was green to the whole experience of massive multiplayer RPGs. This may have made my first couple months harder than the later.

2. Hibernia is a land rich in magic, while Midgard is leaning a bit more to the sword side of Sword & Sorcery. (Albion is more balanced.) And I have a talent for magic, selecting the right spells deliberately and playing tactically rather than being quick-fingered in the middle of a pitched battle. Even as a fighter type, I like to augment with magic.

3. Hibernia seems to be more social, with more couples and girls playing. Midgard is more macho, and as such pride and honor tends to get the better of people. These are folks who have chosen to play Vikings, after all. And you know what reputation those have outside Scandinavia. Even the game manual plays up to this. I may be many things; not macho, though.

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There's a final reason why I think my opinion may be more subjective than it feels: All the people who choose to play the other realms. Yes, I argued in my previous DAoC entry that the system is naturally balanced by the existence of 3 competing factions: If one grows too strong, the others would reduce the fighting between each other to stop the one from overrunning the whole world. It makes sense to fight the bigger threat. But this isn't all of the truth. If it were so, then we would see a pattern on all (or almost all) servers where Hibernia was advancing, only to be fought by Midgard and Albion who were in a position of de facto truce. But this is plainly not the case. On Bedevere, where I play now, Hibernia was in fact the dominant power, but then Albion took the lead, and now it is settling back towards an equal balance between all three factions.

I don't think most players consciously seek out the losing side and play there. Rather, the balance must be caused by supreme game balancing by Mythic Entertainment, the makers of the game. You would expect that most people would initially join Albion, because the game is in English and has Camelot in its name. While there are quite a number of people of Scandinavian descent in the USA, and probably even more Irish, this would hardly be enough to balance the realms. It is more probable that most players, like me, try out different realms for a while, and play them in proportion to how much they like them. It is even possible that the absolute number of players in each realm is not nearly the same, I don't really know any way to check that. It could be that the few who make it to the top in Midgard are more powerful than the many in Hibernia, for instance. (Though I think I would have heard it if this was all out of proportion – it's not like gamers aren't quick to complain if they feel any injustice.)

Nor has Mythic just shipped the game, set up a number of servers and moved on to their next cash cow. They are continually tweaking the game, adding a zone here and a spell there. It is possible that this subtly alters the balance between the realms, but it doesn't look like it. The game was fairly young when I started, and there has never been a time when one of the realms was clearly superior. Except to me.