Dark Age of Camelot: Trials of Atlantis/Catacombs versus Darkness Rising

I choose to open things with this example of a pretty standard game design dynamic, biting the hand that feeds you. Sorta.

Mythic released Trials of Atlantis to originally much yawning. Frankly, there wasn't much there to change the game immediately, because it was 99% high end raid content. There was much talk before the expansion about the expansion not affecting RvR much at all, so everyone expected that going in.

Then came Retribution.

Retribution is about the best group of players of any game that I've ever seen, each and every one of them a die hard gamer, each and every one of them able to break the game simply through skill. They were for a time the only guild in DAoC ever to lead guilds in on two different servers at once in total realm points (in fact, with Nimue being clustered with two of the most populated servers in the game, Retribution still ranks 7th, and realm points come much slower on lower population servers).

What Retribution did was devote themselves to the expansion for a few weeks. They quickly learned how to get through all the Master Levels, they quickly had all the artifacts they needed, and when they were done, they dominated the server like they had never done before. Before anyone had completed Master Level 2, Retribution had access to Power Fonts, Warguard, Forceful Zephyr, and the wealth of game-breaking abilities that Mythic promised would not affect RvR at all.

While Ret didn't do it, a group of 8 Animists and buffbots took down the Hibernian dragon during this period of time, an encounter which is supposed to be done with 30+ active players, and is usually accomplished by non-farmers with 50 or more.

They also had all the drops that comes from going through all those encounters, and because they did most of it with their sister guild, The Phoenix Guard, they split the drops evenly, so in the end, everyone had +25% (before they went "uh oh" and changed it to 10%) casting speed, melee speed, and damage to both. Divon, an Eldritch who was already disgustingly good, turned around and began soloing with a traditionally poor soloing class (Mana Eld), and could not lose. He had Brittle Guards and Prescience Nodes to go along with the fact that he could fire Mastery of Concentration and cast 8 or 9 PBAOE's before their target could get out of the radius.

Needless to say, Trials of Atlantis was broken.

With the release of Catacombs, Mythic did it again, releasing three new overpowered classes (Warlock, Vampiir, and Bainshee), while the other two classes were somewhat lackluster.

And now, with Darkness Rising, we see the phenomenon come full circle. Having been bitten one too many times, they have released what may be the most boring and pointless expansion released for an MMORPG to date.

It is human nature that, when you do something wrong, you fade back, try to cover it up, and hope it goes away. This is the way that phenomenon works in game design. After blowing your game wide open, you come back unwilling to push the boundaries of the game. The Champion Levels are similar drivel to the Master Levels, except of very little use, and with no real different abilities available, just rehashes of the same stuff. The Champion Weapons are largely just artifacts with various abilities, though none of them compare to the power of artifacts out there now, such as Battler and Malice (though I admit the caster staves are pretty nice.) It seems the only selling point of the expansion is mounts, something which was purely done in reaction to WoW having them available.

It is the equivalent of a walk after a home run, the fear of going too far ensuring that you don't go far enough. Game design is about walking that line. You have to escalate, if you don't escalate from one expansion/addition to the next, you simply don't make money. If old players don't need the expansion to succeed, they won't get it, but if you make it so that you can't succeed without the new expansion, everyone complains about it.

And then they go out and buy the expansion.

So think about it next time you see some new addition (like the new Warrior ZG trinket), and your first impulse is to complain. If it isn't a little better than what you already had, then you have no reason to get it.