DAoC was a better game because of the three factions. Each helped to balance the others. If one faction got too powerful, the other two would work together to bring them down a notch. The cycle repeated itself time and again. It was a powerful inherent equalizer, that worked wonderfully.
In two faction combat, the only way to balance is with artificial and,
ultimately, superficial balancers. Increased XP, better loot and other “perks” to the unbalanced side. This does not work for a myriad of reasons, chiefly because no one wants to re-roll just because the other faction is now getting advantages.
Now everyone that plays WAR wants a third faction. I agree that a third faction would help game balance tremendously and get rid of the artificial measures, such as the Underdog system, that they are using.
Unfortunately, at this stage, it will not work. Adding a third faction, at first glance, sounds fantastic, but let’s think about it for a bit. If you add a new faction, the guilds and community will be torn apart. Imagine that half of your guild wants to join the new faction and half does not, what do you do? Alliances will take a huge hit and break apart. The entire community will go through upheaval. In addition, at least initially, a huge chunk of the server will choose to go to the new faction. The “newness” of the faction will cause it to be “flavor-of-the-month” thus inhibiting balance even more.
Consider that WAR has already had tremendous community upheaval already, having to merge servers at a rapid pace tends to do that. I know when I re-upped my WAR account a couple of months ago, I had again been assigned a new server. I have had friends who have had to move servers upwards of seven times and each time killed their guild and friend list a little bit more.
The same can be said for the Klingons in ST:O. Originally, the Klingons were supposed to be a complete second faction, with PvE and PvP available to them. Just like the Federation. As release drew near, Cryptic realized that they could not do this on time and, instead, made Klingons a PvP only faction, similar to Monster Play in LotRO. Promises were made that they would flesh out Klingons and make them a true Faction in the future.
So, now they expect everyone to play Federation mostly and jump unto Klingon every so often for PvP. As the Klingons get “fleshed” out, they then expect Guilds to make the decision of whether to stay Federation or make the move to Klingons.
What?
You want us to decide whether to abandon our hard work on Federation and go Klingon? Thus uprooting the guild and causing
And so will ST:O with its release state.
havoc in the community? Now to be fair, ST:O is a one server game, so you may indeed be able to play both on the same account and server, but still. That is just ridiculous.
Cryptic should have bit the bullet, pushed the release date and finished the Klingons. While they were at it, they should have fixed the horrible lag, endless bugs and terrible gameplay. But, no, it is just the latest example of a horribly rushed MMO from Cryptic.
I guess I should not be surprised.
By the way, there is a great post from Angry Gamer about the latest “State of the Game” address from Cryptic, located right here. He sums up my feelings about Cryptic and the messes they continually create pretty well. Take a look and enjoy!
Corpse Run 