DAOC - Celebrating Six Years : DAOC News

Hello all,



It’s been six truly wonderful years since Dark Age of Camelot first opened its servers to the hungry Realm versus Realm masses; six years of high intensity melee combat and countless magical explosions on the battlefields of the Frontiers; six years of the deadliest and most compelling siege warfare ever seen in any live MMO to date.



Six years and still counting.


I suspect that few of you know who I am. My name is Chris Rabideau and I have been the Producer of Dark Age of Camelot since January of 2007. Perhaps some of the ‘old schoolers’ might remember me, but for the most part, prior to my role as Producer, I’ve not been in the public eye simply because most of the jobs I’ve held over the years didn’t require it. In the seven years I’ve been with Mythic, I have never moved off the DAoC project. I’ve worked in nearly every capacity, including content development, systems design, QA, and production. I remember running to the store for office supplies or server RAM back when Mythic Entertainment was a small company and we all wore many hats. I have a great deal of passion and love for this game, and I have a tremendous amount of appreciation and respect for its community.

During my time as Producer thus far, the DAoC team has worked hard to realize many new features and loads of new content for the game. From upgrading/improving the keeps and towers in the Frontiers region, to “A Dragon’s Revenge” (a six month story campaign chock-full of free content), to working on a new UI, to updating our patcher to a more modern (and user-friendly) layout, this team has gone from one end of the game to the other - and we aren’t finished yet. We are currently in the process of improving our housing system to expand on and make storage more readily available and to add value to higher tier houses which cost more to buy and maintain. We are also developing some new player mounts – I don’t want to ruin the surprise, but they’re not horses J. We continue to fine tune and tweak core systems of our game with new improvements, as well as each of the realm’s classes within DAoC to ensure that all players share an equally enjoyable gameplay experience.



We also recognize that some changes are not always welcome. A decision to make a change, particularly to a core game system, is never easy. As a team, we carefully analyze not just data, but also what our community is telling us. This is why you will continue to see login polls asking for your opinions. We have always been interested in what our community says, and we always will be.



I’d like to tell you more about our new test environment: In the coming months, we are going to be deploying a new ‘experimental’ test server to our gaming community (to accompany Pendragon). This new server will house code changes to highly complex game systems, which will typically require more than one patch cycle to implement. Changes to or additions of major systems, such as the UI, in-game mail and auction house (to name a few) will be deployed out to this new server ahead of all other servers, including Pendragon. This will allow the community to log in and see what we’re up to, as well as allow more time for the community to react to and make suggestions about whatever major systems we’re working on. This will also provide us more time to consider community feedback, and make adjustments where best for the game and its players.



I realize this post is more of a Producer’s Letter and less a celebration of DAoC’s 6th anniversary. However, I hope my message conveys the facts that Dark Age of Camelot, after six fantastic years, still has a tremendous following, and still receives a tremendous amount of developer support. We are committed to this game and we will continue to work hard to ensure that Dark Age of Camelot remains a truly fun and enjoyable gameplay experience.



From all of us here at EA Mythic, we thank you for six wonderful years, and we hope to see you around for many, many more.



Chris Rabideau

Producer, Dark Age of Camelot

EA Mythic

October 10, 2007