DAOC style RvR? whats that?
The single greatest RvR in an MMO to date
I will attempt (and fail to do it justice) to explain.
In Daoc you had battlegrounds and you had the frontier.
The battlegrounds were in level brackets, so a level 5-10 battleground, a level 11-15 battleground and so on up to max level. The battlegrounds were not temporary instances like in WoW and other MMOs, they were a persistant battleground which was always running, with no limit on the number of players in them. You could go into them whenever you wanted, no waiting, no queueing, at any time of the day. Each battleground was merely a zone, with some pve mobs in, and a castle in the centre of the zone. The 3 factions (3 factions being Daocs most important feature of success) each had a "border" castle of there own and you would arrive there and could then run out towards the middle of the battleground to capture the castle in the middle,(owning it would give benefits to everyone in your faction, so there was always a good reason for everyone in your faction, for you to own it). As it was a totally persistent battlground you got situations where you would be fighting in a battle to take the castle and when you logged in the next day, they were still fighting for it. Then one faction might hold it for 2 days or so until it was conquered by one of the others.
The frontiers were like an extension of that, each faction in Daoc had its own "pve" lands, say 10 zones each, all different, all unique to that faction. Then "in between" the 3 factions was the frontier, this was a series of 6 or 7 zones for each faction which were the RvR zones, each zone had 3 or 4 castles in them which could be captured and owned by factions and guilds within those factions (Daoc allowed you to have a guild emblem on your cloaks and shields to identify your guild, which was pretty cool and something more MMOs should do imo). As with the battleground castles, owning the castles in the frontiers gave everyone on your faction bonuses, so again there was always good reason for your faction to control them. There were also relics in some of the castles, which gave further bonuses for the faction which owned them. In order to own them you had to travel into the frontiers, run through to an enemies keep , conquer it , grab the relic and then run it back through the frontiers to your keeps. Again, the frontiers were also full of Pve mobs, so you could go out there and pve too (the mobs in the frontiers gave extra xp as reward for the danger of pvp), all of this was persistent, no time limits, no queuing.
Daoc RvR was some of the best PvP I've ever experienced, pure quality.
