The 8v8 population on the live Ywain cluster of DAoC is shrinking because of shrinking overall population, high skill and realm level gaps, dominant groups, and increased cliquishness. We propose several measures to nurture 8v8 including eliminating realm timers, RPs for losses, 8v8 kill bonuses, 8v8 group leader and member bonuses, 8v8 arenas, and increased 8v8 spotlight.

There is no single cause for this problem, but rather a combination of several causes:

• Shrinking overall population: As a 20-year old game, the population on the live Ywain cluster is shrinking steadily. This means that there are simply fewer players available to draw into the 8v8 community.

• High skill gap: Given the complexity and skill involved in 8v8 fights at the top level, it is hard for new players to get involved in 8v8 fights so that they can reach the necessary level to compete and not be carried by their group.

• Dominant groups: A corollary of the high skill gap is that some experienced groups are so dominant (read: IRC) that any other group in another realm are hard-pressed to kill a single of their number, let alone defeat them entirely in 8v8 combat.

• Increasing realm level gap: With so many of the experienced players having acquired a high realm level, it is hard for a newcomer to compete.

• Increasing cliquishness: While Discord has decreased the barrier for entry (i.e., no longer a need to use IRC), the 8v8 community is still tight-knit and relatively closed to newcomers.

• Strong BG leaders: all three realms have dominant and relatively successful BG leaders, such as Herorius (Hib), Leegen (Mid), and Rescu (Alb). Their BGs make for a comfortable and relatively stress-free playstyle that supports safe and dependable RPs. Fighting outside the BG is often seen as risky and uncertain for people unused to the 8v8 playstyle.

All of these factors lead to a discouraging and uphill battle for new players and new groups, thus contributing to the 8v8 community shrinking and running the risk of eventually dying out entirely.

Broadsword Online Games, the maintainers of the live DAoC servers, have done several things to support and nurture the 8v8 community, a few of them recently:

• Ellan Vannin: harking back to the Agramon days, the central island in the RvR frontiers has always been a prime roaming ground for 8v8 groups because of the lack of siege objectives (save the towers and the central Knoc Meayll keep) and patrolling guards.

• Obelisk: the recent introduction of an obelisk in each realm's relic town for instantly porting your group to a random location on EV has been a good change.

• BP bonus: roaming on EV now yields a bonus to bounty points.

• EV information: porting using the obelisk now yields a regular update of the number of groups of 6+ members from each realm who are also on the EV island.

While obviously limited in what changes it can enact, the player community has also taken measures to improve the 8v8 climate on the Ywain cluster:

• Etiquette: While difficult to enforce and far from ubiquitously respected, the more established 8v8 groups tend to observe certain rules of etiquette when encountering each other, such as (1) not adding on an ongoing 8v8 fight, (2) turning on enemies that adds on an ongoing 8v8 fight (or pulling off if the adders are from the same realm), (3) pausing combat if the enemy group has an LD (linkdeath), and (4) letting enemy groups get prepared after fighting an enemy group (like getting a new pet, rebuffing, rezzing, etc).

• Drafts: In the past, certain 8v8 community members have organized nightly "drafts" where volunteers can sign up to be assigned to a group and then fight in set 8v8 fights, typically on EV. These drafts provide a (more or less) friendly environment for players to learn 8v8 skills and compare themselves against others.

• Random/semi-random 8v8 groups: Rather than the traditional draft setup with set fights in EV, a very new development (April 2021) organized by Xuu and Tuneses is an ongoing plan to form random (or semi-random) 8v8 groups of interested players and then let these groups roam freely during an evening. This will provide another way for even inexperienced players to get into the 8v8 community and learn the appropriate skills as well as get to know other community members. The goal is for these players to bring these skills and mindset back to their regular groups during the rest of the week.

There are additional changes that could be made by the player community:

• Reduced toxicity: The 8v8 community can be toxic and difficult to get into, but its members will need to realize that continuing to push away potential new members only hurts the community itself in the end. There have been recent improvements in understanding all playstyles in the game, but the onus is on the existing members to reduce its toxicity further.

Despite these existing measures, the 8v8 population is shrinking and more intervention is necessary. Below are some proposed measures that would require implementation by Broadsword:

• No realm timers: Switching realms to either allow for changing the makeup of a draft group, or for switching over when the number of 8v8 groups is imbalanced in the frontiers, is currently impractical due to the 15-minute realm timer. Most players don't have 15 minutes to spend and would thus rather stay on their current realm. At this point in the game, when virtually all players have characters in all three realms, abolishing the timer (or at least reducing it to 5 minutes) makes sense.

  • Argument (Carol/Broadsword): Realm timers affect everyone, including the battlegroups, not just the 8v8 community. The realm timers prevent people from switching to the realm that is currently dominant.

  • Response: The realm timer is already counterproductive even for battlegroups. For example, when defending a relic, the realm timer prevents the defenders from mounting a successful strike force to intercept the relic being transported back to a realm since most players will want relic credit on another toon and need to log out at least 15 minutes before the relic drop in order to be able to switch. Finally, the use of a 50% RP pot is often a bigger deterrent to switching; if players switch realms, Broadsword will arguably benefit because they will be consuming more RP pots.

• RP bonus for group lead: Arranging an 8v8 group requires knowledge, skill, and leadership. However, there is little incentive for forming an 8v8 group. Providing an RP bonus to the group organizer would better incentivize players to step up and put a group together. In practice, this could mean giving a, say, 25% RP bonus to the group leader in every full group.

  • Argument (Carol/Broadsword): The stated bonus is too high, there could be issues when people LD or switch group leader, and this would lead to many small groups because everyone would want to be a group leader.

  • Response: The percentage can certainly be tweaked---maybe 10% instead of 25%? Perhaps the bonus only becomes active for full groups, or perhaps the percentage scales as the group grows in size: 5% at 4 players, and 9% at 8 players?

• RP bonus for full group: Similarly, to incentivize forming full groups of eight players (and not just in 8v8), there could be an RP bonus for every group member for being part of a full group.

  • Argument (Carol/Broadsword): We can't give out RPs merely for showing up.

  • Response: This bonus is not awarded for showing up, but is instead given as a bonus percentage on the RPs the group gains from killing enemies and sieging keeps.

• 8v8 kills: The game currently distinguishes between solo and non-solo kills. Presumably it is also possible to distinguish 8v8 kills (perhaps merely by counting the number of friendly and enemy players within a radius of, say, 2,000 units). This could potentially be used (1) as a special category on the herald, (2) for special 8v8 RvR missions (similar to how soloers have special missions and now also dedicated "bow towns"), or (3) for increased RPs for 8v8 kills.

  • Argument (Carol/Broadsword): This may be interesting, but may cause Ywain to become too much of a freeshard and experimental server.

  • Response: Given that the game already has solo kills, siege kills, and open field kills, this is yet another category that would just serve to increase the richness of the playstyles supported by the game.

• Spotlights on 8v8: While the official DAoC Twitch stream routinely shows individual 8v8 fights on the regular Saturday stream, there could be an increased spotlight on the 8v8 community from Broadsword. There is already discussion of streaming the upcoming player-organized "random/semi-random 8v8 group" event, which would be a good thing. Additional streams, publicity, and events (such as the arena discussed above) targeted at 8v8 groups would continue to promote this small but dedicated community.

  • Argument: This costs resources and the 8v8 community is small.

  • Response: Increased exposure helps everyone; a rising tide raises all boats. A significant amount of Twitch streams and publicity is already generated by the players, many of them in the 8v8 community. Also note that competitive PvP is the central focus of the e-sports industry; could there be potential avenues in promoting 8v8 in this manner?

• Unlocking frontier zones: Introduce a game mechanic where different parts of a realm's zone can be "unlocked" by taking keeps, resulting in moving frontlines. For example, if Caer Benowyc is in Albion hands, only Hadrian's Wall would be accessible to Hibs and Mids and it would be impossible to move into the other zones until the keep has been taken.

  • Argument: Reducing the available space would result in a greater risk of BGs or other groups adding on an ongoing 8v8 fight.

  • Response: The 8v8 groups would still have full access to EV. The reduced number of available zones will make it easier for groups to find each other when looking for a fight.

Impractical Ideas

Several ideas have already been explicitly discouraged by Broadsword and their representatives. These ideas are listed here for completeness:

• 8v8 arena: An 8v8 arena that groups could queue for, similar to the battlegrounds in World of Warcraft or the now-defunct Warhammer Online, would allow for quick and effortless 8v8 fights. While this would presumably be a significant engineering undertaking for Broadsword, it would allow for "clean-room" 8v8 fights with no risk of adds intervening in the fight.

  • Flaw: This idea is not in line with the overall realm vs. realm focus of the game.

• Shrink the frontiers: The current New Frontiers zone is very large in size, causing groups and fights to be unnecessarily spread out. Finding an enemy group to fight can sometimes take ten or fifteen minutes, or longer. By comparison, during the Spring 2021 Caledonia event, hundreds of players were confined to a single zone, leading to non-stop action and massive battles. Reducing the size of the frontiers would yield more action.

  • Flaw: This leads to large parts of the existing frontiers going unused. Unlocking the frontiers (above) may be more practical.

• RPs for losses: A major discouraging factor for new 8v8 groups is that it is difficult to gain realm levels when fighting exclusively 8v8 fights because low realm rank makes it hard to defeat high realm rank groups (or even kill single enemies in that group). This is a reinforcing negative relationship because the low-rank groups can thus never achieve higher realm rank, forcing them to turn to zerg/BG combat to gain realm levels. This would be fixed if players would still receive some minor RP award even if defeated, similar to how a siege bonus is awarded even to the defeated force.

  • Argument (Carol/Broadsword): Giving RPs for losing is impractical and may result in people suiciding merely to collect RPs.

  • Response: The RPs for losing mechanic is already in the game: even the defeated force receives a siege bonus when they fail to take a keep. Obviously the rewards should be smaller than for winning, but perhaps it could be proportional to the IRS or total RPs of the group that defeated them; being killed by a very successful group should yield some RPs even if no opponent was killed. As for suiciding, there is already an existing potential for RP farming in the game, and this change does not exacerbate that problem.

  • Flaw: Significant risk of abuse when doing nothing yields you RPs.

The 8v8 community in DAoC is a core and dedicated set of players, but it is shrinking. The causes are many, and the solutions to address them equally so. We hope to see some of these ideas, and certainly other ones, implemented to better nurture this community in DAoC.