DAoC: State of the Game Article

WorthPlaying has dished up another MMORPG-related article, this time addressing several aspects of the Dark Age of Camelot: State of the Game editorial over at the Camelot Herald. An excerpt to follow:
The free levels you'll get some extra coin along with that free ding, too are all well and good, but they don't do a thing to help out the other reason people don't want to start over: the artifacts and Master Levels introduced in the Trials of Atlantis expansion. Both are time consuming to get and level up, especially in the case of the ML's which require over 90 steps to complete, most of which require multiple groups to complete. Matt's post acknowledges this issue, and they are working on ways to alleviate some of these issues, but there are no details yet. Personally, I hope they do something about these encounters since they are the biggest frustration point I have in the game; I've been log jammed on some steps to wrap up an ML for months. There are a few things they can do to alleviate this pain. One is to allow you to do ML's in any order. That way if you are stuck in ML1 and there's raid to do ML4, you can do ML4 and get credit for it; right now you'll need to do ML's 1, 2, and 3 to get credit for 4. It's a subtle change, but it will help people progress though the ML's quicker. Getting rid of the requirement to have a certain amount of ML XP to do the next ML would help as well. Also, I'd like to see most of the encounters tuned so a single group can do them, but that's a (pie in the sky) wish.