Darkfall "Released"

[Venkman]

The point everyone misses is that most of the time the guy who a$$rapes you outside Minoc likes to store his shit in gold plated furniture.  At the extreme risk of WUA posting an image macro, trammel was like the SWG NGE, a new experience was forced on players.  The fact it was popular doesn't in any way justify what happened.

The popularity is what made it different from NGE 

In all seriousness though, I'd prefer a compartmentalized uniserver over sharded space if you're going to try for anything more than another whack-a-foozle. If you want to give players freedom but not have the CSR nightmare of managing what become completely different player societies and cultures, I'd think the Eve model would be easier. Plus it becomes easier to channel players to the right player society compartments within, as long as you're paying attention to your own game.

Basically, what you are talking about and what I think it would take is a completely different model than waterfall development to push out $80mil of content to then be managed by mere hallway monitors.

[Feverdream]

I'm a fledgling here, so if I am posting this link in error or in the wrong place and end up taking a bullet to the head over it, at least make it quick, please.

There's an interview with Tasos (lead on Darkfall) on Curse:

http://www.curse.com/articles/darkfall-en-news/372269.aspx

I am so desperate for a PvP-centered game that I am still subscribed to WAR.  My guild was accepted into the fictional 'guild beta' for Darkfall back in 2005.  We were cynical about the game then, and after total lack of communication from Aventurine, and learning a year later that they had decided to drop the guild beta but didn't bother to inform anyone, we wrote the game off.

Even in my current PvP-starved state, Darkfall looks like SUCH a loser.  About the only enjoyment I can get out of it is the warped kind that comes from watching ithe game's inevtable crash-and-burn.  But I get a big dose of that already from WAR, so I am in danger of overdosing on bitter glee.

I just need a good game fix.  And there's nothing on the horizon.  These are dire times for a cranky old PvPer like me.

[tmp]

NEMESIS! I must defeat you!   

SUCK MY DIK IM NOT LIEK U

_{sorry, couldn't resist...}

[sidereal]

cynical...warped...bitter...dire...cranky

You'll fit right in!

[Xerapis]

SUCK MY DIK IM NOT LIEK U

_{sorry, couldn't resist...}

Oh, the irony of you directing that at quite possibly the only guy on the forums who might actually take you up on it.

Shorter: pics first 

[Azaroth]

help I need an adult

[Phildo]

I'm here now.

[Lantyssa]

I'm thinking it was intentional, Xerapis.

And spoiler tag those pics, please.   

[tmp]

I'm thinking it was intentional, Xerapis.

And spoiler tag those pics, please.   

Tbh that effect was entirely uninteded, but then doesn't that go for half of humour on the intrawebs

Did consider posting the obligatory pic of guy walking his giant cock, but then it's rather old...

[Arthur_Parker]

The popularity is what made it different from NGE 

Sorry for my inebriated last post.  Yeah I see that, but new games should be built with the understanding that server transfers or even simple cloning might be needed at some point.  I believe it's pretty unforgivable nowadays to pull the whole "I'm going to change the whole game and expect everyone to like it" thing, without giving people an out of moving to a pre-massive-change ruleset server.

[Mrbloodworth]

23 days till launch, NDA still in effect.

No beta leaks to be found.

[kildorn]

23 days till launch, NDA still in effect.

No beta leaks to be found.

They're all really, REALLY loyal testers and are too busy playing the game to talk about it? 

[Nonentity]

One point of the NDA is that you have to agree to have Adventurine send a big Greek guy with a bat out to your house. You know, just to 'hang out' when you're by your computer.

Just to chat.

[Mrbloodworth]

It sucks , i like the "IDEA" of Darkfall, but all signs point to...well you know.

It really does seem that the mistakes of other games, is what the Darkfall developers call features.

[UnSub]

23 days till launch, NDA still in effect.

No beta leaks to be found.

They're all really, REALLY loyal testers and are too busy playing the game to talk about it? 

Most likely they haven't got enough testers for there to actually be wide scale leaks.

[SnakeCharmer]

Does anyone actually know someone in beta?

[Lantyssa]

23 days till launch, NDA still in effect.

No beta leaks to be found.

At four weeks to launch with no dropping of the NDA we're supposed to be worried, right?  What are Jacob's criteria again?

[Mrbloodworth]

Compiled List of all the known Features on one Page Complete with sources!

Oh let us count the ways on the 22nd.

[Nebu]

Compiled List of all the known Features on one Page Complete with sources!

Oh let us count the ways on the 22nd.

Wow... this list is full of fail. Let's have a little SB fun with the list of features.

Open ability system, more than 1000 skills and spells

Anyone else get the feeling that these 1000 skills will boil down to about 4 or 5 optimized sets?  This is a pvp game and people will min-max it to the teeth.

Some Prestige Classes: Paladin, Assassin, Gladiator and Enchanter

Ooooo PRESTIGE classes... when I read "prestige" I read "you must grind to get to the fun".

Characters need to eat and drink regularly or they will suffer from temporary penalties

Sounds fun!  Talk about a 10 year old idea...

Wearing Armor will affect the swimming and running speed

READ: Players will need to make a macro to remove all armor while travelling. 

Spells can be casted while wearing armor, but with a variety of penalties

This looks foolproof.  Casters wearing armor... what could possibly go wrong?

The effects alone make the friggin’ spell feel like a powerful thing. The eye candy was great… The ground shakes, you burn

That's what I want... lots of effects in my pvp game.  Framerate anyone?

I'll quit here.  It's like they learned nothing about the past 10 years of MMO development.  NOTHING!

[Mrbloodworth]

I'll quit here.  It's like they learned nothing about the past 10 years of MMO development.  NOTHING!

Latest Video as to why Darkfall isn't like any other MMO eva

[Nebu]

These could very well be the sweetest tears ever.  Like jelly beans. 

[Falwell]

Latest Video as to why Darkfall isn't like any other MMO eva

A person, an actual human being, took the time to edit, plan and compose that video. After all of that he looked at it and said "Oh yeah, that's hot. I gotta post this for the world to see."

I'm caught somewhere between pity and depressed over this.

[Mrbloodworth]

Latest Video as to why Darkfall isn't like any other MMO eva

A person, an actual human being, took the time to edit, plan and compose that video. After all of that he looked at it and said "Oh yeah, that's hot. I gotta post this for the world to see."

I'm caught somewhere between pity and depressed over this.

You clearly "Have not felt his pain".







(nothing wrong with UO, just getting snarky at the reference in the video, lolz)

[sidereal]

Latest Video as to why Darkfall isn't like any other MMO eva

That was the  best.  Watching the whole thing delivers this quote at the end as a prize:
"Darkfall. The last hardcore mmorpg"

I certainly hope so.

[Signe]

You have been revealed as a troll on MMORPG.com, MrB!  You'll never be a REAL member of the Darkfall community with that attitude.  Where is your blind faith?

Oh and

[Nebu]

Hey now... Vanguard showed that there is still a strong and vibrant market for a hardcore MMOG. 

[Mrbloodworth]

You have been revealed as a troll on MMORPG.com, MrB!  You'll never be a REAL member of the Darkfall community with that attitude.  Where is your blind faith?

Oh and

I lost blind faith a long time ago.

[K9]

That's what I want... lots of effects in my pvp game.  Framerate anyone?

I'll quit here.  It's like they learned nothing about the past 10 years of MMO development.  NOTHING!

Don't forget that all spells and arrows fly as aimed, not straight-to-target. So if you live more than 5 feet from a server you've going to have to learn to lead like a god.

[K9]

Wow, if this is real.... wow. What a waste of dev time.

Beta Leaker's paranoia (they can track you using your screenshots!  ):

Just make sure you do everything you can to prevent your identity from coming through. I'd recommend using some photoshop filters, do a small gausian blur to the entire image (I've heard some companies will encrypt something like your ip address into a part of the overview, they do it by slightly altering the colors in a certain area which acts as a bit pattern). Also, block out anything that could possibly be linked to you, like a message saying you got to skill level 25 by creating a barbed arrow (just an example, who knows what they can search for in logs). Finally, make sure you upload the files anonymously to an image site, don't put them in your personal folder.

Let's say they have 1000 closed beta testers. That can be uniquely represented by 10 bits. An easy way to do that is to use an overlay that actually has a bit pattern in it. If they used one where each bit was represented by 5x5 pixels enough information would survive through compression to make distinguishing it fairly easy.

Example:
Let's say you're beta account #372, your bit pattern is:
0101110100.

For sake of the example let's say thenoobcomic is beta leaking and we want to catch her.
First picture gets hit with the overlay:
Screenshot with overlay

Do you see it?
How about if we zoom in:
Zoom view

Still nothing? That's kind of the whole point, people don't even realize they are sending their identifier.
We take the area that the identifier is in and apply a level adjustment to it to bring out the marked area (In this case the identifier was put in the red channel only):
Level shift

Now, some of the information was lost due to compression artifacts in it being a jpeg image. No problem, that is why we made the original adjustment areas so large (5x5 pixel squares). We now apply a 5x5 averaging to the area:
Averaged

And since we are looking for information stored in the red channel, we remove the other channels:
Red Channel Only

Reading it left to right, top to bottom: 0101110100 = #372
And that was taking an image that had already been jpeg'd once (from thenoobcomic site) and then applying the almost invisible identifier afterwards. If the identifier had been in the original image before it was compressed it would be even more pronounced.

That is just one example of how a company could "tag" the game to you specifically.

That was done with just one picture with one identifier in one specific area. If you don't know what you're looking for, you'll never find it, but the company knows exactly where they put it, and what they have to do to the image to bring it back out.

I'm not trying to scare people into not leaking, I'm just saying that there are some really innovative security measures out there, so if you do leak, be smart about it, companies can find you by more than just your in game name.

Just saying they can hide things in the UI so they can find them

I'm no expert at image recovery, but I'm pretty sure once an image is as destroyed as her text box is, it's beyond recoverable. It just looks similar because the way she chose to block out her chatbox is by using an averaging filter (Which is availible in photoshop, and probably other programs).

I used the averaging filter to recover the bit pattern because averaging works well for doing exactly that, finding the average. So all I was doing was looking for which blocks are on average more red then the other blocks. This may help, this is what the "hidden" bit pattern looked like that I put into the image:

It was put into the screenshot at 1% opacity, which makes it pretty much invisible until you adjust the levels to look for it.

Here's what it would have looked like at 100% opacity:
Visible

Just want to reiterate, I'm not trying to discourage anyone from leaking more photos, and I highly doubt that Aventurine is using a scheme like this to track users. All I'm saying is that if you want to leak screenshots (And not get pulled from beta because they identified you) you should do more than just block out your name and chatbox. And on that note, if anyone is interested in leaking screenshots but worried about getting ID'd for one reason or another, feel free to PM me and I can help you with some tricks to keeping yourself anonymous. Some people might consider it being paranoid, but I've leaked a fair number of screenshots from AoC and WAR closed betas and was in the beta right up until the end.

[Azaroth]

So that's what took so long.

[Arthur_Parker]

Characters need to eat and drink regularly or they will suffer from temporary penalties

Sounds fun!  Talk about a 10 year old idea...

Wearing Armor will affect the swimming and running speed

READ: Players will need to make a macro to remove all armor while travelling. 

Spells can be casted while wearing armor, but with a variety of penalties

This looks foolproof.  Casters wearing armor... what could possibly go wrong?

DArkfall is going to be a clusterfuck, but those ideas are all perfectly logical for any fantasy game (as long as eating/drinking regularly means every 4 hours or so and encumbrance includes inventory items etc).

[sidereal]

Wow, if this is real.... wow. What a waste of dev time.

It wouldn't take much dev time.  That sort of steganography isn't rocket science.  In fact, even easier would be dropping the user info in the jpeg header of the cap being spit out, which might even survive resizing and uploading (though probably not username-blurring.  I doubt Photoshop or Gimp carry header comments across file formats).

But I very much doubt they'd spend any time on it, because pulling the identifier back out of the cap takes time and because once the cap is up the damage is already done.  I suspect the threat of banning has a lot more reward/time than actually carrying through with it.

those ideas are all perfectly logical for any fantasy game (as long as eating/drinking regularly means every 4 hours or so and encumbrance includes inventory items etc).

Logical != fun.  Requiring a rebuff on an x minute timer is just an irritant. 

[Arthur_Parker]

those ideas are all perfectly logical for any fantasy game (as long as eating/drinking regularly means every 4 hours or so and encumbrance includes inventory items etc).

Logical != fun.  Requiring a rebuff on an x minute timer is just an irritant. 

Logical helps immersion, I like the fact that in LOTRO wolves drop fur, bones and meat instead of swords and armour.  You would bitch about being slightly weaker if you didn't eat and drink something once every 4 hours of game play?  Heh, that's awesome, anorexic gameplay.

(illogical doesn't equal fun either).

[WindupAtheist]

"They broke my heart, they stole my soul, and why I'll never know!" just as the UO part comes up. PK tears, the gift that never stops giving.

[sidereal]

You would bitch about being slightly weaker if you didn't eat and drink something once every 4 hours of game play? 

I bitch about having to recast "always on" buffs every 10 minutes in WoW, so yes I would.  I think the difference is in how easy it is to get the resource.  If getting food is just a matter of pushing a button or going to the store, then it's just irritating busywork.  There's no challenge, there's no interesting decisions.  It's just a cockblock.  On the other hand, if getting food is a challenge or at least some form of crafting, then at least it has a gameplay element and I could live with it.