Darkfall "Released"

[Falconeer]

One day someone will tell me why Geldon was sent away and this vampiric trollish buffon is welcome to stay.

[Signe]

I don't know.  Maybe we'll grow to love him?  Like a comfy old sock or a terminal disease that gives you cool hallucinations before it kills you?  That last is how I want to go!

[rk47]

 

Not playing it anymore Falcon?

[Lantyssa]

One day someone will tell me why Geldon was sent away and this vampiric trollish buffon is welcome to stay.

He doesn't post as much nor as verbosely, and not at all about himself.  Geldon on the other hand still posts about his love-hate relationship with this place and it's been, what, a year?  When he's wrong, at least Riley is succinct about it and not making twenty posts in a row to emphasize just how wrong he is.  Much, much easier to ignore.

[HaemishM]

Niche means fuckall when your playerbase is encouraged by the game's design to DRIVE USERS AWAY FROM YOUR SERVICE AS A CONDITION FOR WINNING. That's the problem with open PVP games in general. They draw in the worst sorts of fucktards whose sole purpose is the lamentation of their enemies' women. Only that lamentation takes the form of forum whining and eventual subscription cancellation. Niche games by their definition will have very thin profit margins. Unlike say a World of Warcraft or even a Warhammer Online or LotRO, they can't take the churn. A loss of 1% in playerbase in a month is a whole lot more damaging when your margins are as thin as something like Darkfall.

Niche means that you have a good business plan that doesn't require a bazillion subs to be profitable. It doesn't mean you can just make any old shit and say "This isn't for you" when people quit or post bad reviews. It means you have to be MORE focused on 1) making your playerbase happy and 2) making sure that you don't have so many people quitting every month. Niche games are better of making all of their playerbase a little unsatisfied than in catering to the worst fucking game-wrecking twats their game design attracts.

Also, people like Bone and every one of you "hardcore PVP" mouth-breathing cunts who cheat, lie and exploit your way to victory and then complain about all the "sheep" leaving the game rather than be your helpless fuckdolls, you can all go rot in a fiery, crotch-sizzling hell full of anal-raping weasel demons with spike-covered horse cocks. You are exactly the sloppy cunts who have ruined MMOG PVP from the get go.

[Surlyboi]

Niche means fuckall when your playerbase is encouraged by the game's design to DRIVE USERS AWAY FROM YOUR SERVICE AS A CONDITION FOR WINNING. That's the problem with open PVP games in general. They draw in the worst sorts of fucktards whose sole purpose is the lamentation of their enemies' women. Only that lamentation takes the form of forum whining and eventual subscription cancellation. Niche games by their definition will have very thin profit margins. Unlike say a World of Warcraft or even a Warhammer Online or LotRO, they can't take the churn. A loss of 1% in playerbase in a month is a whole lot more damaging when your margins are as thin as something like Darkfall.

Niche means that you have a good business plan that doesn't require a bazillion subs to be profitable. It doesn't mean you can just make any old shit and say "This isn't for you" when people quit or post bad reviews. It means you have to be MORE focused on 1) making your playerbase happy and 2) making sure that you don't have so many people quitting every month. Niche games are better of making all of their playerbase a little unsatisfied than in catering to the worst fucking game-wrecking twats their game design attracts.

Also, people like Bone and every one of you "hardcore PVP" mouth-breathing cunts who cheat, lie and exploit your way to victory and then complain about all the "sheep" leaving the game rather than be your helpless fuckdolls, you can all go rot in a fiery, crotch-sizzling hell full of anal-raping weasel demons with spike-covered horse cocks. You are exactly the sloppy cunts who have ruined MMOG PVP from the get go.

This. A thousand times, this.

[Hindenburg]

Niche means fuckall when your playerbase is encouraged by the game's design to DRIVE USERS AWAY FROM YOUR SERVICE AS A CONDITION FOR WINNING. That's the problem with open PVP games in general. They draw in the worst sorts of fucktards whose sole purpose is the lamentation of their enemies' women. Only that lamentation takes the form of forum whining and eventual subscription cancellation. Niche games by their definition will have very thin profit margins. Unlike say a World of Warcraft or even a Warhammer Online or LotRO, they can't take the churn. A loss of 1% in playerbase in a month is a whole lot more damaging when your margins are as thin as something like Darkfall.

Niche means that you have a good business plan that doesn't require a bazillion subs to be profitable. It doesn't mean you can just make any old shit and say "This isn't for you" when people quit or post bad reviews. It means you have to be MORE focused on 1) making your playerbase happy and 2) making sure that you don't have so many people quitting every month. Niche games are better of making all of their playerbase a little unsatisfied than in catering to the worst fucking game-wrecking twats their game design attracts.

Also, people like Bone and every one of you "hardcore PVP" mouth-breathing cunts who cheat, lie and exploit your way to victory and then complain about all the "sheep" leaving the game rather than be your helpless fuckdolls, you can all go rot in a fiery, crotch-sizzling hell full of anal-raping weasel demons with spike-covered horse cocks. You are exactly the sloppy cunts who have ruined MMOG PVP from the get go.

Spoken like the pussy carebear that you are. If Darkfall fails, and it isn't showing any signal of going down that path, it'll be because they'll start modifying the great thing that they have right now. There'll always be more wolves to sustain the environment, you just have to respect them. Tasos understands this.


 

[pxib]

There's got to be a certain baseline that acts as a floor to this sort of gaming discussion.

Darkfall is an ugly, awkward, poorly designed, poorly made nightmare that punishes you for not knowing how to play, punishes you while you learn how to play, and then continues to punish you for playing. A vast supermajority of gamers wouldn't play Darkfall for more than two hours if it was FREE. Its screenshots and gameplay videos do not sell it to passing curiosity seekers, and it will receive almost no word of mouth advertising that isn't bad.

"Niche" doesn't begin to cover it.

[gryeyes]

Niche apparently encompasses every game that is poorly developed with a dwindling user base. I for one await the day there are a dozen specialized and well developed MMO's with 100k subscriptions.

[Threash]

Niche means fuckall when your playerbase is encouraged by the game's design to DRIVE USERS AWAY FROM YOUR SERVICE AS A CONDITION FOR WINNING. That's the problem with open PVP games in general. They draw in the worst sorts of fucktards whose sole purpose is the lamentation of their enemies' women. Only that lamentation takes the form of forum whining and eventual subscription cancellation. Niche games by their definition will have very thin profit margins. Unlike say a World of Warcraft or even a Warhammer Online or LotRO, they can't take the churn. A loss of 1% in playerbase in a month is a whole lot more damaging when your margins are as thin as something like Darkfall.

Niche means that you have a good business plan that doesn't require a bazillion subs to be profitable. It doesn't mean you can just make any old shit and say "This isn't for you" when people quit or post bad reviews. It means you have to be MORE focused on 1) making your playerbase happy and 2) making sure that you don't have so many people quitting every month. Niche games are better of making all of their playerbase a little unsatisfied than in catering to the worst fucking game-wrecking twats their game design attracts.

Also, people like Bone and every one of you "hardcore PVP" mouth-breathing cunts who cheat, lie and exploit your way to victory and then complain about all the "sheep" leaving the game rather than be your helpless fuckdolls, you can all go rot in a fiery, crotch-sizzling hell full of anal-raping weasel demons with spike-covered horse cocks. You are exactly the sloppy cunts who have ruined MMOG PVP from the get go.

Spoken like the pussy carebear that you are. If Darkfall fails, and it isn't showing any signal of going down that path, it'll be because they'll start modifying the great thing that they have right now. There'll always be more wolves to sustain the environment, you just have to respect them. Tasos understands this.


 

Was this supposed to be green? You honestly think darkfall is anything other than a complete and utter failure?

[Rishathra]

  is the new green.

[Falconeer]

[Arthur_Parker]

Niche means fuckall when your playerbase is encouraged by the game's design to DRIVE USERS AWAY FROM YOUR SERVICE AS A CONDITION FOR WINNING. That's the problem with open PVP games in general. They draw in the worst sorts of fucktards whose sole purpose is the lamentation of their enemies' women. Only that lamentation takes the form of forum whining and eventual subscription cancellation.

It's a darkfall thread, I'd be reluctant to draw any general conclusions, because you know, darkfall.  It's a miracle they made release at all.

[pxib]

It's a darkfall thread, I'd be reluctant to draw any general conclusions, because you know, darkfall.  It's a miracle they made release at all.

I don't think he's drawing conclusions so much as stating them. The majority of EVE's characters spend as much time outside security space as most of UO's characters spend outside Trammel. Just because Darkfall is a buggy, laggy, tedious piece of shit doesn't mean that, were it a AAA product, it would suddenly be popular enough to sustain a population of cannon fodder. It would get more impulse buys, certainly, but they'd clear out as soon as they realized there was nowhere to run. Same bad publicity. Same collapsing community.

People like to play with dogs, not wolves. Dogs may be dumber and not as exciting, but they love you. They're less likely than wolves to shit on your carpet, and they are considerably less likely to break your neck, tear your stomach open, and eat you.

[Arthur_Parker]

The majority of EVE's characters spend as much time outside security space as most of UO's characters spend outside Trammel.

Think about that several times, then take a glance at the eve forum.

I couldn't even be arsed to argue with LC, the safe areas issue is a major problem for area control pvp games, but Darkfall has so many problems, why argue about how serious just one of them is?  Same thing applies here, it's darkfall, you want to find something to reinforce your own opinions that's fine, it's still a bad example.

[DLRiley]

The majority of EVE's characters spend as much time outside security space as most of UO's characters spend outside Trammel.

Think about that several times, then take a glance at the eve forum.

I couldn't even be arsed to argue with LC, the safe areas issue is a major problem for area control pvp games, but Darkfall has so many problems, why argue about how serious just one of them is?  Same thing applies here, it's darkfall, you want to find something to reinforce your own opinions that's fine, it's still a bad example.

You mean the eve forum in the f13 section? Just because people are willing to take pvp seriously, don't mean 90% of the playerbase won't spend their time in the pve only zones. A lesson open world pvp'ers  refuse to learn.

[Arthur_Parker]

I'm not really interested in getting into this PVE/PVP conversation again at any length so I'll be brief.  Darkfall is a bad game, you want to say pvp is unpopular, well it's not, WoW proved that.  You want to say world pvp is unpopular, fine, it is, niche you could say, no argument from me.  The most interesting Eve thread is the war thread, the war thread is about area control.  Even you saying 90% of players only pve in eve doesn't actually conflict with anything I said nor would I see a reason to even dispute that.  If you want to disagree with my saying "darkfall is a bad example to draw general conclusion from", go right ahead, I'd have thought that was obvious, but hey go for broke, I'll dig out some Tabula Rasa links to counter you with and we can have a really stupid conversation.

[AutomaticZen]

I'm not really interested in getting into this PVE/PVP conversation again at any length so I'll be brief.  Darkfall is a bad game, you want to say pvp is unpopular, well it's not, WoW proved that.  You want to say world pvp is unpopular, fine, it is, niche you could say, no argument from me.  The most interesting Eve thread is the war thread, the war thread is about area control.  Even you saying 90% of players only pve in eve doesn't actually conflict with anything I said nor would I see a reason to even dispute that.  If you want to disagree with my saying "darkfall is a bad example to draw general conclusion from", go right ahead, I'd have thought that was obvious, but hey go for broke, I'll dig out some Tabula Rasa links to counter you with and we can have a really stupid conversation.

I believe all they were saying is that PVP taken to it's extreme (which is what the 'hardcores' always want) is not conductive to retaining your playerbase, as not many want to pay to lose everything over a long term.  And paying over a long term is the MMO business model.

[pxib]

Come now, Parker, nobody sane would go up against you in a link-dredging fight.

Think about that several times, then take a glance at the eve forum.

A tiny minority of MMO players, of any game, ever visit any forums other than to read whether the game is down... an even tinier minority posts. Those that do discuss three things: how to play, why the game sucks, and drama. EVE's single universe and player-controlled space means that drama is almost entirely PvP related. Without raiding guild drama, high-sec PvEers just don't have much worth chatting about. Is world PvP crucial to EVE's success? Absolutely. Just like soloers enjoy soloing in massively-multiplayer games, PvEers enjoy knowing they're a part of that dangerous world they so rarely visit. More importantly, they provide enough revenue to keep the rest of the game operating.

WoW didn't prove PvP is popular. It proved that people like playing with dogs. Arf. Run back from the graveyard, stomach intact.

EDIT: What AutomaticZen said. The reason this goes in a Darkfall thread isn't because it's some terrific example. It's a dead horse, through and through. This goes in a Darkfall thread because the high expectations and grim collapse of this game is following such a familiar, predictable route.

[Arthur_Parker]

I believe all they were saying is that PVP taken to it's extreme (which is what the 'hardcores' always want) is not conductive to retaining your playerbase, as not many want to pay to lose everything over a long term.  And paying over a long term is the MMO business model.

That depends on safe areas to retreat to and how much looting is involved.  AC1 Darktide steadily increased in population size even with the massive disadvantages of no safe areas, part looting and instant gibbing for new players (helped in part by the accidents of a large zoneless world and lack of other games).  I personally think it's crazy to solely target hardcore pvp players for a game, as you need to create all the art work and client technology anyway, so the extra work in creating a PVE type ruleset (that's likely to be more popular even with terrible pve) is minor.

WoW didn't prove PvP is popular. It proved that people like playing with dogs. Arf. Run back from the graveyard, stomach intact.

I didn't disagree really with the rest of your post, my point about drawing general conclusions on pvp using Darkfall as an example, applies again with this quoted part.  All WoW servers have pvp, WoW pvp servers have a tiny element of world pvp (that doesn't work very well), despite that, more people pick a pvp server than a pve (even though it's not really a classic sense pve) server.
WoW proved pvp is mainstream, all servers offer the choice, it's pvp lite but it's still pvp, so ultimately all we are talking about is how it's implemented.  Choice is what should be offered, using Darkfall to say open pvp (area control pvp, looting pvp, or whatever you want to call it) is unpopular misses the point, I could say Vanguard proves PVE is unpopular using the same logic.

Edit typo

[pxib]

WoW proved pvp is mainstream, all servers offer the choice, it's pvp lite but it's still pvp, so ultimately all we are talking about is how it's implemented.  Choice is what should be offered, using Darkfall to say open pvp (area control pvp, looting pvp, or whatever you want to call it) is unpopular misses the point, I could say Vanguard proves PVE is unpopular using the same logic.

I think we agree. Largely to play devil's advocate, I propose that Vanguard did demonstrate the unpopularity of PvE.

Vanguard's supporters (and Darkfall's) argue that their game's quality is based on its feature list. They say what's important to players is a particular set of rules. They have armchair discussions about how exactly those features should be implimented. They feel some special rules have been largely abandoned, and by doing so game designers and publishers have somehow betrayed not only an important sub-section of their audience, but their bottom line. Those features "done right" would make robot jesus moneyhats for decades.

Trouble is, moneyhats aren't made of feature lists.

Players like skinnerbox ding grats. They like to have a lot of reachable goals: completing quests, exploring areas, and gathering crap to fill recipe lists. They like improving their avatars with new abilities, new gear, and new toys. Without these things, they hate PvE, they hate PvP, they hate repetitive quests, they hate travel time, they hate grinding. Every familiar aspect of MMOG gameplay, robbed of ding grats, is box office poison. If the game ever gives the player enough time to stop and wonder why she's doing what she hates, the game will fail. She must always have a small local goal, and must be able to see that goal completed before she gets bored. This need not be a delicate balancing act. Free Realms does it via blunt force trauma.

So Vanguard failed because it thought players wanted challenging PvE, player housing, and a vast world to explore. But it provided them with goals that were neither small nor local, and it was stingy with the ding grats. People are investing their monthly fee in character advancment, and if they stop advancing they stop paying.

They're not paying for the gameplay. The gameplay sucks.

[Redgiant]

I believe all they were saying is that PVP taken to it's extreme (which is what the 'hardcores' always want) is not conductive to retaining your playerbase, as not many want to pay to lose everything over a long term.  And paying over a long term is the MMO business model.

That depends on safe areas to retreat to and how much looting is involved.  AC1 Darktide steadily increased in population size even with the massive disadvantages of no safe areas, part looting and instant gibbing for new players (helped in part by the accidents of a large zoneless world and lack of other games).  I personally think it's crazy to solely target hardcore pvp players for a game, as you need to create all the art work and client technology anyway, so the extra work in creating a PVE type ruleset (that's likely to be more popular even with terrible pve) is minor.

WoW didn't prove PvP is popular. It proved that people like playing with dogs. Arf. Run back from the graveyard, stomach intact.

I didn't disagree really with the rest of your post, my point about drawing general conclusions on pvp using Darkfall as an example, applies again with this quoted part.  All WoW servers have pvp, WoW pvp servers have a tiny element of world pvp (that doesn't work very well), despite that, more people pick a pvp server than a pve (even thought it's not really a classic sense pve) server.
WoW proved pvp is mainstream, all servers offer the choice, it's pvp lite but it's still pvp, so ultimately all we are talking about is how it's implemented.  Choice is what should be offered, using Darkfall to say open pvp (area control pvp, looting pvp, or whatever you want to call it) is unpopular misses the point, I could say Vanguard proves PVE is unpopular using the same logic.

WoW had a very active open world PvP for a while on the server I played on at launch (Tichondrius). The problem was: Blizzard decided they didn't WANT open world PvP to be a big draw due to the spikey demands it kept placing on specific and narrow portions of their world servers which was hard for them to handle the load of in a smooth way. TM/Southshore anyone?

City raids were fun when they used to organically occur. So were outdoor spontaneous battles like over the outdoor Azshara dragon and Khazak or whatever he was called in Blasted Lands (I think). I remember being involved in almost DAoC-like fights over them, when suddenly another 40-50 people would swoop in to not only keep us from killing them but try to take them on themselves, and it would go back and forth.

Blizzard could easily have promoted and grown open world PvP except for one small detail: they just didn't want to. It had nothing to do with what most PvP-prone people at the time wanted , or what would be the most interesting and dynamic choice. It was just what they wanted to have happen to avoid performance spikes and the usual problems associated with pockets of open world unpredictable load.

It is really too bad that they went the way of the instanced, arena PvP instead of a more UoWoW style. Even without full loot drops (which I am sure no matter what they would never do), just having no instances (everyone fighting over the same bosses and loot), and a more Wintergrasp-y effort world-wide, with buildable/upgradeable/controlable/seigable keeps and the like, they would have out-WAR'd WAR and made even the most hardcore DAoC vet admire their efforts. I am convinced that they were fully aware of all this, and decided not to pursue it on purpose.

They left the door open for crap like Darkfail to "pretend" to fill a niche that WoW purposely left the vacuum for.

[DLRiley]

You mean blizzard didn't expand on a proven player base sucking idea...but yeah WoW could support if it really wanted to make the investment into server stability but is it worth the 15 minutes of fame before someone dominates the map and everyone leaves? The problem open world pvp'ers have with WoW is that WoW refuses to give them anymore tools then the ability to gank each other outside of towns. Which inherently isn't "good enough".

[Arthur_Parker]

The problem open world pvp'ers have with WoW is that WoW refuses to give them anymore tools then the ability to gank each other outside of towns. Which inherently isn't "good enough".

Maybe, but then most vocal people about open pvp are stupid.  I'd have thought the main problems with developing a more involving area control pvp ruleset for WoW would be :-

1.  The zones are built for pve advancement.
2.  The BOP and purple loot system would make even limited looting really annoying.
3.  It's level based advancement

I think it would be incredibly hard for them to do and for only 10% of the players, I don't think it's worth the effort.

[calapine]

Players like skinnerbox ding grats. They like to have a lot of reachable goals: completing quests, exploring areas, and gathering crap to fill recipe lists. They like improving their avatars with new abilities, new gear, and new toys. Without these things, they hate PvE, they hate PvP, they hate repetitive quests, they hate travel time, they hate grinding. Every familiar aspect of MMOG gameplay, robbed of ding grats, is box office poison. If the game ever gives the player enough time to stop and wonder why she's doing what she hates, the game will fail. She must always have a small local goal, and must be able to see that goal completed before she gets bored. This need not be a delicate balancing act.

As MMORPG player and ex-field marshall I'd like to object to this demeaning description!
The way you talk about "giving it the ding-grats" evokes images of lab-rats with wires attached to their pleasure centres that light up every time they complete navigating a maze or press the shiny red button.

We can't all be that stupid! 

[IainC]

lab-rats with wires attached to their pleasure centres that light up every time they complete navigating a maze or press the shiny red button.

That is pretty much the MMO experience in a nutshell yes.

[IainC]

[Mrbloodworth]

You know, i enjoy reading the noob. But i think she just took a stab at both parties.

[tmp]

Well, the comic author is (was?) big Darkfall fan, so with that in mind that's a rather fair take from her.

[Surlyboi]

Well, being a fan of darkfall does qualify you as mentally unstable...

[schild]

Fuck, Eurogamer pussed out and are having Kieron take a second look. He COULD tear it apart, but I have a feeling he's going to find some sort of redeeming value just to set things straight. I hope he rips it apart. It would be a win for gaming journalism. I'm not big on "second looks," even if the first one was wrong. If you're willing to print something, print that shit in stone and stand behind it.

[IainC]

Fuck, Eurogamer pussed out and are having Kieron take a second look. He COULD tear it apart, but I have a feeling he's going to find some sort of redeeming value just to set things straight. I hope he rips it apart. It would be a win for gaming journalism. I'm not big on "second looks," even if the first one was wrong. If you're willing to print something, print that shit in stone and stand behind it.

This.

[Mrbloodworth]

Fuck, Eurogamer pussed out and are having Kieron take a second look. He COULD tear it apart, but I have a feeling he's going to find some sort of redeeming value just to set things straight. I hope he rips it apart. It would be a win for gaming journalism. I'm not big on "second looks," even if the first one was wrong. If you're willing to print something, print that shit in stone and stand behind it.

Ed Zitron was the original rev reviewer.Becouse Aventurine is attacking Ed's credibility, Kieron Gillen is to do the re review, supposedly because he has more "cred".

[tmp]

Fuck, Eurogamer pussed out and are having Kieron take a second look.

Tasos said they didn't want that, though.... there's high potential for some more lulz; hope he chooses to take offense at it.

[schild]

Fuck, Eurogamer pussed out and are having Kieron take a second look. He COULD tear it apart, but I have a feeling he's going to find some sort of redeeming value just to set things straight. I hope he rips it apart. It would be a win for gaming journalism. I'm not big on "second looks," even if the first one was wrong. If you're willing to print something, print that shit in stone and stand behind it.

Ed Zitron was the original rev reviewer.Becouse Aventurine is attacking Ed's credibility, Kieron Gillen is to do the re review, supposedly because he has more "cred".

Uh, yes. I know.

Edit: I suppose I should point out I've chosen to get myself very close to this situation and I'm choosing to not be wordy over it out of respect for the people involved.