Darkfall "Released"

[Nebu]

I need to give Darkfall an honest shot.  I can tolerate a lot of grinding and shit pve mechanics if the endgame turns out to be worth the pain.  I did play DAOC for 5+ years afterall. 

[Der Helm]

I did play DAOC for 5+ years afterall. 

I never made it past level 20. I am reluctant to give Darkfall a try. 

[Malakili]

I need to give Darkfall an honest shot.  I can tolerate a lot of grinding and shit pve mechanics if the endgame turns out to be worth the pain.  I did play DAOC for 5+ years afterall. 

The number one thing, as has been said, is that if you can go in with a guild that you can enter right away, the experience is just vastly superior.

[Rendakor]

Everyone says that about Eve too, but despite a full F13 twinkage I didn't last more than a week.

[WayAbvPar]

Unless you have played it, don't knock it. It is a hell of a lot of fun. Apparently there is more achiever in my profile than I first figured. Or maybe the Killer part just wants power so it can get to work.

Yes, I need to play it to appreciate how you have to grind out a bunch of skills and shit in order to participate in pvp and not be cannon fodder.  Where can I signup for your newsletter, Im curious as to your thoughts on why FFXIV is futuristic thinking.  As for your unless you played it shit, its getting old. 

Go troll somewhere else. It is tiresome.

[Speedy Cerviche]

I was on vacation 2 weeks but it looks like they will be adding an offline skill gain system (like Eve) in the next few weeks.

Skill gains should be on par with what you could achieve via afk macroing, but less than through active play (actually fighting mobs).

I really like this as it will eliminate the messy macroing element of the game that avantages hardcore players. Even as someone who has macroed, I welcome this as setting up complicated macro programs is a pain, plus it wears on my computer, wastes bandwidth, to have to leave DF running at night and while I'm at work.

[Nebu]

Why not just pay for stats?  If a 3 month sub costs $45, then you should be able to just buy your way there for a similar price.

I know... I know... they can't do that because the wolves would be cheated out of 3 months worth of sheep. 

[Speedy Cerviche]

Tolling aside, I don't know what would be a better solution for the problem of macroing in skill based games.

A"power hour" type deal could work.

Oher games have historically just avoided it, AC with experience points, EVE with no active skill games. I never played SWG, what did they do?

[Nebu]

It wasn't a troll.  I'm dead serious as I'd play Darkfall were it not for the grind. 

How about making the game fun out of the gate?  It's a pvp game.  Let people pvp without having to macro or afk skills.  The days of requiring stupid cockblocks as a barrier to play are 5 years gone. 

WAR had the right idea but really screwed up by having a) too much cc, b) too many pve requirements, and c) too many class imbalances.  Darkfall should be looking at WAR, grabbing the good bits, and adding to them.  All of the components for making a decent pvp MMO are out there.  Someone just needs to set aside the pointless dick-punching and allow players to spend their time fighting each other. 

[WayAbvPar]

Even if they 'charged' reagents and equipment wear for the equivalent skill gains that would occur from macroing it would be a win, since you wouldn't have those 'had 10k regs on me and accidentally killed myself because I mistimed my macro setup' situations, nor would you have to worry about getting killed and looted while AFK macroing. Cranking up skill gains on active mobs would be nice too, especially at skill levels below like 75. That would allow newer players access to more schools/spells/skills far sooner which would make them at least competent.

[Malakili]

  Someone just needs to set aside the pointless dick-punching and allow players to spend their time fighting each other. 

I'm hoping for Tribes Universe to be honest.

To try and keep this a little on topic though, I have to say that Darkfall is actually REALLY close to being a game I'd play regularly.  In the end I just didn't have the time to play the way I wanted to though.

  World War 2 Online is seriously probably the best example of a PvP MMO out there right now in my opinion.  Granted, its really for sim fans, so it isn't accessible for casual shooter fans for the most part.  HOWEVER, their model of a giant war that goes to completion and resets the map when its over is fantastic, even campaign lasts anywhere from a month to a few months, the fighting is consistent and always "important" 

[Speedy Cerviche]

Even if they 'charged' reagents and equipment wear for the equivalent skill gains that would occur from macroing it would be a win, since you wouldn't have those 'had 10k regs on me and accidentally killed myself because I mistimed my macro setup' situations, nor would you have to worry about getting killed and looted while AFK macroing. Cranking up skill gains on active mobs would be nice too, especially at skill levels below like 75. That would allow newer players access to more schools/spells/skills far sooner which would make them at least competent.

Yeah I still think the grind is a bit much, though this change will be another step toward reducing since it creates more skill gains for anyone who isn't macroing 24/7 (I'd say only 20% of players marco THAT much, so net gain for the other 80% of mostly newer & more casual players).

If you draw a trendline from grindiness 18 months ago at release till now, there is a steady decline in the grind and this will further it.

[Nebu]

If you draw a trendline from grindiness 18 months ago at release till now, there is a steady decline in the grind and this will further it.

In DAoC I could level from 1-50 and be geared and ready for pvp in 24 hrs played.  When Darkfall approaches this, I'll sign up. 

[WayAbvPar]

That is if you know exactly what you are doing. DF definitely takes longer, but I think it is a lot more fun to play.

[DLRiley]

It wasn't a troll.  I'm dead serious as I'd play Darkfall were it not for the grind. 

How about making the game fun out of the gate?  It's a pvp game.  Let people pvp without having to macro or afk skills.  The days of requiring stupid cockblocks as a barrier to play are 5 years gone. 
 

This is not a pvp game. It is a fantasy sim that just happens to allow you to skullfuck the player next to you in the slowest way possible.

[Chinchilla]

I don't know.  Last time I checked it does have open non-restricted Player vs. Player so doesn't that make it a PvP game?

[DLRiley]

I don't know.  Last time I checked it does have open non-restricted Player vs. Player so doesn't that make it a PvP game?

Let people pvp without having to macro or afk skills.

[WayAbvPar]

This thread is for discussion of the game. If you haven't played it, have no desire to play it, and are in fact just here to piss in everyone's Cheerios, I highly suggest you fuck off to another thread or another website.

[Nebu]

It would have been interesting had I gone further back than a week... but...

From the Wurm thread:

Aren't there any Amish NPCs that can pitch in and help?

From the LotRO thread:

It is like syphilis! Fun when you acquire it, but it goes downhill from there.  

People that live in glass houses and all that jazz.

[Chinchilla]

I wonder how many ppl that post on this thread actually gave the game a decent go. And decent in mean like 2 weeks to maybe 1 month. Not a few hours.

[Nebu]

I wonder how many ppl that post on this thread actually gave the game a decent go. And decent in mean like 2 weeks to maybe 1 month. Not a few hours.

I gave up rather quickly.  So quickly in fact that I mistook another game for it in an earlier reply.  

When they remove even more of the grind I'll give it an honest shot.  I am really wanting to play a pvp game, I just don't want it to feel like a job.   That's a part of the reason why I've been following this thread. I want to try it... just not quite yet.

[Malakili]

I wonder how many ppl that post on this thread actually gave the game a decent go. And decent in mean like 2 weeks to maybe 1 month. Not a few hours.

I played it regularly for the month that came with the "box", was in a clan from the beginning.   It was enjoyable, but by the end I felt like I'd rather spend that 15 bucks towards trying something else out.

[Shatter]

This thread is for discussion of the game. If you haven't played it, have no desire to play it, and are in fact just here to piss in everyone's Cheerios, I highly suggest you fuck off to another thread or another website.

So you going to delete every post from people who havent played it?  Im pretty sure every game posted under the MMOG discussion has posts from people who havent played the game in fact I know it since a bunch of them arent even out yet.  Take your overinflated mod e-peen and get over yourself.

[Paelos]

This thread is for discussion of the game. If you haven't played it, have no desire to play it, and are in fact just here to piss in everyone's Cheerios, I highly suggest you fuck off to another thread or another website.

So you going to delete every post from people who havent played it?  Im pretty sure every game posted under the MMOG discussion has posts from people who havent played the game in fact I know it since a bunch of them arent even out yet.  Take your overinflated mod e-peen and get over yourself.

So instead of paying attention to the idea of staying on topic, you're going to poke the bears with a stick. Good luck to you sir. F13 may not be for you.

[WayAbvPar]

It would have been interesting had I gone further back than a week... but...

From the Wurm thread:

Aren't there any Amish NPCs that can pitch in and help?

From the LotRO thread:

It is like syphilis! Fun when you acquire it, but it goes downhill from there.  

People that live in glass houses and all that jazz.

Part of my gig here is reading through as many threads as I can stomach/have time for. The first quote was just a silly joke that didn't come at the expense of the game or the people playing it. For the 2nd quote, I subscribed to LotRO for several months, so I speak from experience.

This thread is for discussion of the game. If you haven't played it, have no desire to play it, and are in fact just here to piss in everyone's Cheerios, I highly suggest you fuck off to another thread or another website.

So you going to delete every post from people who havent played it?  Im pretty sure every game posted under the MMOG discussion has posts from people who havent played the game in fact I know it since a bunch of them arent even out yet.  Take your overinflated mod e-peen and get over yourself.

Reading comprehension ftw. I am just tired of the drive by bullshit from DLRiley (who does it in pretty much every thread in which he participates) and his ilk. If you want to discuss the game, go right ahead. But making little snide comments do not a discussion make.

[Trippy]

This thread is for discussion of the game. If you haven't played it, have no desire to play it, and are in fact just here to piss in everyone's Cheerios, I highly suggest you fuck off to another thread or another website.

So you going to delete every post from people who havent played it?  Im pretty sure every game posted under the MMOG discussion has posts from people who havent played the game in fact I know it since a bunch of them arent even out yet.  Take your overinflated mod e-peen and get over yourself.

It's not a question of playing or not playing, it's whether or not you are adding "signal" or "noise" to the thread. We don't expect people to only be adding to the signal side -- i.e. a certain amount of noise is tolerated (and inevitable) -- but there are some people that "specialize" in adding noise. That's the issue.

[WayAbvPar]

New patch out today. Notes-

   1. Offline skill meditation has been added. More information on this can be found on the Darkfall Blog.
   2. Sea fortresses will only go vulnerable during peak hours.
   3. If you have a stack of ammo equipped on your Paperdoll (for example arrows), and click on a stack of arrows in your backpack, it will merge that stack with the one on the paperdoll.
   4. Fixed a bug where you would sometimes lose buffs from enchantments after entering gank mode and then being revived.
   5. Fixed an issue regarding blood effects and spells where their behaviour would be different depending on spell hitting the back/front of a player.
   6. The names of players who are entering/leaving your clan city will now be displayed with colors corresponding to their political status towards your clan.
   7. Raised the limit of active quests from 10 to 15.
   8. When a system message notifies you that a friend is online, you can now click on his name to open up a private chat window.
   9. Pressing Alt-Use on a player (default "G"), now gives you the option to send him a whisper.
  10. Getting encumbered while performing any kind of Recall, will no longer interrupt the Recall's animation and sound.
  11. By popular demand, NPC vendors will now accept Composite Clubs from players who wish to sell them.
  12. Added roll commands to the chat system: /roll , /roll_party , /roll_clan.
      If you issue a simple /roll command, it will roll a standard 6-sided die. You can choose the number of sides of the die if you wish by doing (for example) /roll D20. This will roll a 20 sided die.
  13. Face lifts, using the amazing no.15 face in the Barber shop is now available to Dwarves and Alfars as well.

Details on meditation -

you all know, today’s patch will add the already announced meditation system to the game. Here is some basic information about the system.

In order to use the meditation system you need to purchase meditation points from your journal while being in game. You can buy up to a maximum of 100,000 points which are non-refundable. The gold is taken straight from your bank.

To set up skills to meditate on you can either use the in-game journal page or the out of game Darkfall External Web Interface Tool (D.E.W.I.T). Depending on your server you can access the tool from the following links: EU D.E.W.I.T – NA D.E.W.I.T

On the meditation page in your journal, you can select the skill that you want to meditate on. Keep in mind that you must have already purchased the skill in game. You will be able to see how many meditation points a skill needs to get to 100 and if you start meditating on it you will also see how much time it will take. The meditation system is subject to diminishing returns.

You can abort meditation at any point without losing any of the skill points you have already gained. Meditation will stop if you run out of meditation points, if you disable it yourself, if the skill you are meditating on reaches 100 or if your subscription runs out. Meditation will also pause when you log in the game and resume when you log back out. There is also an Auto meditation feature that will randomly select another skill once your current one gets to 100.

Any changes you do to your meditation options needs to be verified by pressing the Save Changes button. If you do not save your changes the meditation options will revert to their last saved state.

As we have already announced, this is the first implementation of the system. Additional skills will be added at regular intervals and the mechanics might change based on player feedback and our own observations.

As soon as the patch is applied a help section entry will be added that will offer more detailed information on the feature.

This seems of really limited use. It will be ok for a couple of schools (like Spell Chanting, which I just spent 2 days and about 1000 regs leveling to 26.72!) to get to the 'main' spells, but most other schools you are going to want to level the spell and subskills (intensify etc) along with the school. If/when this gets applied to melee skills it will be a lot more useful.

[Speedy Cerviche]

The meditation thing is useless right now cuz it is inferior to macroing (self buffs, or casting debuffs/buff others on players).

It is significantly more expensive, slower, and you don't get subskill or stat gains.

Spellchantring is ridiculously slow to raise (by far the worst school), but some guy posted that to get it from 87 to 100 would cost 87,000 gold using the meditation system...That is really expensive, I'm pretty sure it would not cost anywhere close to 90k gold to buy mandrake and macro casting adept to gain those 13 points (plus you would gain sub-skills and INT).

I hope AV is just live testing this before the actually make it competitive to macro skill gains, otherwise it was just a waste of time haha.

On the plus side, as a member of a clan who holds our alliance's cities in our name, I really like the system message fix. It will make watching for hostiles a lot easier (we don't bot it). The sea tower change is nice too.

Overall a pretty minor patch, tho if they fix the meditation system so it can replace the need to macro that will be nice.

[Chinchilla]

I feel kinda bad to say it, but I think I'm getting kinda tired of this game.  It just feels like everyone is basically the same build or same setup.  I think what they should have done is like what UO had where you can only get 7xGM.  Not have it where everyone can have 100 in everything.  Or let there be like atrophy or something.  There is no paper, rock, scissors feel to it.  Its just all the same.  I guess in one hand that isn't too bad, but I really miss seeing like healers, rangers, wizards, tanks, dps. 

Overall the game really isn't bad, but I do have to say... I really suck at PvP.  I am much better at PvP in other games, but in Darkfall... holy crap do I suck.

[Speedy Cerviche]

Those complaints are definitely valid. The playerbase has been bringing this up for a while, and AV announced is planning on adding "prestige classes" in the big DF201X expansion.

We don't have many details, but from what's been heard is that they're like current specializations but more fleshed out and more class-like.

Basically you will be specializing in some areas, gaining unique skills and powers, but losing the ability to use other ones.

Some current specializations are actually pretty good, like Destroyer. You are a little weak in 1 v 1, but you basically rape face in group PvP if you can get into the enemy lines while they are focused on launching AOEs into the enemy force.

If done well they'll cut down on the grind (less skills needed in a prestige class), and add some of that rock-paper-scissors that allows weaker players to be very effective in more specialized roles.

We'll see if AV can pull it off, but it's something the game could really use.

[Chinchilla]

You still playing Speedy?

One of the major things I am encountering that is also causing me issues is finding a good clan.  I thought I had one, but then no one ever really cared about doing anything.  I would try and organize groups, but they were like "ummm yeah.... sure..." *cricket cricket*. 

Are you in a clan? 

I haven't logged on in awhile, but I really do want to get back into it, but the most enjoyable thing to me about the game is other player interaction.  I really want some other players to play w/ so I can hone my skills because I am absolutely terrible at PvP.

[Speedy Cerviche]

Clans make a huge difference in the amount of fun you can have. Check your messages.

Pretty disappointed with the new patch. Jacking up the price on rank 70 bows by over 50% was retarded without any other accompanying archery/magery cost imbalance changes (a good bow already cost 8k gold, while a high ranked mage could be effective naked and with a 100 gold). Between this and the meditation patch failure it's not inspiring much confidence that they will be able to deliver all the stuff they are talking up that's coming down the pipeline.

[WayAbvPar]

Yeah the 'hey at least they are patching regularly' excitement has faded and I realize they aren't advancing nearly as quickly as one would hope. More portal shard drops is good though.

[LC]

So apparently the darkfail devs have hatched a new scheme in recent months. They are planning to relaunch the game as darkfail 2, and then somehow fool everyone into paying again.

Development should be completed sometime in August and we should know around that time when we’re going to release it and we’ll give out a release date and all the details. This relaunch is not an expansion. It’s a new game we’ve been developing in parallel with the current version of Darkfall.

[Speedy Cerviche]

Speaking as probably the only person here who plays Darkfall, I wasn't going to say anything until they actually update the damn game but since this was brought up, I will comment...

You have to understand any "darkfall 2" hype in the context of passing through the following prism: 1) The devs don't speak english very well, 2) they are Greek, 3) they haven't had any decen't content releases in the past 1.5 years and are going got an all-or-nothing marketing strategy of releasing all this pent up development as a "re-launch"

Taking all this into account, Darkfall players have basically been playing a paid beta these past 2 years. Now the game itself is a fairly playable if spartan MMORPG/FPS (stable client, decent depth, fairly well balanced). Darkfall's playerbase though through 1.5 years of poor updating has been distilled into a very cynical core of fans.

Aventurine, the aformentioned GREEK devs at some point in 2010 abandoned an ambitious tri-annual update strategy instead opting to just "re-launch"  ("darkfall 2") the game with 1.5 years of development crammed into one x-pac, basically the ultimate jesus patch.

At this point, speaking as someone who really likes this game but is very cynical about the competance of it's greek devs, I think I echo a large segment of it's current playerbase when I say "show me the money". We have put up with it for this for a long ass time now, and the "re-launch" is basically around the corner. It will either be everything the devs have talked it up to be, both in content additions and nirvana balances, or it will bomb horribly and Darkfall will die.

The game oozes potential, just this aftenoon at a "sea tower" battle (massive fortress in the middle of the ocean that becomes vulnerable to capture every 10 days) there was a fairly spectacular 8 way ship battle that lasted about 2 hours, a shitload of cannon-blasting twitch-action fun you couldn't get in any other MMO, but even the most dedicated player is fairly fed up with the greek delays at this point between these highlight battles.

We'll see what Aventurine can come up with in August, it's make or break for Darkfall since they've gone for this all-or-nothing marketing/content strategy, but it's not completely inaccurate to term it "Darkfall re-launch" (but "Darkfall 2" is a stretch).