Darkfall "Released"

[Speedy Cerviche]

They divide up into tribes and frag each other, the population declining or not based upon how bored they are. What else would happen?

Pretty much how it is now. The NA server overall is pretty competitive even in its stagnant and reduced state. There's about a half dozen major alliances, another half dozen less powerful ones, and then a few dozen independant clans ranging from small l33t crews of a dozen to larger newbish clans. Unlike Shadowbane, the game seems to discourage mega-zergs from forming. Unlike Shadowbane, it's a lot harder to play2crush in DF, when you take a clan's city the loss is softer, they didn't sink hundreds of man-hours into building it, and it's easy for them to regroup in a sympathetic player holding across the world, or even a chaos city if they are despised. The mega-zergs also become unwieldy, players get bored, and it puts a big fat target on their back for smaller PK groups who will swarm your land and harass you all day and night, and you can't stamp them out because they have invulnerable bind points to raid out of (chaos cities, and player housing in villages) and camping them forever becomes tedious. 4 alliances actually merged about 6 months ago and their little empire imploded in about a month for these reasons.

The main problem is lack of interesting stuff to do, not cuz of players, but cuz of the devs. The content is just incomplete, not enough sand in the sandbox. The most interesting PvP event they added in the last 1.5 years are "sea towers", large keeps in the middle of the ocean that become vulnerable to capture every 10 days. It's a fun battle, the one on Friday afternoon had warships from 10 different clans show up to fight it out. Every clan has a chance to win also, because you can ninja the prize. Unfortunately AV screwed up the live time so they always become vulnerable in the afternoon, so most people who work can't attend. Friday was the first one I attended in months because of holiday. Besides that, the main PvP event are sieges, but these are becoming less frequent because of the lower population, there's less competition for holdings (supply vs demand).

If there was some interesting game content events like this drawing players into battle every day it would make things much better, but right now there are a lot of nights where people just sit around in cities and have team duels.

Some of the stuff to be added in "re-launch" should improve this. "Land towers" like the "sea towers" adding more such big game generated battles, and maybe other such world PvP events that go live consistently all week. AV also adding a bunch more epic mob spawns that take 10-20 people to kill, will draw in large groups that inevitably collide. Dungeons are being fleshed out also, to UO size or larger (currently much smaller, with all but one having just a 3-5 rooms) and with boss mobs, so again clans will be sending 10-20 people into them. A population influx would also spurr holding competition which is currently slacking. The "wolfs" are not the problem, most of them are there to fight each other, the problem is that the game doesn't channel this well.

This is what the game needs more than anything, this kind of new content which will add more to fight over, and it is coming in the "re-launch". If this is adressed along with improving the newbie experience (better protections, and decreasing its duration by closing the power gap between newbs and plateaud vets), Darkfall will be a much more appealling game and better able to retain players.

[DLRiley]

Not enough rails in my sandbox   

[sinij]

is it possible to create a pvp-centric diku-mmo

DIKU does not mesh well with "PvP-centric" regardless how you chose to implement it. Your best bet to get PvP-centric anything is a sandbox or arena style, not DIKU "rail-yard".

Playing DF it is clear that developers were inspired by golden days of UO, sadly they did not take all the good lessons and in number of cases reached wrong conclusions.

For example, in SB "mine" spawns were ultra-popular frequent PvP hotspots. In DF mines are the only bonus of city ownership. Instead of mines you compete for village control points, that generally seen as "not worth the trouble" unless they are nearby. Simply implementing SB's mine system would open tons of PvP opportunities in the game. As it stands right now bored vets have no other venue to PvP than largely pointless raids on player cities (in turn making player cities very unsafe for new players).

[Speedy Cerviche]

For example, in SB "mine" spawns were ultra-popular frequent PvP hotspots. In DF mines are the only bonus of city ownership. Instead of mines you compete for village control points, that generally seen as "not worth the trouble" unless they are nearby. Simply implementing SB's mine system would open tons of PvP opportunities in the game. As it stands right now bored vets have no other venue to PvP than largely pointless raids on player cities (in turn making player cities very unsafe for new players).

"Sea towers" are the equivilent of SB's mines. Big hopspot, with a nice reward (crapload of rare ore, gold, and other valuable materials), very competitive and everyone has a shot at winning from a major clan sailing a battleship to 2 guys on a single cannon launch (you can ninja it). Problem is they only go live every 10 days, and at a bad time (bug that needs to be fixed). The village control points are a joke, the reward isn't good enough to compete for them, they are usually captured by a naked afk guy autoclicking a siegehammer on them for 30 mins. Improving that to bring in competition for it, or adding some new hotspot stuff ("land towers", or epic mob spawns with phat lewtz) is what the game needs to give PvPers more to do. Problem of lack of content, Dev team small and slow, holding back everything for this Jesus "relaunch".

[Dark_MadMax]

This is what the game needs more than anything, this kind of new content which will add more to fight over, and it is coming in the "re-launch". If this is adressed along with improving the newbie experience (better protections, and decreasing its duration by closing the power gap between newbs and plateaud vets), Darkfall will be a much more appealling game and better able to retain players.

Do I still have to macro for 6 months straight? It could be best pvp game ever, I seriously doubt I would play it with the grind.

[Speedy Cerviche]

Do I still have to macro for 6 months straight? It could be best pvp game ever, I seriously doubt I would play it with the grind.

Well between them doubling skill gains off mobs 6 months ago, and making offline meditation cost competitive to macroing, much fewer people are macroing. There's still some tedious stuff that's best done by macroing (buff spells) but other then that not really too much macroing anymore.

They still need to cut down on grind though. Specialization roles are being added in xpac, which will remove the need for people to have spells from all schools to be competitive (a huge grind). Further skill gain speed increases would be helpful too.

I would wait until "relaunch" to try the game. If it is a failure the game will die, if it is successful the game will be very much improved and more digestible to people who really want that sandbox pvp MMORPG/FPS but are turned off by some of DFs flaws.

[sinij]

Do I still have to macro for 6 months straight? It could be best pvp game ever, I seriously doubt I would play it with the grind.

Yes. Unless you are buying account, don't bother starting DF before "Jesus Expansion".

[Vinadil]

I hope specializations work like EVE or even Rift... where you can know everything but only choose to use some of it at the same time.  That was one of the most maddening things when I was playing this game; at some point people just had SO MANY skills that I could not compete with them, even playing myself 4-5 hours a day.  I was just not "doing it right" since I did not enjoy hitting people sitting on a wall for hours and macroing all night long.

Content is most definitely an issue.  And you will rarely get this when listening to the PvP crowd.  All day they will talk about the PvP issues, and then leave for WoW where they can get in a good raid.  The truth is these PvPers need someone to help them get online, out of their cities, and in the same area... fighting over something they both want.  Doing so in similar sized groups would be great too.

I have to laugh about the dungeon content, well all of it really... I am pretty sure I was still playing when they first started that talk.  Their current dungeons are actually not bad at all... you know except that there are NO bosses and barely any mobs in them.  Who designs a dungeon with no boss?  Did they think players would just sit around the boss room (oh yea, the dungeons have boss rooms... just no mob) waiting for other parties to show?

I still don't get why PvE is so hard for them to design either.  It is not like other FPS games don't have PvE... and I think some people even play it from time to time.  I always thought that the goblins were the most fun combat experience in the whole game.  The difficulty was not found in how many HP they have or how much Damage they do (classic MMO "difficulty" measures), but in how many there are and how quickly they spawn.  They also use a nice mix of range and melee damage and dance around.  I guess the server just can't handle too many NPCs (still) spawned at once, so they have to make you fight smaller groups of boring NPCs.  FPS combat is actually WORSE than auto-attack when I have to click my mouse 200 times before something dies.  They should take the goblin approach (or the FPS console approach) and just make you kill ever increasing numbers of enemies as you progress, and let those enemies get slightly more powerful.

[Speedy Cerviche]

I hope specializations work like EVE or even Rift... where you can know everything but only choose to use some of it at the same time.  That was one of the most maddening things when I was playing this game; at some point people just had SO MANY skills that I could not compete with them, even playing myself 4-5 hours a day.  I was just not "doing it right" since I did not enjoy hitting people sitting on a wall for hours and macroing all night long.

So far how they've described it is new specializations will be based on gear, instead of chosen at a trainer like current ones (destroyer, indestructable, mage killer, etc.). So it will probably be something like you put on a new "fire robe" and your fire magic is enhanced, while you lose other advanced elemental schools. These specializations, if done properly and have advantages over current hybrid who has access to every spell, would reduce grind because someone could take a specialization and just play that effectively, ignoring all the other stuff.

Someone who has trained up more skills would have an advantage of being able to change specializations on the fly depending on situation or fancy. it wouldn't be a huge advantage though, because DF is not a rock-scissors-paper game. Currently your loadout choices (light/medium/heavy armour, using bow/magic for range attack, destroyer, etc.) can give you strengths in certain battle situations, but your effectiveness and the inevitable outcome will still come down to how well you fight and are able to execute on on playing up to those strengths.

[Rake]

Hope the game gets a big reduction in grind, a nice new GUI, an economy and some more sand in the box.
For all its faults, it really is hard to go back to Tab targeting after playing FPS style.
Here is some messing around in a Robe, with a cheap weapon and a little skill.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3Scqg1InZ4&feature=player_embedded

[Speedy Cerviche]

Hope the game gets a big reduction in grind, a nice new GUI, an economy and some more sand in the box.
For all its faults, it really is hard to go back to Tab targeting after playing FPS style.
Here is some messing around in a Robe, with a cheap weapon and a little skill.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3Scqg1InZ4&feature=player_embedded

Not much skill, there was aim (always a constant requirment) but that guy crutched on chained fire knockups every fight. Video only shows the sad current state of DF PvP, where a naked guy crutching on the 5 cheesiest, most overpowered spells can do way too well with zero risk (no armour, worthless melee wep and staff, handful of reagents, probably no mount even), which has completely thrown out of whack the balance of the core risk:reward philosphy. I try and avoid small scale pvp like that and just do larger raids with my clan, or sieges. If I want some smaller scale pvp I'll log into warband, much better balance.

AV's slow reactions to imbalances like that is one reason a lot of people have left. Really cheesy tactics like that dominate small scale pvp and AV hasn't even attempted any kind of adjustments for over the past 8 months, even though it's not even new content, just editing quickly editing number values for a handful of certain overpowered spells would reallyu improve the pvp quality for people who are sticking around. Really bad on their part and a reason why so much rage is directed at these greeks even by people who love the game and still play it.

[Outlawedprod]

http://www.darkfallonline.com/blog/darkfall-2-0/

[Speedy Cerviche]

I think you mean http://www.darkfallonline.com/blog/update-and-qa/

Basically more vague stuff about how everything is being re-balanced, hugely improved, jesus patch, yada yada yada... Real details to come, soon...

Most players don't expect any of this to be actually ingame before December or next year after the Greek factor is taken into account.

[WindupAtheist]

Speedy hates him some Greeks. Did a Greek dude shoot your dog, or what?

[HaemishM]

The Greeks PKed his flax. 

[Speedy Cerviche]

No it's just kind of a joke I don't actually hate them. They have even joked about how when the original Norweigian team moved to Greece they quickly picked up on the Greek concept of "Avrio" (do it tommorrow), and they have also said stuff like the riots/general strikes has caused delays in game development.

I work at a brokerage so I have read a lot about the ongoing Greek saga and its root problems (the national disfunctions). I also have travelled to Greece, and I live in a city that has a sizeable Greek community, great people, and they will be the first to tell you the old country and it's people have real problems.

[WayAbvPar]

I appreciate the updates- if/when this sees the light of day I hope it is worth coming back for.

[Amaron]

I've been watching the news on this occasionally.   They are being really vague on the server wipe issue though.   I'm not touching it without a fresh server or a wipe myself.

[Speedy Cerviche]

Probably will be a wipe, otherwise they would have denied it since the lack of denial is costing them subs of people who won't feel like playing a game where everything will be wiped in 3-6 months (9 months? who knows). Supposedly all development on "DF2.0" is "near complete" and they'll give us an ETA or the ETA for release "in August" (so 2-7 weeks, knowing them, probably more like 8-10, mid-September). In a poll on the forums over 70% didn't expect to see "DF2.0" until 2012.

The forums have been raging hard the past few weeks it's been entertaining. The whole ambiguous wipe thing really set off a spark for people to start unloading the flamethrowers on the Devs. It's not so much that people are worried about losing their precious pixels; Most really don't care, overall want to see "DF2.0" succeed, and are willing to sacrifice to make that happen. They are mad because they have little confidence in AV to pull it off, mad that AV basically just killed DF1.0 (already a low population took a 40% hit when the vague wipe statements hit, party is basically over, the people left are just playing it like a quake arena), and mad they have been strung along for over a year and a half now.

If you think about it, AV basically pulled a bait and switch on current customers. Early 2010 they announced their "DF2010" development plan. 3 expansions for the year. Only one was ever delivered in October and it was fairly underwhelming. Late 2010 we were told the total revamp was still in the pipeline, better than ever, project name is "DF:arena" (dropping the "2010" heh). Their communication updates talked up revised systems they were basically done, and coming soon. Now mid-2011 they say the past 2 years of content development are being packaged as a "new relaunched game", oh and there's probably going to be a wipe also. As a customer, I was basically paying for content updates, enduring their non-delivery, being told they were coming soon, only to find out my money was actually going to a new product for new customers, not what I paid for (this is now in a sense, a paid beta).

So you can see why their players are pretty mad at them and calling them all kinds of names. These are people who actually liked and stuck through DF1.0, they would of been happy with steady updates to the current game. Hell they didn't even need lots of new content, fix some bugs every month and do a little balance update and they would have been very happy. Never happened, some annoying bugs and balance issues (such as some particularly annoying overpowered spells with CC effects that were screaming for nerfs) have gone unchecked for a year or more. And the final nail is now AV has basically thrown DF1.0 under the bus with this wipe talk.

The wipe talk started with the July 7th update where they started talking up all the "new game" content, at which point the forums started buzzing about new game == wipe? In response AV put out this statement the next week on July 15th:

Wipe speculation: We addressed this, to the extent of our knowledge of the topic, during our last activity report when it was brought up by some members of the community in relation to Darkfall’s relaunch. This is not an issue for the present, but you wouldn’t know it looking at our forums. Furthermore the speculation and discussion about the possibility of a wipe is based on the current Darkfall status and facts. We haven’t wiped the server and we wouldn’t do it as things are now, so discussing this is pointless.

This statement is jaw dropping in how vague and weasel worded it is. It's like some Ghaddafi would say when asked if the JDAMs dropping on his compound in Tripoli are a problem. The forums exploded of course. The little bolded part produced some pretty amusing signature images of stuff like planes exploding and the pilot (shopped with pics of the dev) repeating that statement.

As a business decision I can see why AV did it. They had a choice between regular updates and maybe occasional smaller marketing efforts plus a happy playerbase that would've helped with word of mouth (for a kind of an EVE style buildup), this is what most MMOs try to do. They went a different route: Save up 2 years of content development, release it in one jesus-expansion branded as a "new game DF2.0" with a big marketing splash, throw in a wipe too to bring people into the restart. I really don't think I've ever seen a MMO treat their most loyal customers so cynically, and they are Indie devs too! Not the usual evil empire suspects. There really is something sublime about the whole saga, especially with that July 15th statement. AV really doesn't help themselveswhen they put out communiques that sound like something Baghdad Bob would have said.

[DLRiley]

Again with the EVE parallels. Steadily building up a playerbase only works if your game doesn't actively shut out new players. EVE has a massive carebear/rp playerbase and steadily sees growth on that end of the spectrum. Darkfall has a tiny playerbase made of wolves, even factoring in the "people who quit cause its boring with no updates" crowd, its a tiny playerbase made of wolves and the only game on the market for wolves. Its not steadily building anything, just circling the drain until the next indie open world pvp game comes out promising shiny rainbow shitting unicorns.

[Speedy Cerviche]

Again with the EVE parallels. Steadily building up a playerbase only works if your game doesn't actively shut out new players. EVE has a massive carebear/rp playerbase and steadily sees growth on that end of the spectrum. Darkfall has a tiny playerbase made of wolves, even factoring in the "people who quit cause its boring with no updates" crowd, its a tiny playerbase made of wolves and the only game on the market for wolves. Its not steadily building anything, just circling the drain until the next indie open world pvp game comes out promising shiny rainbow shitting unicorns.

The "wolf" thing isn't the biggest issue. Lots of people have come into DF ready to take some lumps, consider it exciting and have fun playing their first month. After that by and large the biggest single /quit factor has been once after that they realize that there's going to be a 6-8 month grind ahead while they have significant disadvantages in character power. This senseless grind is the killer, unless significantly reduced "DF2.0" will fail.

DF could use some better safer areas to smooth out a few rough edges. I believe in DF2.0 they are consolidating NPC starter areas to the capital area. This will make it easier for anti-PKs to chase off any PKers. Stuff like roaming guards and warning messages would be useful also and give newbies a better chance. Overall though newbies are usually alright, if they can't handle dieing a few times they probably shouldn't be playing DF. Many powerful clans accept raw newbies too, and once they get in they are much better protected than in newbie areas (along with free equipment, getting trained by savvy vets, clana ctivities, better hunting grounds, etc.).

Those are small tweaks though, the biggest issue is not open world PvP but terrible character development system and balance.

[DLRiley]

The back of EVE was not built on nullsec. Without empire you follow the growth trajectory of all open world pvp games, which is flat. Shaving a month or two off the grind won't solve anything, unless you can pvp like a pro with 3 weeks of noncasual play your just tossing your playerbase off a slightly shorter cliff. The devs of DF know they don't actually have to update their game to keep a playerbase, they also know that expansions won't expand it either. They have every intention on milking their small sub base for all its worth, if they weren't so lazy they would be at DF 3 by now.

[Speedy Cerviche]

Shaving down the time to fill out one of these new "specialization" roles to 1-2 months of non-hardcore play is what they need to do. It would make a huge difference over the current 6-12 months to have a decent (not great) character.

I think you are putting way too much emphasis on your pattern of "open world PvP" games. How many exactly are there? Darkfall and Shadowbane? Then a few PvP servers for more standard MMORPGs...I don't know how you can establish "trajectories" based on these flawed examples where the biggest downfall of these games was some major system balance flaws or bugs, not the actual open pvp concept. I'd actually say DF and SB showed there is a decent market for these games, since both DF and SB attracted pretty large initial box sales (people who knew full well what they were buying) and then people eventually left en masse due to the bugged or poorly designed nature (something not unique to PvP games, looking at STO, AC2, WAR, LOTR, AOC, and all the other MMORPG failures).

[sinij]

"He went to the mountain and wrote on the stone tablet -All PvPers are anti-social pedophile rapists griefers that live in their mother's basement and can't relate to other human beings". As written in Carebear Gospel according to WUA, chart 2:113. Trammel be upon you.

[DLRiley]

If you can give me a good example of an open world pvp game expanding its playerbase in small increments, moving slightly out of the niche neckbeard ghetto one year at a time, than I'll concede my point.

[Speedy Cerviche]

Did you even read my post? I already said there have only been a few open world PVP MMORPGs attempted, and both had severe bug & design issues that resulted in most of their initial launch players leaving (same with plenty of non-PVP MMORPGs that have had massive subscription falloffs). Drawing sweeping conclusions off such a small and flawed sample pool is inaccurate.

[WindupAtheist]

It's nice to see the old "There's totally a mass-market audience for a Bad Old Days of UO remake, they just didn't show up to (insert game) because it was a shitpile!" song and dance still hanging on into it's second decade. And it'll always be a servicable excuse, too, as long as no one is actually dumb enough to blow fifty million bucks or whatever on such an obviously doomed enterprise.

[Amaron]

It's nice to see the old "There's totally a mass-market audience for a Bad Old Days of UO remake

You're way behind.  People are pining for Shadowbane these days not UO.

[Paelos]

Guild wars is fun, but they instanced it.

[DLRiley]

Guild wars is fun, but they instanced it.

Guild wars is fun because they instanced it.

[Paelos]

Guild wars is fun, but they instanced it.

Guild wars is fun because they instanced it.

Why would I want open world then?

[DLRiley]

Guild wars is fun, but they instanced it.

Guild wars is fun because they instanced it.

Why would I want open world then?

People like fantasy sims. Why do you think GRRM Song of Ice and Fire series is so popular. Most of those people however will hate playing a fantasy sim. Song of Ice and Fire would replace UO easy if turned to an mmo, but wouldn't do much better than SWG if it was a open world game that is true to the books.

[sinij]

You are right, competitive PvP has zero appeal. After all who would want to form a team and beat/score against other PLAYERS? We _must_ kill brain-dead AI, there is no other way and anyone trying to do something else must be psychopathic griefer.

[DLRiley]

You are right, competitive PvP has zero appeal. After all who would want to form a team and beat/score against other PLAYERS? We _must_ kill brain-dead AI, there is no other way and anyone trying to do something else must be psychopathic griefer.

I think you have the topic confused. We are strictly talking about competitive pvps' third cousin in Alabama, open world pvp. You know the rule set that doesn't shit millions of dollars.

[Malakili]

You are right, competitive PvP has zero appeal. After all who would want to form a team and beat/score against other PLAYERS? We _must_ kill brain-dead AI, there is no other way and anyone trying to do something else must be psychopathic griefer.

I think you have the topic confused. We are strictly talking about competitive pvps' third cousin in Alabama, open world pvp. You know the rule set that doesn't shit millions of dollars.

Winner winner chicken dinner.