And my already low opinion regarding the reviews done by MMORPG.com drops several more notches.
I've played this game for six weeks now, and the author of this "review" is showing blantant favoritism by either glossing over or directly avoiding any disscusion about the serious lapses of this game. Pretending that problems don't exist won't make them go away ( or make them any less noticeable, for that matter ).
I dedicated a complete article exclusively to the largest negative aspects currently in Darkfall Online. Articles can be 1500 words max, if it were longer maybe I would have included minor things which are easily fixable and not major problems such as
You can swim in plate armor without stamina drain
You can run full speed in plate armor
You can't craft in bulk, for instance it takes 20 seconds to make 20 arrows and can literally take hours to make thousands
But I cannot honestly place these over things like speedhacking, and the most important of all, inability to buy the game. Those are things I can easily include in the upcoming 8 parts as I go into detail on each aspect.
Everyone has differences of opinion. Many believe that macroing will ruin the game. Certainly hasn't done so for Ultima Online. They even have had a term coined for rapid macroing techinques that have been around for years (8x8 anyone?). If someone wants to sit in their clan town and blow spells off in the air wasting coin on resources they will never see a gain from, why the hell do I care? I have snuck into many clan towns I am at war with, killed the macroers and gotten literally thousands of free reagents. There is no may to macro coin gain, and nearly all combat skill gain costs $$$.
Maybe I missed what you are saying completely. Can you please specifiy issues I have "glossed over or directly avoiding..."? Please use specific examples and I would be happy to address any of them.
The contents of this post do not necessarily reflect the views of MMORPG.com and its management.
Hope this is a joke. So basically the game is 100% perfect minus 3 things.
You obviously didnt read the "overview" or you would know that the 3 things you claim are minuses are actually "non issues". I guess we know where the iraq minister of information found work after the invasion.
Why exactly do we have more darkfall news threads on this site than the game has subs?
Are you serious? this is it? So Darkfall's most important and glaring issues in a nutshell (in order of importance): 1-buying the game. 2-cheating. 3-macroing. 4-The notorious Alignment System!
"To be honest, the rest of the "problems" you will see discussed on the message forums are non issues." In other words, the other issues are not important enough to be mentioned, such as the extreme lack of content (closer to non existent actually), extreme lack of polish, broken combat to say the least, prehistoric UI, and I'm not even mentioning the 1998 graphics, the fact that there's NO lore, the awful control system etc.
So the best games on the market have more issues than DF I guess. Totally blinkered 'overview'. 'Yay I can kill anyone and take his loot!' Seriously.. some people are incredibly easy to please.
Sorry i dont get it.
whats broke about the combat?
Non existent content? how come i havent gone a day yet when i havent been raided by enemies? and i havent left the newbie area yet and surrounding Leafhelm there are 3 goblin camps i have found and a Large Skeleton/zombie area. and i'm too scared to go far lol! oh ye and the crafting i started last night is going to keep me busy it seems.
Control system is different from what were used to, but it works and is actually more fun that most mmo's
Graphics are not as good as Aoc/Vanguard maybe but i would call them average if i am honest.
Polish i agree with, theres non. But i dont think there ever will be much. It's not a bells and whistles game is it?
Prehistoric UI...hmm ye your close there. seems to be workable but could be so much better.
But come on mate his review was at least honest, your statments are misleading.
Combat is extremely clunky and lacks polish. for example, you don't hit every time even though you're in range, and it's worse for ranged combat.
There is a lack of content, even fanboys are complaining about this. there is very few pve content, but of course if you're happy grinding goblins, gank and be ganked for days, then more power to you.
What don't you get? you actually agreed with me on the other points (Graphics (character models are especially bad), polish, UI, no lore). Also how is this overview in any way honest? If I didn't know anything about the game and read this, the major cons of DF, I would be on the official site spamming F5 to buy an account lol. I don't think I have ever read something as biased as this.
I dont get how the combat is broke! you dont hit all the time even if in range? i havent noticed that at all, which makes me feel that it's something that, A: was broke but has been fixed at least 3 weeks ago, or B: it's something you have read in some other post and just decided to jump on the bandwagon yes i agreed to other points, just because i am honest! but combat being broke i really dont get, it works fine for me. Yes i dont hit everytime but isnt that normal in combat? lol even EQ was doing that from the first day, and WoW still does it to this day!
Oh ye and by the way! you wouldnt be spamming F5 to buy a copy cause you already have one dont you? or are you just making your factual statments of what you have read from others who dont like the game lol? surely not
Oh and as for just farming goblins i said also that i found skeletons and zombies close to the newbie area. And this morning i was at the Troll camp that i recently discovered, after trying the Elements and finding them too tough for me at the min. So ye lol i can see the lack of content
Come on mate wait till your more informed at least or maybe try the game yourself. I mean you believe the negative comments but wont believe the positive ones? whats that all about, it's almost like your trying to find reasons not to like it and convince others not to either. Stand up mate and make your own judgment just like i am.
the part about macroing being a nonissue made me laugh.
Try going into one of the big player cities. All you will see if afk macroers leveling up skills whether its magic / archery solo or a team macro for weapon skill. The game pretty much forces you to do this to compete. Macrofall am i right?
better to give the game an honest heartfelt 2/10 then try and feed this line of BS to people.
the part about macroing being a nonissue made me laugh.
Try going into one of the big player cities. All you will see if afk macroers leveling up skills whether its magic / archery solo or a team macro for weapon skill. The game pretty much forces you to do this to compete. Macrofall am i right? better to give the game an honest heartfelt 2/10 then try and feed this line of BS to people.
No it doesnt force you friend! i am a solo Darkfall player who has never macroed once and seem to be competing rather well so far. Of course if i felt like it i could but that agin would be a choice of mine. Personally i have never tried to max skills as fast as poss, i prefer to "play" the game.
But your right it is better to give the game a heartfelt 2/10 than feed bullshit. But it's also better to give an honest overveiw than just go along with what you read in other posts isn't it? For instance i make my own opinion and like the game.
I think Graphics are not top line but they are good solid graphics.
i think the UI is very bland but workable.
Combat i have no problem with at all. seems fluid and smooth to me.
Cheating i hate. Havent seen any yet but also i am not naive enough to not know it exists. Just like in any game.
Macorers dont bother me. they might level up faster than me but, hey who cares! if it becomes a problem for me then ill complain
Open area's with no mobs? at last a game that feels no need to fill every square inch with content. i prefer goblins to hang about in a camp rather than be everywhere! makes me feel like im in a RPG
the part about macroing being a nonissue made me laugh.
Try going into one of the big player cities. All you will see if afk macroers leveling up skills whether its magic / archery solo or a team macro for weapon skill. The game pretty much forces you to do this to compete. Macrofall am i right? better to give the game an honest heartfelt 2/10 then try and feed this line of BS to people.
I explained clearly in my article why macroing is a non issue, but I shall reiterate here. I never said macroing doesn't happen, because it absolutely does.
Macroing magic, and archery takes resources (arrows and reagents). Gold in this game is tough to come by. Arrows, and reagents especially are very expensive in this game. As an example, a newbie goblin will drop 5 gold about 75% of the time. Reagents on average cost 3g EACH. So if you have arrows or reagents you really want to be using those on monsters to try and recoup some of your costs. If someone wants to spend their money with zero return, and blow off arrows or spell in the air then more power to them. This in no way effects how you play, or your character in any way. If they earn enough money to blow arrows and reagents on the thin air, then so be it. Not to mention they have big red targets painted on their backs for anyone sneaking into their city because you can hear bow shots and spell casting from a mile away.
Please understand the mechanics of the game before bashing them. Macroing is, and will continue to be a non issue in this game. The same as it has been in UO for 10 years running now.
The contents of this post do not necessarily reflect the views of MMORPG.com and its management.
To be honest, the rest of the "problems" you will see discussed on the message forums are non issues.
If I came to this site to find some information about DFO from the articles written by people trying to pass themselves off as journalists, I'd probably think that that there is nothing wrong with the game and all the bad press surrounding it is generated by a bunch of angry trolls. You admit that there are indeed some issues, seemingly breaking the trend of constantly praising the game and its dev team, but the things you list as the game's greatest shortcomings aren't really issues at all. Not because there aren't any bigger problems to be worried about, but because you conveniently forget to include them in your article, giving all uninformed readers the impression that the game's pretty much perfect. I'm sure there's some kind of definition for this kind of cover up dance you're doing in your little article. Or is it that you're simply clueless and ignorant?
Let's start off with the alignment system. I doubt anyone who wants to PVP in a legitimate manner (that excludes griefing newbies under the disguise of a lawful citizen), has been playing the game for a while, and/or has access to a player run city cares whether he's blue or not. The alignment system is simply a bad copy of the alignment system they had back in UO. In UO:
- you couldn't grind your way back to being a lawful citizen in a matter of minutes by rezkilling your alt - you couldn't grief someone by constantly looting their kills without any repercussions, because you'd go grey, and then they'd be able to kill you without taking an alignment hit - you couldn't as easily grief someone into going grey/red, because of the personal flag; if you're grey and someone attacks you, you remain grey to him for as long as it takes for him to kill you, while in DFO if you don't attack back while you're grey, you'll always remain grey for the set duration of 120 seconds, and as soon as you go back blue, the person attacking you will go grey, or red if he's unlucky enough to score a killshot or a "gank" the second you turn blue - you could actually defend yourself if you were grey (because of mistakenly looting someone's corpse, for example), once again, because of the personal flag; if you were grey or red and someone decided to attack you, he'd flag grey to you and be attackable and freely killable throughout the whole duration of the fight - you couldn't accidentally kill a person that easily, and even if you did, you wouldn't immediately go red because of it
Yes, the system was exploitable, but much less so than the one in DFO. And no, DFO is not UO2, but if you're going to copy something, then copy it well or don't copy it at all (speaking of doing a piss-poor job copying features from UO... hello, inventory and skill systems!). You didn't even touch any of the stuff I mentioned, I guess these are just some of the non-issues people whine about for no reason at all.
Cheating has a huge impact on the game, since it revolves around PVP and competition, and yet, once again, you're trying to margninalize the issue by saying that it's is not as widespread as some people claim, which is a load of crap. You might want to take a look at the video where a legitimately stolen boat gets hijacked by a cheater (member of the guild the boat got stolen from). Not that big of a deal, right? Just do a search on youtube if you want to find more videos of people cheating or even actual cheat ads. Yes, they've made some strong statements toward banning cheaters etc., but anyone who believes any word that leaves Tasos' mouth at this point should be immediately put under medical observation. If they can simply go through the server logs and find cheaters based on what they see in there, then why the need to report every cheater by name? I'm guessing having a piece of code that highlights logs with some suspicious client behaviour is out of the question? The GMs cannot and will not do anything unless they have the name of the suspected person, because they have no means to determine whether someone is cheating or not other than to follow them, watch them, and catch them red handed, so anyone being careful with their 3rd party tools, for example only using the part of the hack that negates stamina drain (that's how "the best pvpers" of darkfall can sprint/shoot/jump for 5+ minutes straight without having to worry about running out of stam), or only using the radar hack that allows them to see every player in their range on the minimap is never going to get caught.
Exploiting falls under the same category. The exploiters have it great in Darkfall. If I was the kind of person who doesn't care about actual competition and tries to win at any and all cost, I'd love this game. There are exploits in every game out there, what's important is how quickly and efficiently a dev team can deal with both bugs and people exploiting them. Aventurine has this original, one of a kind, ass-backwards way of fixing exploits, that actually rewards exploiters and punishes those who play fair. Acid pools, guard towers, newbie weapons, skilling up on invulnerable targets etc. Every player who took advantage of any of the aforementioned exploits was already ahead of everyone who played fair, but by fixing the exploits and not doing anything about the exploiters, Aventurine indirectly punished everyone else, because they now have to fight people who are much stronger than them and work twice as hard to catch up ("twice as hard" is a major understatement in most cases). There are many other exploits that have existed since the game's not-so-official release and haven't been fixed to this day, like people farming tons of gold and high-end equipment by sitting inside walls, trees, rocks, and other similar objects, chain-soloing mobs that are nearly impossible to solo. Some people are already insanely rich, they're way ahead of the curve in every way imaginable since they can easily afford buying all the stuff they'll ever need to finish building their characters, they get a huge edge over normal players thanks to the high-end equipment, they don't have to worry about losing any of the stuff they wear, since they've got tons of it banked anyway. Nothing is being done about it. How the hell is this a non-issue in a PVP game? Do explain.
Aside from AutoIt loot macros allowing you to empty a tombstone filled to the brim with nearly weightless items in a matter of seconds, I wouldn't say there are any macros that hurt the game at all. Macros are not the problem. The problem is the insanely slow skill grind coupled with the fact that the game is devoid of any actual content, which leads to a situation where macroing is the only way of building a character without going batshit insane.
There are so many other issues with Darkfall, that it would take at least 10 more overviews to list them all. Not like this one, however, since all you do is beat around the bush as much as possible to distract the readers from the real problems. Client and server performance being one of them, considering that city building, sieging, and zerging each other is supposed to be one of the key features of the game. Unfortunately for everyone paying for the game, though, the server lags and crashes every time a big siege is about to take place. The lack of communication with the customers is another thing someone writing an article like this one would most likely list as a problem. It's funny in a sad kind of way how we had to beg Aventurine to start posting some patch notes, and all it takes to make that big-mouthed fraud, Tasos, go on a posting spree is to post some half-assed review consisting of pretty much the same amount of factual-substanse as their official website. I guess they just can't take what they dish out on a regular basis.
tldr version: MMORPG.com game correspondents are full of crap.
To be honest, the rest of the "problems" you will see discussed on the message forums are non issues.
If I came to this site to find some information about DFO from the articles written by people trying to pass themselves off as journalists, I'd probably think that that there is nothing wrong with the game and all the bad press surrounding it is generated by a bunch of angry trolls. You admit that there are indeed some issues, seemingly breaking the trend of constantly praising the game and its dev team, but the things you list as the game's greatest shortcomings aren't really issues at all. Not because there aren't any bigger problems to be worried about, but because you conveniently forget to include them in your article, giving all uninformed readers the impression that the game's pretty much perfect. I'm sure there's some kind of definition for this kind of cover up dance you're doing in your little article. Or is it that you're simply clueless and ignorant?
Let's start off with the alignment system. I doubt anyone who wants to PVP in a legitimate manner (that excludes griefing newbies under the disguise of a lawful citizen), has been playing the game for a while, and/or has access to a player run city cares whether he's blue or not. The alignment system is simply a bad copy of the alignment system they had back in UO. In UO: - you couldn't grind your way back to being a lawful citizen in a matter of minutes by rezkilling your alt
- you couldn't grief someone by constantly looting their kills without any repercussions, because you'd go grey, and then they'd be able to kill you without taking an alignment hit
- you couldn't as easily grief someone into going grey/red, because of the personal flag; if you're grey and someone attacks you, you remain grey to him for as long as it takes for him to kill you, while in DFO if you don't attack back while you're grey, you'll always remain grey for the set duration of 120 seconds, and as soon as you go back blue, the person attacking you will go grey, or red if he's unlucky enough to score a killshot or a "gank" the second you turn blue
- you could actually defend yourself if you were grey (because of mistakenly looting someone's corpse, for example), once again, because of the personal flag; if you were grey or red and someone decided to attack you, he'd flag grey to you and be attackable and freely killable throughout the whole duration of the fight
- you couldn't accidentally kill a person that easily, and even if you did, you wouldn't immediately go red because of it Yes, the system was exploitable, but much less so than the one in DFO. And no, DFO is not UO2, but if you're going to copy something, then copy it well or don't copy it at all (speaking of doing a piss-poor job copying features from UO... hello, inventory and skill systems!). You didn't even touch any of the stuff I mentioned, I guess these are just some of the non-issues people whine about for no reason at all.
Cheating has a huge impact on the game, since it revolves around PVP and competition, and yet, once again, you're trying to margninalize the issue by saying that it's is not as widespread as some people claim, which is a load of crap. You might want to take a look at the video where a legitimately stolen boat gets hijacked by a cheater (member of the guild the boat got stolen from). Not that big of a deal, right? Just do a search on youtube if you want to find more videos of people cheating or even actual cheat ads. Yes, they've made some strong statements toward banning cheaters etc., but anyone who believes any word that leaves Tasos' mouth at this point should be immediately put under medical observation. If they can simply go through the server logs and find cheaters based on what they see in there, then why the need to report every cheater by name? I'm guessing having a piece of code that highlights logs with some suspicious client behaviour is out of the question? The GMs cannot and will not do anything unless they have the name of the suspected person, because they have no means to determine whether someone is cheating or not other than to follow them, watch them, and catch them red handed, so anyone being careful with their 3rd party tools, for example only using the part of the hack that negates stamina drain (that's how "the best pvpers" of darkfall can sprint/shoot/jump for 5+ minutes straight without having to worry about running out of stam), or only using the radar hack that allows them to see every player in their range on the minimap is never going to get caught.
Exploiting falls under the same category. The exploiters have it great in Darkfall. If I was the kind of person who doesn't care about actual competition and tries to win at any and all cost, I'd love this game. There are exploits in every game out there, what's important is how quickly and efficiently a dev team can deal with both bugs and people exploiting them. Aventurine has this original, one of a kind, ass-backwards way of fixing exploits, that actually rewards exploiters and punishes those who play fair. Acid pools, guard towers, newbie weapons, skilling up on invulnerable targets etc. Every player who took advantage of any of the aforementioned exploits was already ahead of everyone who played fair, but by fixing the exploits and not doing anything about the exploiters, Aventurine indirectly punished everyone else, because they now have to fight people who are much stronger than them and work twice as hard to catch up ("twice as hard" is a major understatement in most cases). There are many other exploits that have existed since the game's not-so-official release and haven't been fixed to this day, like people farming tons of gold and high-end equipment by sitting inside walls, trees, rocks, and other similar objects, chain-soloing mobs that are nearly impossible to solo. Some people are already insanely rich, they're way ahead of the curve in every way imaginable since they can easily afford buying all the stuff they'll ever need to finish building their characters, they get a huge edge over normal players thanks to the high-end equipment, they don't have to worry about losing any of the stuff they wear, since they've got tons of it banked anyway. Nothing is being done about it. How the hell is this a non-issue in a PVP game? Do explain.
Aside from AutoIt loot macros allowing you to empty a tombstone filled to the brim with nearly weightless items in a matter of seconds, I wouldn't say there are any macros that hurt the game at all. Macros are not the problem. The problem is the insanely slow skill grind coupled with the fact that the game is devoid of any actual content, which leads to a situation where macroing is the only way of building a character without going batshit insane.
There are so many other issues with Darkfall, that it would take at least 10 more overviews to list them all. Not like this one, however, since all you do is beat around the bush as much as possible to distract the readers from the real problems. Client and server performance being one of them, considering that city building, sieging, and zerging each other is supposed to be one of the key features of the game. Unfortunately for everyone paying for the game, though, the server lags and crashes every time a big siege is about to take place. The lack of communication with the customers is another thing someone writing an article like this one would most likely list as a problem. It's funny in a sad kind of way how we had to beg Aventurine to start posting some patch notes, and all it takes to make that big-mouthed fraud, Tasos, go on a posting spree is to post some half-assed review consisting of pretty much the same amount of factual-substanse as their official website. I guess they just can't take what they dish out on a regular basis.
tldr version: MMORPG.com game correspondents are full of crap.
Your post is well thought out, but again is devoid of many concepts. For one, you like to use Ultima Online as the example of what they did right, and what in your opinion Darkfall does wrong. In reality UO had far more exploits, far more cheating, then most mmorpgs in history. It was the pioneer this is to be expected. But if you are going to compare the good, please show both sides and compare the bad. Throughout UO's history there were all sorts of duping bugs, primarily for gold but for resources as well. There were also MANY player trading exploits that have popped up over the years.
The alignment system is not perfect. I mentioned this in my article. However 2 months into it and they have already made large strides in balancing it, and Im sure more will come. I'm not sure why you make it seem as though what is here is here to stay and can never at any time be fixed, changed, balanced or altered in any way. The crux of the entire post revolves around this all important statement:
There is not a single issues in Darkfall that cant be patched and balanced out of the game. Not a single one. The core of the game is solid. Games with no solid core can't be changed, Age of Conan being the example. Games can try and change their core, Star Wars Galaxies being the example of that .
You call the game a grind because its slow gaining skills. I think thats one of the large problems in this game where people expect to play 24 / 7 and see and do all there is to the game in a month... much like you saw with World of Warcraft expansions. This game was not designed in a way where you max your weapon, magic or archery skills in a week. If you are a high end mage, then you earned it. If your goal is to become the max skill level in everything then perhaps this is not the game for you. If you play the game, simply play it... go pk, siege, PvE, craft and trade, your skills will go up naturally and over time, with use as intended. Skills will feel like a grind if your sit in town shooting spells and arrows into the air watching your skill gains.
99% of the cheating videos you see are recycled videos from the first 2 weeks of the game. I actually saw the boat video and from what I heard it was a legit exploit. In one way this is a shame but in another it's almost expected. In one of the first games to actually intoduce sailable ships... and then kick it up a notch and offer up all out naval warfare (even against other cities) I will be expecting major balance issues, tweaks, and exploit fixes to be incoming. I think this may be a ways out though since the amount of big boats crafted to date can still be counted with my own two hands.
Lastly, to put things into perspective, I had 1500 words max to use in this article. Your entire post was 100 words short of my entire article.
The contents of this post do not necessarily reflect the views of MMORPG.com and its management.
Macroing is a non-issue except all the guilds who control the majority of the world are ones that got their before anyone else, and MACROED to get their players skilled and harvesting supplies needed. Who controls the game world is a non-issue though.
You also left out the worst part of the alignment system. The fact that a game like Ultima online and Lineage2 have targeting and DF doesn't. Fighting mobs in camps or group PvP became a joke. A very frustrating unfunny joke.
And then there is exploiting. Exploiting in DF probably needs an article on its own. The exploits and the alignment system combined are what killed the game for me.
Why are DF reviews so blatantly biased one way or the other?
the part about macroing being a nonissue made me laugh.
Try going into one of the big player cities. All you will see if afk macroers leveling up skills whether its magic / archery solo or a team macro for weapon skill. The game pretty much forces you to do this to compete. Macrofall am i right? better to give the game an honest heartfelt 2/10 then try and feed this line of BS to people.
I explained clearly in my article why macroing is a non issue, but I shall reiterate here. I never said macroing doesn't happen, because it absolutely does.
Macroing magic, and archery takes resources (arrows and reagents). Gold in this game is tough to come by. Arrows, and reagents especially are very expensive in this game. As an example, a newbie goblin will drop 5 gold about 75% of the time. Reagents on average cost 3g EACH. So if you have arrows or reagents you really want to be using those on monsters to try and recoup some of your costs. If someone wants to spend their money with zero return, and blow off arrows or spell in the air then more power to them. This in no way effects how you play, or your character in any way. If they earn enough money to blow arrows and reagents on the thin air, then so be it. Not to mention they have big red targets painted on their backs for anyone sneaking into their city because you can hear bow shots and spell casting from a mile away.
Please understand the mechanics of the game before bashing them. Macroing is, and will continue to be a non issue in this game. The same as it has been in UO for 10 years running now.
I have been a DF player since day one until a couple weeks ago. As a solo player in the newb cities it may be a non issue, this is not where the bulk of the players who actually matter in the game play. (by "matter" I mean those that belong to the guilds who are shaping this PvP sandbox world) Money is not an issue in this game for those that belong to the large guilds / alliances, resources are just about unlimited in and around player cities. Because of territory control you don't have much at all to risk as far as getting ganked. This gives these guild members an unnatural advantage over those who do not have access to these resources and is, in effect, a game breaking imbalance, especially when the death penalty is what it is (which, for the record, is what I like about this game in the first place.)
This coupled with the fact that the guilds that have built these cities did so from exploits that were available from day 1. I couldn't understand how these cities were springing up so early in the game until I learned of the mob glitch that caused some camps to drop 500g each, which was very quickly taken advantage of. Next thing we see is people running around with 100 rigor from abusing another exploit (yeah try fighting a naked ork with 100 rigor sometime, it's not fun).
Also, let's face it, Aventurine never stress tested their servers. Everyone who bought the game up to this point has been involved in a paid beta program. Had they waited and done an open or even just a larger scale closed beta test for bug reporting purposes and capacity tests, this game could have could have been much finer tuned. Instead we have a community that was built on exploits and has enabled an unfixable imbalance in the game.
Most of us that have left are waiting for the NA server to come up in hope that the exploits will be fixed and everyone can start on a level playing field. However, since the Aventurine team can't even get enough manpower to update their front page and seemingly always are addressing crashes due to hardware or connectivity issues, this just doesn't seem like it will be coming to fruition any time soon.
So yes, I understand, have used, and now bash the mechanics of the game.
I will say the fact that they actually did take action on the hackers is a good sign. But they have a long way to go before they get subs back.
Macroing is a non-issue except all the guilds who control the majority of the world are ones that got their before anyone else, and MACROED to get their players skilled and harvesting supplies needed. Who controls the game world is a non-issue though.
You also left out the worst part of the alignment system. The fact that a game like Ultima online and Lineage2 have targeting and DF doesn't. Fighting mobs in camps or group PvP became a joke. A very frustrating unfunny joke.
And then there is exploiting. Exploiting in DF probably needs an article on its own. The exploits and the alignment system combined are what killed the game for me.
Why are DF reviews so blatantly biased one way or the other?
Ok I have to call bullshit on your comments . Hmm where to start:
You cannot macro for resources. You never could, and you never will be able to. What you could do is create a macro that kept clicking your mouse button repeatedly while sitting at a resource to get its 51 TOTAL resources per node. However this does nothing to protect you from getting PKed with your abundance of 51 resources in your pack. And it takes approximately 8-10 minutes to empty a node. So your macroing attempts do not net any real gain
You cant macro to get needed equipment. And your combat skills do not effect your ability to hit, or even your damage in Darkfall. So I fail to see how macroing skills helps me in the initial weeks where clans were making their initial land claims
I am a bit confused by the statement regarding the alignment system. The issues you speak of is in regards to combat and has nothing to do with the alignment system in any way. Targeting in this writer's opinion is hands down one of the most welcome features in an MMORPG to come, ever. It's FPS style targeting. There is none of that bull shit where I stand inches from an enemy, swing with a giant halberd and somehow miss because the mob is such a higher level from me. The same goes for magic and archery. Gravity plays a role like in real life. Firing an arrow or spell takes skill as you have to both aim and time. You don't just see a magical targeting ring and land hits based on die rolls. This is actually my favorite aspect of gameplay. This also means you have to choose your fighting tactics carefully as if you begin firing arrows into crowds of people you will undoubtedly hit friendlies, and other untintended targets.
Define what you consider exploits. There are cheats using third party applications which is bannable, and there is using the game mechanics to someone benefit in an unattended way, which is not currently bannable. I know of one exploit which I do not want to mention (but I will admit it exists if I see it posted in this thread) which they are actively kicking people for, but not banning. But I have a feeling you are referring to cheats. Regardless, as I said in my article, the cheating has dropped off dramatically since the ban hammer was dropped.
If you don't like the game thats ok, many won't. Just make sure what you post is accurate and up to date.
The contents of this post do not necessarily reflect the views of MMORPG.com and its management.
If you're going to write an article that makes the accusation that there's a lot of misinformation floating around, you may want to make sure you got all your facts straight.
"The basic premise is that all characters start with +10 alignment on a scale of -50 to +100."
The maximum possitive aliengment a player can gain is 10.
From the patch notes: • Alignment has been tweaked. The maximum positive alignment you can have has been reduced to 10.
"However, with the massive demand for this game, the daily sales quotas were being consumed in under 5 minutes."
No. It never sold out in less then 5 minutes. Some days it took 45 some days it took 15, but it never took 5. One day in fact it took almost an hour and a half.
"The game is purchased via digital download exclusively"
No. If you read thier EULA you would also understand why they aren't allowed to sell you a copy of the game, and what you actually purchase is an account. From the EULA: 1. Limited License to the World. Your participation in the Game and the World are subject to your ongoing agreement to and compliance with these TOS. Aventurine grants you a non exclusive, non transferable, revocable license to the Game and the World, subject to these TOS and the EULA.
The game client itself is free to download, and not dependant upon the purchase of your limitted lisence.
"I can confirm that cheating does in fact exist in this game"
Cheating in any form is never a "non-issue"; the fact that you can confirm it and say "You may see this from time to time," is not a good thing in any game. In the 3 years of Lineage 2, and 4 years of WoW the worst cheating I encountered were bots. I never encounterd speed hacks, teleport hacks, flying hacks, or aim hacks in those games. You're attempting to downplay a serious issue with the game. It blows my mind that anyone can in one sentence state that it's a non-issue, and in another say that you'll see it from time to time.
AFK macroing is cheating. It can get you banned. Tasos himself has had to make mulitple posts covering this topic; that in itself implies a problem. AFK macroing accures a LOT. No, it won't make you uber overnight, but again you took a serious issue and attempt to downplay it. The guy that will afk macro his lesser magic, will also afk macro is greater magic; they don't do this just one night, they do this for days on end. This sort of cheating is gives people a considerable advantage and allows them to advance at a rate that a normal player has no chance of competing with. It's hardly a non-issue.
The alignment change was in the April 10th patch.
Harvesting was changed in the May 1st patch notes.
Either the author isn't actually playing the game anymore, or this article was written over a month ago, and contanes "misinformation".
Macroing is a non-issue except all the guilds who control the majority of the world are ones that got their before anyone else, and MACROED to get their players skilled and harvesting supplies needed. Who controls the game world is a non-issue though.
You also left out the worst part of the alignment system. The fact that a game like Ultima online and Lineage2 have targeting and DF doesn't. Fighting mobs in camps or group PvP became a joke. A very frustrating unfunny joke.
And then there is exploiting. Exploiting in DF probably needs an article on its own. The exploits and the alignment system combined are what killed the game for me.
Why are DF reviews so blatantly biased one way or the other?
Ok I have to call bullshit on your comments . Hmm where to start:
You cannot macro for resources. You never could, and you never will be able to. What you could do is create a macro that kept clicking your mouse button repeatedly while sitting at a resource to get its 51 TOTAL resources per node. However this does nothing to protect you from getting PKed with your abundance of 51 resources in your pack. And it takes approximately 8-10 minutes to empty a node. So your macroing attempts do not net any real gain
You cant macro to get needed equipment. And your combat skills do not effect your ability to hit, or even your damage in Darkfall. So I fail to see how macroing skills helps me in the initial weeks where clans were making their initial land claims
I am a bit confused by the statement regarding the alignment system. The issues you speak of is in regards to combat and has nothing to do with the alignment system in any way. Targeting in this writer's opinion is hands down one of the most welcome features in an MMORPG to come, ever. It's FPS style targeting. There is none of that bull shit where I stand inches from an enemy, swing with a giant halberd and somehow miss because the mob is such a higher level from me. The same goes for magic and archery. Gravity plays a role like in real life. Firing an arrow or spell takes skill as you have to both aim and time. You don't just see a magical targeting ring and land hits based on die rolls. This is actually my favorite aspect of gameplay. This also means you have to choose your fighting tactics carefully as if you begin firing arrows into crowds of people you will undoubtedly hit friendlies, and other untintended targets.
Define what you consider exploits. There are cheats using third party applications which is bannable, and there is using the game mechanics to someone benefit in an unattended way, which is not currently bannable. I know of one exploit which I do not want to mention (but I will admit it exists if I see it posted in this thread) which they are actively kicking people for, but not banning. But I have a feeling you are referring to cheats. Regardless, as I said in my article, the cheating has dropped off dramatically since the ban hammer was dropped.
If you don't like the game thats ok, many won't. Just make sure what you post is accurate and up to date.
Based on you list of items here I just have 1 question.
And please bear with me, as it is an honest question...
If combat skils do not effect damage or hit rate, or I'm assuming effect the outcome of combat at all, why are there combat skills?
the part about macroing being a nonissue made me laugh.
Try going into one of the big player cities. All you will see if afk macroers leveling up skills whether its magic / archery solo or a team macro for weapon skill. The game pretty much forces you to do this to compete. Macrofall am i right? better to give the game an honest heartfelt 2/10 then try and feed this line of BS to people.
I explained clearly in my article why macroing is a non issue, but I shall reiterate here. I never said macroing doesn't happen, because it absolutely does.
Macroing magic, and archery takes resources (arrows and reagents). Gold in this game is tough to come by. Arrows, and reagents especially are very expensive in this game. As an example, a newbie goblin will drop 5 gold about 75% of the time. Reagents on average cost 3g EACH. So if you have arrows or reagents you really want to be using those on monsters to try and recoup some of your costs. If someone wants to spend their money with zero return, and blow off arrows or spell in the air then more power to them. This in no way effects how you play, or your character in any way. If they earn enough money to blow arrows and reagents on the thin air, then so be it. Not to mention they have big red targets painted on their backs for anyone sneaking into their city because you can hear bow shots and spell casting from a mile away.
Please understand the mechanics of the game before bashing them. Macroing is, and will continue to be a non issue in this game. The same as it has been in UO for 10 years running now.
I have been a DF player since day one until a couple weeks ago. As a solo player in the newb cities it may be a non issue, this is not where the bulk of the players who actually matter in the game play. (by "matter" I mean those that belong to the guilds who are shaping this PvP sandbox world) Money is not an issue in this game for those that belong to the large guilds / alliances, resources are just about unlimited in and around player cities. Because of territory control you don't have much at all to risk as far as getting ganked. This gives these guild members an unnatural advantage over those who do not have access to these resources and is, in effect, a game breaking imbalance, especially when the death penalty is what it is (which, for the record, is what I like about this game in the first place.)
This coupled with the fact that the guilds that have built these cities did so from exploits that were available from day 1. I couldn't understand how these cities were springing up so early in the game until I learned of the mob glitch that caused some camps to drop 500g each, which was very quickly taken advantage of. Next thing we see is people running around with 100 rigor from abusing another exploit (yeah try fighting a naked ork with 100 rigor sometime, it's not fun).
Also, let's face it, Aventurine never stress tested their servers. Everyone who bought the game up to this point has been involved in a paid beta program. Had they waited and done an open or even just a larger scale closed beta test for bug reporting purposes and capacity tests, this game could have could have been much finer tuned. Instead we have a community that was built on exploits and has enabled an unfixable imbalance in the game.
Most of us that have left are waiting for the NA server to come up in hope that the exploits will be fixed and everyone can start on a level playing field. However, since the Aventurine team can't even get enough manpower to update their front page and seemingly always are addressing crashes due to hardware or connectivity issues, this just doesn't seem like it will be coming to fruition any time soon.
So yes, I understand, have used, and now bash the mechanics of the game.
I will say the fact that they actually did take action on the hackers is a good sign. But they have a long way to go before they get subs back.
You bring up 2 good points. The first 3 days the game was released there were issues with mobs becoming out of synch with the world. This made it so that many camps did not actually attack back. The players in beta apparently knew where the higher end mob camps were and when they realized the sync issues they began to exploit. This is both a true and legit statement. They then garnered the 10k gold necessary to purchase a clanstone and grabbed a city. Keep in mind 10k is actually not that much. Consider your clan has 100 players, and each players donates 100g. This is the equivalent of killing 25 - 30 goblins. At any rate this caused people to gain cities faster than normal. However this is brought up time and time again as some sort of game breaking issue where in reality it is not. Games like Ultima online used to cost a shitload to build a castle or a large structure. But its not like these were popping up on day 1 . In Darkfall there are set plots of land laid out for hamlets (small cities) all the way up to the full cities. I believe there are 97 total spread out all over the place. It doesnt matter if players grabbed all 97 sites on day 1, day 11, day 111, day 1111 or whatever. At some point all cities are going to be owned. FYI any and all cities can be stolen, and this includes any and all resources spent on building the city up. Once you take it over its yours. Its called sieging. Cities change hands on a daily basis, and I have been called on more than one occasion as a solo mercenary who does good work in city defense. I have been paid quite hansomly on several occasions.
The second comment you make is also valid, about the stress testing. However, at some point they have to release like any mmorpg. 30 days from now the game will be be better than it was 30 days ago. In fact, every mmorpg works that way. Lord of the Rings Online, one of the most stable mmorpgs ever released, contantly adds content. Would they hold many more subs if they waited years (until now) to release with the included content that has been developed over the past several years? Probably. But at some point the developement needs to stop, the game needs to be released, and what didnt make it into release becomes future content.
Your comment about clans having some fair unbalance is not as accurate. Owning a city provides only one real benefit other than having a safe area outside of the newbie cities to hang out in. That benefit is having in town nodes for various resources. These nodes are the equivalent of 20 or so regular nodes in one, and regen very slowly. This happens to be the only way to harvest rare ore other than killing the spefic golems themselves. This is the reason cities are both sought after and warred after. The resources are typically turned into building blocks used to create more structures in the city. It actually takes massive amounts of resources to build structures in Darkfall. But say they have an unfair advantage is like complaining that the well orgranized group of 100 just slayed the dragon and is flashing all sorts of loot in your face, all the while you tried and failed to solo the dragon on your own. I am a through and through solo player and have been all the way back to UO. I like grouping with close friends but I am not a fan of clans, especially large "leet" ones. But its not fair for me as a player to expect to accomplish the same thing as a large clan for that very reason. Some clans literally have hundreds and hundreds of active players. But claiming an unbalance is a bit harsh. Its just a numbers game short and simple.
The rigor exploit was well known and was corrected within 10 days of the game's release. It was actually fixed before I even knew what rigor was. This was again used by beta testers that apparently already knew about it. And as you have already pointed out there werent enough beta testers . And we have done quite a few tests against people with 100 rigor. Through normal play to this point your should have around 30-50 rigor which gives .3 - .4 in your applicable defenses. 100 Rigor gives you 1.0. A suit of scale (which is mid grade armor, costs 1000 gold or so for a full suit) gives you about 7.0 or so to your applicable defenses. So exploiting at this point would put you at about 8.0 vs 7.4 in the given defensive area. Thats approximately a 7.5% advantage to the beta players who decided to exploit in the first 10 or so days the game went live.
If you went to another server, played for 60 days or so, and all of the towns are swallowed up by clans, won't your same issues with the alleged imbalance exist?
The contents of this post do not necessarily reflect the views of MMORPG.com and its management.
Macroing is a non-issue except all the guilds who control the majority of the world are ones that got their before anyone else, and MACROED to get their players skilled and harvesting supplies needed. Who controls the game world is a non-issue though.
You also left out the worst part of the alignment system. The fact that a game like Ultima online and Lineage2 have targeting and DF doesn't. Fighting mobs in camps or group PvP became a joke. A very frustrating unfunny joke.
And then there is exploiting. Exploiting in DF probably needs an article on its own. The exploits and the alignment system combined are what killed the game for me.
Why are DF reviews so blatantly biased one way or the other?
Ok I have to call bullshit on your comments . Hmm where to start:
You cannot macro for resources. You never could, and you never will be able to. What you could do is create a macro that kept clicking your mouse button repeatedly while sitting at a resource to get its 51 TOTAL resources per node. However this does nothing to protect you from getting PKed with your abundance of 51 resources in your pack. And it takes approximately 8-10 minutes to empty a node. So your macroing attempts do not net any real gain
You cant macro to get needed equipment. And your combat skills do not effect your ability to hit, or even your damage in Darkfall. So I fail to see how macroing skills helps me in the initial weeks where clans were making their initial land claims
I am a bit confused by the statement regarding the alignment system. The issues you speak of is in regards to combat and has nothing to do with the alignment system in any way. Targeting in this writer's opinion is hands down one of the most welcome features in an MMORPG to come, ever. It's FPS style targeting. There is none of that bull shit where I stand inches from an enemy, swing with a giant halberd and somehow miss because the mob is such a higher level from me. The same goes for magic and archery. Gravity plays a role like in real life. Firing an arrow or spell takes skill as you have to both aim and time. You don't just see a magical targeting ring and land hits based on die rolls. This is actually my favorite aspect of gameplay. This also means you have to choose your fighting tactics carefully as if you begin firing arrows into crowds of people you will undoubtedly hit friendlies, and other untintended targets.
Define what you consider exploits. There are cheats using third party applications which is bannable, and there is using the game mechanics to someone benefit in an unattended way, which is not currently bannable. I know of one exploit which I do not want to mention (but I will admit it exists if I see it posted in this thread) which they are actively kicking people for, but not banning. But I have a feeling you are referring to cheats. Regardless, as I said in my article, the cheating has dropped off dramatically since the ban hammer was dropped.
If you don't like the game thats ok, many won't. Just make sure what you post is accurate and up to date.
Based on you list of items here I just have 1 question.
And please bear with me, as it is an honest question...
If combat skils do not effect damage or hit rate, or I'm assuming effect the outcome of combat at all, why are there combat skills?
I'd also like to know how you could never macro for resources?
Because I macroed for resources before they implimented the harvesting toggle.
And I would really like to know if Andy is still playing the game.
Some of the things mentioned in the article were changed over a month ago.
Edit:
There are NPC vendors that can only be accessed if you have a clan city/ hamlet and place that vendor.
Vendors that sell things like recipes that unless you have access to a clan city you can't get. I also believe that there are supposed to be other skills that clans in control of cities will gain access to through vendors only they can put in place.
If you're going to be a correspondent for a game you should at least be playing that game. I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that Andy isn't playing any longer as much of the things I'm seeing him write aren't relevant to the game today, or he's very uniformed about some of the mechanics of the game.
Macroing is a non-issue except all the guilds who control the majority of the world are ones that got their before anyone else, and MACROED to get their players skilled and harvesting supplies needed. Who controls the game world is a non-issue though.
You also left out the worst part of the alignment system. The fact that a game like Ultima online and Lineage2 have targeting and DF doesn't. Fighting mobs in camps or group PvP became a joke. A very frustrating unfunny joke.
And then there is exploiting. Exploiting in DF probably needs an article on its own. The exploits and the alignment system combined are what killed the game for me.
Why are DF reviews so blatantly biased one way or the other?
Ok I have to call bullshit on your comments . Hmm where to start:
You cannot macro for resources. You never could, and you never will be able to. What you could do is create a macro that kept clicking your mouse button repeatedly while sitting at a resource to get its 51 TOTAL resources per node. However this does nothing to protect you from getting PKed with your abundance of 51 resources in your pack. And it takes approximately 8-10 minutes to empty a node. So your macroing attempts do not net any real gain
You cant macro to get needed equipment. And your combat skills do not effect your ability to hit, or even your damage in Darkfall. So I fail to see how macroing skills helps me in the initial weeks where clans were making their initial land claims
I am a bit confused by the statement regarding the alignment system. The issues you speak of is in regards to combat and has nothing to do with the alignment system in any way. Targeting in this writer's opinion is hands down one of the most welcome features in an MMORPG to come, ever. It's FPS style targeting. There is none of that bull shit where I stand inches from an enemy, swing with a giant halberd and somehow miss because the mob is such a higher level from me. The same goes for magic and archery. Gravity plays a role like in real life. Firing an arrow or spell takes skill as you have to both aim and time. You don't just see a magical targeting ring and land hits based on die rolls. This is actually my favorite aspect of gameplay. This also means you have to choose your fighting tactics carefully as if you begin firing arrows into crowds of people you will undoubtedly hit friendlies, and other untintended targets.
Define what you consider exploits. There are cheats using third party applications which is bannable, and there is using the game mechanics to someone benefit in an unattended way, which is not currently bannable. I know of one exploit which I do not want to mention (but I will admit it exists if I see it posted in this thread) which they are actively kicking people for, but not banning. But I have a feeling you are referring to cheats. Regardless, as I said in my article, the cheating has dropped off dramatically since the ban hammer was dropped.
If you don't like the game thats ok, many won't. Just make sure what you post is accurate and up to date.
Based on you list of items here I just have 1 question.
And please bear with me, as it is an honest question...
If combat skils do not effect damage or hit rate, or I'm assuming effect the outcome of combat at all, why are there combat skills?
That is a very legit question, and is answered in my next part of the overview on skills. Darkfall is very strange in the way it works its skills, and its not like other skill based games (UO, AC, etc). Darkfall does everything it can to put as much of the final outcome of a battle into the hands of the player themselves. We will call this player skill. They do this by offering advantages to higher skills, but not necessarily how you would expect. For instance if I have a skill of 1 in sprint, I will run just as fast as someone that has 100 sprint skill. The difference will be that my stamina will deplete faster at a skill level of 1, meaning I can travel that much farter while sprinting the higher my skill goes.
In regards to combat fighting skills do 3 things:
* They make you consume less stamina per swing (more ttacks before you are out of stam)
* At skill level 1 you can use any weapon in the game. However each weapon (all items really) have a durability that decreases with use. Once it reaches 0 it breaks and disappears, no repair skills or repair NPCs... the item is gone forever. The more higher rank (higher end) the weapon, the faster it will degrade without proper skill. So this saves you a shitload of money later on because the real high end stuff is insanely expensive, and if it breaks after an hour its hardly worth it. Very neat system in that it allows anyone to use anything, but for a price
* Using weapon skills increase your strength (or dex for archery) which also secondarily increases your damage
The contents of this post do not necessarily reflect the views of MMORPG.com and its management.
Macroing is a non-issue except all the guilds who control the majority of the world are ones that got their before anyone else, and MACROED to get their players skilled and harvesting supplies needed. Who controls the game world is a non-issue though.
You also left out the worst part of the alignment system. The fact that a game like Ultima online and Lineage2 have targeting and DF doesn't. Fighting mobs in camps or group PvP became a joke. A very frustrating unfunny joke.
And then there is exploiting. Exploiting in DF probably needs an article on its own. The exploits and the alignment system combined are what killed the game for me.
Why are DF reviews so blatantly biased one way or the other?
Ok I have to call bullshit on your comments . Hmm where to start:
You cannot macro for resources. You never could, and you never will be able to. What you could do is create a macro that kept clicking your mouse button repeatedly while sitting at a resource to get its 51 TOTAL resources per node. However this does nothing to protect you from getting PKed with your abundance of 51 resources in your pack. And it takes approximately 8-10 minutes to empty a node. So your macroing attempts do not net any real gain
You cant macro to get needed equipment. And your combat skills do not effect your ability to hit, or even your damage in Darkfall. So I fail to see how macroing skills helps me in the initial weeks where clans were making their initial land claims
I am a bit confused by the statement regarding the alignment system. The issues you speak of is in regards to combat and has nothing to do with the alignment system in any way. Targeting in this writer's opinion is hands down one of the most welcome features in an MMORPG to come, ever. It's FPS style targeting. There is none of that bull shit where I stand inches from an enemy, swing with a giant halberd and somehow miss because the mob is such a higher level from me. The same goes for magic and archery. Gravity plays a role like in real life. Firing an arrow or spell takes skill as you have to both aim and time. You don't just see a magical targeting ring and land hits based on die rolls. This is actually my favorite aspect of gameplay. This also means you have to choose your fighting tactics carefully as if you begin firing arrows into crowds of people you will undoubtedly hit friendlies, and other untintended targets.
Define what you consider exploits. There are cheats using third party applications which is bannable, and there is using the game mechanics to someone benefit in an unattended way, which is not currently bannable. I know of one exploit which I do not want to mention (but I will admit it exists if I see it posted in this thread) which they are actively kicking people for, but not banning. But I have a feeling you are referring to cheats. Regardless, as I said in my article, the cheating has dropped off dramatically since the ban hammer was dropped.
If you don't like the game thats ok, many won't. Just make sure what you post is accurate and up to date.
Based on you list of items here I just have 1 question.
And please bear with me, as it is an honest question...
If combat skils do not effect damage or hit rate, or I'm assuming effect the outcome of combat at all, why are there combat skills?
That is a very legit question, and is answered in my next part of the overview on skills. Darkfall is very strange in the way it works its skills, and its not like other skill based games (UO, AC, etc). Darkfall does everything it can to put as much of the final outcome of a battle into the hands of the player themselves. We will call this player skill. They do this by offering advantages to higher skills, but not necessarily how you would expect. For instance if I have a skill of 1 in sprint, I will run just as fast as someone that has 100 sprint skill. The difference will be that my stamina will deplete faster at a skill level of 1, meaning I can travel that much farter while sprinting the higher my skill goes.
In regards to combat fighting skills do 3 things:
* They make you consume less stamina per swing (more ttacks before you are out of stam)
* At skill level 1 you can use any weapon in the game. However each weapon (all items really) have a durability that decreases with use. Once it reaches 0 it breaks and disappears, no repair skills or repair NPCs... the item is gone forever. The more higher rank (higher end) the weapon, the faster it will degrade without proper skill. So this saves you a shitload of money later on because the real high end stuff is insanely expensive, and if it breaks after an hour its hardly worth it. Very neat system in that it allows anyone to use anything, but for a price
* Using weapon skills increase your strength (or dex for archery) which also secondarily increases your damage
ARE YOU STILL PLAYIG THE GAME!
You have informatin in your article that is WRONG!
The alignment system was changed over a month ago.
How can you not know this?
Edit: You also made a comment in this thread about clan cities not giving any real benefit and that is also WRONG. Clan cities have access to vendors that sell things you can't get unless you have a city and have placed that vendor.
You bring up 2 good points. The first 3 days the game was released there were issues with mobs becoming out of synch with the world. This made it so that many camps did not actually attack back. The players in beta apparently knew where the higher end mob camps were and when they realized the sync issues they began to exploit. This is both a true and legit statement. They then garnered the 10k gold necessary to purchase a clanstone and grabbed a city. Keep in mind 10k is actually not that much. Consider your clan has 100 players, and each players donates 100g. This is the equivalent of killing 25 - 30 goblins. At any rate this caused people to gain cities faster than normal. However this is brought up time and time again as some sort of game breaking issue where in reality it is not. Games like Ultima online used to cost a shitload to build a castle or a large structure. But its not like these were popping up on day 1 . In Darkfall there are set plots of land laid out for hamlets (small cities) all the way up to the full cities. I believe there are 97 total spread out all over the place. It doesnt matter if players grabbed all 97 sites on day 1, day 11, day 111, day 1111 or whatever. At some point all cities are going to be owned. FYI any and all cities can be stolen, and this includes any and all resources spent on building the city up. Once you take it over its yours. Its called sieging. Cities change hands on a daily basis, and I have been called on more than one occasion as a solo mercenary who does good work in city defense. I have been paid quite hansomly on several occasions.
The second comment you make is also valid, about the stress testing. However, at some point they have to release like any mmorpg. 30 days from now the game will be be better than it was 30 days ago. In fact, every mmorpg works that way. Lord of the Rings Online, one of the most stable mmorpgs ever released, contantly adds content. Would they hold many more subs if they waited years (until now) to release with the included content that has been developed over the past several years? Probably. But at some point the developement needs to stop, the game needs to be released, and what didnt make it into release becomes future content.
Your comment about clans having some fair unbalance is not as accurate. Owning a city provides only one real benefit other than having a safe area outside of the newbie cities to hang out in. That benefit is having in town nodes for various resources. These nodes are the equivalent of 20 or so regular nodes in one, and regen very slowly. This happens to be the only way to harvest rare ore other than killing the spefic golems themselves. This is the reason cities are both sought after and warred after. The resources are typically turned into building blocks used to create more structures in the city. It actually takes massive amounts of resources to build structures in Darkfall. But say they have an unfair advantage is like complaining that the well orgranized group of 100 just slayed the dragon and is flashing all sorts of loot in your face, all the while you tried and failed to solo the dragon on your own. I am a through and through solo player and have been all the way back to UO. I like grouping with close friends but I am not a fan of clans, especially large "leet" ones. But its not fair for me as a player to expect to accomplish the same thing as a large clan for that very reason. Some clans literally have hundreds and hundreds of active players. But claiming an unbalance is a bit harsh. Its just a numbers game short and simple.
The rigor exploit was well known and was corrected within 10 days of the game's release. It was actually fixed before I even knew what rigor was. This was again used by beta testers that apparently already knew about it. And as you have already pointed out there werent enough beta testers . And we have done quite a few tests against people with 100 rigor. Through normal play to this point your should have around 30-50 rigor which gives .3 - .4 in your applicable defenses. 100 Rigor gives you 1.0. A suit of scale (which is mid grade armor, costs 1000 gold or so for a full suit) gives you about 7.0 or so to your applicable defenses. So exploiting at this point would put you at about 8.0 vs 7.4 in the given defensive area. Thats approximately a 7.5% advantage to the beta players who decided to exploit in the first 10 or so days the game went live.
If you went to another server, played for 60 days or so, and all of the towns are swallowed up by clans, won't your same issues with the alleged imbalance exist?[/quote]
No, because the exploits used for resources around these towns still exist and are used daily. For the new server to succeed these will need to be looked at and patched. Hacking was the next big concern, but it seems that since they are taking action on this we can check this one off the books. Macroing still needs to be addressed in a big way.
The rigor exploit was just one example of the exploits that can be used to alter stats. There are still exploitable mobs in this game that can be used for stat increase as well as material gain, not to mention macro tactics that can also build these stats. Your comment about armor brings up another good point, these naked pk's have nopthing to lose while the honest citzen is out a set of plate. Unfair, imbalanced.
My comments on the imbalance of clan cities has nothing to do with a numbers game, it's about providing a worry free macro environment which others are not privy to, as well as access to the exploits in that area which are also in a worry free environment so far as getting ganked is concerned.
If you're going to write an article that makes the accusation that there's a lot of misinformation floating around, you may want to make sure you got all your facts straight. "The basic premise is that all characters start with +10 alignment on a scale of -50 to +100." The maximum possitive aliengment a player can gain is 10.
From the patch notes: • Alignment has been tweaked. The maximum positive alignment you can have has been reduced to 10. "However, with the massive demand for this game, the daily sales quotas were being consumed in under 5 minutes." No. It never sold out in less then 5 minutes. Some days it took 45 some days it took 15, but it never took 5. One day in fact it took almost an hour and a half. "The game is purchased via digital download exclusively" No. If you read thier EULA you would also understand why they aren't allowed to sell you a copy of the game, and what you actually purchase is an account. From the EULA: 1. Limited License to the World. Your participation in the Game and the World are subject to your ongoing agreement to and compliance with these TOS. Aventurine grants you a non exclusive, non transferable, revocable license to the Game and the World, subject to these TOS and the EULA. The game client itself is free to download, and not dependant upon the purchase of your limitted lisence. "I can confirm that cheating does in fact exist in this game" Cheating in any form is never a "non-issue"; the fact that you can confirm it and say "You may see this from time to time," is not a good thing in any game. In the 3 years of Lineage 2, and 4 years of WoW the worst cheating I encountered were bots. I never encounterd speed hacks, teleport hacks, flying hacks, or aim hacks in those games. You're attempting to downplay a serious issue with the game. It blows my mind that anyone can in one sentence state that it's a non-issue, and in another say that you'll see it from time to time. AFK macroing is cheating. It can get you banned. Tasos himself has had to make mulitple posts covering this topic; that in itself implies a problem. AFK macroing accures a LOT. No, it won't make you uber overnight, but again you took a serious issue and attempt to downplay it. The guy that will afk macro his lesser magic, will also afk macro is greater magic; they don't do this just one night, they do this for days on end. This sort of cheating is gives people a considerable advantage and allows them to advance at a rate that a normal player has no chance of competing with. It's hardly a non-issue. The alignment change was in the April 10th patch.
Harvesting was changed in the May 1st patch notes. Either the author isn't actually playing the game anymore, or this article was written over a month ago, and contanes "misinformation".
Read post #16, this explains the discrepency in the alignment info. Artciles are submitted up to 2 weeks prior to posting. I noted the changes as soon as the article was posted.
For anyone that tried to buy the game the first few weeks, it was gone in 5 minutes. I am not sure what to tell you. From what I am told recently the store has been open for as long as 45 minutes, as you claim.
I am not sure why you are nitpicking about the digital download. You give them 50 bucks, you get the game to download, you pay your 15 bucks a month after your free month like every other mmorpg. You cant buy it in a store. Not sure why that was confusing.
I never said cheating was a non issue, thats why it was mentioned in the article relating to "the downside of Darkfall".
AFL macroing does "occur" (hrm) a lot. I mention this as well. The reasons its a non issue were explained clearly. If you want to macro something that will make a difference, every arrow shot, or spell cast will cost you the same as someone using the same attacks on legit targets. On one hand you lose the cost, the other you supplement it. If you want to take your hard earned arrows and reagents and shoot them in the air go ahead. I prefer to use my gold to make more of it. Or at least break even.
The contents of this post do not necessarily reflect the views of MMORPG.com and its management.
Macroing is a non-issue except all the guilds who control the majority of the world are ones that got their before anyone else, and MACROED to get their players skilled and harvesting supplies needed. Who controls the game world is a non-issue though.
You also left out the worst part of the alignment system. The fact that a game like Ultima online and Lineage2 have targeting and DF doesn't. Fighting mobs in camps or group PvP became a joke. A very frustrating unfunny joke.
And then there is exploiting. Exploiting in DF probably needs an article on its own. The exploits and the alignment system combined are what killed the game for me.
Why are DF reviews so blatantly biased one way or the other?
Ok I have to call bullshit on your comments . Hmm where to start:
You cannot macro for resources. You never could, and you never will be able to. What you could do is create a macro that kept clicking your mouse button repeatedly while sitting at a resource to get its 51 TOTAL resources per node. However this does nothing to protect you from getting PKed with your abundance of 51 resources in your pack. And it takes approximately 8-10 minutes to empty a node. So your macroing attempts do not net any real gain
You cant macro to get needed equipment. And your combat skills do not effect your ability to hit, or even your damage in Darkfall. So I fail to see how macroing skills helps me in the initial weeks where clans were making their initial land claims
I am a bit confused by the statement regarding the alignment system. The issues you speak of is in regards to combat and has nothing to do with the alignment system in any way. Targeting in this writer's opinion is hands down one of the most welcome features in an MMORPG to come, ever. It's FPS style targeting. There is none of that bull shit where I stand inches from an enemy, swing with a giant halberd and somehow miss because the mob is such a higher level from me. The same goes for magic and archery. Gravity plays a role like in real life. Firing an arrow or spell takes skill as you have to both aim and time. You don't just see a magical targeting ring and land hits based on die rolls. This is actually my favorite aspect of gameplay. This also means you have to choose your fighting tactics carefully as if you begin firing arrows into crowds of people you will undoubtedly hit friendlies, and other untintended targets.
Define what you consider exploits. There are cheats using third party applications which is bannable, and there is using the game mechanics to someone benefit in an unattended way, which is not currently bannable. I know of one exploit which I do not want to mention (but I will admit it exists if I see it posted in this thread) which they are actively kicking people for, but not banning. But I have a feeling you are referring to cheats. Regardless, as I said in my article, the cheating has dropped off dramatically since the ban hammer was dropped.
If you don't like the game thats ok, many won't. Just make sure what you post is accurate and up to date.
Based on you list of items here I just have 1 question.
And please bear with me, as it is an honest question...
If combat skils do not effect damage or hit rate, or I'm assuming effect the outcome of combat at all, why are there combat skills?
I'd also like to know how you could never macro for resources?
Because I macroed for resources before they implimented the harvesting toggle.
And I would really like to know if Andy is still playing the game.
Some of the things mentioned in the article were changed over a month ago.
Edit:
There are NPC vendors that can only be accessed if you have a clan city/ hamlet and place that vendor.
Vendors that sell things like recipes that unless you have access to a clan city you can't get. I also believe that there are supposed to be other skills that clans in control of cities will gain access to through vendors only they can put in place.
If you're going to be a correspondent for a game you should at least be playing that game. I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that Andy isn't playing any longer as much of the things I'm seeing him write aren't relevant to the game today, or he's very uniformed about some of the mechanics of the game.
To answers your comments:
* You cannot macro to the capacity of massive gains as some are suggesting. As I have already stated, each node carries 51 resources and can be wiped in 8-10 minutes. If you have a macro that can run from resource to resource, hide from PKs, defends against PKs, run to the bank when you are full of resources, switch tools when they break with use, then I stand corrected. If your macro just pressed the mouse button 51 times instead of you doing it with your finger, I fail to see the game breaking nature of this.
* Your comment on special vendors in towns that are not available elsewhere is false. There was one spell in the game which was bugged and only appeared in Player Cities (on T2 Mage vendors) and this was the spell Teleport Anchor which allows you to bind a runestone to a location. As of a patch or two ago, this was fixed and is now found in all racial capital cities
The contents of this post do not necessarily reflect the views of MMORPG.com and its management.
Just for the fact that this company is indie ill give them the benefit of the doubt. I understand its hard to start from sratch and only limited copies are released. But they need to shape up soon and start giving out Trials or something so they can defend themselves, as well as players in the game, properly. Right now the future of this game does not look so pretty....
Comments
I dedicated a complete article exclusively to the largest negative aspects currently in Darkfall Online. Articles can be 1500 words max, if it were longer maybe I would have included minor things which are easily fixable and not major problems such as
But I cannot honestly place these over things like speedhacking, and the most important of all, inability to buy the game. Those are things I can easily include in the upcoming 8 parts as I go into detail on each aspect.
Everyone has differences of opinion. Many believe that macroing will ruin the game. Certainly hasn't done so for Ultima Online. They even have had a term coined for rapid macroing techinques that have been around for years (8x8 anyone?). If someone wants to sit in their clan town and blow spells off in the air wasting coin on resources they will never see a gain from, why the hell do I care? I have snuck into many clan towns I am at war with, killed the macroers and gotten literally thousands of free reagents. There is no may to macro coin gain, and nearly all combat skill gain costs $$$.
Maybe I missed what you are saying completely. Can you please specifiy issues I have "glossed over or directly avoiding..."? Please use specific examples and I would be happy to address any of them.
The contents of this post do not necessarily reflect the views of MMORPG.com and its management.
-Rogan Blackheart
You obviously didnt read the "overview" or you would know that the 3 things you claim are minuses are actually "non issues". I guess we know where the iraq minister of information found work after the invasion.
Why exactly do we have more darkfall news threads on this site than the game has subs?
Sorry i dont get it.
whats broke about the combat?
Non existent content? how come i havent gone a day yet when i havent been raided by enemies? and i havent left the newbie area yet and surrounding Leafhelm there are 3 goblin camps i have found and a Large Skeleton/zombie area. and i'm too scared to go far lol! oh ye and the crafting i started last night is going to keep me busy it seems.
Control system is different from what were used to, but it works and is actually more fun that most mmo's
Graphics are not as good as Aoc/Vanguard maybe but i would call them average if i am honest.
Polish i agree with, theres non. But i dont think there ever will be much. It's not a bells and whistles game is it?
Prehistoric UI...hmm ye your close there. seems to be workable but could be so much better.
But come on mate his review was at least honest, your statments are misleading.
Combat is extremely clunky and lacks polish. for example, you don't hit every time even though you're in range, and it's worse for ranged combat.
There is a lack of content, even fanboys are complaining about this. there is very few pve content, but of course if you're happy grinding goblins, gank and be ganked for days, then more power to you.
What don't you get? you actually agreed with me on the other points (Graphics (character models are especially bad), polish, UI, no lore). Also how is this overview in any way honest? If I didn't know anything about the game and read this, the major cons of DF, I would be on the official site spamming F5 to buy an account lol. I don't think I have ever read something as biased as this.
I dont get how the combat is broke! you dont hit all the time even if in range? i havent noticed that at all, which makes me feel that it's something that, A: was broke but has been fixed at least 3 weeks ago, or B: it's something you have read in some other post and just decided to jump on the bandwagon
yes i agreed to other points, just because i am honest! but combat being broke i really dont get, it works fine for me. Yes i dont hit everytime but isnt that normal in combat? lol even EQ was doing that from the first day, and WoW still does it to this day!
Oh ye and by the way! you wouldnt be spamming F5 to buy a copy cause you already have one dont you? or are you just making your factual statments of what you have read from others who dont like the game lol? surely not
Oh and as for just farming goblins i said also that i found skeletons and zombies close to the newbie area. And this morning i was at the Troll camp that i recently discovered, after trying the Elements and finding them too tough for me at the min. So ye lol i can see the lack of content
Come on mate wait till your more informed at least or maybe try the game yourself. I mean you believe the negative comments but wont believe the positive ones? whats that all about, it's almost like your trying to find reasons not to like it and convince others not to either. Stand up mate and make your own judgment just like i am.
What's Darkfall? LOL. That game is still going?
LOL
@ The trolls of course.
Talk about bias.
EDIT: What about those hissy fits now and the panty ripping?
the part about macroing being a nonissue made me laugh.
Try going into one of the big player cities. All you will see if afk macroers leveling up skills whether its magic / archery solo or a team macro for weapon skill. The game pretty much forces you to do this to compete. Macrofall am i right?
better to give the game an honest heartfelt 2/10 then try and feed this line of BS to people.
No it doesnt force you friend! i am a solo Darkfall player who has never macroed once and seem to be competing rather well so far. Of course if i felt like it i could but that agin would be a choice of mine. Personally i have never tried to max skills as fast as poss, i prefer to "play" the game.
But your right it is better to give the game a heartfelt 2/10 than feed bullshit. But it's also better to give an honest overveiw than just go along with what you read in other posts isn't it? For instance i make my own opinion and like the game.
I think Graphics are not top line but they are good solid graphics.
i think the UI is very bland but workable.
Combat i have no problem with at all. seems fluid and smooth to me.
Cheating i hate. Havent seen any yet but also i am not naive enough to not know it exists. Just like in any game.
Macorers dont bother me. they might level up faster than me but, hey who cares! if it becomes a problem for me then ill complain
Open area's with no mobs? at last a game that feels no need to fill every square inch with content. i prefer goblins to hang about in a camp rather than be everywhere! makes me feel like im in a RPG
I explained clearly in my article why macroing is a non issue, but I shall reiterate here. I never said macroing doesn't happen, because it absolutely does.
Macroing magic, and archery takes resources (arrows and reagents). Gold in this game is tough to come by. Arrows, and reagents especially are very expensive in this game. As an example, a newbie goblin will drop 5 gold about 75% of the time. Reagents on average cost 3g EACH. So if you have arrows or reagents you really want to be using those on monsters to try and recoup some of your costs. If someone wants to spend their money with zero return, and blow off arrows or spell in the air then more power to them. This in no way effects how you play, or your character in any way. If they earn enough money to blow arrows and reagents on the thin air, then so be it. Not to mention they have big red targets painted on their backs for anyone sneaking into their city because you can hear bow shots and spell casting from a mile away.
Please understand the mechanics of the game before bashing them. Macroing is, and will continue to be a non issue in this game. The same as it has been in UO for 10 years running now.
The contents of this post do not necessarily reflect the views of MMORPG.com and its management.
-Rogan Blackheart
To be honest, the rest of the "problems" you will see discussed on the message forums are non issues.
If I came to this site to find some information about DFO from the articles written by people trying to pass themselves off as journalists, I'd probably think that that there is nothing wrong with the game and all the bad press surrounding it is generated by a bunch of angry trolls. You admit that there are indeed some issues, seemingly breaking the trend of constantly praising the game and its dev team, but the things you list as the game's greatest shortcomings aren't really issues at all. Not because there aren't any bigger problems to be worried about, but because you conveniently forget to include them in your article, giving all uninformed readers the impression that the game's pretty much perfect. I'm sure there's some kind of definition for this kind of cover up dance you're doing in your little article. Or is it that you're simply clueless and ignorant?
Let's start off with the alignment system. I doubt anyone who wants to PVP in a legitimate manner (that excludes griefing newbies under the disguise of a lawful citizen), has been playing the game for a while, and/or has access to a player run city cares whether he's blue or not. The alignment system is simply a bad copy of the alignment system they had back in UO. In UO:
- you couldn't grind your way back to being a lawful citizen in a matter of minutes by rezkilling your alt
- you couldn't grief someone by constantly looting their kills without any repercussions, because you'd go grey, and then they'd be able to kill you without taking an alignment hit
- you couldn't as easily grief someone into going grey/red, because of the personal flag; if you're grey and someone attacks you, you remain grey to him for as long as it takes for him to kill you, while in DFO if you don't attack back while you're grey, you'll always remain grey for the set duration of 120 seconds, and as soon as you go back blue, the person attacking you will go grey, or red if he's unlucky enough to score a killshot or a "gank" the second you turn blue
- you could actually defend yourself if you were grey (because of mistakenly looting someone's corpse, for example), once again, because of the personal flag; if you were grey or red and someone decided to attack you, he'd flag grey to you and be attackable and freely killable throughout the whole duration of the fight
- you couldn't accidentally kill a person that easily, and even if you did, you wouldn't immediately go red because of it
Yes, the system was exploitable, but much less so than the one in DFO. And no, DFO is not UO2, but if you're going to copy something, then copy it well or don't copy it at all (speaking of doing a piss-poor job copying features from UO... hello, inventory and skill systems!). You didn't even touch any of the stuff I mentioned, I guess these are just some of the non-issues people whine about for no reason at all.
Cheating has a huge impact on the game, since it revolves around PVP and competition, and yet, once again, you're trying to margninalize the issue by saying that it's is not as widespread as some people claim, which is a load of crap. You might want to take a look at the video where a legitimately stolen boat gets hijacked by a cheater (member of the guild the boat got stolen from). Not that big of a deal, right? Just do a search on youtube if you want to find more videos of people cheating or even actual cheat ads. Yes, they've made some strong statements toward banning cheaters etc., but anyone who believes any word that leaves Tasos' mouth at this point should be immediately put under medical observation. If they can simply go through the server logs and find cheaters based on what they see in there, then why the need to report every cheater by name? I'm guessing having a piece of code that highlights logs with some suspicious client behaviour is out of the question? The GMs cannot and will not do anything unless they have the name of the suspected person, because they have no means to determine whether someone is cheating or not other than to follow them, watch them, and catch them red handed, so anyone being careful with their 3rd party tools, for example only using the part of the hack that negates stamina drain (that's how "the best pvpers" of darkfall can sprint/shoot/jump for 5+ minutes straight without having to worry about running out of stam), or only using the radar hack that allows them to see every player in their range on the minimap is never going to get caught.
Exploiting falls under the same category. The exploiters have it great in Darkfall. If I was the kind of person who doesn't care about actual competition and tries to win at any and all cost, I'd love this game. There are exploits in every game out there, what's important is how quickly and efficiently a dev team can deal with both bugs and people exploiting them. Aventurine has this original, one of a kind, ass-backwards way of fixing exploits, that actually rewards exploiters and punishes those who play fair. Acid pools, guard towers, newbie weapons, skilling up on invulnerable targets etc. Every player who took advantage of any of the aforementioned exploits was already ahead of everyone who played fair, but by fixing the exploits and not doing anything about the exploiters, Aventurine indirectly punished everyone else, because they now have to fight people who are much stronger than them and work twice as hard to catch up ("twice as hard" is a major understatement in most cases). There are many other exploits that have existed since the game's not-so-official release and haven't been fixed to this day, like people farming tons of gold and high-end equipment by sitting inside walls, trees, rocks, and other similar objects, chain-soloing mobs that are nearly impossible to solo. Some people are already insanely rich, they're way ahead of the curve in every way imaginable since they can easily afford buying all the stuff they'll ever need to finish building their characters, they get a huge edge over normal players thanks to the high-end equipment, they don't have to worry about losing any of the stuff they wear, since they've got tons of it banked anyway. Nothing is being done about it. How the hell is this a non-issue in a PVP game? Do explain.
Aside from AutoIt loot macros allowing you to empty a tombstone filled to the brim with nearly weightless items in a matter of seconds, I wouldn't say there are any macros that hurt the game at all. Macros are not the problem. The problem is the insanely slow skill grind coupled with the fact that the game is devoid of any actual content, which leads to a situation where macroing is the only way of building a character without going batshit insane.
There are so many other issues with Darkfall, that it would take at least 10 more overviews to list them all. Not like this one, however, since all you do is beat around the bush as much as possible to distract the readers from the real problems. Client and server performance being one of them, considering that city building, sieging, and zerging each other is supposed to be one of the key features of the game. Unfortunately for everyone paying for the game, though, the server lags and crashes every time a big siege is about to take place. The lack of communication with the customers is another thing someone writing an article like this one would most likely list as a problem. It's funny in a sad kind of way how we had to beg Aventurine to start posting some patch notes, and all it takes to make that big-mouthed fraud, Tasos, go on a posting spree is to post some half-assed review consisting of pretty much the same amount of factual-substanse as their official website. I guess they just can't take what they dish out on a regular basis.
tldr version: MMORPG.com game correspondents are full of crap.
Your post is well thought out, but again is devoid of many concepts. For one, you like to use Ultima Online as the example of what they did right, and what in your opinion Darkfall does wrong. In reality UO had far more exploits, far more cheating, then most mmorpgs in history. It was the pioneer this is to be expected. But if you are going to compare the good, please show both sides and compare the bad. Throughout UO's history there were all sorts of duping bugs, primarily for gold but for resources as well. There were also MANY player trading exploits that have popped up over the years.
The alignment system is not perfect. I mentioned this in my article. However 2 months into it and they have already made large strides in balancing it, and Im sure more will come. I'm not sure why you make it seem as though what is here is here to stay and can never at any time be fixed, changed, balanced or altered in any way. The crux of the entire post revolves around this all important statement:
There is not a single issues in Darkfall that cant be patched and balanced out of the game. Not a single one. The core of the game is solid. Games with no solid core can't be changed, Age of Conan being the example. Games can try and change their core, Star Wars Galaxies being the example of that
.
You call the game a grind because its slow gaining skills. I think thats one of the large problems in this game where people expect to play 24 / 7 and see and do all there is to the game in a month... much like you saw with World of Warcraft expansions. This game was not designed in a way where you max your weapon, magic or archery skills in a week. If you are a high end mage, then you earned it. If your goal is to become the max skill level in everything then perhaps this is not the game for you. If you play the game, simply play it... go pk, siege, PvE, craft and trade, your skills will go up naturally and over time, with use as intended. Skills will feel like a grind if your sit in town shooting spells and arrows into the air watching your skill gains.
99% of the cheating videos you see are recycled videos from the first 2 weeks of the game. I actually saw the boat video and from what I heard it was a legit exploit. In one way this is a shame but in another it's almost expected. In one of the first games to actually intoduce sailable ships... and then kick it up a notch and offer up all out naval warfare (even against other cities) I will be expecting major balance issues, tweaks, and exploit fixes to be incoming. I think this may be a ways out though since the amount of big boats crafted to date can still be counted with my own two hands.
Lastly, to put things into perspective, I had 1500 words max to use in this article. Your entire post was 100 words short of my entire article.
The contents of this post do not necessarily reflect the views of MMORPG.com and its management.
-Rogan Blackheart
Wow. Can't say I really expected much else. I'll stick with K&Gs blog on the subject.
Macroing is a non-issue except all the guilds who control the majority of the world are ones that got their before anyone else, and MACROED to get their players skilled and harvesting supplies needed. Who controls the game world is a non-issue though.
You also left out the worst part of the alignment system. The fact that a game like Ultima online and Lineage2 have targeting and DF doesn't. Fighting mobs in camps or group PvP became a joke. A very frustrating unfunny joke.
And then there is exploiting. Exploiting in DF probably needs an article on its own. The exploits and the alignment system combined are what killed the game for me.
Why are DF reviews so blatantly biased one way or the other?
I explained clearly in my article why macroing is a non issue, but I shall reiterate here. I never said macroing doesn't happen, because it absolutely does.
Macroing magic, and archery takes resources (arrows and reagents). Gold in this game is tough to come by. Arrows, and reagents especially are very expensive in this game. As an example, a newbie goblin will drop 5 gold about 75% of the time. Reagents on average cost 3g EACH. So if you have arrows or reagents you really want to be using those on monsters to try and recoup some of your costs. If someone wants to spend their money with zero return, and blow off arrows or spell in the air then more power to them. This in no way effects how you play, or your character in any way. If they earn enough money to blow arrows and reagents on the thin air, then so be it. Not to mention they have big red targets painted on their backs for anyone sneaking into their city because you can hear bow shots and spell casting from a mile away.
Please understand the mechanics of the game before bashing them. Macroing is, and will continue to be a non issue in this game. The same as it has been in UO for 10 years running now.
I have been a DF player since day one until a couple weeks ago. As a solo player in the newb cities it may be a non issue, this is not where the bulk of the players who actually matter in the game play. (by "matter" I mean those that belong to the guilds who are shaping this PvP sandbox world) Money is not an issue in this game for those that belong to the large guilds / alliances, resources are just about unlimited in and around player cities. Because of territory control you don't have much at all to risk as far as getting ganked. This gives these guild members an unnatural advantage over those who do not have access to these resources and is, in effect, a game breaking imbalance, especially when the death penalty is what it is (which, for the record, is what I like about this game in the first place.)
This coupled with the fact that the guilds that have built these cities did so from exploits that were available from day 1. I couldn't understand how these cities were springing up so early in the game until I learned of the mob glitch that caused some camps to drop 500g each, which was very quickly taken advantage of. Next thing we see is people running around with 100 rigor from abusing another exploit (yeah try fighting a naked ork with 100 rigor sometime, it's not fun).
Also, let's face it, Aventurine never stress tested their servers. Everyone who bought the game up to this point has been involved in a paid beta program. Had they waited and done an open or even just a larger scale closed beta test for bug reporting purposes and capacity tests, this game could have could have been much finer tuned. Instead we have a community that was built on exploits and has enabled an unfixable imbalance in the game.
Most of us that have left are waiting for the NA server to come up in hope that the exploits will be fixed and everyone can start on a level playing field. However, since the Aventurine team can't even get enough manpower to update their front page and seemingly always are addressing crashes due to hardware or connectivity issues, this just doesn't seem like it will be coming to fruition any time soon.
So yes, I understand, have used, and now bash the mechanics of the game.
I will say the fact that they actually did take action on the hackers is a good sign. But they have a long way to go before they get subs back.
Ok I have to call bullshit on your comments
. Hmm where to start:
If you don't like the game thats ok, many won't. Just make sure what you post is accurate and up to date.
The contents of this post do not necessarily reflect the views of MMORPG.com and its management.
-Rogan Blackheart
If you're going to write an article that makes the accusation that there's a lot of misinformation floating around, you may want to make sure you got all your facts straight.
"The basic premise is that all characters start with +10 alignment on a scale of -50 to +100."
The maximum possitive aliengment a player can gain is 10.
From the patch notes: • Alignment has been tweaked. The maximum positive alignment you can have has been reduced to 10.
"However, with the massive demand for this game, the daily sales quotas were being consumed in under 5 minutes."
No. It never sold out in less then 5 minutes. Some days it took 45 some days it took 15, but it never took 5. One day in fact it took almost an hour and a half.
"The game is purchased via digital download exclusively"
No. If you read thier EULA you would also understand why they aren't allowed to sell you a copy of the game, and what you actually purchase is an account. From the EULA: 1. Limited License to the World. Your participation in the Game and the World are subject to your ongoing agreement to and compliance with these TOS. Aventurine grants you a non exclusive, non transferable, revocable license to the Game and the World, subject to these TOS and the EULA.
The game client itself is free to download, and not dependant upon the purchase of your limitted lisence.
"I can confirm that cheating does in fact exist in this game"
Cheating in any form is never a "non-issue"; the fact that you can confirm it and say "You may see this from time to time," is not a good thing in any game. In the 3 years of Lineage 2, and 4 years of WoW the worst cheating I encountered were bots. I never encounterd speed hacks, teleport hacks, flying hacks, or aim hacks in those games. You're attempting to downplay a serious issue with the game. It blows my mind that anyone can in one sentence state that it's a non-issue, and in another say that you'll see it from time to time.
AFK macroing is cheating. It can get you banned. Tasos himself has had to make mulitple posts covering this topic; that in itself implies a problem. AFK macroing accures a LOT. No, it won't make you uber overnight, but again you took a serious issue and attempt to downplay it. The guy that will afk macro his lesser magic, will also afk macro is greater magic; they don't do this just one night, they do this for days on end. This sort of cheating is gives people a considerable advantage and allows them to advance at a rate that a normal player has no chance of competing with. It's hardly a non-issue.
The alignment change was in the April 10th patch.
Harvesting was changed in the May 1st patch notes.
Either the author isn't actually playing the game anymore, or this article was written over a month ago, and contanes "misinformation".
Ok I have to call bullshit on your comments
. Hmm where to start:
If you don't like the game thats ok, many won't. Just make sure what you post is accurate and up to date.
Based on you list of items here I just have 1 question.
And please bear with me, as it is an honest question...
If combat skils do not effect damage or hit rate, or I'm assuming effect the outcome of combat at all, why are there combat skills?
Leveling combat skills build str / dex which increases damage.
I explained clearly in my article why macroing is a non issue, but I shall reiterate here. I never said macroing doesn't happen, because it absolutely does.
Macroing magic, and archery takes resources (arrows and reagents). Gold in this game is tough to come by. Arrows, and reagents especially are very expensive in this game. As an example, a newbie goblin will drop 5 gold about 75% of the time. Reagents on average cost 3g EACH. So if you have arrows or reagents you really want to be using those on monsters to try and recoup some of your costs. If someone wants to spend their money with zero return, and blow off arrows or spell in the air then more power to them. This in no way effects how you play, or your character in any way. If they earn enough money to blow arrows and reagents on the thin air, then so be it. Not to mention they have big red targets painted on their backs for anyone sneaking into their city because you can hear bow shots and spell casting from a mile away.
Please understand the mechanics of the game before bashing them. Macroing is, and will continue to be a non issue in this game. The same as it has been in UO for 10 years running now.
I have been a DF player since day one until a couple weeks ago. As a solo player in the newb cities it may be a non issue, this is not where the bulk of the players who actually matter in the game play. (by "matter" I mean those that belong to the guilds who are shaping this PvP sandbox world) Money is not an issue in this game for those that belong to the large guilds / alliances, resources are just about unlimited in and around player cities. Because of territory control you don't have much at all to risk as far as getting ganked. This gives these guild members an unnatural advantage over those who do not have access to these resources and is, in effect, a game breaking imbalance, especially when the death penalty is what it is (which, for the record, is what I like about this game in the first place.)
This coupled with the fact that the guilds that have built these cities did so from exploits that were available from day 1. I couldn't understand how these cities were springing up so early in the game until I learned of the mob glitch that caused some camps to drop 500g each, which was very quickly taken advantage of. Next thing we see is people running around with 100 rigor from abusing another exploit (yeah try fighting a naked ork with 100 rigor sometime, it's not fun).
Also, let's face it, Aventurine never stress tested their servers. Everyone who bought the game up to this point has been involved in a paid beta program. Had they waited and done an open or even just a larger scale closed beta test for bug reporting purposes and capacity tests, this game could have could have been much finer tuned. Instead we have a community that was built on exploits and has enabled an unfixable imbalance in the game.
Most of us that have left are waiting for the NA server to come up in hope that the exploits will be fixed and everyone can start on a level playing field. However, since the Aventurine team can't even get enough manpower to update their front page and seemingly always are addressing crashes due to hardware or connectivity issues, this just doesn't seem like it will be coming to fruition any time soon.
So yes, I understand, have used, and now bash the mechanics of the game.
I will say the fact that they actually did take action on the hackers is a good sign. But they have a long way to go before they get subs back.
You bring up 2 good points. The first 3 days the game was released there were issues with mobs becoming out of synch with the world. This made it so that many camps did not actually attack back. The players in beta apparently knew where the higher end mob camps were and when they realized the sync issues they began to exploit. This is both a true and legit statement. They then garnered the 10k gold necessary to purchase a clanstone and grabbed a city. Keep in mind 10k is actually not that much. Consider your clan has 100 players, and each players donates 100g. This is the equivalent of killing 25 - 30 goblins. At any rate this caused people to gain cities faster than normal. However this is brought up time and time again as some sort of game breaking issue where in reality it is not. Games like Ultima online used to cost a shitload to build a castle or a large structure. But its not like these were popping up on day 1
. In Darkfall there are set plots of land laid out for hamlets (small cities) all the way up to the full cities. I believe there are 97 total spread out all over the place. It doesnt matter if players grabbed all 97 sites on day 1, day 11, day 111, day 1111 or whatever. At some point all cities are going to be owned. FYI any and all cities can be stolen, and this includes any and all resources spent on building the city up. Once you take it over its yours. Its called sieging. Cities change hands on a daily basis, and I have been called on more than one occasion as a solo mercenary who does good work in city defense. I have been paid quite hansomly on several occasions.
The second comment you make is also valid, about the stress testing. However, at some point they have to release like any mmorpg. 30 days from now the game will be be better than it was 30 days ago. In fact, every mmorpg works that way. Lord of the Rings Online, one of the most stable mmorpgs ever released, contantly adds content. Would they hold many more subs if they waited years (until now) to release with the included content that has been developed over the past several years? Probably. But at some point the developement needs to stop, the game needs to be released, and what didnt make it into release becomes future content.
Your comment about clans having some fair unbalance is not as accurate. Owning a city provides only one real benefit other than having a safe area outside of the newbie cities to hang out in. That benefit is having in town nodes for various resources. These nodes are the equivalent of 20 or so regular nodes in one, and regen very slowly. This happens to be the only way to harvest rare ore other than killing the spefic golems themselves. This is the reason cities are both sought after and warred after. The resources are typically turned into building blocks used to create more structures in the city. It actually takes massive amounts of resources to build structures in Darkfall. But say they have an unfair advantage is like complaining that the well orgranized group of 100 just slayed the dragon and is flashing all sorts of loot in your face, all the while you tried and failed to solo the dragon on your own. I am a through and through solo player and have been all the way back to UO. I like grouping with close friends but I am not a fan of clans, especially large "leet" ones. But its not fair for me as a player to expect to accomplish the same thing as a large clan for that very reason. Some clans literally have hundreds and hundreds of active players. But claiming an unbalance is a bit harsh. Its just a numbers game short and simple.
The rigor exploit was well known and was corrected within 10 days of the game's release. It was actually fixed before I even knew what rigor was. This was again used by beta testers that apparently already knew about it. And as you have already pointed out there werent enough beta testers
. And we have done quite a few tests against people with 100 rigor. Through normal play to this point your should have around 30-50 rigor which gives .3 - .4 in your applicable defenses. 100 Rigor gives you 1.0. A suit of scale (which is mid grade armor, costs 1000 gold or so for a full suit) gives you about 7.0 or so to your applicable defenses. So exploiting at this point would put you at about 8.0 vs 7.4 in the given defensive area. Thats approximately a 7.5% advantage to the beta players who decided to exploit in the first 10 or so days the game went live.
If you went to another server, played for 60 days or so, and all of the towns are swallowed up by clans, won't your same issues with the alleged imbalance exist?
The contents of this post do not necessarily reflect the views of MMORPG.com and its management.
-Rogan Blackheart
Ok I have to call bullshit on your comments
. Hmm where to start:
If you don't like the game thats ok, many won't. Just make sure what you post is accurate and up to date.
Based on you list of items here I just have 1 question.
And please bear with me, as it is an honest question...
If combat skils do not effect damage or hit rate, or I'm assuming effect the outcome of combat at all, why are there combat skills?
I'd also like to know how you could never macro for resources?
Because I macroed for resources before they implimented the harvesting toggle.
And I would really like to know if Andy is still playing the game.
Some of the things mentioned in the article were changed over a month ago.
Edit:
There are NPC vendors that can only be accessed if you have a clan city/ hamlet and place that vendor.
Vendors that sell things like recipes that unless you have access to a clan city you can't get. I also believe that there are supposed to be other skills that clans in control of cities will gain access to through vendors only they can put in place.
If you're going to be a correspondent for a game you should at least be playing that game. I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that Andy isn't playing any longer as much of the things I'm seeing him write aren't relevant to the game today, or he's very uniformed about some of the mechanics of the game.
Ok I have to call bullshit on your comments
. Hmm where to start:
If you don't like the game thats ok, many won't. Just make sure what you post is accurate and up to date.
Based on you list of items here I just have 1 question.
And please bear with me, as it is an honest question...
If combat skils do not effect damage or hit rate, or I'm assuming effect the outcome of combat at all, why are there combat skills?
That is a very legit question, and is answered in my next part of the overview on skills. Darkfall is very strange in the way it works its skills, and its not like other skill based games (UO, AC, etc). Darkfall does everything it can to put as much of the final outcome of a battle into the hands of the player themselves. We will call this player skill. They do this by offering advantages to higher skills, but not necessarily how you would expect. For instance if I have a skill of 1 in sprint, I will run just as fast as someone that has 100 sprint skill. The difference will be that my stamina will deplete faster at a skill level of 1, meaning I can travel that much farter while sprinting the higher my skill goes.
In regards to combat fighting skills do 3 things:
* They make you consume less stamina per swing (more ttacks before you are out of stam)
* At skill level 1 you can use any weapon in the game. However each weapon (all items really) have a durability that decreases with use. Once it reaches 0 it breaks and disappears, no repair skills or repair NPCs... the item is gone forever. The more higher rank (higher end) the weapon, the faster it will degrade without proper skill. So this saves you a shitload of money later on because the real high end stuff is insanely expensive, and if it breaks after an hour its hardly worth it. Very neat system in that it allows anyone to use anything, but for a price
* Using weapon skills increase your strength (or dex for archery) which also secondarily increases your damage
The contents of this post do not necessarily reflect the views of MMORPG.com and its management.
-Rogan Blackheart
Ok I have to call bullshit on your comments
. Hmm where to start:
If you don't like the game thats ok, many won't. Just make sure what you post is accurate and up to date.
Based on you list of items here I just have 1 question.
And please bear with me, as it is an honest question...
If combat skils do not effect damage or hit rate, or I'm assuming effect the outcome of combat at all, why are there combat skills?
That is a very legit question, and is answered in my next part of the overview on skills. Darkfall is very strange in the way it works its skills, and its not like other skill based games (UO, AC, etc). Darkfall does everything it can to put as much of the final outcome of a battle into the hands of the player themselves. We will call this player skill. They do this by offering advantages to higher skills, but not necessarily how you would expect. For instance if I have a skill of 1 in sprint, I will run just as fast as someone that has 100 sprint skill. The difference will be that my stamina will deplete faster at a skill level of 1, meaning I can travel that much farter while sprinting the higher my skill goes.
In regards to combat fighting skills do 3 things:
* They make you consume less stamina per swing (more ttacks before you are out of stam)
* At skill level 1 you can use any weapon in the game. However each weapon (all items really) have a durability that decreases with use. Once it reaches 0 it breaks and disappears, no repair skills or repair NPCs... the item is gone forever. The more higher rank (higher end) the weapon, the faster it will degrade without proper skill. So this saves you a shitload of money later on because the real high end stuff is insanely expensive, and if it breaks after an hour its hardly worth it. Very neat system in that it allows anyone to use anything, but for a price
* Using weapon skills increase your strength (or dex for archery) which also secondarily increases your damage
ARE YOU STILL PLAYIG THE GAME!
You have informatin in your article that is WRONG!
The alignment system was changed over a month ago.
How can you not know this?
Edit: You also made a comment in this thread about clan cities not giving any real benefit and that is also WRONG. Clan cities have access to vendors that sell things you can't get unless you have a city and have placed that vendor.
[quote]
You bring up 2 good points. The first 3 days the game was released there were issues with mobs becoming out of synch with the world. This made it so that many camps did not actually attack back. The players in beta apparently knew where the higher end mob camps were and when they realized the sync issues they began to exploit. This is both a true and legit statement. They then garnered the 10k gold necessary to purchase a clanstone and grabbed a city. Keep in mind 10k is actually not that much. Consider your clan has 100 players, and each players donates 100g. This is the equivalent of killing 25 - 30 goblins. At any rate this caused people to gain cities faster than normal. However this is brought up time and time again as some sort of game breaking issue where in reality it is not. Games like Ultima online used to cost a shitload to build a castle or a large structure. But its not like these were popping up on day 1
. In Darkfall there are set plots of land laid out for hamlets (small cities) all the way up to the full cities. I believe there are 97 total spread out all over the place. It doesnt matter if players grabbed all 97 sites on day 1, day 11, day 111, day 1111 or whatever. At some point all cities are going to be owned. FYI any and all cities can be stolen, and this includes any and all resources spent on building the city up. Once you take it over its yours. Its called sieging. Cities change hands on a daily basis, and I have been called on more than one occasion as a solo mercenary who does good work in city defense. I have been paid quite hansomly on several occasions.
The second comment you make is also valid, about the stress testing. However, at some point they have to release like any mmorpg. 30 days from now the game will be be better than it was 30 days ago. In fact, every mmorpg works that way. Lord of the Rings Online, one of the most stable mmorpgs ever released, contantly adds content. Would they hold many more subs if they waited years (until now) to release with the included content that has been developed over the past several years? Probably. But at some point the developement needs to stop, the game needs to be released, and what didnt make it into release becomes future content.
Your comment about clans having some fair unbalance is not as accurate. Owning a city provides only one real benefit other than having a safe area outside of the newbie cities to hang out in. That benefit is having in town nodes for various resources. These nodes are the equivalent of 20 or so regular nodes in one, and regen very slowly. This happens to be the only way to harvest rare ore other than killing the spefic golems themselves. This is the reason cities are both sought after and warred after. The resources are typically turned into building blocks used to create more structures in the city. It actually takes massive amounts of resources to build structures in Darkfall. But say they have an unfair advantage is like complaining that the well orgranized group of 100 just slayed the dragon and is flashing all sorts of loot in your face, all the while you tried and failed to solo the dragon on your own. I am a through and through solo player and have been all the way back to UO. I like grouping with close friends but I am not a fan of clans, especially large "leet" ones. But its not fair for me as a player to expect to accomplish the same thing as a large clan for that very reason. Some clans literally have hundreds and hundreds of active players. But claiming an unbalance is a bit harsh. Its just a numbers game short and simple.
The rigor exploit was well known and was corrected within 10 days of the game's release. It was actually fixed before I even knew what rigor was. This was again used by beta testers that apparently already knew about it. And as you have already pointed out there werent enough beta testers
. And we have done quite a few tests against people with 100 rigor. Through normal play to this point your should have around 30-50 rigor which gives .3 - .4 in your applicable defenses. 100 Rigor gives you 1.0. A suit of scale (which is mid grade armor, costs 1000 gold or so for a full suit) gives you about 7.0 or so to your applicable defenses. So exploiting at this point would put you at about 8.0 vs 7.4 in the given defensive area. Thats approximately a 7.5% advantage to the beta players who decided to exploit in the first 10 or so days the game went live.
If you went to another server, played for 60 days or so, and all of the towns are swallowed up by clans, won't your same issues with the alleged imbalance exist?[/quote]
No, because the exploits used for resources around these towns still exist and are used daily. For the new server to succeed these will need to be looked at and patched. Hacking was the next big concern, but it seems that since they are taking action on this we can check this one off the books. Macroing still needs to be addressed in a big way.
The rigor exploit was just one example of the exploits that can be used to alter stats. There are still exploitable mobs in this game that can be used for stat increase as well as material gain, not to mention macro tactics that can also build these stats. Your comment about armor brings up another good point, these naked pk's have nopthing to lose while the honest citzen is out a set of plate. Unfair, imbalanced.
My comments on the imbalance of clan cities has nothing to do with a numbers game, it's about providing a worry free macro environment which others are not privy to, as well as access to the exploits in that area which are also in a worry free environment so far as getting ganked is concerned.
Read post #16, this explains the discrepency in the alignment info. Artciles are submitted up to 2 weeks prior to posting. I noted the changes as soon as the article was posted.
For anyone that tried to buy the game the first few weeks, it was gone in 5 minutes. I am not sure what to tell you. From what I am told recently the store has been open for as long as 45 minutes, as you claim.
I am not sure why you are nitpicking about the digital download. You give them 50 bucks, you get the game to download, you pay your 15 bucks a month after your free month like every other mmorpg. You cant buy it in a store. Not sure why that was confusing.
I never said cheating was a non issue, thats why it was mentioned in the article relating to "the downside of Darkfall".
AFL macroing does "occur" (hrm) a lot. I mention this as well. The reasons its a non issue were explained clearly. If you want to macro something that will make a difference, every arrow shot, or spell cast will cost you the same as someone using the same attacks on legit targets. On one hand you lose the cost, the other you supplement it. If you want to take your hard earned arrows and reagents and shoot them in the air go ahead. I prefer to use my gold to make more of it. Or at least break even.
The contents of this post do not necessarily reflect the views of MMORPG.com and its management.
-Rogan Blackheart
Ok I have to call bullshit on your comments
. Hmm where to start:
If you don't like the game thats ok, many won't. Just make sure what you post is accurate and up to date.
Based on you list of items here I just have 1 question.
And please bear with me, as it is an honest question...
If combat skils do not effect damage or hit rate, or I'm assuming effect the outcome of combat at all, why are there combat skills?
I'd also like to know how you could never macro for resources?
Because I macroed for resources before they implimented the harvesting toggle.
And I would really like to know if Andy is still playing the game.
Some of the things mentioned in the article were changed over a month ago.
Edit:
There are NPC vendors that can only be accessed if you have a clan city/ hamlet and place that vendor.
Vendors that sell things like recipes that unless you have access to a clan city you can't get. I also believe that there are supposed to be other skills that clans in control of cities will gain access to through vendors only they can put in place.
If you're going to be a correspondent for a game you should at least be playing that game. I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that Andy isn't playing any longer as much of the things I'm seeing him write aren't relevant to the game today, or he's very uniformed about some of the mechanics of the game.
To answers your comments:
* You cannot macro to the capacity of massive gains as some are suggesting. As I have already stated, each node carries 51 resources and can be wiped in 8-10 minutes. If you have a macro that can run from resource to resource, hide from PKs, defends against PKs, run to the bank when you are full of resources, switch tools when they break with use, then I stand corrected. If your macro just pressed the mouse button 51 times instead of you doing it with your finger, I fail to see the game breaking nature of this.
* Your comment on special vendors in towns that are not available elsewhere is false. There was one spell in the game which was bugged and only appeared in Player Cities (on T2 Mage vendors) and this was the spell Teleport Anchor which allows you to bind a runestone to a location. As of a patch or two ago, this was fixed and is now found in all racial capital cities
The contents of this post do not necessarily reflect the views of MMORPG.com and its management.
-Rogan Blackheart
Just for the fact that this company is indie ill give them the benefit of the doubt. I understand its hard to start from sratch and only limited copies are released. But they need to shape up soon and start giving out Trials or something so they can defend themselves, as well as players in the game, properly. Right now the future of this game does not look so pretty....