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Darkfall: Skills in DFO
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
MMORPG.com Darkfall Correspondent Andy Cormier writes this look at the skill system in Darkfall Online.
In this article, we are going to take a deeper look into one of the core game mechanics of Darkfall Online, the skill system. Having a skill system in and of itself is a vast departure from the more mainstream mmorpgs such as World of Warcraft or Everquest. In Darkfall you are simply a sum of your various skills. You have no level, no class, and when you die...you will have no gear. Pretty much the only thing you can take with you are your skills. There are many skills in Darkfall ranging from melee skills, magic skills, crafting skills, and general skills (like running and swimming).
;)
Read Skills in DFO
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
"Skills like "run" (not to be confused with "sprint"), which claims to make you run faster, don't seem to do anything."
Such is the way of many thing in Darkfall. Lots of things seem to do nothing, and there is lots of mystery behind skills and attributes.
Didn't get through the whole article, but if he didn't mention the massive amount of copypasted abilities so that there is really only one true skillset, let it be known.
He who keeps his cool best wins.
One really anoying draw back to this system is the great lengths people take to speed the skill progressions process. They fire mana missiles non stop... at anything or nothing at all. Some will group just to take swings at each other and others will swim into walls or crouch walk all over town just to raise those skills. Personally I find it more enjoyable to go out and pay the game but then I do tend to die more against those who have spent there hours in mindless skill grinding.
To bad they cant eliminate the benifits gained unlessits only from going out and experiencing the world. Yes I know it is a nieve thought.
Many of the skills are there to give you a slight edge in combat, yet people seem determined to grind every possible skill when Aventurine intended them to be trained as the user played the game. Mastery skills, spell skills and any craft skills are obviously very important. Others could be classed as sub-skills as they give improve your character in almost unnoticeable ways, but any highly competitive players would scratch for any type of advantage over other players, hence so many people grinding for seemingly useless skills.
When you speak of copypasted abilities, what exactly are you referring to?
Just incase you're not up-to-date: Spell skills now only advance if the player hits monsters/other players. Same with archery.
Yup, a lot of the exploits people were using at launch have been removed. The acid pool is gone, the stat increase after skill level 100 has been massivly reduced (swimming against a wall now is much less helpful) Hitting other players with shields no longer lets you skill up. Starter weapons no longer let you skill up. Earthquake no longer gives rigor without damage. Arros have to hit players/monsters to level as do spells.
While you could argue that all these things should have been fixed before launch, you can't really argue that AV hasn't been active. They have a patch pretty much every Friday and almost every patch so far has reduced problems and improved the game. I agree many people might still not like Darkfall but AV really are slowly making the game better and better
Yes even if launch day was borked AV have been very good with patch frequency and patch content, and all the changes they have made have been good ones. The only real thing I can fault them on is not penalising those who used the exploits before they were patched.
Yup, a lot of the exploits people were using at launch have been removed. The acid pool is gone, the stat increase after skill level 100 has been massivly reduced (swimming against a wall now is much less helpful) Hitting other players with shields no longer lets you skill up. Starter weapons no longer let you skill up. Earthquake no longer gives rigor without damage. Arros have to hit players/monsters to level as do spells.
While you could argue that all these things should have been fixed before launch, you can't really argue that AV hasn't been active. They have a patch pretty much every Friday and almost every patch so far has reduced problems and improved the game. I agree many people might still not like Darkfall but AV really are slowly making the game better and better
That is a huge bug though! All the players that have been playing since launch have all those skills maxed now. Now everyone new that joins can't do that, making it even harder for new players to enjoy the game. And in a game where you get killed and lose all your stuff all the time, it's annoying to know those "badasses" that kill you most likely cheated to get to where they are and then AV removed it. It's good they fixed it, but its a little late. That's a benefit I guess to pay to play their beta testing, but if they were a legit company they would of made it an actual beta and then reset the server once the game went live to the public.
Yup, a lot of the exploits people were using at launch have been removed. The acid pool is gone, the stat increase after skill level 100 has been massivly reduced (swimming against a wall now is much less helpful) Hitting other players with shields no longer lets you skill up. Starter weapons no longer let you skill up. Earthquake no longer gives rigor without damage. Arros have to hit players/monsters to level as do spells.
While you could argue that all these things should have been fixed before launch, you can't really argue that AV hasn't been active. They have a patch pretty much every Friday and almost every patch so far has reduced problems and improved the game. I agree many people might still not like Darkfall but AV really are slowly making the game better and better
That is a huge bug though! All the players that have been playing since launch have all those skills maxed now. Now everyone new that joins can't do that, making it even harder for new players to enjoy the game. And in a game where you get killed and lose all your stuff all the time, it's annoying to know those "badasses" that kill you most likely cheated to get to where they are and then AV removed it. It's good they fixed it, but its a little late. That's a benefit I guess to pay to play their beta testing, but if they were a legit company they would of made it an actual beta and then reset the server once the game went live to the public.
in 6 months most people playing now will have their skills maxed.
WHOAA, you touched on something, Hence why they haven't opened another server yet. Once they get everything working good on the EU server 1, they will open new servers maybe. But I swear I head someone say that you can transfer your TOON to another server from EU1 to NA1. But then again maybe I heard wrong. OR,, maybe AV may let you transfer your TOON over but at a cost of all your stats to 25% hehehe.
Anyone know there sub count yet?
http://www.wowarmory.com/guild-info.xml?r=Malfurion&n=Lock+and+Shackles&p=1
Guild info
they don't open up a new server because they simply can't afford a second, you are currently playing an unofficial pay to play closed beta, they only open the shop when they have banned players or if enough people cancelled their subscription. don't worry, there will be another wave of players banned soon, as all old hacks still work and being advertised, even improved. blame the poor code of df.
there was no announcement of av (as if there were any at all, except some nerdrage of tasos because of the eurogamer review or the announcement of open shop times) that you will be able to transfer your toon. most likely this will not happen, but you never know.
no one knows their sub count, the list of all guilded players that currently floats around also counts deleted, banned and of course characters that have already quit.
the skillsystem in df plain and simple sucks. you have 4 levels, that's all. all your skillgains mean nothing until you hit 25 / 50 / 75 / 100. i also disagree with the "player skill" needed in df combatwise as an oldschool shooter player. but that is maybe only my opinion.
jedi mind - heavenly divine, steadily shine in '99!
No one can know for sure, but they claim they sell 1000+ accounts each time they open the shop. So I would guess maybe 30,000 - 60,000 accounts sold total. If we use WAR as a worst case scenario for people leaving ( 1 million down to 300,000) we could guess that 2/3 have left. so 10,000 to 20,000 active subs.
All numbers are pulled out of my arse (accept for the 1000+ per opening of the store) so really its a stab in the dark
They are stuck with EU-1 while Tasos keeps running from investor to investor asking for money
Darkfall will be lucky to make it to the end of the year. And most of the exploits still work in the game. They fix one thing and break another. It is like a 3 alarm fire being fought with a bunch of volunteers. Despite claims to the contrary, people are still macroing skill gains using methods Aventurine has not patched yet.
the whole server situation is a joke anyway. so many people exploited their skills and exploited insane amounts of gold, all those people that start now or later will have a huge disadvantage, because skill matters much in df if you have weapon mastery, it's not that different to other themepark games where you grind high end equipment.
maybe mo will do it better with the twitch based combat and skill system... well and everything else, at least they don't seem to lie everytime they open their mouth.
jedi mind - heavenly divine, steadily shine in '99!
No one can know for sure, but they claim they sell 1000+ accounts each time they open the shop. So I would guess maybe 30,000 - 60,000 accounts sold total. If we use WAR as a worst case scenario for people leaving ( 1 million down to 300,000) we could guess that 2/3 have left. so 10,000 to 20,000 active subs.
All numbers are pulled out of my arse (accept for the 1000+ per opening of the store) so really its a stab in the dark
Well, nobody knows for sure, but we do know somethings and can extrapolate numbers from there. For example, we know that the count of players in clans was ~16k on May 1st. I know this because I tabulated the counts from the in-game clan screens and published them in a spreadsheet. As of May 18th, that number dropped to ~15k. Additionally, we've had confirmation that the clan counts include ex-players and deleted characters that were re-rolled with new names (deleted names aren't freed up for future use). The total alliance membership is ~10k.
So, the maximum possible number of clan members as of yesterday is ~15k. Subtract x amount of invalid characters from that and you have a true clan count. Why is this important? Because most players are in clans, especially those who stick with the game. The percentage of un-guilded players to guilded players is probably pretty small. Bsaically, a formula for identifying the sub count would be:
(Clan Count - invalid clan members +non-guilded characters) = total subscriptions
Furthermore, Signus--an IRC Mod for Darkfall--posted that there were 13k+ players on the official boards. I copied and pasted his statement in a few threads here, which is a good thing, because his post mysteriously vanished.
So, the player count is probably somewhere between 13 and 16k. I seriously doubt if it's over 16k. With a 1k drop in the clan count in less than a month, major alliance leaders complaining of players leaving due to the grind, etc..., I think Darkfall is hurting for membership.
~Ripper
That had to be one of the most boring articles I have ever read on this website.
How on earth the writer was able to stretch the content out so far is beyond me, for heavens sake having a paragraph about the "Run" skill and stamina management, you know if I hadn't played all the popular MMO's out there I think the guy was calling me an idiot the way the piece was written.
Really poor article which really talked about a very very small set of skills that really didn't need such a wall of text to explain, 1 paragraph would have been able to convey what they did and the impact of useage had over passive/button mashing skills from other level based MMO's have.
I joined Darkfall on day 3 after launch. I spent 2 days getting ganked, and getting the loot from my kills stolen by other players.
On my third day of playing ( 6 days after launch), I joined a clan. I was immediately told
1. Here is a link to download two 'needed' hacks. One was a stamina hack that allowed you to never run out of stamina. The other was a hack that allowed you to insta-loot your kills.
2. I was lead to a group of mobs by a river that my clan had been exploiting since launch. 2 mobs would spawn, it was very easy to get them to 'bug out' so they wouldn't fight back. My clan had been working this spawnpoint since launch. Players were given a portion of the gold, and the rest went to the clan to build a city. By my second day in the clan, we had built an advanced city.
3. I was taught the 'wall' trick with archery, and with the gold I had acquired, I quickly trained up my archery skill. My melee skills were already pretty high from beating on mobs that couldn't fight back.
The skill system in Darkfall is 'interesting' in theory... but the actual implementation of the system is terrible. Exploitations are rampent and if you raised your skills naturally, you would be so far behind other players that you would just get owned all the time. In a pvp-centric game with full-loot, it is just no fun to play fair and raise your skills naturally while constantly getting ganked/looted by players who macro'd/hacked
Everything about Darkfall sounds good on paper, and it sounds like the ruleset everyone wants. But everything about the actual game is terrible. It's hard for me to find a game where I could say 'nothing is good' about it.. but Darkfall is about as close to that as I've ever gotten.
The second I heard "stamina" I had an AoC flashback and that derailed my reading. Still, I might try this game if I can actually make it through reading about it (oh and they had a game you could buy, has that changed yet?)
The entire tone of the article felt like.
Skills don't do anything but unlock other skills to use.
In fact. That is pretty much the case.
It's a leveling system.
Instead of having just a character level you have a bunch of skills you level instead.
Reach a certian milestone, like say level 25 and you unlock other skills to purchase that increase your damage.
The DFO skill system is no dif. then leveling in WoW or EQ.
I thought this article was going to be about combat?
Pretty boring write up.
Actually the unlocking of different skills when you reach "certain" milestones is more of something solid to look forward to at a static point. As skills go up there is always some benefit, although the game does a piss poor job of explaining exactly what that is in all instances.
For instance, each school of magic has a spell that decreases the mana cost of all spells in the given school. When your character is out of mana, and you attempt to cast a spell, it tells you in chat why the spell cant cast. Something like:
"You need 6.52 mana to cast the spell. You currently have 3.46"
With each increment of the skill you can physically see the mana cost go down. Its just that in most cases you dont have a numerical representation of how much you benefit from any given skill gain.
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-Rogan Blackheart
Still sounds like DFO doesn't really get around the big downside of use-based progression systems: being pigeonholed into a playstyle.
Instead of playing how you want, and leveling how you want, use-based progression forces you to play in a specific way to level the skill you want. Which is fine for a while until either (a) one of the skills isn't as fun to level (running) or (b) one of your skills lags behind and you're forced to fight weaker monsters than normal just to get it raised.
Still seems like Asheron's Call 1 had the most successful use-based model by augmenting it with XP Investment. So you'd still fight using the main combat skills you wanted to raise, but you'd also be getting this income of XP which you could invest in any skill you chose - which let you sidestep both of the major disadvantages of a use-based system. Really the main downfall is the abilities in AC1 weren't all that deep and didn't make for particularly compelling combat.
(edit: Oops...I would delete this post if it let me. I'm not a fan of 4+ day old forum necromancy :X )
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver