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Total lack of Development of this game
This is taken from the Darkfall forums - I could not agree more with this guy. Seriously where is the development for this game? It is basically the same game as it was when it was release. Nothing major has been added. It is all promises from Mr Taco.
http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?p=4984496#post4984496
Dear Aventurine,
I write this open letter to you, because I need to vent my frustration with the game and its development.
I do this out of love, because I believe that Darkfall simply is the best mmo ever made even though its full of flaws.
Its stunningly beautifull at times, it has any aspect you might want in a pvp mmo and it got unparalleled combat.
I am sure that you hit what you hit along with no friendly fire, is the main reason for this and I dont see myself playing a tab to target game seriously ever again.
So its a lot of praise, and I love the game with all my heart but I also hate some things about it, and much of it isnt centered on the game its centered on you -> Aventurine.
The most core part of any mmo is that it MUST evolve and darkfall simply doesnt.
This leads to stagnation, a dying economy and less and less players logging in.
Due to boredom and a game not evolving you see the community degenerating partly because people get really bored, but they also love the game and simply dont wanna leave it - so they vent their anger towards each other, blaming each others for them getting bored.
Im angry with Aventurine for a couple of reasons in this regard, and will bring my complaints after a small recap of all patches the last 1.5 years.
When you go through the below patches, please consider how much any of this has changed the daily events for a active player.
May 27 Fix, lawfull areas.
May 11 content: Lawfull areas, Tuning: Fishing boats.
April 7th, Fix Shock charges
March 31st. Stat meditation, Fishing ships, alignment/chaos churches,shock charges.
Feb 10 Bug fixes, Clan bank policies, Wars time our after 7 days, willpower and fitness In meditation.
Jan 27th meditation price and time slashed, some new skills can be meditated.
2011
Dec 16th You can rest on H, Christmas items, decreased duration on blinds, more expensive sbs.
Oct 29 Bugfix treasure maps, Halloween items.
Oct 14 a few fixes, and some updated areas.
Oct 8 Bugfixes
Oct 6 Expansion
6 gb data.
-Terrain, Newbie dungeons,dungeon revamp ? , player vendors.
-Cooldown on rays, Wof nerf, speed mounts.
-Use flags, fun hulks
-Treasure maps
-Worldbuilding
June 16th, Rares in normal nodes, mounted combat nerf, wildlife, insta rays, some fixes, aoe dam nerf.
May 5th performance optimization
April 9 bugfixes
April 1 Strongboxes, portal chambers, quests, visual, destroyer/archery spec buff.
Feb 23 bugfixes
Feb 17 newbie protection
Jan 28 lots of fixes and new gfx
2010
Dec 18 Fixes and new gfx
Dec 16th ww cooldown, knockback nerf, Bugfixes
Dec 11 fixes
Dec 10 fixes
Dec 7 fixes
Dec 5th Conquer the seas expansion.
2009
The above is 1,5 years of development and it does make me feel bad when I know people are working their ass off - but its just not good enough.
During the years there have been a insane amount of good suggestions, and there are so many things that could be done that would increase the meaning and give objectives on the daily playing sessions.
You spend so much time on things for new players, and almost zero time on your loyal and existing playerbase. We are not that demanding, but we simply need a bone once in a while.
Communication:
Your communication is still disastrous, because it feels like you take the players for fools.
Av makes a statement that the next expansion comes early q2 now we are late q2, and not a word. Not even a word saying its delayed or even a new eta.
We need some bones here, because its more than 1.5 years since we got something new and it just has to be done better.
Also the biweekly, chaos chests etc are totally gone now again without a word.
Most players dont understand why you prioritise funhulks, use flags, wildlife, terrain, dungeon revamp (without new itemization) and so on why not tell people why its important, because many including me just dont get it.
I applaud you for tasos weekly updates, although often it feels like he just pedals for time trying to find something to write about.
You made a big feature out of scrum developing, but where is the products, the new patches , the new content ?.
If there is a reason for all of this, and if the next expansion indeed is a major jesus patch then throw us some bones with some details so we at least believe it.
Expansions.
This is a point that makes me angry.
Expansion should be the main source of new content. They should be the major things that changes the game, or puts a lot of new options in it. You have to make the expansions count as something big that really puts new things into combat and the daily gameplay, hellfreeze simply wasnt good enough and conquer the seas from 1.5 years ago was only borderline ok.
Why are they free?.
Im really annoyed with your free expansion policy. You are not doing the players any favors by having free expansions its totally the other way around.
Let us pay 20 euros for a Expansion, make most content available to all and then the individual things only for the players who have the xpac. This could be new weapon attacks, crafts or skills/whatever. And then let the content be available to everyone since I guess thats where the problem is in terms of closing things of for those who dont have it.
If 5000 players buys it, its 100.000 euros use that for salary for 2 coders/designers who ONLY works on additional content and the next expansion.
I can guarantie you that the majority would love to pay 20euro one time a year for a content expansion that changes the daily gameplay.
I think not doing the above is the biggest mistake you have done so far, and expansions simply need to be funded by selling them othervise these ressources end up getting tied up in daily operations to larger degree, and this costs a lot of the future development.
What what kind of stuff am I talking about.
Well it sounds like armor diversification and crafting gets a overhaul, this is very needed by I cant say much on it since its probably already made and I have no idea on what you are gonna do here.
But there are plenty of other things:
-Holdings, cities and alliances. There are many threads describing how those part could be improved.
-new rare weapons/armors/occurences , like the dynamic legendary weapon events I have posted about a couple of times.
-New skills, new specialization options, use of transmutes , and new crafts.
-Dynamic pvp or pve events that gives the players objectives straight away:
Examples:
Dynamic pvp objectives:
Have 3 strongboxes in various parts of the world.
Have them go vulnerable once every 7 days, ala seatowers.
The strongboxes have a decent amount of hp, and inside it there is a potion.
The potion takes 2 minutes to drink
When you drink a potion your whole guild get a random buff which can be (+5 to melee, archery or spell damage , +5 to all protections, double skinning etc). And this lasts for 7 days.
This will create simply landbased pvp events, for guilds.
Dynamic Pve/pvp objectives:
World message: Anthrax the hobgoblin king will visit duskwood in 1 hour.
You spawn anthrax as a mob, and then its all about finding and killing him and when he gets killed the alliance slaying him gets the kings of hobgoblins title for 24 hours, which will make all hobgoblin loot and skins increase by 3-5 times. And this can happen to any mob type in the game.
This would create a event out of killing the king with a lot of fighting in the area he spawns, but especially a lot of action afterwards because the winning alliance will farm these mobs for great income, but all the other guilds will also know that these spawns are likely to be populated, so it will be equally dangerous to farm there, and this will create massive dynamic events with a lot of fun both for guilds, alliances as well as the solo pks who will try to get the fat loot off the farmers.
Crafting Caravan:
Have a caravan spawn at a city and move towards another city. Its a trademaster travelling with rare elixirs.
When killed the trademaster will drop 1-5 elixirs, which effect is that after you drink it all crafts you make will be the highest rolls for 1 minute.
Skills forensics/tracking:
Use the skill on a grave, and you will see a circle in which area the killer is at.
The higher your skills, the smaller the circle will be and the longer time you will see the circle before loosing the scent.
Grappling hooks:
A craftable item that you throw in the air, it will stick to any rough surface and will let you climb up walls, towers etc. The higher quality mats used, the longer the range of the grappling hook. (needed for the non magic destro spec below, or non magic archery spec)
More class specs:
Pure mage options, archery specs with aoes and others at the cost of destroyer spec, even more goodies for a destroy at the cost of all magic etc.
There are so many things that could be put in, and in the suggestion forum there Is many ideas on par with the above and it would mean the world to the existing playerbase simply to get more stuff to do in the game.
Its long overdue.
That was all for my little rant, and hopefully somewhat constructive criticism. It comes out of love for the game but a mmo has to evolve, and Darkfall has simply been stagnant for almost 2 years now.
Thanks for reading.
Frank Sinatra
Ps. Since I have a whole army of people hating me, im not gonna respond to the hate that will come but might engage in a constructive debate if anyone actually wanna discuss what the post is about .
Comments
While I agree with the majority of his post that AV really should get their heads out of their asses for once, I completly disagree on having paid expansions.
1. It's supposed to be an open-world MMORPG, introducing paid expansions would require the developers to put limits to where players can go on the pretence that they are required to buy an expansion to access it, thus destroying the whole open-world system.
2. Because of it's open-world nature, having limits instaured would cause for a lot of exploiting the borders, none of which could be fixed.
3. MMORPGs can survive on subs alone, paid expansions is just cash grabbing, especially when the cost of the expac is usually the same as the full retail box but with much less content.
4. Aventurine has yet to be able to release a single expansion, saves for CtS, that would actually classify as an expansion. The quality of the game is rather low, and forcing players to buy an expac will likely turn more players away from the game when it badly needs to retain them.
Look at EVE. Retail box is $5, expansions are free. It's viable because the game is good. But when you look at the content of many of those expansions, can you imagine the issues that they would bring if they were to split the community apart? A part of the playerbase would have access to a lot of new features and options, skills perhaps or mechanic changes, while the rest of the playerbase are still stuck with the previous options and features yet they would still clash daily in PvP causing massive issues of balance. That just ain't going to work.
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His "Open Letter" starts to lose a little credibility when Frank begins to suggest features that do not necessarily represent the playerbase.
I agree that he was wide of the mark when he talked of paid expansions.
The rest seemed spot on.
I really dont know what devs in these companies think they are doing after releasing games, development seems to drop to a complete halt.
I just want to point out, that you're talking about a game that was considered vaporware for the 8yrs after it started development. lol
Got a Game Idea? Look Here!
Maybe they just don't make enough money with Darkfall to do any further development ?
They must run the servers, bug fixing, customer services... and how many active subscriber are there ?
I think that is why he was advocating paid expansions.
QTF
How much should we expect 1 man in his basement to do?
But then again, there are several important issues that players have been experiencing since Launch that, should they ever be fixed, would bring back a lot of players, yet in over 2 years Aventurine has done very little in that direction (saves for reducing the grind, and the recent, albeit quite horrible, alignement system). They've been shooting themselves in the foot from the beginning.
At this point if they want to improve, they have to gamble a little and invest more on developping those specific issues that would bring back the playerbase (and not pull a half-assed version of it). Then the money issue will be fixed.
They follow a chronologic development plan. (after putting in housing + sea objectives)
What was the most (IMO not reelevant) people complained about at launch ?
It was graphics, UI. That impossed a wrong priority on their development cycle IMO. (IMO they should have just ignored UI and graphics). The work behind these things is mostly work on engine and technology and won't have unfortunately much effect on gameplay. Some may react with "oh" and "ahh" but just for a few hours. Instead they should have ignored all the irrelevant peeps that wont playthe game netherless if better UI and graphics is in. Oh and yes skill cap was also a catchphrase at launch. These is what you get if you demand uselless things.
For almost the whole time since launch people was crying about "the grind" like it was ever a problem in DF. They promised server would become full with peeps if just "the grind" would be lessened forcing AV to waste ressouces on meditation system and spped up skill progression instead of doing more usefull things. These is what you get if you listen to wrong players and their fail habbits.
-----MY-TERMS-OF-USE--------------------------------------------------
$OE - eternal enemy of online gaming
-We finally WON !!!! 2011 $OE accepted that they have been fired 2005 by the playerbase and closed down ridiculous NGE !!
"There was suppression of speech and all kinds of things between disturbing and fascistic." Raph Koster (parted $OE)
Skill Cap had been mentionned on the older website, same with Skill Decay. Aventurine did away with both during Beta if I recall. So it was just as much of a catchphrase as Prestige classes, Warhulks, Alignement, etc.
But admittedly, in the first 2-3 months, AV were quite busy fighting off hackers and cheaters, fixing exploits (rigor pool) so got to give credits where credit is due, they've done a fairly good job. But after those 2-3 months were over, and those issues adressed, they still weren't adressing the main problems that the playerbase was facing like Alignement, but now also the need to macro and grind which admittedly has been adressed few months later, but the time required to develop that change (skill gain rates) is far too small to actually take away time from the development of other mechanics or features.
The UI has been mentionned a lot indeed, and Aventurine has been talking about changing it since the small expac DarkFall had in the summer of 2009, but it's only in DF Arena that we might see those changes and we haven't heard much about it either yet.
Some of you have obvious not played when game was launched. Game have changed alot sinds then. And all expansions where free so why you all complaining?