Darkfall Improving, Now In 1999 Instead Of 1997

In Ultima Online’s Publish 13 notes Darkfall’s March 21 notes, Runesabre Tasos notes that availability is improving even though you still can’t technically buy the game, and then goes on to explain:

We have been permanently banning all accounts that we detect are using 3d party software exploits. Still, there are a few people who don’t understand this and continue installing and using these exploits. You will definitely be banned if you do this. No appeals and no excuses are accepted.

Macroing: We are working to address it at its source, but until then we need to enforce our policies. Before we do that we will appeal to players not actually playing the game to log off rather than leaving their character in-game. This will allow more people to be able to enjoy Darkfall instead of unmanned characters taking up server space. If you’re skilling up by not playing the game as it was intended, you will be kicked and repeated offenses will result in a ban.

In response, players have created flash movies involving OSI GMs running a PK guild Youtube movies involving Hitler running a PK guild.

  • http://crymore.de EpicSquirt

    When will we see a better game from you Scott, considering you’d have the same resources as Aventurine?

    You could trash blog the games & companies more which actually had some serious funding and bloated development teams.

    I am not sure what you’re trying to say, I don’t play Darkfall and have no intention to play it, but if I had then not being able to buy a messed up game is way better than buying a broken AoC/TR/Warhammer?

  • Drey

    As long as Scott doesn’t brag about how great and hardcore his game is going to be and then deliver the Darkfall experience, he’s doing better than Aventurine.

  • Drey

    Props where props are due; giving the current subscribers 34 days play time free for all the problems they’ve experienced is pro.

  • http://www.f13.net sinij

    EpicSquirt :
    When will we see a better game from you Scott, considering you’d have the same resources as Aventurine?

    Hopefully this century, because it is open season on bashing Lum’s mistakes. Reap what you sow.

  • Joe

    Drey :Props where props are due; giving the current subscribers 34 days play time free for all the problems they’ve experienced is pro.

    Don’t most MMO’s give players the first month free when they purchase the game? So they are giving them 3-4 free days for dealing with the crappy launch?

  • http://syncaine.wordpress.com Syncaine

    Those flash movies were classics though, admit it.

    Sadly though, at some point the fact that the players actually playing the game (rather than those playing ForumFall) are really enjoying it is going to ‘leak’ out. Yes AV talked an amazing amount of hype before release, and not everything they said was/is PR-polished, but they did deliver a really fun game, one that works amazingly well all things considered (who would have placed money on the game being able to handle 200+ players on screen without turning down the game to low?) Perfect? No, it’s an MMO, but it’s along much further than anyone would have expected, and is certainly nothing like sb.exe.

  • Random Poster

    I’m with Drey on this. The reason so many people are pointing and laughing at Darkfall and to a lesser extent Warhammer is due to what the developers bragged about it.

    Darkfall was going to be the best thing since sliced bread…in better shape in alpha than any game released bug wise .

    And it’s none of those things.

    You can even see this, albeit to a much smaller degreee, with Peter Molyneux. He spent AGES talking about how revolutionary Black and White was going ot be..then B&W2..then Fable. He is notorious for over promising. Difference being that for the most part his games while not delivering everything he said weren’t BAD games. Oh and he never dogged other games while he was doing it. He has gotten better about this recently. Fable 2 probably delivered the most complete game he has done.

    So far I don’t think i’ve seen Lum ever say anything along those lines . Come to think of it I have no idea what the hell he’s been doing :P

  • Amaranthar

    I can forgive Darkfall for many of the problems as far as unfinished game goes. But I think they’ve proven now that their ideas on PvP are foolish, and that’s at the heart of Scott’s topic here.
    You cannot allow PKers to do whatever they want and expect your game to succeed. Alliance? Faction? Meaningless. Every other aspect of the game bows to the reds, and becomes as meaningless as alliances/factions/races.

  • Drey

    Joe :

    Drey :Props where props are due; giving the current subscribers 34 days play time free for all the problems they’ve experienced is pro.

    Don’t most MMO’s give players the first month free when they purchase the game? So they are giving them 3-4 free days for dealing with the crappy launch?

    Ah, I misread it; I thought they were giving 34 more and not just 4 more added to the normal 30. At least they’re acknowledging compensation is due but I’m less impressed now than I was initially, thanks for pointing that out.

  • xzzy

    I think every MMO since Everquest has awarded “free play time” for problems experienced during launch.

    Point being it’s nice of Aventurine to do it, but it’s hardly unprecedented.

  • Robin Kestrel

    @Drey

    Let’s start a rumor that Scott and Richard Bartle are making a perma-death hardcore PvP virtual world together. :-)

  • http://www.brokentoys.org/ Scott Jennings

    When will we see a better game from you Scott, considering you’d have the same resources as Aventurine?

    it is open season on bashing Lum’s mistakes. Reap what you sow.

    You know, no one threatens stuff like this when I talk about WoW or SL. I love how PvP games generate such *militant* loyalty!

    (And I fully expect, and count on, ‘open season on bashing my mistakes’. Goes with the territory of being a loudmouth.)

    All I was pointing out here though was how the postings from Darkfall today were almost identical to what we were literally seeing a decade ago. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

  • http://hudshideout.com/blog Hudson

    Nothing like a little open macro cheating to put your game in the bargain bin! Can’t wait for this title to implode.

  • http://www.f13.net sinij

    Scott Jennings :

    You know, no one threatens stuff like this when I talk about WoW or SL. I love how PvP games generate such *militant* loyalty!

    You generally much more civil and don’t regress to “your play style could never work, watch it burn” level when talking about WoW or SL. You are not even pretending to be objective or impartial when it comes to DF or Open PvP.

    Broken Toys blog is now for all intents and purposes a Dark Fall effigy burning site. You might want to update site name to reflect this fact.

    All I was pointing out here though was how the postings from Darkfall today were almost identical to what we were literally seeing a decade ago.

    In a way it is amusing, but not in a way you think. Instead you should be pointing out that there was literally no progress in the industry as a whole since a decade ago.

    If WoW couldn’t solve macroing problem in 3+ years of its existence, why do you expect DF to have it solved out of the gates? Why is it even a priority when core DF gameplay is PvP and cannot be macroed?

  • Angelworks

    You generally much more civil and don’t regress to “your play style could never work, watch it burn” level when talking about WoW or SL. You are not even pretending to be objective or impartial when it comes to DF or Open PvP.

    Broken Toys blog is now for all intents and purposes a Dark Fall effigy burning site. You might want to update site name to reflect this fact.

    One of the reasons Darkfall is a ripe target (and rightfully so) is all the outrageous claims the developers made for the last 8 or 9 years (I’ve lost count). As well as the userbase. I actually read the darkfall forum and the mmorpg forum for darkfall for entertainment – I can’t think of another mmo you can do this with (maybe coad on Eve Online…).

    Yeah Blizzard spent as much time on WoW, but they never talked about it so to most people it took a lot less time to build. They also didn’t make as many outrageous claims about what the game would mean or do.

    You can be an indy developer btw and be modest at the same time – its not hard – in their case they just need to stop talking.

  • http://www.f13.net sinij

    Blizzard could afford to not talk about WoW, after all who is not familiar with Blizzard or WarCraft franchise?

    Dark Fall on other hand would be doomed to obscurity unless they generated hype around it. There is no such thing as bad publicity when you are obscure indy developer.

  • Raad

    @sinij
    If your lips were planted any harder on the throbbing manhood of Tasos I think you two would become as one.

  • Random Poster

    @Sinji concerning changing the site name.

    I think the name Broken Toys fits Darkfall perfectly.

  • dartwick

    I dont agree with all of DFOs PVP ideas but I dont think they have been proven foolish yet. Im not saying they will work.

  • Matt Mihaly

    Sinij has a point. Would Darkfall have had the number of players it has now without making the outrageous claims it did? The answer is almost certainly ‘no’, which is all the justification the devs need I’d imagine.


    If WoW couldn’t solve macroing problem in 3+ years of its existence, why do you expect DF to have it solved out of the gates? Why is it even a priority when core DF gameplay is PvP and cannot be macroed?

    If it’s not a big deal, the devs wouldn’t need to ban people for doing it.

    –matt

  • http://www.crymore.de EpicSquirt

    @Scott Jennings
    I could see that. But in DF’s case there is nothing special in repeating the mistakes done 10 years ago, ~99% of the industry is doing it.

  • Raad

    @EpicSquirt
    99% of the industry is going around trashing carebears/sucking from the teat of the 1337.

  • Drey

    xzzy :
    I think every MMO since Everquest has awarded “free play time” for problems experienced during launch.
    Point being it’s nice of Aventurine to do it, but it’s hardly unprecedented.

    Unprecedented? No. It would have been more HARDCORE to not award free play time though. Hence, while my props have been reduced, props are still awarded.

  • Drey

    Robin Kestrel :
    @Drey
    Let’s start a rumor that Scott and Richard Bartle are making a perma-death hardcore PvP virtual world together.

    I heard that somewhere too … I think KaVir is being roped in also, possibly it will be Godwars 3D.

  • Soulflame

    FFA PvP does not work in a persistent environment. It never has. It never will. This is less a problem with mechanics, and more a problem with people.

    In short, just because you can pk that miner doesn’t mean that you should pk that miner. Unless, of course, your aim is to make that miner cancel. In which case, I ask, what will the pk kill tomorrow? The answer is once the predators have depleted the prey, they move on to the next game after they get tired to dying to better pks.

  • http://www.f13.net sinij

    @Soulflame
    Pray? Predators? Please, let UO mentality go.

    Anyone playing Open PvP mmorpg know what they are getting into. In these games miners don’t mine because they enjoy it, they mine to support or advance their own PvP ambitions.

    SB undeniably demonstrated that PvPers are more than happy to fight other PvPers. As long as you don’t pile it up on the loser so they can recover to fight back you will have consistent player base content on getting each other miner’s PKed, cities burned and exp parties killed and camped.

    There are no victims in DF, only people that chose to play it. This play style might not appeal to you. You might not even understand it. This doesn’t change the fact that enough people do and more than happy to.

    Think it about this way. There are people who enjoy stapling their cocks to a wooden crossed and setting it on fire. If you do it to unwilling person, it will be torture, but if you do it to yourself… well then its between you and closed doors.

  • Gx1080

    If you want to be in a Open PvP game its your choice, as long as you can fight back and win. And, seriously you sound like you are still pissed for having to stand the UO experience at its fullest. They are doing fine, its not perfect but its an small indie studo trying to do an MMORPG. That, for being a Open PvP game where you can make and destroy cities, it needs to be a bigger world than others MMOs. And they did it, its not perfect and they are going to sweat theri asses if they want to last, but i think that they can.

    The fact that most of the people (and the devs) there are exactly as your Xbox Live idiots its not that important. They have their game, let them have it.

  • http://www.gawaintheblind.com GTB

    Scott Jennings’: World Of Dbase & Server Networking Code (WoDSNC) set to debut in Q3, 2009!

    I love Darkfall and i’m not even playing it. I love it because of the amazing amount of entertainment generated by its players on forums and blogs.

  • http://[email protected] JuJutsu

    “There are people who enjoy stapling their cocks to a wooden crossed and setting it on fire.”

    This is the best description of the Darkfall playerbase I’ve seen yet.
    /bow

  • http://evilbastages.blogspot.com Grimhawke[EB]

    What’s wrong with ’99? I like playing Darkfall precisely because it reminds me of UO pre-trammel. The game is fun because you have to constantly be on alert and aware of your surroundings. I like being able to PK that douche who is ninja looting my kills. It’s also about time a game came out that doesn’t limit your in-communication with other players. WOW – what a revolutionary concept! It’s too bad WoW didn’t do anything revolutionary other than mass produce carebears that can’t take a little shit talking.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Mike-Maurice/1317626857 Mike Maurice

    sinij :
    @Soulflame
    Pray? Predators? Please, let UO mentality go.
    Anyone playing Open PvP mmorpg know what they are getting into. In these games miners don’t mine because they enjoy it, they mine to support or advance their own PvP ambitions.
    SB undeniably demonstrated that PvPers are more than happy to fight other PvPers. As long as you don’t pile it up on the loser so they can recover to fight back you will have consistent player base content on getting each other miner’s PKed, cities burned and exp parties killed and camped.
    There are no victims in DF, only people that chose to play it. This play style might not appeal to you. You might not even understand it. This doesn’t change the fact that enough people do and more than happy to.
    Think it about this way. There are people who enjoy stapling their cocks to a wooden crossed and setting it on fire. If you do it to unwilling person, it will be torture, but if you do it to yourself… well then its between you and closed doors.

    We also ate our own until SB had nothing but 3 free servers left.

  • Amaranthar

    Grimhawke[EB] :
    It’s also about time a game came out that doesn’t limit your in-communication with other players. WOW – what a revolutionary concept! It’s too bad WoW didn’t do anything revolutionary other than mass produce carebears that can’t take a little shit talking.

    Yeah, I saw the posts asking for better animations so you guys can “teabag” your victims better. Aren’t limitations teh [aR3b3aR ?
    I’m glad that you guys have your game. Really. Because nobody else wants to play with you guys. It’s just a shame that you all can’t make it work without the rest of us to teabag. What a shame, because then you always want to come to the next game too. We just can’t get rid of you all even if you have your own game, which you consume like a disease.

  • http://www.f13.net sinij

    Yes, eating your young and weak is #1 problem any and all PvP designer needs to address. Designing an Open PvP mmorpg where you can keep winning but can never permanently win or prevent others from participating is challenging because it is not as well understood as DIKU. We will get there eventually. I am willing to bet than in 20 years we will have as many, if not more, niche mmorpgs, some will be Open PvP, than blockbuster titles like WoW.

    If you are curious, back in 07 I outlined 13 “steps” that any would be PvP designer need keep in mind. They can be found http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=9562.0

  • Gx1080

    Oh great. sinj, i aprecciate the effort, but this discussions tend to become a war betwen the gankers and the people who take waaay too seriously being ganked. And any, any discussion about FFA PvP ends in this. Gankers are jerks, that is true, but watch the so prideful carebears sinking to their level of insults because they take ganking as a personal attack (that it isnt). Jeez, if you are so good players, why you need to insult the other way to play the damn games. If i get to the level of the guys that i despise, they are the winners because they turned me in them.

    In short, its a game, dont take that seriously and if a group of people want to play DarkFall its their business and no one else and you should respect their decision.

    That said, the DarkFall devs arent dont have the knowledge of the full UO experience. They just saw what they liked. Certain lessons (like the fact that the devs and GMs and everybody that speaks for the company needs to be responsible and mature) are better learned in the flesh.

  • Freakazoid

    If adventurine bans macroers, they won’t have any subscribers left! *drumroll*

  • Paks

    *rimshot!

    @Gx1080: Yeah we carebears should stop insulting those jerk gankers…

    Stop being so defensive it’s just a game :(

    And has anyone ever noticed that it’s always the *other person who’s at fault and it’s *the other person who’s taking things too seriously?

    There is no concept of responsibility on the interwebs. I think it got nerfed to hell in the first release patch. :(

    Anyway, as soon as AV bans more NPCs from their game so they can get more PCs out of the queues I’m sure there will be lots more ganker jerks playing Darkfall as is their frakkin right! ;P

  • http://www.arksark.org/blog/ Arkenor

    I can report that there are currently:

    Infinite stamina exploits
    Superspeed exploits
    Flying exploits
    Teleport exploits, including being able to teleport your corpse while dead to prevent you being looted.
    You can also pull your network cable out if you look like losing a fight, and you will be gone from the game world within 10 seconds.
    You can invite people to group with you, and then murder them without penalty.
    Macroing is rampant.

    If some of these things sound like they’d be quite easy to detect serverside, particularly teleportation, you’re right. However Aventurine have somehow failed to learn from a decade of seeing what sort of things people exploit.

    Oh, and they’ve still not updated the feature list on their website to remove all the features that are not actually in the game. That’s a pet hate of mine that too many MMO producers do.

  • UnSub

    sinij :

    Anyone playing Open PvP mmorpg know what they are getting into.

    She came in here asking for it, your Honour. We could tell, because why else would she have come in here?

  • http://www.ritchian.com Ritchian

    So how long untill we hit 2000 and they add Trammel?

  • http://www.arksark.org/blog/ Arkenor

    Ritchian :
    So how long untill we hit 2000 and they add Trammel?

    There isn’t even a murder system. Just a weak alignment system that makes it easy for just about anyone to stay blue while killing their own races’ newbies at their spawn point or crafters at the bank. It’s not even up to Felucca standards of safety, and it does not want to be, so I don’t think Trammel is going to be happening just yet.

    I ain’t going to be resurrecting my old genial crafter/merchant UO character there, that’s for sure. You need to be able to not be murdered in the middle of town to make the whole trader thing work. There’s no room for all the playstyles that found a niche in pre-Trammel UO, so there is no place for me.

  • Tet

    Paks – And has anyone ever noticed that it’s always the *other person who’s at fault and it’s *the other person who’s taking things too seriously?

    That isn’t a gaming or Internet thing, that’s a life thing. “Well officer I was just walking down the street whistling on my way to donate to the orphanage when that guy just ran up and punched me in the face for no good reason. I distinctly remember him saying ‘I’m going to punch you in the face. You know why? For no good reason that’s why!’ Then he said Mwahahaha.”

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/William-Purvis/1529807928 William Purvis

    Personally, I found the video rather entertaining. Not as creative as the old school flash movies, but I had to laugh about the Kit Kat and the part about the guy’s WoW family being f’d…

    I mentioned that part about 1999 returning a month ago. I am going to have to load Darkfall just to see what all the crying is about though. I hope their maint is not on Tuesday… ;(

  • Amaranthar

    Arkenor :

    Ritchian :
    So how long untill we hit 2000 and they add Trammel?

    There isn’t even a murder system. Just a weak alignment system that makes it easy for just about anyone to stay blue while killing their own races’ newbies at their spawn point or crafters at the bank. It’s not even up to Felucca standards of safety, and it does not want to be, so I don’t think Trammel is going to be happening just yet.
    I ain’t going to be resurrecting my old genial crafter/merchant UO character there, that’s for sure. You need to be able to not be murdered in the middle of town to make the whole trader thing work. There’s no room for all the playstyles that found a niche in pre-Trammel UO, so there is no place for me.

    The vibrancy of all those different play styles is what I miss about UO. That world was alive, even if flawed with rampant grief. It’s too bad game designers took over from the world simulators and turned it into just another game.

  • Owain ab Arawn

    Well, as the saying goes, your milage may vary. My original UO Guild from UO Siege Perilous days, the KGB (Knights of Glory and Beer) oracle.the-kgb.com, has been heavily involved in Darkfall in both the Beta test and since the European release, and we find the game to be just what we have been waiting for.

    Since UO, the KGB has deployed to numerous worlds (DaOC, SB, SWG, WoW, Vanguard, AoC, Warhammer) but the Class/Level design of most of these games together with the poor PvP environments made these games sub par, in our estimation. Darkfall, for all it’s problems, is the only game in the last decade to hold any real promise.

    In UO, KGB was not a PK guild, but was rather one of the many Anti-PK guilds that sought to bring player justice to Siege Perilous, and to defend ordinary players from the depredations of murderers. Those days are gone forever, unfortunately. Darkfall offers different challenges.

    I don’t think any of the people panning Darkfall here have ever played the game. Unfortunately, neither have I due to the availability issues already discussed. The KGB does currently have about 40 active members in game, and once availability improves, we hope to field 100 or more. From our members currently playing the game, game play is good to excellent. Problems are being addressed, and the game is improving steadily. No one knows what balance issues may arise, as none have yet to reach the highest skill levels, but for now, the game is interesting and challenging.

    You can pan the game as you like, but unless you’ve played it, you’re only guessing. I will reserve my own judgement until I have the opportunity to get first hand knowlege. However, the views of those actually in game are more pursuasive than those who know nothing, and who allow bad experiences with UO, ShadowBane, or whatever rule their opinions rather than finding out for themselves how things really stand.

    Until you do that, your comments to the contrary regarding game play are premature. Comments regarding the roll out are spot on, though, and particularly with respect to game availability, there is a lot of room for improvement. But I’d rather have a good game with initial distribution problems than a crap game delivered smoothly (re: Vanguard, Age of Conan, and others).

  • Gx1080

    Im not being defensive, im just tired of seeing all PvP discussions (and several non-PvP discussions) turining into a gankers vs carebears flamewar. And, let me tell you i dont support either band because neither the 13-year old with anger issues or the emo-kid should win. I dont play DarkFall, i support the concept because i believe that if you asked to the NPCs in a theme park game to lick your ****, they will do it. And another human being is more unpredictable that a Boss, so for me its more fun.

    That said, i havent played DarkFall and, like Owain ab Arawn i suspect that most of its detractors havent either. Try playing it BEFORE start trowing stones. You maybe will like it.

  • http://www.f13.net sinij

    @Owain ab Arawn
    Having strong and established guild, like KGB, and years of experience back you up changes things a lot.

    Many players still trapped into ‘solo’ mentality DIKU indoctrinated them with, and you simply cannot do that in Open PvP games. Just like football, if you are playing alone on the field you get stomped and run over.

    If you are asking why my miners are killed, why am I being repeatedly killed while I try to exp, why I am being killed and looted in the middle of the city… answer is always: because you are not part of the guild.

    If you want to try DF with mature group of people I encourage you to apply to established guild; like KGB, CoS, Evil Bastages, Goons, UDA.

  • Angelworks

    sinij :
    Blizzard could afford to not talk about WoW, after all who is not familiar with Blizzard or WarCraft franchise?
    Dark Fall on other hand would be doomed to obscurity unless they generated hype around it. There is no such thing as bad publicity when you are obscure indy developer.

    Blizzard wasn’t always a massive company. There was a time when they were a small company called Silicon & Synapse and just did ports for other companies. I know someone who was hired on when they were just announcing World of Warcraft and they were located on a non descriptive building on the UCI campus that was shared with 3-4 other companies (like Linksys) – they were a small company then.

    And there is such a thing as bad publicity – after a while it ads up and its difficult to shake your image as a bad-ass who can’t execute.

    I do actually wish them the best of luck because what they are doing is good for the industry, but wow do they have a toxic userbase in part inspired by their own blustering.

  • http://www.arksark.org/blog/ Arkenor

    sinij :
    @Owain ab Arawn
    Having strong and established guild, like KGB, and years of experience back you up changes things a lot.
    Many players still trapped into ’solo’ mentality DIKU indoctrinated them with, and you simply cannot do that in Open PvP games. Just like football, if you are playing alone on the field you get stomped and run over.
    If you are asking why my miners are killed, why am I being repeatedly killed while I try to exp, why I am being killed and looted in the middle of the city… answer is always: because you are not part of the guild.
    If you want to try DF with mature group of people I encourage you to apply to established guild; like KGB, CoS, Evil Bastages, Goons, UDA.

    Sinij, this is from the Darkfall FAQ:

    Do I have to join a Clan?
    Darkfall can be played any way you want. If you want to get involved in conquest, wars, and ruling kingdoms, you join a clan, or get together with some friends and start your own, but you do not have to.

    What other options other than joining a Clan do I have?
    You are only limited by your imagination in what else you can do, but here are some examples to get you going:

    You could be a lone adventurer, hunting for treasure, magical items and fame, or a mercenary selling your services to the highest bidder. You may choose to play a merchant, setting up caravans and shops in different cities, buying high quality hides from Mahirim hunters and selling them for top prices at Human cities. You could hook up with a few friends and be pirates, sailing your galleon around, plundering merchant ships, or choose to play the Dwarven blacksmith, crafting mighty magical weapons and armor, or perhaps a farmer producing rare herbs and spell reagents. The possibilities are limitless.

    OK, maybe people were naive to believe that, but we did. I don’t know if you played pre-trammel UO, or whether you would consider it open PvP, but you could very much solo there or play something other than a psychotic if you so desired

    If we’ve reached the point where games are only for members of the giant cross-game guilds, and their imitators, I would find that unfortunate. I would rather give up MMOs entirely than join any of the guilds you listed.

  • Vetarnias

    For the record: I don’t play Darkfall. Even if I could play it, I’d be a bit wary of buying a game I can only get through the Internet — and even more wary of giving my credit card information to such an apparently amateurish company as Aventurine. That would apply even if Darkfall suddenly became known as the greatest game ever made.

    This being said, all that I have heard and seen about Darkfall has convinced me not to play it. Like Arkenor above, I’d have been more interested in playing a crafter/trader and get my friends together to start a small crafting guild.

    But such a nice plan just falls apart when faced with the actual mechanics of Darkfall. Full loot everywhere just means anyone can rob you instead of paying you even a penny. So sooner or later, either you bring more friends (assuming you have many of them willing to play MMO’s) around just to serve as your bodyguards, or you start looking for options. Which means it will devolve sooner or later into being bullied into a protection racket. Might as well cancel on the spot.

    Not to mention the lesson Pirates of the Burning Sea finally proved: Guilds want to be self-sufficient. They don’t care about what you make, since they won’t buy it. Either they’ll loot you, or they will ignore you. I’m surprised the crafter/trader type — which makes items for profit — still endures in sandbox games.

    A Darkfall-type game would be fun to play if it weren’t for the rabble such games typically attract. It’s the most notorious gamer migration out there: Join every new game (ideally in beta, so you can know how to cut corners), gank, grief and exploit for a few months, then leave for the next new game.

    They don’t care about where a game is set or what its aims are. Roleplaying (as in respecting the setting, not the silly stuff full of Mary Sues and implausible story lines) is so anathema to what they’re doing that whether the game is set in Caribbean waters, outer space, the Franco-German border or a fantasy land, their behaviour will always be the same, as will their retort to players they gank: “Lol pwned! Go back to WoW noob”. In the words of a classic D&D “munchkin” joke, they won’t care what class or race they pick, they’ll just go for “whatever gives the most plusses”.

    Those gamers, sadly, don’t respect the games they play, nor the people who make them. I still can’t explain how Aventurine thought they could develop an entire game by expecting to rely on them exclusively.

    That reminds me of something I read on the Mortal Online forums, too, where one player said the Darkfall community was awful, and that MO was looking much better…. But is there any uncertainty as to where the Darkfall rabble will be heading next? (Besides, the usual “I got my forum account before you” thing is showing up over there as well, now that beta is in sight and a pecking order is required. It will remain to be seen whether MO will make all the mistakes of Darkfall.)

    I’d love a sandbox game that works. Unfortunately, that would mean selecting players according to mindset, which would involve some sort of personality test, and I can’t see that happen (besides, wouldn’t Teh Hardcorez take pride in cheating?). And it wouldn’t solve anything in the larger political context of a game: Big alliance versus big alliance, until one collapses and the other wins. So I have written off the entire idea of a “sandbox” game.

  • Paks

    @sinij: Seriously no offense meant, but you don’t have to play a game to see that it has major flaws and the top flaw in this case, is the developer, in my opinion. You also don’t have to play a game to see that it has exploit issues and that’s thanks to YouTube and other such sites as well as screens etc, etc. And lastly, you don’t have to play a game to see that the community (not all) have major issues. Just look at the forums and other sites.

    And sure I know CoS and KGB (by the way Owain was that a recruitment post or what? :) ) and sure they have a lot of good guys in the guild and they’re always anti-griefer. I remember both guilds from SB and had fun playing with them. It’s the visible and most vocal part of the DF community that’s a complete mess, including AV. Personally, I wouldn’t even consider trying DF but that does not and should not mean I can’t have an opinion on it based on what I see.

    And I’ve never tried nor do I like(meaning hell no I won’t try it!) Calamari either so shoot meh!

    @Tet: Yeah point taken. :)