I Hate WoW Achievements

Who are you, and what did you do with Lum. You’re either putting on a brilliant display of irony as a writing tool, or you’re just a massive pile of QQ. I can’t decide which yet.

So battlegrounds are a big cluster-cluster this week. That’s tragic. On the other hand, no one is holding a gun to your head (I presume), forcing you to go into the mean, awful BGs. On the gripping hand, BG participation is as high as I’ve seen it since WotLK came out, even if that means they’re chock full of carebears.

I played a grand total of seven BGs in order to get my Children’s Week wrapped up. 1xEotS, 2xAB, 3xWSG, and 1xAV. The AB’s, incidentally, were two of the most intense AB matches that I can recall. I think this achievement actually made AB more exciting.

I agree that it made WSG more tedious than usual. The second match I played in, the alli’s (I play Horde) ventured out of their base a grand total of one time, and one of my teammates got the flag return credit. On the other hand, we did win, so I’m trying to see the bright side here.

In any case, it’ll all be over soon. It’ll just be a few days, and you’ll get your long BG queue times back.

Im sick of the achievement system, it needs to die. It has turned a once helpful guild into a bunch of epeen strokers. You used to be able to get people to come back to help you with old content, now, no one will go unless they need the acheivement. It sickens me.

Dont get me wrong, I love my guild, been with them through Gruuls and all the way to Ulduar. But, the pursuant of acheivements, is killing the real reaon people are in guilds, to help others, not “What acheivement do I get if I help them”.

Oh well. Maybe its time to give it up.

You know, I’ve never once gone out of my way to do any achievement.. Why do people kill themselves over these things? I understand there are those that want to do everything possible and get the full experience, but seriously. How many of them achieved Grand Marshal? Woops.. Something they’ll never get, they might as well give up now. Whenever I do manage to get one, it’s a surprise to me.

Oh, and if you need to win in EotS, come to the battle group where Steamwheedle Cartel is located. Alliance wins EVERY match.

Lum, you really need to camp the DarkFall online store, and try to snag a copy. A pain, I know, but I think you really would find it worth your while. Roll an Alfar, and come to the KGB city, Khosgar, which lies on the south east coast of the main continent. Submit an application for citizenship on the KGB web site, oracle.the-kgb.com, and list Owain ab Arawn as your sponser. Shhhh. No else needs to know. This will be our secret. Except for everyone else who reads this.

I’ve been in the game a couple of weeks now, and what I’ve found that there is not the non-stop universal gankage everyone seems to think that Darkfall will inevitably fall into. Granted, if you wander solo into the world, you will find no shortage of opportunities to be ganked, but no one does that. Instead, Darkfall seems like a continent wide battleground, but without the stupid stuff you are complaining about with WoW battlegrounds.

Yesterday was very typical of this, from what I’ve seen so far. I checked in, got on the City Defense Ventrillo channel, and found that all was quiet on all fronts, so I went to the bank and got a few tools, and starting chopping wood and mining for stone, both to supply lumber and stone for the guild achitects for building supplies, and also to develop strength and other attributes.

After about 20 minutes of this, somebody comes into Vent and announces that infiltrators have gotten over the walls and are moving towards the city bank, where most folks hang out macroing skills, and dropping off harvested supplies. I stow my pickaxe and equip a bow, and join the hunt. Thanks to the quick warning we drop the ones inside the walls pretty quick, but there are more outside the walls, both to the north and to the south. I run to the north wall and man the siege cannon and start firing at troops in the open, scattering them quickly.

They move out of my visual range soon after I start firing, but we have spotters out in the field that direct my fire on their location, and soon they are in full retreat towards a local enemy hamlet. We armor up, mount up, and move out on a retaliatory strike.

They have no siege weapons, so we sweep through their village without much difficulty, and catch them in the open. We overpower those we find, and withdraw before they can mount a counter attack. Things quiet down after that, so we go back to foraging. I strip off my equipment and go for an ocean crossing swim to build other attributes, and carry a fishing pole with me as well. A lad has to eat, you know.

30 minutes later, the city is under attack again. I am half a continent away, fishing, so I do a bindstone recall, and reappear in the city in the middle of the attack, unarmored. I make it to the wall and start sniping with my bow. I get pretty well fried by their mages, but somehow manage not to die, and eventually we clean them out of the city, so it’s time to armor up again, and we have big fight south of the city. Neither side can make much headway, so both sides disengage and withdraw. Back to the city, where we defend against intermittent probing attacks and feints, but no large engagements for a while.

No where in this are points awarded to permit me to buy a pair of uber pants. There are no flags to cap, no achievements to unlock, no artificial carrots to entice players, no flying mounts, nor quest rails to follow. But also, no non-stop ganks or fighting just for the sake of fighting. We are harvesting resources and crafting supplies, and our enemies seek to disrupt our operations and claim our resources for their own, all the while we are training and develping our skills to better defend our expanding sphere of influence. Some days, we get no probing attacks at all, so we harvest mobs, and forage for resources. Other days, we face waves of attacks.

I’ve played battlegrounds on WoW and in DarkFall, but these feel more like sporting events than actual combat. There must be a strong attraction there for that kind of game play, because a LOT of people take part in it. Nothing ever changes in that setting though. Once you get through with the map, it starts again, and again, and again. The same fight over and over again. Groundhog Day, with swords.

In DarkFall, no two fights are ever the same. The areas change, the tactics change, the objectives change, and depending on your success or lack thereof on the battle field, your over all strategies change. One week, you may be triumphantly expanding, and the next week, you may be desperately defending your civilization. Either way, things are never boring. And no “purple pulsating flying manhood compensators.”

All in all, not bad for my first few weeks in a brand new game.

@Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green

Winterveil as a feral druid was indeed very, very painful.

I like the achievement system in WoW. I also liked the badge system in CoH.

I think the School of Hard Knocks achievement was a mistake, for the reasons Lum gave.

I’m going for all the holiday achievements and yes, they’ve sunk a lot of time. But I’m in a situation where I can’t seem to get into a successful raid with my two out of three guildmates who share my play schedule. We’re all RL friends and playing together is much of why we play.

So instead, I can satisfy my diamond-y impulses with the achievement system. Who is to say that a new title is worth less of a time investment than a new wand?

@Owain
Great post Owain.

Grimhawke[EB] :@Owain Great post Owain.

I hope this isn’t a duplicate post, but the last one didn’t seem to take.

Thanks Grimhawke.

I need to clarify one comment I made so folks won’t be confused. At one point, I wrote, “I’ve played battlegrounds on WoW and in DarkFall,” when what I meant was, “I’ve played battlegrounds on WoW and in WarHammer…”

I don’t see any way to edits posts submitted here, but that sure would be a handy function sometimes.

I gotta admit, any system that can provide a basis for this sort of comedy is good by me. http://www.zwixy.com/Obama_Barack_World_of_Warcraft_achievement.jpg

The only cheev that is worthless is the EoTS one. The other cheevs are positive things to happen in a BG. Or in other words if you aren’t also trying for the cheev yourself, you can’t really say that someone killing the EFC, returning a flag or assaulting a tower is bad. Hell, if you are in WSG and have 4 people that are rediculously over-zealous about camping the FR and killing the EFC, then you really should just get your ass on offense and count yourself as lucky, because you are in a group that is better than 60% of all WSG pugs. But everyone worth their salt knows that flags don’t freakin mean dick in EoTS games. That cheev is just pure fail.

When dealing with a particular aspect of a game that gets my goat, I like to get the bottom of it: why does it bother me?

Take the mother of all MMORPG killers: the grind. Why does the grind bother me? At first blush, you’d think it’s because there’s levels and experience points. Some people swear off games with levels because of this. However, the true problem with the grind is simply that you’re bored solid of the individual repetitive activities that constituted filling that experience bar. That experience and levels exist was never really the problem.

In this same approach, we look at World of Warcraft achievements. Is the fact that people can earn a dandy title for committing to certain difficult tasks the problem? No – we know this because City of Heroes has the same thing and it hasn’t broke that game. It seems to me the real problem with WoW is that players are heavily incentivising to earn the achievements. No badge in City of Heroes earns you can epic mount, so you can live without it.

As we know from old school Ultima Online incentives turning the first graphical virtual world into a gankfest, incentivising people to make the game suck is easy to do.

Honestly, I don’t regard what WoW does as all that important. Sure, they got millions of subscribers, but I’m more or less convinced that most of those millions are from the Blizzard brand name fishing in new players to the genre. WoW didn’t need to be good, it just needed to have the EverQuest hook, and the millions were assured. Nobody else can replicate WoW’s success because they’re not Blizzard and they don’t have millions of fans sitting in the wings waiting to jump that bandwagon.

So, my formula for MMORPG success? Develop for niches on a shoestring budget, because WoW was a one time deal. Either that, or find a whole other pack of people who never played MMORPGs before and pull them onboard. (Good luck without a brand recognition grapevine working for you.)

“As we know from old school Ultima Online incentives turning the first graphical virtual world into a gankfest, incentivising people to make the game suck is easy to do.”

This is not true so much as UO made both griefing and solo PvE too easy. It was easy for the griefers because hit and run gankage was easy. You hit the guy soloing outside town, and even if you had friends in close proximity, the murderer only had to recall and he was home free, so there were always solo PKs to contend with because there was nothing anyone could do to prevent them from ganking targets of opportunity.

On the other hand, they weren’t all that wide spread that people absolutely couldn’t solo PvE. You always had secure cities to fall back on, and if you were smart, you could still play solo because you also had the recall escape spell as well. Live was easier in a guild, but not overwhelmingly so.

My problem with WoW and it’s clones is that, in many ways, they really aren’t role playing games. This is reflected in the way people now refer to them as MMO games (massive multiple online games) instead of the older term, MMORPG (massive multiple online role playing games). WoW-esque games are exercise in grindage, whether it’s level grinding, gear grinding, achievement grinding, grinding, grinding, grinding. Grinding for what? For the success of your faction? Can’t be that, because it wouldn’t matter to your faction if you have the highest levels, the best gear, or whatever, Humans never lose Stormwind, and Orcs never lose Orgrimmar. The world is static.

The situation in a game like DarkFall is dramatically different. I am very much a citizen of the city state of Khosgar. I actively contribute to the success of my city, both through supplies gathered to improve our infrastructure, and through defense of the city from direct attack. If I lose on this ‘battlefield’, it doesn’t mean just a few repairs to my otherwise immortal gear. My supplies, my gear, and my mount may all be lost, suddenly and permanantly (at least until replaced). If the clan loses the battle and the city falls, suddenly we are all refugees in a hostile world. This is a level of role playing beyond anything WoW offers. MMO indeed.

On the other hand, outside of the newbie areas, I haven’t seen much of the griefing gankage that was common on UO. There are permanant faction cities, but they are vastly inferior to player cities. There are some unguilded solo players, but the overwhelming majority of players belong to clans, both large and small, so you don’t find many solo PKs or solo PvE players. The solo PKs and PvEers are both rare because you don’t have the fast recall ‘escape hatch’. Most players I encounter do not operate solo, so a solo player has to almost always contend with a group, which quickly results in a dead player. Actions have consequences in DF for both good guys and bad guys, which was less the case in UO.

You do have rival raiding parties, but at least in our case, they run significant risks because reinforcements are only a voice chat call away, and the hunters can quickly become the hunted unless they are very careful.

“However, the true problem with the grind is simply that you’re bored solid of the individual repetitive activities that constituted filling that experience bar.”

This represents the best argument I can think of both for and against games like WoW. The fact that you can be bored by doing the chief activities designed into the game says a lot. The fact that Wow in particular has so many subscribers demonstrates that many players don’t particularly want to be challenged, and are content with endlessly repeating simple tasks that are not particularly difficult as long the carrot of the next level, or the next bit of gear, or the next ‘achievement’ is available. Skill is not necessarily needed, but simple endurance most definately is. Thus, WoW successfully has a lot of subscribers. For many players, myself included, pure grindage games are no longer viable.

Darkfall has it’s share of grindage, to be sure. Mining and lumberjacking are not the most stimulating of activities, but they do have the advantage of yielding supplies and building attributes that contribute directly to my survival, both short term and long term. And since I never know when the next raiding party will show up, being bored is not something I have had to worry about for long.

If Darkfall will be a long term success, it will be because it followed at least part of Geldonyetich’s advice. “So, my formula for MMORPG success? Develop for niches…” Darkfall is very much a niche game, as Eve is a niche game, and as ShadowBane was a niche game before either of them. If you find yourself chafing at the odd design decisions taken by WoW and others, DF may be a niche that fits better than you think.

The problems are generally exaggerated. AV has already been back to normal for the last couple days on my battlegroup, Strand (which is awesome) isn’t affected at all. Arathi Basin is just spazzier than normal on flag flips. Only WSG and Eye are really adversely affected, and IMO anyone who actually enjoys WSG is adversely affected in the head anyway.

Even if you believe that to be the case Ingmar, there’s still the critical point in the fact it’s simply a poorly designed achievement. It requires players to act contrary to the good of the battleground, directly or indirectly, and forces competition over limited resources that would be irrelavent if not for the achievement.

You can get away with this sort of “do it backwards!” design in PVE since it’s both easier to design around and presumably everyone in a raid is willing and informed to do it a specific way. But in a battleground, you’re both facing an uncontrollable opposition and surrounded by random people who want to do things properly – perhaps still even while they’re going for the achievement.

There’s nothing wrong with game design that encourages players to try parts of games they might otherwise shy away from. Maybe Blizzard could have made the achievement progress for the battlegrounds simply winning one of each, though, or even win one or lose two — something like that.

Ha. The anger against archievements is an old one. I mean its the Blizzard’s way of making busisness: Put a purple manhood/self-esteem compensator in the finish line, and people will do any stupid-grindy-content strech thing any day of the week.

When the year passes and only 2-3 people have the Purple Drake i can bet that they will be called no-lifers for the rest despite the fact that they tried too.

When that happens the “holiday archievement frenzy” will slow down a lot.

I could say that people are stupid, but the problem is that the average WoW player thoughts are: Me no like think. Me think hard all day so Me want to sit ass in front of computer and do brain-dead activities that a monkey could do.

Winning BGs is harder that sit and click the flag all day. Thats why the archievements are things like that, after all is just Blizzard catering to their costumers.

“However, I suspect a larger portion of this was because ganking was a means to circumvent the grind. Would you rather spend several hours mining and smelting, or 5 minutes killing the miner and swiping their ingots?”

For the one thing, miners very rarely carried ingots. They carried ore, which required mining skill to refine, and was VERY heavy, so it was generally useless to the PKs. They would frequently steal ore, kill an animal, and then leave it on the corpse so it would vanish when the corpse decayed. It was more trouble to steal than it was worth as far as value was concerned. They robbed the miner not so much to profit from it, but rather to deny him the use of the ore. As mentioned, there was little downside to the activity in UO because it was so easy to get away with it. It’s a lot harder in Darkfall, and because they can’t get away as easily, attackers frequently die when trying it, so at least in my experience, solo PKs are FAR more rare than they were in UO.

“There’s two things that are keeping me out of Darkfall:

1. The PvP is completely unrestricted, meaning that individual player skill is second to how many people you can drag to the battlefield. It doesn’t matter how good you are, your village is dust the minute some guild bigger than yours, or perhaps simply on another time zone than you, decides they want to destroy it.”

I have not participated in a siege in the couple of weeks I have been playing, so I cannot comment on it in detail. From what I understand, it’s a major undertaking, it’s VERY expensive, and it involves huge risks for both sides, so it is not entered into lightly. Once I have a better understanding of the siege system, I’ll see if I can expand on that, but it would seem that DarkFall learned from mistakes made by ShadowBane where city building was an enormously difficult enterprise, but conducting sieges was trivial in comparison. There is a lot more involved than big guilds rolling over small guilds. If that were the case, sieges would be far more common than they are.

“2. The gameplay mechanic boasts no activity I haven’t already bored of in another game.”

Well, there’s nothing new under the sun, so until they start marketing holodecks, I guess you’re screwed, game-wise.

Agreed, taken in isolation, there is nothing earthshaking about things in Darkfall. Other games feature ancient weapons, magic, dungeons, PvE, and PvP, although the PvP in most other games is pretty anemic. Darkfall does stray pretty far from the WoW model, so for gamers who are looking for a style of play that very different from the large number of WoW clones available.

“The former assures that the game itself is an unbalanced travesty of a shadow of a game…”

Now there is an unbiased statement spoken from the depths of an ignorance so pure it sparkles, and from an complete lack of first hand knowledge whatsoever, but do carry on. You are certainly among friends here.

“…and the later assures that in order to find novelty in the game I’d have to convince myself it’s something’s it’s not.”

So you should not be considered to be part of Darkfall’s target audience. Yeah. I got that. I did mention niche games, and Darkfall does fill a niche currently unserved by any other game I am aware of, with the possible exception of Eve, which belongs to a different genre entirely, so there should be little competition between the two.

Some folks play WoW. Fine. Some folks play sports games. Good for them. Some folks play The Sims Online or Second Life. Well. There’s no accounting for taste. My one and only point is that players who are tired of riding the quest rails on a level based grindtastic game like WoW and it’s clones, a more wide open skill based sandbox game like Darkfall might be something to consider. In many ways, Darkfall seems more and more like a persistant first person shooter with elements of RTS build and conquer games. That is pretty different, at least in my experience, but then I’m not as thoroughly bored with it all as some.

Your milage may vary.

(Of course, a quick look at his related link reveals a gung-ho PvP guild currently situated in Darkfall Online.

I’m almost wise enough to remember that debating those who have arrived under the spell of a self-appointed crusade is inevitably fruitless. Such an individual is on a mission, and any claim that they’re here to learn is a ruse so profound that they themselves may believe it.)

Comparing Darkfall to EVE Online only acts as greater confirmation to me that I was indeed quite wise to know without trying in this case. This is because I criticize EVE Online along the exact same lines: the open, unbalanced PvP is not conductive to good gameplay.

EVE Online is actually a bit worse than Darkfall on the grounds that you’ll never catch up to established players by design. Skills are gained by simply designating skills and waiting, and they’ve several years of waiting in front of you. Economically, it’s even worse, the established players are the only ones who can afford to profit off all the starting players – a newbie’s asteroid/mission grinding ultimately makes sure the rich stay richer than you, because it’s the veteran players who are backing all the buying and selling in the home sectors.

That the BoB-death drama even happened is a massive indicator along the lines in which EVE Online is broken as a game. Why play EVE Online as a game – all that intergalactic resource acquisition, processing, and ship battles? If you want to make real progress, find somebody inside the corporation who is frustrated with how idiotic his fellow corp mates are, and has all the right permissions to destroy it. They’ll practically hand you the “win” button, and hand over hundreds of thousands of man hours of your corporation’s work to their enemies, because they can.

That said, don’t misunderstand me. Yes, I’m calling them terrible games, but that’s only because I’m operating under a fairly reasonable design premise that a “good” game should be balanced and fair to the players. If you don’t care about that, you can certainly enjoy them. I never said they didn’t excel at being a spectacle. Hey, being a spectacle works for Reality TV.

“There’s really no way around it, unrestricted PvP might bear some fruit in spectacle factor, but otherwise makes for a pretty broken game. It’s not like it’s hard to add, just flag the players so they can gank eachother and you’re done.”

This is an interesting theory you have there, but it doesn’t match the facts on the ground. If it were true, the KGB would be the undisputed power in our little corner of the continent, but we aren’t. We currently have large numbers, and a reasonabley large city, but the way the siege system works, if we were to lay siege to one of the small hamlets near our city that disputes our authority, we’d have to challenge them, and if they ally with the many other groups in the area that are fighting against us and we fail to take their hamlet, we either lose our city, or we have to stake such an enormous amount of gold that the risks FAR outweigh the benefits. So right now, we are embroiled in a guerilla war against numerous smaller insurgent groups in our area, and we are constrained by the game mechanics from being able to use our greater numbers against them.

That is good game design, and one we are not particularly upset about, because although we are limited in our capability to seize these smaller hamlets, we do enjoy a target rich environment where we can employ small group tactics over a very wide area, which brings us back to the relevance of this topic to this thread.

Lum was originally complaining about changes that have been made to the WoW battlegrounds, namely the achievements. I have no direct experience with that, but it does sound like it truly sucks, so I’ll take his word for it. He ends his post thus: “I hate WoW achievements. I want my game back, goddamit.”

I can’t help him there with respect to WoW, but I can suggest an alternative based on my own direct experience in Darkfall. At least with respect to a ‘battlefield’ situation, Darkfall does offer an environment that surpasses by far anything WoW has to offer in terms of size, scope, variety, and challenges. Alas, we have no “purple pulsating flying manhood compensators” to offer, but I think Lum would not consider that to be a bad thing.

“Would you play a team game where anyone’s capable of joining any side regardless of numbers? I wouldn’t, because 24 on 2 is pretty sucky balance. Put those odds on any game, where any player is given an equal power lot, and an “unbalanced travesty of a shadow of a game” is a very apt description.”

If you are talking football, yeah, that would make for a long afternoon, particularly if you are constrained to a regulation field. But this is the view of PvP as a sporting event that fails, in my opinion. I’ve played 2 v 24 odds on the short side, and as long as you don’t let them box you in and smother you, it can be hilareous, particularly if the mob isn’t very well organized. While they are milling about trying to figure out what to do, you can frequently pick one or two folks off who aren’t paying attention, and make it out before they know what’s happened.

Sure, in cases like that, I almost invariably end up taking a dirt nap, but sometimes that’s intentional. The other day, I was out chopping some wood, gathering resources, and I was jumped by a party from a rival group. I knew I was going to die, but they were mounted and less maneuverable while I was on foot, and I was able to bob and weave and duck between them while they were hitting each other more than they were hitting me long enough that reinforcements from the city I had alerted over voice chat were able to arrive and roll over them. Yeah, I died, but I lost nothing, and they lost 5 mounts, plus all their gear. I count that as a win, and the biter ended up getting bit.

If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.

“I can tell because you keep dragging the conversation back to Darkfall that you’re here to defend it. Well, guess what? The people here actually know what they’re talking about. Darkfall is pretty dang broken in many fundamental ways.”

The reason I keep dragging the conversation back is because it’s relevant. People, like Lum, either point out problems with other games, and I point out that if that feature bothers you, here’s an alternative that doesn’t suffer from that problem. Alternatively, people lke you who have never played some game, in this case Darkfall, make sweeping that are contrary at least to my personal experience, so in the interest of clarifying the situation, I try to set the record straight.

“Of course, a quick look at his related link reveals a gung-ho PvP guild currently situated in Darkfall Online.”

I’m not sure how this is a bad thing. If any of Scott’s readers were to want to learn more about Darkfall, to whom should they turn? Should they listen to someone who has never played the game, is hostile to the genre in general, and whose conceptions about the game are contrary to how the game actually works, or should they listen to a person who is actively and enthusiastically playing? Before anyone drops their hard earned 50 bucks on Darkfall, by all means, drop by the KGB web site (oracle.the-kgb.com) and get a feel for what is really going on, good and bad. That way, you would be making a more informed decision than you would by listening to someone saying, “Yeah, I’ve never played it, but I heard Ultima Online sucked because it had unrestricted PvP, and EvE is just a non-stop gankathon, and don’t EVEN get me started about ShadowBane… So based on that, I know that Darkfall is an unbalanced travesty of a shadow of a game, or something.”

As near as I can tell, you are calling it a terrible game either because there is no ‘Easy Win’ button, or no referee to make the sporting event you are looking for “fair”. It’s not so much a terrible game as it is a game that you don’t care for, which is fine. The last thing I want is to have someone buy any game and then whine about how ‘unfair’ it all is. To quote the immortal words of Gunnery Sergeant Hartmann from Full Metal Jacket, “… my orders are to weed out all non-hackers who do not pack the gear to serve in my beloved Corps. Do you maggots understand that?”

Darkfall is not easy. It is not fair. You will die. A lot. And when I say a lot, I mean a LOT. From the start, your skills will suck, and they will suck hard for a very long time. Quests are limited, so if you are addicted to the glowing “!” over some npc’s head, move along. This is not the MMORPG you are looking for. You may join a small guild, start doing well, and the next week a bigger group will roll into your area and knock you on your collective butts. You may have to take to the hills and live by your wits, wishing you had eyes in the back of your head. Or, you may experience what is best in life! “To crush your enemies, to drive them before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!”

But you will not be bored.

It’s that, or “purple pulsating flying manhood compensators.” (Heh! I love that phrase.) Your choice.

Choose wisely.

P.S. If you have any other faulty conceptions about how the game works, by all means, contribute them, and I will seek to clarify. I am here to serve.

“The early state of any MMORPG is always extremely different from the later state.”

Fair enough. As has been pointed out here and elsewhere, Darkfall is not without its problems. If it is still going strong in two years, no one will be happier than I, although I’m having bit of a hard time following the logic of a statement that says, in effect, “Well, it seems to be working to perfection right now, so of course I wouldn’t want to try it currently.”

Of course, in two years, even if the current balance of power is maintained, you will have folks saying, “Joining Darkfall now is an exercise in futility. The established clans have been there two years, and new players stand no chance.” Whatever.

I think it must be a ‘comfort zone’ thing, and few folks like to stray too far from theirs.

Because its hype. Thats for shareholders and calming down trolls. And this is a Hardcore PvP game, a type of game that would be more enjoyable if didnt atract the community that atracts.

I like the achievements, generally. But some of them are very frustrating. I am a kibbles and bits recipe away from getting my Chef achievement but despite doing the BC cooking quest on a daily basis for months, the recipe has not dropped. Similarly the SoHK achievement sux hard. I gave up.

Alliance are not allowed to bitch about not winning EotS as they always friggin win AB and AV.

Vivianne Draper :I like the achievements, generally. But some of them are very frustrating. I am a kibbles and bits recipe away from getting my Chef achievement but despite doing the BC cooking quest on a daily basis for months, the recipe has not dropped. Similarly the SoHK achievement sux hard. I gave up.

And geldonyedich calls Darkfall “an unbalanced travesty of a shadow of a game.” I read that, and started bleeding from the ears.

Vivianne. I have no words. No human being should be subjected to that degree of suffering…