By Request, This Week's Darkfall Post!

Well, I tried submitted a long post with links, failed several times, then succeeded with some reformatting, then editted it, and the edit caught the moderation filter. So I don’t know if it’s still visible from before the edit, but if it’s still not up for a while I’ll try again.

Risking a multiple post (sorry Scott):

Keen’s blog is blocked at my work too, but luckily I can dig in my Google Reader RSS archives. He has many, many posts on Darkfall, including very detailed (and often enthusiastic) accounts of his time spent in Darkfall, and I skimmed through them just now backwards, latest posts first. Here’s one towards the end, where he collects some of his general thoughts on the flaws:

Here’s a far more detailed collection of thoughts on hits and misses written in the middle of his time in Darkfall:

Here’s one part way after his initial beginner days (actually after the last link), describing what he’d been up to in-game:

Here’s where he gets hopeful about the “end-game”

And this is from the very beginning, part 1 of 5 or so of his initial impressions

So hopefully you’ll see that he did give the game a fair shake, and that, for him at least, the unsatisfactory outweighed the good.

A game can still be poorly constructed and yet people will find it enjoyable.

This statement makes no sense. I would think that it would be axiomatic that if people enjoy a game, by definition, it is well constructed for that audience. Tastes differ. I do not proclam that soccer is poorly constructed, and thus a failed game just because I prefer basketball.

Darkfall Online fully deserved a bad score because it is, in many ways, an ill-conceived game. Provably so, insofar as game theory is provable (which is not very…)

Yeah, this is great. It’s provable (but not really…). Do read this stuff before you Submit Comment?

Again, you are referring to an issue of taste and preference. It is not an absolute.

Specifically, what is wrong with Darkfall from a game design assessment? I have yet to hear that defined.

I find blog game reviews like Lums way more helpful than “official” game critics. Bloggers are just people with a website and an opinion. They do not pretend to be anything that they are not. On the other hand game site critics tend to have nice things to say about any game produced by a company that has advertising money to spend. Making their reviews almost totally useless.

I read Eurogamers review and it looks like Aventurine does not have any advertising money to spend. So the reviewer decided the game was not worth nice words or his time. That said, some of his observations may well be valid. The complaints about the combat system concern me, but the rest of it sounds like the reviewer was unhappy because the game is not like WoW.

I have not played Darkfall. But I remember Owain’s guild from Shadowbane. I’ll bet that is why Owain is having a good time well others are struggling. In Shadowbane you join a guild first, and then you make a character. You log your character in and get it added to your guild, and BAM, you’re in the end game content. I’m betting Darkfall is very similar.

There’s a loot mini-game? I’m not entirely sure I understand what you are saying.

Do you mean that the process of looting a corpse, npc or player, is controlled by the client, and although it hasn’t happened yet, so it currently is not a problem at all, at some point in the future (or maybe never) someone may write an autoloot hack, so Q.E.D, Darkfall is teh FAIL.

How would you suggest that this design abomination be fixed? The user has to select the tombstone using the client. The user has to drag individual items, again using the client. Everything the user does to communicate with the server, by definition, uses the client. How do you suggest they change this. Require telepathy?

I don’t see this as a major problem. If you are in a pickup group, and somebody employs a loot hack like this, you have a nice option. The group can always gank him, and take the loot of his rapidly cooling corpse.

This isn’t a long term solution, so maybe the best bet is to report him to the dev’s, who hopefully will be able to detect the use of an unauthorized hack in violation of the TOS, so you may be able to perform the ultimate gank, and get his account canceled.

If this is the worst ‘flaw’ you can come up with, I can rest easy.

Next?

@Owain
I’ll give Aventurine that, it knew precisely which type of clientele it wanted to reach, but it’s not much to Aventurine’s credit because that clientele is incredibly easy to pin down. They hate Trammel UO way past everyone’s caring point. They played Shadowbane, until the bugs and exploits, not the premise, ruined it. They cry “carebear” left and right, and they can’t find a game to satisfy them because the games around them have all been tainted by carebearization. They see their gameplay as permanently under siege from their inferiors who dare to refuse to play victims to their greatness. They are organized. And whatever they say, they ensure they say it as loudly as possible.

Aventurine just pushed the right buttons, and that’s how it ended up with that “community”. Whether it’ll manage to retain it over the long term, considering how quickly such players abandon games, is another matter.

That clientele and Tasos’ grandstanding are, to borrow a cliche, a match made in heaven; they feed off one another. And if you don’t believe me that the community is one of the worst out there, by all means, check it out for yourself, both on the official Darkfall forums and on the MMORPG.com Darkfall forum (since I don’t play the game, it’s the most direct evidence I have). See their old-school smug sense of superiority which might be, WoW’s invincible-juggernaut “casual elitists” excepted, the most arrogant you’ll find around a game anywhere. Read the Darkfall players’ trash-talking, even when addressing legitimate questions or answering mild jokes. But if you’re reading a blog such as this, it’s likely you already read the forums.

As for pandering to such hardcore players, what about the “choice words” before choosing to finish off another player? I’m pretty sure it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

In that case, WoW panders to it’s resident asshats, Warhammer panders to it’s asshats, and so does Second Life, Left 4 Dead, and every other game that has ever been released. It’s called Marketing.

‘Darkfall, the Forum’ is not ‘Darkfall, the Game’, which is why I do not waste my time on the forums. In my experience, the players who are the least accomplished in the game are the ones who are most prolific on the forums. If they spend as much time in game as they spend perfecting their forum PvP, they’d be better off. I’m sure I could go on the WoW Battleground forums and find morons there as well. They might even be the same morons, playing both games. You’ll have to do better than that.

What “choice words” when finishing off another player? You don’t have a feature in Darkfall like you had in UO where speech appears over your head. You can’t ‘talk’ to another player. There is a global chat channel, but no one I know monitors that channel. I’ve deleted it from my interface because I have quite enough to keep track of in the System, Clan, and Alliance channels. There is a tell function, which shows up in a separate tab, but those are usually Delete-Before-Reading. If you open that tab, you deserve what you get. I think I’ve gotten a total of 3 annonymous Tells, which may have been innocent, I don’t know. I don’t think that trash talk is a big problem.

Again, since you don’t play the game, you really don’t have an accurate idea what goes on in the game. Since your assumptions are flawed, perhaps you should reconsider your conclusions.

Vetarnias :

It’s one thing to be conservative. It’s quite another to brag about how successful the game is because the game’s demand so outweighs supply.

Is anyone bragging about how wildly successful they are? I haven’t heard about it, if so. Got a link?

Even so, success is relative. They are FAR more successful than the developers of Duke Nukem Forever.

I haven’t heard about it, if so.

However, I’m not sure about long-term growth by restricting supply. If I’m left waiting too long in line outside a fashionable nightclub, how long will it take before I say, screw it, I’ll do something else instead? It’s arguable how long it will take, but the game’s momentum will pass. And the queue will dry up.

Patience, grasshopper. It took Eve years to build it’s player base, which was done slowly, and mostly by word of mouth. There seems to be a ‘fast-food-mentality’ at work here. If you don’t instantly get your gamer-happy-meal, something must be wrong. Maybe. Maybe not.

If so many people are lined up, why doesn’t Aventurine seize the opportunity to maintain supply as close to demand as possible? Why not make a cash grab early on, even if that might mean cutting down on servers in a few months when the Darkfall fad has passed? It’s one thing to start with too many servers (or to mistake early success for steady numbers down the road, a la Age of Conan); it’s another to keep supply low no matter what, especially if the demand is there.

Let me scroll up… Yes, I did mention ‘small independent developer’ and ‘limited resources’. Just checking.

I’m sure the Darkfall devs would dearly love to capture some of that pent up demand right now, but for reasons best known to them, there must be constraints they facing that precludes that. As soon as they are able, I’m sure they will.

I can understand Aventurine’s refusal to overestimate demand. But I can’t understand their not even trying to meet it.
EVE is basically one large server, but did it have limitations on the number of players who could play? I’m not sure, but I never heard about anyone being forced to wait to register for the game.

Eve doesn’t have multiple ‘shards’, so speaking of servers is a misnomer for them, and is probably not accurate for other games as well. As I understand it, Eve increases it’s player capacity by adding more servers to a collective server farm, which is probably also true of other games.

I played Eve briefly, but didn’t like the ‘ship is your body’ approach. I couldn’t identify that ship on the screen as being ME. While I playing, there were times where you would have problems in high population star systems. Lag in those systems would be very bad, and when trying to enter that system via a jump gate, you’d enter a jump queue that would keep you waiting for a long time sometimes. Eve did not limit game purchases, but allowed population to degrade game performance. Over time, they added additional servers and larger servers to improve things, but some systems were always very laggy.

Darkfall has elected to limit population rather than degrade game performance. Having tried both, I prefer the Darkfall approach, but that’s easy for me to say, since I’m in game, and others are still waiting. Again, time will tell if Darkfall made the correct development choice here.

Vetarnias :@OwainI’ll give Aventurine that, it knew precisely which type of clientele it wanted to reach, but it’s not much to Aventurine’s credit because that clientele is incredibly easy to pin down. They hate Trammel UO way past everyone’s caring point. They played Shadowbane, until the bugs and exploits, not the premise, ruined it. They cry “carebear” left and right, and they can’t find a game to satisfy them because the games around them have all been tainted by carebearization. They see their gameplay as permanently under siege from their inferiors who dare to refuse to play victims to their greatness. They are organized. And whatever they say, they ensure they say it as loudly as possible.
Aventurine just pushed the right buttons, and that’s how it ended up with that “community”. Whether it’ll manage to retain it over the long term, considering how quickly such players abandon games, is another matter.
That clientele and Tasos’ grandstanding are, to borrow a cliche, a match made in heaven; they feed off one another. And if you don’t believe me that the community is one of the worst out there, by all means, check it out for yourself, both on the official Darkfall forums and on the MMORPG.com Darkfall forum (since I don’t play the game, it’s the most direct evidence I have). See their old-school smug sense of superiority which might be, WoW’s invincible-juggernaut “casual elitists” excepted, the most arrogant you’ll find around a game anywhere. Read the Darkfall players’ trash-talking, even when addressing legitimate questions or answering mild jokes. But if you’re reading a blog such as this, it’s likely you already read the forums.
As for pandering to such hardcore players, what about the “choice words” before choosing to finish off another player? I’m pretty sure it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Ahhhh. Now I get it. Its not that DarkFall its terribad, its that you, Lum and many, many others really dislike the market of DarkFall. Even if it DarfFall was perfect (that it isnt), many people would still complain about it because they hate the community.

Besides that, i still stand that Adventurine doesnt fight macroers because they enjoy their blowjobs.

Owain, please…
You are being too articulated and making sense.
You are even bothering to politely debate with people who are not engaged in a serious discussion, just mud slinging.
We have to keep the FFA PVP players reputation.
Just write a “back to wow, n00bxor, lulz1!!!!1111″

IainC :

Owain :

A game can still be poorly constructed and yet people will find it enjoyable.

This statement makes no sense. I would think that it would be axiomatic that if people enjoy a game, by definition, it is well constructed for that audience. Tastes differ. I do not proclam that soccer is poorly constructed, and thus a failed game just because I prefer basketball.

His point makes perfect sense. A game can be poorly designed or otherwise flawed and people will still play it despite that. People will play practically anything as long as they are able to find some meagre crumb of comfort from somewhere in the design.
There are plenty of bad games out in the wild. People play all of them despite their many faults. And a ‘bad game’ is defined by the quality of its design and not by the preferences of its players. By trying to redefine the argument as a question of differing tastes, shows that you don’t actually understand the points that are being made.

At one point, though, the preferences of players will reflect on what is deemed good or bad game design.

However, I entirely agree with the view that people will play deficient or even bad games (even by their own standards) because they enjoy one element of it. Would Mount & Blade, for example, be such a success if it were judged exclusively by the depth of its politics or the variety of its quests? No, all that I hear about the game is that it is good despite the repetitive quests (worse, being forced to do them if you’re a vassal with any given kingdom), mostly on the strength of its battle mode. Or the Gothic series, a model of how to NOT do an interface, which wins points purely on immersion and plot design.

We could discuss this subject for days on what makes a good or bad game, and how we should assess it, but tastes would probably take a large part of the list of criteria — unless you want to address purely technical concerns such as bugs or game stability, which are besides the point here.

However, as far as this conversation is concerned, I feel like taking the disgustingly consumerist cop-out of saying that a good game, as far as MMO’s are concerned, is one whose features are commercially viable. That way, I skirt around personal tastes and the moral high ground. Yeah, I know what this also means, and I can’t shake off the mental image of WoW fanatics grinning from ear to ear. But games are a business. As much as I think that WoW’s commercial success doesn’t mean it’s perfect (far from it, in fact), from a commercial viewpoint it’s still some kind of holy grail that, for better or worse, can’t be ignored by the industry. But sustainability is an important factor that is unique to MMO’s, because in single-player games the closest we get to that is replay value — and even then, they’ve made their money off you, they don’t care if you play it a week before letting it gather dust on the shelf.

From that perspective, can Darkfall sustain itself? That would depend on a few factors. First, assuming the game lives up to its premise, it refuses to offer anything to PvE players because it doesn’t want to have them around. Fair enough. Better make that clear instead of having a situation like Pirates of the Burning Sea where you try to appeal to both PvP and PvE players, and in the end satisfy neither. Where’s PotBS today? It’s still around, but based on what I saw last month the PvEers seem to have all left. A few reasons I’m tossing out: lack of quest variety, PvE that almost exclusively served PvP, the internal guild production that killed the economy, etc. But the big one: PvEers like to do their stuff without being fodder to the PvPers. And the PvPers, on the other hand, just need to grind to be able to PvP. If we’re talking about imperfect design, that is one blatant example.

So on that level, the game just made it clear it’s not for the PvE crowd. Fine, I’m not losing sleep over that. But then you need to explain why Shadowbane, which also made it clear (with “play to crush”, etc.) that it was exclusively for PvP and RvR, happened to fail. Six years might be long, but how long was it artificially kept alive? I played in late 2007 and it looked dead, despite the Asian popularity of the game, an unwanted demographic as far as advertisers funding the then-free game were concerned.

Unfortunately, what you’re getting when discussing Shadowbane is that everything but the premise is to blame for its failure. The bugs (SB.exe, for example), the exploits, the developers’ actions, a few design choices (Wanderer often mentions the function-follows-form problems of the game). Sure, there were problems with that. But in the world of laissez-faire sandbox gaming, there is another problem that accompanies the premise: What happens when the map is dead? Big alliance decisively wins over other big alliance. Now what?

When that happens in EVE, I’m sure the game will start dying, unless CCP comes up with something to keep it dynamic — and after six years, surely they’ve thought of something. Pirates of the Burning Sea used periodic map resets as an alternative. It detracted from the “permanent” aspect of the world, and the same factions won every round unless they had collapsed in the meantime, but at least the map maintained a semblance of dynamism as a result — even if by a deus ex machina.

And that’s where I’m not particularly confident about Darkfall. Maybe they’ll be lucky, and the map will stay dynamic for years like EVE’s. But what will Aventurine do if it doesn’t? Have they thought of something? And how will the Darkfall community take it? Does the community even think long-term after starting to play the game? Don’t such players usually stay for a few months then leave when they start losing or when they get bored?

Honestly, I don’t have much confidence in Aventurine to solve or even address these problems. Everything about the release so far has been amateurish, from their sort-of beta and their woes after going live to their credit card billing problems to the rampant macroing we hear about. And all we get is smack-talking from players and Tasos alike. It’s as though the issues will just go away by bullying them hard enough. Attitude is no solution to game design problems, because it just smacks of “no, never mind the sea water in your cabin, or the objects rolling off your dresser, the ship is NOT sinking”.

Is there anything in place to avoid a Shadowbane scenario? I’m not sure. But the two servers that did remain alive before the last round of wipes last year were those where the map was still dynamic, and where the Asian zerg hadn’t invaded everything.

If Darkfall can sustain itself, all the better, because we sure as hell need alternatives to World of Warcraft. I even remember Lum posting something to this effect a few months ago. But the problem is thus: Aventurine is almost like an opposition slate in a two-party system where the administration is corrupt, arrogant, and haughty. But all it manages to propose as an alternative is to fill fire hydrants with single-malt Scotch and hold armpit-farting contests as the high point of its cultural policy. They are, in one word, a joke. And if they fail, the bean counters will just nod and say “we told you so” and stay away from PvP games. And the WoWites will just claim another scalp, regardless of context.

And regardless of shortcomings in execution (such as Shadowbane’s), the premise of a sandbox FFA PvP comes with problems, but Aventurine has shown little willingness or competence to address them. How do we combat player attrition? What is there to do with griefing? How can the map remain dynamic? Questions apparently all brushed off, for it would be too carebear to address them.

Owain :“Demand exceeding availability is a failure in itself – no no, really, it is.”
In a perfect world with unlimited resources, maybe.
So, which is worse?
1) Capacity far exceeds demand for your game, so you lose money hand over fist, you have to combine low populations servers, delete servers, and perhaps go out of business because you’ve developed a game no one wants to play (Vanguard comes to mind here).
2) Because you are a small developer with limited resources, you conservatively open with one server, and limit availabilty to maintain a server population you can support, but you are able to continually enhance your product and improve capacity because you remain profitable, and over the long run supply an entertaining game to an appreciative audience. (Eve most closely fits model).
As you say, time will tell. For now, Darkfall appears to be following the second development strategy.

There is a third state, where capacity is grossly below long term fiscal viability. This is the state we all suspect darkfall is currently in. They have been limiting the availablility of the game to throttle the number of players on their server, because the server and software capabilities simply cannot handle larger numbers. At least not alone or not at this time. But everyone reading here is a student of MMO’s for many many years. Even if Darkfall is an extreme niche product, with a planned lower development cost and cost of operation, there is simply no way that the numbers we have been seeing make sense. In any modern subscription model MMO do you really see any feasable way for a MMO provider to pay off several years worth of development costs and pay for continuing operations on the basis of 10k or so subscribers? Based on their known or stated staffing, and their known or strongly suspected subscriber base, their annual income stands at roughly around $36,000 per employee. This is before development costs and ongoing non employee operational costs such as servers, bandwidth etc are factored in.

Does anyone here really think this is a viable success or a sustainable model of operation? I think we all have come to expect that the absolute drop dead break even point for most MMO’s, The low ball budgeting estimate that makes it a “niche game”, Is a minimum of around 100k paying subscribers. And the sad thing is Darkfall could probably hit that easily, if their tech could actually handle that number. The fact that their current tech cannot handle subsciber numbers that would be needed for fiscal viability, at the time of release, is a core design flaw. The biggest I at least have ever witnessed in one of these games.

Owain :
There’s a loot mini-game? I’m not entirely sure I understand what you are saying.
Do you mean that the process of looting a corpse, npc or player, is controlled by the client, and although it hasn’t happened yet, so it currently is not a problem at all, at some point in the future (or maybe never) someone may write an autoloot hack, so Q.E.D, Darkfall is teh FAIL.

Yes, I mean that process. No, I did not say “Darkfall is teh FAIL.”

You asked what was wrong with Darkfall from the design perspective. I presented this as evidence as something that is poorly designed.

How would you suggest that this design abomination be fixed?

Design goals:
1) prevent people from looting quickly
2) trade off fully looting a corpse vs escaping quickly
3) prioritizing looting order quickly
4) excitement of seeing the Sword of Coolness among junk items

User view:
Click on the tombstone to loot. You go to the loot screen. You click once on items to loot. These items are added to your loot queue in order of clicking. Queue is visible, growing as you add to it, and disappearing as you successfully grab the items. Items also disappear from the queue if someone else loots them first. You can hit a Loot All button that just dumps everything on the queue, maybe sorting by some $$ metric. Maybe you can rearrange the queue by drag dropping the queue if you see something you want more.

Looting proceeds by the server grabbing the top item on your queue and transferring it to you. Then there is a cooldown time, run on the server, before you can loot the next item. If someone grabs the item before you, it is gone from your queue, so you don’t lose your loot chance, you just pick the next thing on your queue.

Result:
We have pretty much eliminated the possibility of a client side hack. We have maintained the tension of looting a corpse, and the fun part of the game of choosing which things to loot first. What we cut out was the twitch button mashing. We also have the option of making a Looting Skill which cuts the cooldown period.

The user has to select the tombstone using the client. The user has to drag individual items, again using the client. Everything the user does to communicate with the server, by definition, uses the client. How do you suggest they change this. Require telepathy?
I don’t see this as a major problem.

The limiting factor in how quickly I can loot a corpse is how quickly I can drag items with my mouse. This is a false limit as I could easily make an auto-looter that does that dragging for me much faster. If looting quickly becomes important, such auto-looters will predominant. If looting quickly isn’t important, well, why the heck do you have this in the first place. Why give people RSI if all you wanted to do was slow down looting? If your goal is to slow down looting, slow it down.

If you are in a pickup group, and somebody employs a loot hack like this, you have a nice option. The group can always gank him, and take the loot of his rapidly cooling corpse.

That is a rather meaningless counterbalance. In such a pick up group you probably would *want* someone to use this to ensure no one outside the pick up group loots it. The designated looter would then call out the items and do the person-to-person trade. Or just wait until everyone is back home to redistribute. In UO, the dungeon crawls I went on always ended with dumping all the loot on the ground for people to pick through afterwards.

This isn’t a long term solution, so maybe the best bet is to report him to the dev’s, who hopefully will be able to detect the use of an unauthorized hack in violation of the TOS, so you may be able to perform the ultimate gank, and get his account canceled.

And how do you tell the difference between an auto looter and someone who is just really skilled at dragging stuff off a corpse? And how is it good game design to make a system where the “solution” is to waste GMs time investigating hard to substantiate rumours?

If this is the worst ‘flaw’ you can come up with, I can rest easy.

You merely asked for evidence of poor design. I have presented it.

@faefrost

What, then is your theory as to why Darkfall does not provide additional servers? My theory is that they will expand capacity/servers incrementally as resources permit. I see nothing to contradict that theory so far. Prior to this, they have been developing with ZERO customer revenue. They may consider themselves still in development are are using the subscriptions to improve their cash flow. The game now is sufficiently mature that I don’t mind paying to play it now, even if it isn’t in it’s final form. Customers pay the development costs over the long run anyway. Most costs are paid after the fact. Maybe I am helping pay more up front than most. Hopefully, the game will only get better as a result.

@Brask Mumei

In practice, your autoloot ‘problem’ isn’t a large concern. I noticed it while running newbie quests during my first 3 days. Since that time, I have only run in clan groups where we have a designated looter anyway, so I haven’t opened a tombstone in nearly 3 weeks.

It isn’t a problem in PvP either, since it’s an all or nothing thing. In a big fight, people frequently don’t have time to administer the gank coup ‘de grace, let alone loot your corpse. If you pause to finish someone off, or try to loot them, you will quickly find yourself being looted. If they have time to successfully loot your body, it means you have no allies close at hand to prevent it, so fast or slow, it doesn’t make much difference.

You approach, it seems, is a solution looking for a problem that doesn’t exist over the long term. It would be a minor improvement down the road, perhaps, but I’d rather have the dev’s working on other issues before they address this one.

@Vetarnias

“The problem I have with Darkfall, if we can call it a problem, is that it not only claims to offer an alternative to WoW (which I’d say is most welcome when the bulk of the industry is seemingly content with copying it), but that it pretends to offer a superior alternative.”

It IS a superior alternative for the market it was developed for. It is the ONLY alternative in my view, so that makes it an EXCEPTIONALLY superior alternative. It may not be the alternative YOU would like, but that in itself doesn’t invalidate the statement. Sometimes, it’s not all about you. It’s not even all about most game players. In this particular case, it happens to be about ME, and people like me.

“I’d love to play a sandbox game with consequences if it were peopled with chivalric fools such as myself, and yes, even with people who’d readily stab you in the back — as long as they respect the game environment.”

I’m sorry, that is elitist role playing bullshit. There isn’t a great deal of difference between a character named “BarBArIaX WooFKilLer” or “Grishnachk the Terrible”. Neither are particularly easy to pronounce, and both are equally hard on the eyes, but in general I don’t notice names except to separate friend from foe. Who knows. Maybe in Orkish, Grishnahk translates to Ganks-a-lot.

You are proceeding from a false premise, though, with respect to trash talking. As I mentioned yesterday, I see none of that in game. Words don’t appear over players heads as in UO, they appear in the global chat channel, which to my knowledge, no one monitors. So even if someone is trash talking, no one is listening, so who cares. I suspect no one does it because they KNOW no one is listening, but it isn’t worth the effort necessary to check the theory.

The old-school hardcore players don’t need to outgrow pre-Trammel UO. Why should they? They prefer the kind of game they prefer, and are content to have you play the kind of game you prefer as long as OUR kind of game is available. However some people, you perhaps, seem never to have gotten over the fact that long ago, someone was mean to them, and used rude language. As such, the thought that somewhere, somehow, a PvPer may be enjoying himself is for some reason, intolerable.

Is it any wonder why some people want to keep their distance? No! You should keep your distance. That’s what I’m trying to say. If you don’t like unrestricted PvP, don’t play Darkfall. I suspect most people on this forum will fall into this category. The reason I’m here, bucking the current, is NOT to convert the ‘heathens’. I AM one of the heathens. I’m here to explain why most of commentary here about Darkfall is uninformed/misinformed nonsense. If along the way, I attract a new player or two, fine, but I don’t expect that to happen.

But when people say things like “Darkfall is fundamentally flawed and that’s provable (except that I admit it isn’t, but I like saying stoopid things like this because most folks here will nod their heads in agreement anyway),” I have to roll my eyes and submit yet another wall-o’-text to try at least to counter the most laughable misconceptions.

Futile, I know, but then I enjoy unrestricted PvP in general, and Darkfall in particular. I MUST just enjoy the pain.

Drakks :…in Darkfall it’s 100% pvp loot your kills OMG HARDCORE!!!111!1 (insert tiger roaring or screaming jet engine here).

If you include the phrase, “screaming twin J-79 jet engines, in full afterburner, from a supersonic MacDonnel Douglas F-4E Phantom II, it’s freakin’ 20 MM Vulcan cannon blazing”, you will be closer to the mark. But that’s only because I used to fly Phantoms…

Otherwise, not bad.

Crappy game play or not, there are tons of companies that would to unspeakable things to livestock to be in the same position as the Darkfall folks. (i.e.: too many customers to actually sell your product)

“You can suggest short sightedness, poor planning, or bad flossing technique, but neither you or I have a clue of what is going on, so why dwell on it?”

We can’t know for certain what exactly is in Tasos’ mind so we shouldn’t bother discussing it? Come on.

“If they are doing well a year from now, they will have been proven right”

How will you define “doing well”? That’s the tricky part.

“I do not contend that Darkfall has a perfect game design. It’s OK.”

What do you consider it’s flaws? (Even if for you they aren’t big enough to cause problems.)

“It is a simple design, but it doesn’t need to made more complicated than it is, because the current design has a near zero impact, long term, on game play.”

You’re not really getting the server-side vs. client-side problem, are you? Making the mechanics completely client-side, instead of for example implementing a server-side cooldown, makes it trivial and untraceable to hack, as others have noted.

“And yes, Darkfall does have lag, for many of the same reasons you list for Eve.”

And yet EVE didn’t restrict purchases like Darkfall does.

Owain :
@Vetarnias
“The problem I have with Darkfall, if we can call it a problem, is that it not only claims to offer an alternative to WoW (which I’d say is most welcome when the bulk of the industry is seemingly content with copying it), but that it pretends to offer a superior alternative.”
It IS a superior alternative for the market it was developed for. It is the ONLY alternative in my view, so that makes it an EXCEPTIONALLY superior alternative. It may not be the alternative YOU would like, but that in itself doesn’t invalidate the statement. Sometimes, it’s not all about you. It’s not even all about most game players. In this particular case, it happens to be about ME, and people like me.

Fair enough. I’d just shrug and move along. However, the segment of your player core which scoffs at any other gamestyle except its own makes it impossible. These guys don’t respect me as a player; why should I just turn the other cheek?

“I’d love to play a sandbox game with consequences if it were peopled with chivalric fools such as myself, and yes, even with people who’d readily stab you in the back — as long as they respect the game environment.”
I’m sorry, that is elitist role playing bullshit. There isn’t a great deal of difference between a character named “BarBArIaX WooFKilLer” or “Grishnachk the Terrible”. Neither are particularly easy to pronounce, and both are equally hard on the eyes, but in general I don’t notice names except to separate friend from foe. Who knows. Maybe in Orkish, Grishnahk translates to Ganks-a-lot.
You are proceeding from a false premise, though, with respect to trash talking. As I mentioned yesterday, I see none of that in game. Words don’t appear over players heads as in UO, they appear in the global chat channel, which to my knowledge, no one monitors. So even if someone is trash talking, no one is listening, so who cares. I suspect no one does it because they KNOW no one is listening, but it isn’t worth the effort necessary to check the theory.

Then I really have to ask how much of a community you have in the game if chat isn’t even paid attention to. But I’m pretty sure you’re going to say it’s all happening inside guilds, and most of it on voice chat.

As for roleplaying, yeah, I know it seems elitist to some. That’s why games maintain designated RP servers. That reminds me of the controversy surrounding the fact that Age of Conan didn’t have a North American RP-PvE server, while there was one in Europe. I remember some forum comments at the time wondering whether this wasn’t some sort of prejudice on the part of Funcom. I can understand why it’s annoying to non-roleplayers, as roleplayers usually seek to impose their own criteria on everybody to make sure the illusion is complete. Hence the segregation, and when there is no roleplaying server, such players just agree on one and settle there.

But sadly, roleplaying seems to be exercised by a small minority today. And I thought the RPG part of MMORPG still meant something.

The old-school hardcore players don’t need to outgrow pre-Trammel UO. Why should they? They prefer the kind of game they prefer, and are content to have you play the kind of game you prefer as long as OUR kind of game is available. However some people, you perhaps, seem never to have gotten over the fact that long ago, someone was mean to them, and used rude language. As such, the thought that somewhere, somehow, a PvPer may be enjoying himself is for some reason, intolerable.

If we leave the psychobabble aside, the problem isn’t that some people loved UO (or maybe still do), it is that by now said love for UO has been taken over by nostalgia. And unfortunately, part of the effects of said nostalgia has been to transform game the game design flaws of UO into now desirable features.

Don’t be mistaken, I love old games (well, going back to the late ’90′s, when I bought my first computer). I still play a few of them, just as I can imagine myself playing Mount & Blade on occasion five years from now. But I realize that the times have changed, the technology has changed, as have artistic considerations.

I respect the history of the field. However, when I see something like, say, Dwarf Fortress, that is replete with nostalgia at the expense of gameplay, how can I not cringe? In the case of Dwarf Fortress, it’s a very good game, with more depth than most of what’s on the market today, but it’s a post-2000 throwback to the glorious era of ASCII. Even worse, the sole designer is in his lower thirties, which is about my age. But the difference between him and me is that he had access to a computer as a child, whereas I did not, so I was spared the entire eighties’ contribution to home computing which he apparently can’t shake off.

Which means I end up looking at Dwarf Fortress and its chain-key commands barely less convoluted than an optometrist’s eye chart with a mix of desperation and frustration, because I see how much better the game would have been had its maker been willing to acknowledge the existence of the mouse. (And instead of working on his interface, he’s still adding on top of the existing game following his every whim, the gaming equivalent of the Winchester Mansion.)

Likewise, UO is a product of its time, and I see attempts at duplicating it as quite unfortunate — especially if the new design makes it a point of ignoring every problem that game had (or turning them into “features”) or of throwing the entire following decade of game design, graphics excepted, into the garbage bin.

And unfortunately, Darkfall looks like just that. Perhaps it’s not, but it seems to make a point of pretending it’s a time capsule straight from 1998.

Maybe roleplaying is a relic from the past, too, though if that’s the case maybe it should be given a proper funeral (Haris Pilton from WoW could deliver the eulogy). And for that matter, it’s already public knowledge that I oppose the use of voice chat, less out of nostalgia for the good old days of typing things out than privacy, and it’s gotten to the point where it makes it almost impossible for me to play a game where any amount of player coordination is involved. I suspect I wouldn’t last long in Darkfall, if for no other reason.

As for PvPers enjoying themselves, fine. As long as it isn’t at the expense of someone who didn’t want to be involved in PvP in the first place. That was one of the reasons for the failure of Pirates of the Burning Sea. PvEers wanted to run their missions but had to cross red-circle PvP zones to get to them, or wait until the zone went away. The PvPers, however, thought it was just dandy. And when the PvEers dared to complain, the PvPers immediately remarked, “we’re forced to PvE to make the red circles pop up, so stop complaining about being forced to PvP.” And you had the hardcore guild types saying every other type of gameplay had to be stamped out of the game, even if that meant only 200 people hardcore enough were left playing it (pity Flying Lab Software in that case).

Maybe the PotBS case explains my views on the matter. It cemented my view that hardcore gamers don’t care about the viability of a game, as long as they can have the run of it. And having the run of it means chasing away everyone else. At least Shadowbane and Darkfall aren’t ambiguous about that, but beyond that, I’m far from convinced that Darkfall can survive in the long term.

Is it any wonder why some people want to keep their distance? No! You should keep your distance. That’s what I’m trying to say. If you don’t like unrestricted PvP, don’t play Darkfall. I suspect most people on this forum will fall into this category. The reason I’m here, bucking the current, is NOT to convert the ‘heathens’. I AM one of the heathens. I’m here to explain why most of commentary here about Darkfall is uninformed/misinformed nonsense. If along the way, I attract a new player or two, fine, but I don’t expect that to happen.
But when people say things like “Darkfall is fundamentally flawed and that’s provable (except that I admit it isn’t, but I like saying stoopid things like this because most folks here will nod their heads in agreement anyway),” I have to roll my eyes and submit yet another wall-o’-text to try at least to counter the most laughable misconceptions.
Futile, I know, but then I enjoy unrestricted PvP in general, and Darkfall in particular. I MUST just enjoy the pain.

I will just have to say that Darkfall has history going against it. Sure, there is the EVE exception. But I’m not sure it’s going to repeat itself with Darkfall. The guys in Reykjavik never displayed the level of incompetence of Aventurine (I mean, the website still isn’t updated? Beta first impressions, really?).

@Vetarnias
One mans design flaw is another mans feature. That’s about all that can be said about that.

“Then I really have to ask how much of a community you have in the game if chat isn’t even paid attention to.”

You are correct that most community involvement is in the guild. The KGB has dozens of people in game at any one time and more during big events. So I monitor guild chat, alliance chat, and system chat, and I have a hard time keeping up with that. I don’t need a universal server wide partyline.

“Maybe roleplaying is a relic from the past, too.”

That, I think, is due mostly to the pace of operations. I played D&D, and sure role playing is a big part of that game. You decide what you want to do, describe it in detail to the DM and fellow players, and then roll the dice. Now where did I leave my d6?

You can do that in a PvE game too, without too much trouble. The mobs are generally predictable, so you can decide who is going to tank, who is going to dps, who is going to nuke, who is going to cc, and what to do if you the mob baf’s, and you can do it all in Elizibethan English, if you want. Ready for the pull?

Pacing in an unrestricted PvP game just won’t allow that. Everything is stripped to minimums. You could try it if you like, but I suspect you would be spending most of your time resurecting at your bindstone.

“…it’s gotten to the point where it makes it almost impossible for me to play a game where any amount of player coordination is involved.”

And yet you oppose the use of voice chat. There is a great deal of player coordination going on, and voice chat seems to me to be the most natural efficient way to to that.

“As for PvPers enjoying themselves, fine. As long as it isn’t at the expense of someone who didn’t want to be involved in PvP in the first place.”

Which is why Darkfall is a nearly pure PvP game. By definition, someone who doesn’t want to be involved in PvP should NOT play Darkfall.

I don’t think that it is a case of hard core PvPers not caring about viability of the game. PotBS sounds like it was a really bad design in the way they tried to force both PvP and PvE. PvE players wanted to play the game in such a way that they wouldn’t have to interact with PvPers at all, even though it was an integral part of the game. Were they unconcerned with the viability of the game? The PvPers were playing the game as designed, so how you blame them for not caring about the viability of the game? If you don’t want to PvP, don’t buy a game that requires you to PvP! PvP sounds like a PotBS requirement, since players HAD to traverse the PvP areas. The devs didn’t do that by accident, I’m guessing.

Darkfall doesn’t have history working against it so much as it merely serves a smaller audience than other games. The KGB still had people playing ShadowBane right up until they closed the servers, but even I wouldn’t go that far due to the many problems ShadowBane had that were unrelated to PvP design (mostly interface, lag, and stability issues). That audience will move en masse to Darkfall once it becomes more widely available. I think it will enjoy modest success, along the line of Eve Online.

I would predict more, but my crystal ball now reads, “Future Hazy – Try Again Later.” I guess I’ll just have to wait and see, like everyone else.

Owain :

A game can still be poorly constructed and yet people will find it enjoyable.

This statement makes no sense.

No kidding.

There’s no reason why you would keep beating your head against a forum largely occupied by gaming pundits unless you have the wrong perspective to understand that’s going on here.

As I said, this is where pundits reside. Considering a game as a pundit would is an attempt to distance one’s self from subjective opinion and instead consider a game in very technical terms. Darkfall Online has a lot, technically, wrong with it.

Coming here and explaining to people that you like the game and they should try it is missing the point. You could do it all day and night for a week, you could be very vocal about it, but it still doesn’t fix the fundamental fact that the game is clearly broken in many ways we’ve pointed out, and we know this, because we’re pundits who have come to observe games this way.

This is actually pretty core to the Eurogamer versus Adventurine debacle, really. Adventurine missed the point, and was very vocal about it, precisely in the same way you are here.

Actually (taking it to the next level) as a game designer, they should have been immune to making that mistake. Chances are, they’re just being vocal to work the hype and make their fans support them despite the flaws they know are there.

Hurray, I think I’ve reached last week territory.

@geldonyetich “Coming here and explaining to people that you like the game and they should try it is missing the point.”

Missing the point? Irony is so ironic. I think Yogi Berra said that.

No, I’m not saying you should try it. I am saying, how can the game be broken when the people playing it don’t consider it broken?

Let’s try this again, preferably so I can keep this under 2500 words. What is the single most broken-ness about Darkfall?

In a game so fundamentally broken, that should be easy for you to list.

Owain
No, I’m not saying you should try it. I am saying, how can the game be broken when the people playing it don’t consider it broken?

A game is no different than anything else in the world that it can be broken but some people will like it anyway. There’s many examples you can find in this world.

Really, it comes down to fact vs opinion. What’s not subjective versus what is subjective.

The technical and design issues in Darkfall Online? Fact/Not Subjective. (Well, small parts of it will be, such as whether or not the subject (player) finds interface awkward.)
That the game is highly enjoyable? Opinion/Subjective.

If you’re going to interpret non-subjective fact as subjective opinion, you’re setting yourself up for infinite frustration.

Most of what was in that Eurogamer reviewer and what other pundits are trying to isolate is the former: fact.
Most Darkfall Online apologists are stressing the later: opinion.

Never shall they meet by the nature of the things.

@geldonyetich
So for a game that is so amazingly broken, you not only can’t come up with the single most broken design element, you fail to list a single one.

Just what are the qualification one must have to be a pundit, anyway? Whatever they are, they must be pretty minimal.

Fact?

Oh, and if you’re looking for a definition of what a pundit is, it’s right here. Yeah, Lum (Scott Jennings) is a fair legend, it’s sort of how he got into the industry. A lot of people who followed his little singularity sort of have aspirations towards punditry. However, that guy who works for Eurogamer who writes reviews? He’s the one who gets paid specifically because he’s a pundit.

“I am saying, how can the game be broken when the people playing it don’t consider it broken?”

Punditry may have a low hurdle but you still manage to trip. For a while I thought you were being obtuse but I’ve decided that you really and truly don’t get it and never will. Enjoy your game. As for me, you’ve made it clear that you have nothing useful to contribute to discourse about gaming.