let me guess, human? make an elf, ganker problem fixed. or just move to thier cities and do thier quests, but might be a mission to get there unscathed.

OP just free and very helpful advice: next time you'll find yourself in the middle of nowhere with some valuables, just find any water (sea, lake, river, pool), get there and log out. Next time you'll log in by your bindstone...

Originally posted by damian7

Originally posted by Fariic

 

FFA PvP doesn't have to mean senseless killing.
That's what DFO is though. 
It's FFA RvR and I think that's a mistake; especially when you allow ARAC. 
There's no reason for the RvR part.  You get nothing for killing members of an apposing race.  If your in a clan that's at war with another clan you don't even get alignment if the person you killed is an enemy race.

It felt a lot like they weren't really sure what direction they were headed at one point, and then couldn't figure out how to make the mechanics they had into something more cohesive.

The RvR part is counter to the sandbox mentality as well.
The game has already decided for you that another player is the enemy and that you should kill him. 
A true sandbox would have put the lore and story behind the races into the game, built a sence of annimosity between the races through the lore and story, and then left it up to the players to decide who thier enemy was.

Either make it FFA with ARAC clans.
Or make it RvR with FFA within your own race, and NO ARAC clans.

 

 

 

lore? story?

does anyone have any links to an official darkfall anything that contains the lore and story?

Whatchu talkin bout?

There's lots of lore in the game.  I mean a dwarf told me to kill three orks, obviously orks are my enemy.  Thier names are even red now!  That's lore.

Originally posted by kishe

there are easy monsters near every city...i suggest moving away from the starter areas, i did so and ive only got pked twice this week

 

You can see where your guildies are by the green G's moving around the map

Every brand new player is supposed to instintively know that, right?  Aventurine needs to do something to dramatically improve the new player experience.  As an example, I created a brand new character last night.  Since I'm not going to re-sub, I have no vested interest in the character I've been playing the last few weeks, so it was easy to just delete him and start over. I got my starter quests and headed to the nearest goblin spawn:

• There were hardly any players in my entire region and none hunting goblins, which meant I was on my own, with a leafblade, against 4 goblins.  Since I've been playing a few weeks, I know that their individual and ancillary aggro ranges are huge, so I did my best to split the spawn, otherwise I'd have been toast.  A truly new player won't necesarily know this and will probably get killed pretty quickly, unless there are other players around to draw aggro.  Minus those other players, just doing the first newbie quest can be pretty frustrating.
• After taking 2 down solo with my leafblade, I was PKed (while looting) by a red (same race, btw) who was camping the goblins.  I rested up and went back, this time looking for him.  I figured if nobody took him out, he'd keep doing it.  I couldn't find him, so I killed a couple more goblins.  Like I said in the bullet above, there wasn't anybody else killing goblins, so I had to split the pulls as best I could.  I used trees to hide behind and draw them  Just as I was about to start looting, boom!  Headshot with a mana missile.  Since I actually had some health still, I locked on my assailant (same guy, btw) and started strafing back and forth towards him, trying to avoid his missiles so I could attack him.  I was able to actually get up to him, but I was flailing away with my leafblade (I'd yet to be able to loot a single mob and I had 0 skill, since I'd only ever had my starter blade equipped), whereas my opponent had obviously higher skill, decent armor and basically nuked me to death once I got in melee range (having no other options).

So, within my first 1/2 hour on my new character, I got PKed twice, wasn't able to gain any skill points and wasn't able to loot anything. Only the fact that I had any experience with the game (knew to look for goblins near town, knew they had huge aggro range and that I'd have to be careful since no other players were around to draw aggro) at all made it even slightly enjoyable, otherwise, I would have been even more  frustrated with it than I already was.  All-in-all, as a new player experience, it sucked.

After healing up, I decided to leave town in a different direction and find another spawn.  I did, and it was close to town, but it was a much harder spawn due to their being goblin fighters and shamans, not just scouts.  Once again, there weren't any other players there (at first), so I had to pull,  hide, etc.., painstakingly slow, one at a time, run buack, rest to heal, run out to loot, etc...  It was doable, but tedious.  Another player did come in after a while, but he tried to crouch inside my melee range while I was swinging at goblins, so I just let him get killed.  I'd completed one of my two starter missions, but still had yet to see a single goblin axe for my second.  It wasn't until a couple of hours later (yes, hours) that other players came and I was able to fight more openly, loot a staff, start training mana missile and heal self before I finally found my four axes and could complete both quests.

Eventually, I was able to loot some gear, get about 100 gold coins, level up some skills and complete my two quests, but it took several hours, total, two PKs and reliance upon other players being in the area to draw aggro in order to do so. I'm ok with FFA Loot, PvP, and PK'ing, but should the new player experience be this hard, even for an experienced player?  New players should be encouraged to play further, not repelled.

~Ripper

---

Originally posted by Kshahdoo
OP just free and very helpful advice: next time you'll find yourself in the middle of nowhere with some valuables, just find any water (sea, lake, river, pool), get there and log out. Next time you'll log in by your bindstone...

---

Why would you do that when you can just type /bindstone_recall and be ported back to your bindstone whith your valuables at any time?

When a game pronounces itself as a hardcore experience, it should not necessarily mean you need to die 100 times before you know what to do in the game.

They should improve their NPE (new player experience) with quest chains even give a new character protection, that lasts for X hours (I haven't played the game so I have no idea how much that X should be) which would mean they can't be attacked. This way the game could be appealing to those that are not used to free pvp or to those that got the wrong idea that FREE PVP = GANKLAND.

And yes, most peopel do not enjoy when they can't enjoy their new player experience, it's like, you get the wrong idea of the game as I'm pretty sure that if it's a huge game world, finding others on remote places should be rare, getting ganked even more rare. That's not the case on starting areas, and ganking people who just started to play... that's so mature.

Originally posted by rhinok

Originally posted by kishe

there are easy monsters near every city...i suggest moving away from the starter areas, i did so and ive only got pked twice this week

 

You can see where your guildies are by the green G's moving around the map

Every brand new player is supposed to instintively know that, right?  Aventurine needs to do something to dramatically improve the new player experience.  As an example, I created a brand new character last night.  Since I'm not going to re-sub, I have no vested interest in the character I've been playing the last few weeks, so it was easy to just delete him and start over. I got my starter quests and headed to the nearest goblin spawn:

• There were hardly any players in my entire region and none hunting goblins, which meant I was on my own, with a leafblade, against 4 goblins.  Since I've been playing a few weeks, I know that their individual and ancillary aggro ranges are huge, so I did my best to split the spawn, otherwise I'd have been toast.  A truly new player won't necesarily know this and will probably get killed pretty quickly, unless there are other players around to draw aggro.  Minus those other players, just doing the first newbie quest can be pretty frustrating.
• After taking 2 down solo with my leafblade, I was PKed (while looting) by a red (same race, btw) who was camping the goblins.  I rested up and went back, this time looking for him.  I figured if nobody took him out, he'd keep doing it.  I couldn't find him, so I killed a couple more goblins.  Like I said in the bullet above, there wasn't anybody else killing goblins, so I had to split the pulls as best I could.  I used trees to hide behind and draw them  Just as I was about to start looting, boom!  Headshot with a mana missile.  Since I actually had some health still, I locked on my assailant (same guy, btw) and started strafing back and forth towards him, trying to avoid his missiles so I could attack him.  I was able to actually get up to him, but I was flailing away with my leafblade (I'd yet to be able to loot a single mob and I had 0 skill, since I'd only ever had my starter blade equipped), whereas my opponent had obviously higher skill, decent armor and basically nuked me to death once I got in melee range (having no other options).

So, within my first 1/2 hour on my new character, I got PKed twice, wasn't able to gain any skill points and wasn't able to loot anything. Only the fact that I had any experience with the game (knew to look for goblins near town, knew they had huge aggro range and that I'd have to be careful since no other players were around to draw aggro) at all made it even slightly enjoyable, otherwise, I would have been even more  frustrated with it than I already was.  All-in-all, as a new player experience, it sucked.

After healing up, I decided to leave town in a different direction and find another spawn.  I did, and it was close to town, but it was a much harder spawn due to their being goblin fighters and shamans, not just scouts.  Once again, there weren't any other players there (at first), so I had to pull,  hide, etc.., painstakingly slow, one at a time, run buack, rest to heal, run out to loot, etc...  It was doable, but tedious.  Another player did come in after a while, but he tried to crouch inside my melee range while I was swinging at goblins, so I just let him get killed.  I'd completed one of my two starter missions, but still had yet to see a single goblin axe for my second.  It wasn't until a couple of hours later (yes, hours) that other players came and I was able to fight more openly, loot a staff, start training mana missile and heal self before I finally found my four axes and could complete both quests.

Eventually, I was able to loot some gear, get about 100 gold coins, level up some skills and complete my two quests, but it took several hours, total, two PKs and reliance upon other players being in the area to draw aggro in order to do so. I'm ok with FFA Loot, PvP, and PK'ing, but should the new player experience be this hard, even for an experienced player?  New players should be encouraged to play further, not repelled.

~Ripper

 

Man.
Like....

Were you watching me play?

At the end of a session I would log out with this feeling that the entire time was worthless.
I'm not even paying attention to the skills.
 

Originally posted by EricDanie

When a game pronounces itself as a hardcore experience, it should not necessarily mean you need to die 100 times before you know what to do in the game.

They should improve their NPE (new player experience) with quest chains even give a new character protection, that lasts for X hours (I haven't played the game so I have no idea how much that X should be) which would mean they can't be attacked. This way the game could be appealing to those that are not used to free pvp or to those that got the wrong idea that FREE PVP = GANKLAND.

And yes, most peopel do not enjoy when they can't enjoy their new player experience, it's like, you get the wrong idea of the game as I'm pretty sure that if it's a huge game world, finding others on remote places should be rare, getting ganked even more rare. That's not the case on starting areas, and ganking people who just started to play... that's so mature.

Shadowbane has/had that starting area where you could get to 20 in a non-PvP area before having to leave and go to the mainland where it was open PvP. I always thought that was a reasonable way to go about it... give players the chance to try out different builds/classes/races and get to know how to play their character before being thrown into the fray.

It was predicted long before DF "launched" that there would be people camping lowbie spots, ganking the easy targets because they weren't looking for the challenge of PvP... they just wanted cheap thrills. That regardless of the game or how it was setup, there would be people who would find a way to do it. Of course, like with so many other things, those of us who said it back then were answered with "nuh uhhhh... DF won't work like that. STFU". Yet, here we are, with that exact scenario playing out.

Originally posted by Fariic

Man.
Like....

Were you watching me play?

At the end of a session I would log out with this feeling that the entire time was worthless.
I'm not even paying attention to the skills.

Yeah, my exploration sessions were like that.  Lots of running, with almost nothing to see and very little I ran into that I could actually kill.  I did some exploring this past Sunday, but apparently the weekend is a bad time to try fighting if you're not in a clan that's sieging, because everybody in chat was complaining about warping mobs and that it was "normal" when there were sieges going on.  When I tried to fight the trolls and bears I found, I pretty much had the same experience - they were impossible to fight. My ping and fps were fine, but the warping mobs sucked.  I'd spend an hour or two roaming around, see a few spawns, find completely empty locations that looked like they should be populated (little farmsteads, ruins, etc....), but weren't. Oh, and my favorite part, was when I found a location that looked empty, so I'd explore it, be in it for few minutes, then "surprise!". All the mobs would spawn at once and attack me!  This happened to me in several locations, at different times during the week.  I'd be standing on a hill, when suddenly giants would spawn.  I was in a village for a few minutes, when suddenly I was surrounded by beastmen that hadn't been there previously, etc..  When I asked about it in chat, the answer I was given was basically "yeah, the mobs take a while to spawn".  I don't know if this is a deliberate attempt on Aventurine's part to conserve server resources by not spawning mobs if a player isn't in the vicinity (rather than having persistent mob spawns), but it sucks.

There are a ton of posts justifying Darkfall and Aventurine.  i agree, there are definitely some fun aspects to the game, but in the few weeks I've been playing, I've seen far, far more negatives than I've seen positives. When i see other players justify the flaws with excuses like "you're too carebear" or "they're an indie company", I just shake my head.  It's kind of like when you say a person's name twice, like "Oh, that's just Bill being Billy, which is just a nice way of justifying that Billy's an asshole, because that's the way he is.  In this case, its "Oh, that's just Darkfall, being Darkfall", which is a nice way of saying it sucks, but you're excusing it, because that's just the way it is.

~Ripper

Originally posted by rhinok

Yeah, my exploration sessions were like that.  Lots of running, with almost nothing to see and very little I ran into that I could actually kill.  I did some exploring this past Sunday, but apparently the weekend is a bad time to try fighting if you're not in a clan that's sieging, because everybody in chat was complaining about warping mobs and that it was "normal" when there were sieges going on.  When I tried to fight the trolls and bears I found, I pretty much had the same experience - they were impossible to fight. My ping and fps were fine, but the warping mobs sucked.  I'd spend an hour or two roaming around, see a few spawns, find completely empty locations that looked like they should be populated (little farmsteads, ruins, etc....), but weren't. Oh, and my favorite part, was when I found a location that looked empty, so I'd explore it, be in it for few minutes, then "surprise!". All the mobs would spawn at once and attack me!  This happened to me in several locations, at different times during the week.  I'd be standing on a hill, when suddenly giants would spawn.  I was in a village for a few minutes, when suddenly I was surrounded by beastmen that hadn't been there previously, etc..  When I asked about it in chat, the answer I was given was basically "yeah, the mobs take a while to spawn".  I don't know if this is a deliberate attempt on Aventurine's part to conserve server resources by not spawning mobs if a player isn't in the vicinity (rather than having persistent mob spawns), but it sucks.

There are a ton of posts justifying Darkfall and Aventurine.  i agree, there are definitely some fun aspects to the game, but in the few weeks I've been playing, I've seen far, far more negatives than I've seen positives. When i see other players justify the flaws with excuses like "you're too carebear" or "they're an indie company", I just shake my head.  It's kind of like when you say a person's name twice, like "Oh, that's just Bill being Billy, which is just a nice way of justifying that Billy's an asshole, because that's the way he is.  In this case, its "Oh, that's just Darkfall, being Darkfall", which is a nice way of saying it sucks, but you're excusing it, because that's just the way it is.

~Ripper

 

There is a market for every kind of a game, even bad ones.

Yeah.
The weekends were horrible.
Every sat if the mobs weren't bugged out becuase of seiging, the server was down for maintenance.

Why wouldn't they make the mobs spawn before you reach them?
I really never got this.

Originally posted by Fariic
 

There is a market for every kind of a game, even bad ones.

Yeah.
The weekends were horrible.
Every sat if the mobs weren't bugged out becuase of seiging, the server was down for maintenance.

Why wouldn't they make the mobs spawn before you reach them?
I really never got this.

1. It's obvious you're aware of this phenomenon, too.  So, that's further confirmation that it's not just me. /gleeee!
2. I assume it's because NPCs take up resources and this is Aventurine's way (or one aspect of it) for managing resources a little more dynamically.  If the mobs were persisent, then they'd be taking up potential character slots, much like the guards that were replaced with towers for the same reason.  Per Tasos (source), "Running guards have been replaced by guard towers because they are more effective and also because more NPCs in the world just take up player spots."

~Ripper

Originally posted by carpal

After five days, i feel really feel like I have a grasp on the controls and my character movement and combat styld.  I put in some good skill points into two handed sword, bow and lesser magic.  I had a quest to kill Trolls and get their blood using skinning.  I made several attempts to complete this quest and I almost got close, I had two troll bloods at one time.  But as of late, the ganking has increased.  I died several times at the hand of a superior opponent.  I fought hard but to no avail.   Soon after several attempts to complete this quest, I was left with nothing but my starter staff from all the ganking and looting. Sure, I could go finish the quest naked, but I don't get any skill gains naked with my magic,melee or bow.  I logged off for a few hours to see if the maybe it was a timing thing.  I absolutely could not get anything done today from the ganking.  

I logged back in later and tried again.   This time I went back to the Goblins to get some gold and loot and replenish what I had lost.  I also did some resource gathering to sell for gold as well.    This was not successful, the ganking was still going  on and I lost about 200 mining resources.  I found myself bored of this repittion in dying so I turned to the new guild I had joined.  After all they sounded like on vent they were having fun.  They weren't very hepful and I couldn't figure out where they were in the world or how to get there.  So I decided to just do some explorying.  Darkfall afterall looks huge.   I wondered around the lands and was impressed with the strange castles and ruins.  I wondered what all the scattered stuff was, but there is no lore to be found. I found a few creatures, some I could kill, some I could not.  There seemed to be no way of knowing which ones were weaker and stronger.  I found a nice isolated stream and started doing some fishing.  I noticed accross the stream, a fellow alliance player was chopping wood.  Soon I heard the sound of battle and the guy accross the stream was dying to 3 players on mount.  I moved into a bush on the ground and the riders didn't spot me.   I was impressed of this newly discoverd hiding ability.  I survived.  I had loads of fish on me.  I started back towards town, but this time the riders saw me and mowed me down.  It was a quick way back to town.  I logged off after this.  I wasn't a pleasent session at all.  I don't think I accomplished anything.  Well maybe a point or so in defense skills from the ganking I was taking.  I problably won't log in tomorrow night.  Right now I don't feel like playing for a while.  I kinda wasted an evening.  So will see.  I am sure I will play again, but not for a while.  I do like the hardcore of the game, but I would also like a fighting chance.  I am going to leave my guild and see if I can find a more helpful guild.  I probably won't post anymore impressions, unless something more positive occurs.

It sounds like UO all over again. I am glad i am avoiding this game. Won't touch it with a ten foot pole.

First, your clan sucks or just doesn't care about you. Join a better clan.
All they had to do was add you to their party and you'd be able to find them on the map easily.

Second, find safer areas to farm. Also, once you feel like you're getting a good amount of loot - go bank it all. This way, if at some point you do get ganked, at least you still have all of the stuff you banked.

Also - don't bother with all of the quests. The best Troll quest to do is the repeatable one that has you killing 10 tolls for 100gp + bonuses for any more you manage to kill.

And when you do something like fish and see someone die in front of you (and manage to hide). Stay hidden until you are sure they are gone and use /bindstone_recall. No sense in running back that far when you have a ton of stuff in your backpack.

All of the stuff I mentioned above should help you, especially if you find a more newbie friendly clan or just let the clan you're in know that you need more help than you're getting.

And don't forget to use this map: http://www.afraidyet.net/forums/misc.php?do=page&template=Darkfall_Map it will tell you where all of the mobs/player cities are and help you figure out what to avoid (PK player cities and Chaos Stones are hotspots for getting ganked).

Sounds like a waste of Time and Money. I'd rather play Quake Live Clan Arena for free.

Dark Fall --------------> This way to Frustration

Mortal Online ----------> This way to Shadowbane

KOTOR --------------------> This way to the MMO to be!

STO -------------------------> This way to the next Genre

---

Originally posted by Horkathane
Sounds like a waste of Time and Money. I'd rather play Quake Live Clan Arena for free.
Dark Fall --------------> This way to Frustration
Mortal Online ----------> This way to Shadowbane
KOTOR --------------------> This way to the MMO to be!
STO -------------------------> This way to the next Genre
 

---

Wish you to be owned by some nice russian quaker...

Originally posted by Kshahdoo

 

---

Originally posted by Horkathane
Sounds like a waste of Time and Money. I'd rather play Quake Live Clan Arena for free.
Dark Fall --------------> This way to Frustration
Mortal Online ----------> This way to Shadowbane
KOTOR --------------------> This way to the MMO to be!
STO -------------------------> This way to the next Genre
 

---

 

Wish you to be owned by some nice russian quaker...

Another witty retort. Wow who is your writer there Kshahdoo? I need some new material and maybe he would work for a free Dork-n-Fail account?