My old roomate used to play DF so much that I have some small sense of how the game was played.  One thing that always prevented me from getting into darkfall was people auto leveling skills while afk.  Via auto run or macro's.

Will this still be the case with DF 2.0?  Will we see people afk swimming up against walls etc etc to raise skills & stats?

Originally posted by ragz45

My old roomate used to play DF so much that I have some small sense of how the game was played.  One thing that always prevented me from getting into darkfall was people auto leveling skills while afk.  Via auto run or macro's.

Will this still be the case with DF 2.0?  Will we see people afk swimming up against walls etc etc to raise skills & stats?

AFK swimming no.  They removed all the natural type skills from the game like running, swimming, crouching, jumping, riding, etc.

Because of the way darkfall works there is no way to prevent people from afk macroing up skills...people are going to do it no matter what.

However, the grind in DF:UW will be reasonable enough that there will be no reason to afk macro if you play the game a normal amount.

I'm sure some people will still macro but the amount of people should be very small compared to the first game.

Yup Aventurine worked out a much neater solution to skilling up in the latter part of Darkfall 1.0's life, with the Meditation system combined with a chance of skill gain bonus on monsters.  You could still afk macro if you wanted, could off-line level if you needed to, but it was more efficient to level up through actual play.  That is the model we expect to see in Df:UW, as it worked well and importantly still enabled casual players to advance enough to actually have fun in pvp without a few months of mandatory grinding first ;p 

Originally posted by ragz45
So it is likely to still see the hardcore players both playing normally and running a macro to further increase the skill gap while sleeping / working etc?

The amount of skills you need to have in order to be viable has been greatly reduced. DFO had something around 500+ skills and 100s of skill boosters that everyone leveled in order to maintain an edge over people who didn't have them. In DF:UW, each character appears to only have access to roughly 25 skills (5 from primary school, 4 from secondary school and ~16 from the common school). Even though marcoing may be present, it won't improve a character ad-infinitum like it appeared to in DFO. 

There's also a second way to level a character. While we don't know what exactly it affects, player points (achievements) can be spent on boosters and other things. 

We don't know yet but the nature of these games is that you will find people macroing.

However the character system totaly changed for Unholy Wars and the main focus was to make characters much faster viable for PvP with normal playtime.

They have a pretty neat system in place to achieve this

Will we most certainly see macro'ing, there are players who like in the first installment of DF will macro for that advantage straight of the bat and then once they find they have no more advantage as others catch up, will leave, just as they did in the original, i have a few names i could throw out there, but i think most know who they were.

But unlike before, it won't or shouldn't take long to be at a competitive level if AV delivers on their word.