Fan, meet my buddy shit, I believe you two just smushed.
That’s what happened last night at around 2am EST. An in-game raping of Allods CS proportions, one that leaves you all cold on the inside, asking ‘why me’ while you sit crying fully clothed in the fetal position with the shower running above your head. It was also one of those “never going to forget THAT event” type of deals that only really happens in an MMO. This was just left a scar rather than a smile.
Oh right, I’m guessing you are wondering wtf I’m talking about huh? Ok I’ll try to recall the event, but know that I’ll be doing so while tears run down my cheek in classic emo fashion.
The village of Xirdak is close to the city of Dagnamyr, and it’s one that I often go out and capture because it is literally a one minute run. I noticed a while back that one of the houses there was very slow to pay the taxes, with the bill going as high as 2500 gold before being paid. Yesterday I noticed that the bill was getting close to 3000 gold, which is right near the limit of when you lose the house and the spot can be claimed.
I checked on the house earlier in the day yesterday and saw that in addition to the 3000+ tax due, it also had a timer on when the house spot was going to free up. At the time it said 5 hours, which after some quick math meant it would be open around 2-3am. Very late, but a small price to pay to own a house so close to our city.
At just after 1am I went back to the village and saw that the timer was at “less than one hour”, and I figured this must be the final update until it goes free. I went back to town, grabbed some gear, two mounts, and a deed I had bought earlier in the day for 60k to claim the property. I then went up into a nice hiding spot to wait until the timer was up.
I was getting a little sleepy, so I turned up the in-game sound so I could hear anyone approaching, and after about 20 minutes those footsteps came. It was a VAMP member also coming to check on the house, and we partied up to wait, the guy being nice and saying I could grab the house. Another 20 minutes or so goes by when we spot someone had recalled to another house in the village. We ID the guy as a member of the clan Grief (enemy clan), and we attack. The guy tries to run but is brought down quickly, and we resume our wait.
After another 10 minutes or so two other members of Grief recall to the village and another fight breaks out. Initially it goes well, and while we are not able to down either opponent, they are kept at bay and don’t harm us much. A third member shows up, and it’s at this point that things start to go downhill. For starters, I should have just run back to the city and banked my deed if nothing else. Second, we put out the call for additional help way too late, and by the time we had a group together, a fourth Grief member had arrived and we had been killed.
In somewhat of a blind rage, I grabbed one of my best gear bags and rode back to rejoin the fight, and for a while we were holding our own against very skilled opponents. Unfortunately whenever we killed someone, they always came back, and we could never down enough of them to secure the field and collect the loot. Eventually however we suffered one too many deaths, and the tide turned and we were all routed. Top end gear bag gone, second gear bag gone, a total of four mounts gone, and the 60k cottage deed gone. /tear. The guy who had been waiting with me lost about 100k worth of gear as well, since he too grabbed some of his better stuff twice. /moretears. I don’t know about the rest that helped us, but they lost gear as well, not to mention all of the loot the Grief guys were carrying. /riveroftears.
I’m going back to the fetal position now…
(DarkFall-related post disclaimer/reminder. If you click the image link near the top-right of this page and buy a DarkFall account, I get paid 20% of the client cost. If you believe this taints my views and reporting on DarkFall, your opinion is wrong.)
Hardcore Casual 
I’m so sorry for your loss. :(
*hugs*
Sounds like a big loss. How long would that loot take to get back, im wondering? Is it akin to loosing for example a set of raid tier gear in something like wow that would (in days of old) take weeks/months to collect?
Does this put you off the game? i know people tend to enjoy the high risk nature of games like Dark Fall / Eve, but when soo much time has to be invested for such big losses – i cant see the fun really
Well I logged off rather pissed sure, but now it just means I need to farm gold/gear to get back to that level. Having ‘too much’ gold is never a good thing, even if we all keep trying to get more. So no, it’s not something that puts me off the game, if anything, its motivation to get more stuff and get better at PvP.
In terms of the loss itself, I’d say getting the 100k or so that I lost would take me a good few weeks to get back, depending on how hard I farmed just to get cash. Sometimes you farm for other reasons (skill gain, a particular enchanting mat) and that time is far less profitable. Plus its rare that I log in to JUST farm. If I was going for straight cash, I can make an easy 10-15k an hour, but that kind of ‘hard grind’ is a bit boring after a while. I still have plenty of gear, and I still have my house on Ruby.
Blind rage is never good, but cool story, bro. Keep em coming.
What happened to the house? This other group claimed it?
When I say I don’t like “adrenalin rushes”, this is exactly the kind of thing I mean.
I do believe that if you are going to play a full-loot PvP game like Darkfall you have to accept that this kind of emotional mugging is part of the deal. What we sometimes forget is that once upon a time even pure PVE players were in the same boat.
The only time I nearly gave up playing MMOs was way back near the beginning in EQ. I’d already lost everything twice on my then-highest character, a level 8 Dwarven cleric when he fell in the river in Nektulos Forest and got eaten by pirhannas. By the time he’d lost a level and all the gear he had in the bank failing to get his corpse from under the water, I gave up and rolled a new character on a different server.
After a week that half-elf ranger was going great guns. She was level six and she even had a cracked staff! Then she fell down the hollow tree-stump in Blackburrow and despite an evening of trying I just couldn’t get her corpse.
I logged out and didn’t play for three days. I thought I would never play again, but finally I calmed down enough to give it one more go. I swore I would a) be more careful and b) not get emotionally sucked in to such a hysterical degree. I rolled another character on another server and since then I’ve largely managed to keep a sense of perspective.
I don’t miss those emotional roller-coasters one little bit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_resilience
I think this is why PVP players and PVE players have trouble communicating.
We are in it for very different experiences and outcomes.
wonder what may have happened, if you stayed stealthed from that initial Grief player, whether he’d go away and you could claim the house.. :S
Sorry for the hard night you had tho :(
My guess is Grief was there for the same reason as I was. Now, if we assume they never checked my spot (possible I guess), maybe it would have come down to who clicked their deed first to claim it, who knows.
Brutal.
I love it. :D
Sarcasm is strong in you good sir.
Riveting tale, chap! Really a nice read which confirmed for me that I would be too weak for this game. I’d love to bring others to tears but I couldn’t bear losing so much stuff :P So I keep hoping for Earthrise, at least there you’ll have an insurance system which allows you to feel safe in return for some money ^^
Yea we where there to claim it as well it was a goodfight. The funny part was you had a cottage deed to claim a house. We will see you around Agon I’m sure.
Feel like trading that house for one on Ruby?
I still don’t get how that place is a house… thatch roof and no second floor… wtf is a cottage then?
perfect flat fronts are cottages and i would entertain a offer pst me in game.
Glass Molzi
Will do.
It’s a trap
LOL. you fail. :P
No, more seriously i feel for your loss. That stuff happened to me in a full loot PvP browser game and i ragequit it.
I don’tt know why, but games like Darkfall and EVE are veery unforgiving but the most interesting gameplay stories always come out from them.
Me and a buddy are going to give this game a shot, it might be to hardcore for me. He thrives on it though hehe.
I still have nightmares from the UO beta, when this dude hobbes would just run around and murder everyone.
I don’t really see DarkFall as Hardcore. Probably because we are used to “Themeparks with no death penality” that DarkFall is seen as hardcore but really, when you die, you lose everything.
But that “everything” can be re-acquired fairly quickly and while it might set you back by a few hours, it’s not the end of the world, I find it very “basic” and hardly ever bothered me.
Just don’t take the pixels too seriously, experience the adrenaline rush from time to time and just enjoy the game.
So is there a forum post up yet bragging about some low level noob who just happened upon a gaggle of tombstones and is now the 3rd richest person on the server?
You bet your ass we slayed anyone else who came into that area XD after the big village fight, one of our guys one tile over dragged another big group of ppl to us and we had another small war goin on right near dag! what a hell of a pvp run that was o.o
GF tho <3
That’s Darkfall.
Stuff like that happens on all levels and everywhere.
Last night I was attacked by four players on mounts while I was doing the Kobold title quest. I also lost my second best gear (chain :-)), some money, food and reagents. It’s less epic than your story but probably comparable in terms of the relation loss/assets.
We will get over it.
Does what race you choose make much of a diffrence? or is it just some cosmetic thing?
@Herb
Definitely not cosmetic.
The size of the race indicates the differences in your hitbox (you the target) and also your weapon swing radius (what you can hit).
There are also some racial bonuses that affect starting stats. Overtime these won’t matter at all.
There are racial skills that are of greater and lesser use. For example mahirim have a bonus to their core movement speed which is pretty awesome. This speed bonus however doesn’t affect the sprint speed which is what you will be doing 99% of the time in combat so…
If you are unsure human is a very solid choice. Not too many penalties, not too many bonuses.
great story, like reading about the game, not sure i would like playing it lol but sounds like fun
Reading these stories make me want to try it out…. even though i’m not good at PvP in general.
Big question, does it have the same learning curve as Eve does? Because Eve is a killer.
It’s different in a lot of ways, but DF does have a rather steep initial learning curve. The newbie protection helps a lot though, giving you some time to learn the ropes and get comfortable with the controls/UI before throwing you to the wolves.
OH SORRY SYN, forgot to go through you with my $1 Darkfall, NO 20cents for you!!!
Do you get money for existing accounts that click your button (sounds dodgy) and buy Darkfall?