Last night there were multiple large sieges not involving OTG, and since our clan had no formal plans to attend, I made my way down to the area to do some good old scroaching.
For non-Darkfall players, scroaching is basically attending a siege as a neutral third party and picking off anyone you see, while also trying to grab as much loot as possible. It’s an evolution of the word roach (though I can’t recall why it went from roach to scroach, someone in the comments help me out)
Since I was solo, I focused more on the looting part than the fighting, and set out with some basic gear and a mount. Once I arrived at the scene of the first battle, I dismounted and crept from tree to tree, doing my best to not get noticed as I moved towards the closest gravestone. At each gravestone, I looted anything of value before ducking back into the shadows. After five graves I was close to being overloaded, and rather than push things further I rode off to bank my spoils. Round one was a massive success!
I returned to find that the battle had ended and the winning side was cleaning up the battlefield. Since I had little to lose, I took a chance and ran in, hoping people would assume I was an ally. That didn’t work, and shortly I had a small mob on me and was killed. Round two not so good.
A second city was also sieged that night, and since I still had time before our scheduled PvP practice, I again set out to see what I could loot. This city was on the coast with a lot of water surrounding it, and I was able to swim out to a little island with a good view and watched the battle unfold.
Making a judgment call on when the battle was at its peak, I swam across to the closest grave and again began the looting. I then made the mistake of killing a disconnected player (the allure of plate was too strong…), which drew the attention of a mage in the area, who started throwing fireballs at me. I ran towards the water and lost the mage, but sadly the island I swam to had a group of five waiting and I was brought down. Greed kills indeed.
Scroaching is far from an honorable act, but its part of Darkfall tradition and a good change of pace from normal PvE/PvP. Its low risk (other than time), high reward, allows you to see larger PvP battles play out, and gives you a bit of a rush as you sneak around and try to avoid any attention.
Tonight OTG has our own siege, and I’m sure random scroachers will be in attendance.
I believe it’s a combination of scrub and roach :)
i was thinking possibly a portmanteau of scavenger + roach. (scavenging kills and loot, creeping around like a roach)
Doesn’t seem like anyone was around when the term was coined. Tons of possibilities, some combination of (scavenge/scrub/scrounge/scrap/scratch) with roach or poach are strong options. scrounge/poach is my personal favorite, but hard to say.
A roach is the leftover part of a marijuana joint. Scroaching is the act of scrounging together a bunch of roaches to smoke in a bowl or bong. It’s viewed as a “bonus” of sorts…
Obviously, in the context of a siege, it’s scrounging a siege for easy kills and bonus loot.
google didn’t help on that definition – yuk.
Its called ninja-looting in eve.
So how profitable was it in your case aka. roughly how much effort would grinding the equivalent of that loot in PvE(solo, semi-casually) entail?
Also kinda interested in DF:UW; may check it out when they offer free trial.
The first successful run justified the time spent. Hard to put an exact number on it, but yea, worthwhile.
I think ‘scroach’ evolved from ‘siege roach’, but I could be wrong. It’s been awhile.