Watching Darkfall from afar has been entertaining, if tragically so.
First the game just finished it’s first elections for a player council, and it went about as well as you would expect from that fine collection of humanity. Among the highlight from all 390 votes casts: One player had votes removed after he was caught blatantly cheating the vote (this player was previously added to the MVP forums by AV, shortly after that sub-forum become completely useless. AV still can’t add 1+1, but more on that later).
Everyone’s favorite ragemonkey got elected, paving the way for crafting unicorn hunts and fluff-barrel suggestions (oh and he is, yet again, currently banned on the forums; see ragemonkey part), as did the main voice behind the population-crushing ‘jesus patch’ of removing classes, who is now a champion of the economy (guy is really on the cutting edge, but more on THAT shortly).
I legit feel bad for Kasmos, who will have to deal with it all as chairman. If he survives the upcoming three months without putting a bullet in his head, I’d consider that a major success.
AV has also posted an update on things they say they will do (but 90% odds say they won’t fully follow through with). The focus? Why the economy of course. This is my favorite line from the update:
For us, as well as the community from what we see, a functional economy is the stepping stone for a proper sandbox, so our attention is focused on it from the beginning of October and for the next development cycles.
99% sure that bolded part was copy/pasted from my first post in the MVP forum about a year ago (if not longer). Imagine if that had been their focus back then? People might still be playing the damn game! Sadly the entire focus post misses the one critical aspect of an economy actually working (sustainability), and instead has AV wasting yet more development resources on band-aids by just throwing in more new materials and raising the iLvl of gear. One might ask when will they learn, but the safe bet here is on ‘never’. The response to this announced future waste of time? Full community support, of course, because clearly the WoW method of econ balance is a better path to take than, oh I don’t know, following the example of an MMO that actually has a working economy.
The sub-genre of fantasy sandbox titles really is a crazy place. You have Trion doing its best to screw up AA, you have AV sitting on a potential golden goose and just time after time ‘listening to the community’ and burying the game, and you have kickstarter after kickstarter showing everyone that there is demand for someone, ANYONE, to get it right and profit, but nope, no one seems to want money so they all just screw one thing up after another. When freaking Mortal Online is one of the better options out right now, you know we have a serious problem.
Hardcore Casual 
Oh DF community, never change.
Can’t be bothered to log into forumfail to get a fix of lawls so who was the vote cheater?
Poor Kasmos indeed.
Hane of course.
I’m curious, what specifically do you feel needs to change about DF:UW’s economy in order to get it to a functional state? Clearly it’s not working as is – what would AV have to do to get it from where it is now to something even slightly resembling EVE’s economy?
They’ve already been told (item destruction on gank), and even took a baby step towards it, but once again the ‘listen to the community’ mistake was made and they didn’t go far enough.
DF has plenty of faucets, even when you ignore such major mistakes like the kraken event or any of those foolish ‘double loot’ weekends. It practically has no sinks. Just constantly trying to reset the deck (new mats) doesn’t work long-term. It’s a short-term bandaid, which works in WoW because the economy doesn’t matter and resets are expected every expansion.
AV is using the WoW econ model, minus the resets, and getting predictable results: full bank, ‘nothing to do’, people/guilds quitting.
I agree about the destruction on gank, but that alone wouldn’t fix anything beyond creating more demand for items. What do you think about the proposed changes in regards to local/regional banking and the idea of caravans? To me it sounds like the first hint of something more akin to EVE (instead of Amazon.com) but that post sounded so wishy-washy, you can tell they were walking on egg-shells writing it.
Is there a strong enough voice in the community who will champion the merits of local or regional economies long enough for it to get implemented? It seems like this is a do or die moment for AV, if they raise the issue of economy and don’t manage to fix it, that’s about it for the game.
Local banking and all of that won’t matter if everyone has a full bank anyway, or if the demand for everything currently in the game doesn’t change.
But like you said, they won’t actually do it, because the forumfall babies will cry too hard and AV will back down.
A lot of people that were looking for a “Sandbox” experience left the game. This “Arena” mode of “PvP for the sake of PvP” got old very quickly. I agree that AV doesn’t learn. AV still going back to the same 30 vocal elite minorities and trying to design the game with those “elite” preference. I am sorry to say this, AV doesn’t have the balls to do what is right, and instead pays too much attention to the vocal forumfalls. The whole economy is so glutted that if all crafting stations are to be removed from Agon, it will still take 2 ~ 3 years to empty out people banks. Full loot has no meaning if gear is so abundant. Also bunny hopping is back to create a more engaging PvP :-(.