The best PK death ever, thanks DarkFall.

Posted on March 16, 2009 by SynCaine

I’m not really going to talk about the tech issues DarkFall is having, as it’s rather simple. Too many people online, the game never kicks people, lag is bad, queue queue, and all that. It’s an MMO, and in exchange for a new, unexplored, non-databased world, you get tech issues. If they bother you, WoW is that way.

That aside, over the weekend I had an interesting encounter that drove home some vital points about DarkFall, full collision detection and manual looting. From the outside, commentators can easily point out that both features are easy to abuse, a pain, and generally something gaming has ‘moved past’. Luckily not all games.

My guild set out to explore a dungeon, this one a bit different than previous areas in DarkFall in that it consisted mostly of narrow corridors rather than wide open spaces. Narrow corridor + full collision = gtfo of my way! Oh, mobs also have full collision, so mob swarm + full collision = ouch. Mob swarm + guild group + full collision + narrow hallway = fun. Fun in that you actually have to pay attention to everything, including players, mobs, room/corridor layout, all of it. Ignore one thing, and you either end up getting yourself or a guild mate killed. You can also set up choke points for mobs to run into (sometimes, damn AI), and beat on something 3v1 while the rest try to swarm you. Sometimes the bastards pull out bows and sit back plinking you, or kite you around a room, but anyway…

We where happily bashing men-at-arms and collecting some nice loot, when three enemy players ran into our hallway and starting swinging. The initial shock, along with the fact that most of us were at half health/stam or worst, meant the fighting soon turned ugly, and we went running in all directions. As luck would have it, the PKs picked to follow me, and soon I was dodging arrows and magic frantically running down the nearest hallway. It’s at this point that I noticed another interesting feature of this particular dungeon; its one way entry point. The room you enter when you zone in has no exit. Recalling in DarkFall takes a full two minutes of standing still, so that was not an option either. I knew I was going to die, but I figured I might as well make life as difficult as I could for the PKs, so I ran into a room I knew was full of fast-spawning mobs. After some fun running in circles, mobs and PKs chasing, I went down and started to bleed out.

With me down, the mobs turned to bash the PKs, and it’s at this point that they noticed how much damage the mobs actually did. They hurt, a lot, and having 4-5 of them on you is bad news. The PKs tried to kite them while also making attempts to finish me, and eventually one got me. Back in town, I quickly run back to the dungeon and ask my guild mates what the deal is. They reported that they could not find the PKs, and that they see my tombstone (corpse after you actually die) in the room full of mobs. Once back inside, they kite the mobs while I loot my tombstone, noticing that some key items (like my mount) are missing. Damn PKs did partially loot me!

In the corner of the room, I notice another tombstone, and since no one had killed a mob in some time, it has to be a player. Sure enough, it’s the name of one of my PKs, and opening the tombstone reveals a full set of top-end gear, along with plenty of regents and other spoils. My guess is the guy got pinned by the mobs and they took him down. I scan the rest of the room, and upstairs behind a cage find another tombstone. PK #2, clearly trapped between the two sides of the cage. More top-end loot, and what do you know, my mount! At this point my guild mates where getting into trouble with the pursuing mobs, so we make a break for the hallway and drop agro. In the end, getting PK’ed was the most profitable thing that has happened to me so far.

That profitability was only possible because of full collision and slow looting. If the game did not have collision, the PKs would have quickly killed me and never gotten themselves pinned and killed. Had full looting been in the game, they would have one-click looted me and been off, again never putting themselves in danger. Had the dungeon not featured choke points and small spaces, I would have left empty handed. But sometimes, things all come together, and some quick thinking pays off; assuming the game rules are there to allow it.

Posted in Darkfall Online, MMO design, PvP | 18 Comments

Getting my PvE on in DarkFall

Posted on March 13, 2009 by SynCaine

Last night, after a nice 2 hour queue to log in (damn carebear tourists got through!), I had an experience I was not exactly expecting from DarkFall; I had fun doing a PvE dungeon run. Don’t get too excited yet carebears, the dungeon is not an instance and allows the same open PvP/looting that the rest of DF allows. Actually it encourages it a bit more, since people deep in a dungeon are likely to have better loot on them.

For starters, getting to the dungeon portal is an interesting adventure itself. The portal is located in the middle of a large creator-like area inaccessible from all sides. The only way in is to jump down a large waterfall, swim underwater to a cave below the mountain, catch your breath in an air pocket, and again swim under another underwater passage to finally immerge inside the creator. This is all made a bit more difficult because in DarkFall dungeons (or mob camps for that matter) are not marked in any way other than when you are looking at the portal, so without some exploration one would never think to actually jump down and swim.

The area just outside the dungeon has a good collection of mid-level mobs, including some giant skeletons and bone lords. Once inside, you fight some vampire-like mobs and more skeletons. The dungeon itself is huge, and like the rest of DarkFall, not every room is packed with mobs. The mobs have a chance to drop some nice loot, along with the regular assortment of regents and vendor junk (vendors pay you next to nothing for it though, cheap bastards). Of real interest is the one chest located in the dungeon, which if someone has a key (low chance random drop), can open it for 2000 gold and some nice gear. Also found in the dungeon is a ‘public’ chest that everyone can open to get some minor loot. I believe the chest works on a personal timer, but not 100% on that.

Our guild went in 10 strong, which meant everyone else avoided us when we were making our way over and we had an easy 30 minute trip. Once inside, we found 3 players farming some of the mobs, but when seeing our group they quickly picked up and left (we did not actually attack them as they were blue to us). Even blue, I’m guessing they picked leaving with their current loot rather than risking getting dropped. Smart move, considering we were discussing ganking them if they did not leave since they were messing with ‘our’ mobs. The mobs were overall rather easy since we had 10 players, but we still had to be careful since mobs have a chance to insta-kill you (normally you drop to the ground and bleed, giving others a chance to revive you), and no one wanted a 30 minute run back. As one of our members had a key, we popped the chest and collected the 2000 gold to put towards our guild town. Loot when to anyone who needed any, with all crafting/regents going to the guild bank. No need for a DKP system here. We ended the trip by killing a random player inside, who we thought had also come in to open the 2000g chest.

We were wrong, sorry bud. Thanks for the armor set though.

Posted in Darkfall Online | 9 Comments

Rats jumping off the Blizzard ship?

Posted on March 12, 2009 by SynCaine

Spotted this while checking financials.

Acti-bliz is set to announce earnings later this month. When a director and the CEO start dumping their own companies stock before earnings are set to go public… well it’s not because they know earnings are going to be amazing, lets just say that.

Posted in Mass Media, Random, World of Warcraft | 31 Comments

WAR State of the Game: more solid progress being made

Posted on March 11, 2009 by SynCaine

Mark Jacob’s “State of the Game” is up at the herald. It’s a good read, and I think contains a lot of new information for players who don’t follow every forum post made about WAR. It’s very clear that while Mythic is happy with the direction WAR took with the 1.2 patch, it really was only the beginning.

About the SotG specifically, I think Land of the Dead will be huge for the game. It will not only make old DAoC players happy to have a new Darkness Falls-like dungeon, but also expose a ton of new MMO fans to it’s greatness. Given the quality of the added content to WAR so far, I’m sure Mythic will nail it with LotD as well. Giving players an additional venue to fight over and not having everyone focus on the war campaign will be nice. Now you can assault the city, drop it a few stars, and wait for the other realm to build it back up before you make another attempt to burn it.

Concerning oRvR, I think overall its light-years better already than it was at launch, both in stability and just overall fun. People are actually fighting to fight, visible progress is being made in the campaign more regularly, and the rewards are just right to encourage participation without turning the whole thing into “chase the purplez”. It’s still not perfect (it never will be), but 1.2 was a big step, and it sounds like 1.3 will be as well. I’m curious how guilds upgrading keeps will factor into everything, as currently keeps flip at a brisk pace. What will Mythic do to make it worthwhile for guilds to spend time/money to upgrade something that can be captured less than an hour after you have acquired it? If nothing else, guild scrolls to teleport players to a keep are a must-have addition. The part about making Fortress attacks easier was also odd, as currently I believe a Fortress is impossible to defend against a maxed-population attack. Toning down AoE would help that of course, and I’m sure Bright Wizards will be slapped with the nerf stick soon.

Personally the timing of all this is rather poor, as Mythic is making it rather difficult to focus on DarkFall. Knock it off you bastards!

Posted in MMO design, Patch Notes, RvR, Warhammer Online | 9 Comments

More quick thoughts on DarkFall

Posted on March 11, 2009 by SynCaine

My DarkFall time was a bit short yesterday, as Destro CoW had our first Lost Vale run planned, along with the release of the Choppa/Slayer class for those who completed the Bitter Rivals event. Lost Vale was very entertaining, and the customization options for a Choppa are great. More on both at some point I’m sure.

In DarkFall, two technical issues are affecting the game right now. The first is the long (30min+) queue to log in during peak time, no doubt due to the recently increased sales. Annoying but perhaps somewhat exacted since DF still only has one server. The other issue, and this is likely related, is that mob syncing is once again a problem. When fighting a mob, it’s not uncommon for the mob to move away from you after 3-4 swings, but the game will take 1-2 seconds to actually pick up on this. Since you lose stamina with every swing, and mobs have more smarts than your average MMO, losing track of the exact spot of the mob is a problem. I guess before this week the sync issue had been resolved, so hopefully it will be once again shortly.

Technical issues aside, I spend most of my time traveling over to our guild town (currently just a bind stone and some walls) and getting familiar with the local area. The area around our guild town is populated by tougher mobs than the starting spots, so without guild help I’m not about to do much combat-wise. On the plus side, since DF does not have levels or strict gear requirements, grouping with some guild members to take on tougher mobs is not only possible, but actually helpful for everyone involved. My health and damage are lower, I can still swing and deal decent damage, and mobs don’t one-shot me. You also don’t ‘die’ immediately like on other games, but instead get knocked down and start bleeding. If you ‘bleed out’ you die and release back to your bind point, but anyone can come over and save you, getting you back up. This makes hunting mobs as a group a bit ‘easier’, as basically anyone can rez. Hopefully tonight I’ll get more into actually playing the game, and not still running around like a damn noob.

Posted in Darkfall Online, Warhammer Online | 8 Comments

30 minutes of DarkFall

Posted on March 10, 2009 by SynCaine

I logged in and got insta-ganked by a max level character camping the spawn point. I quit. This game is the suxzorz!

As noted yesterday, I finally got my DarkFall account and was able to play for a quick 30 minutes or so last night. I’m guessing due to all the new players entering the game, at the time I was logging on there was a 20-30 minute queue to create a character. When I went to log on right before bed the queue was gone however, and again this morning there was no queue. We will see about tonight.

Having played all of 30 minutes, I can’t exactly give a full review yet (or I guess I could if I worked for IGN), but even in 30 minutes some things just jump out at you. The interface is VERY different, even more so than going from WoW to EVE. The game basically has two modes, one ‘pointer’ mode where you have your mouse cursor, and one ‘game’ mode where you can actually move around and swing a weapon. This is toggled with the right mouse button, which becomes very natural quickly, and really is a nice way to keeps things accessible while still keeping with the spirit of DF. When you are in ‘game’ mode, most of your interface fades away, which really draws you into the world and keeps things simple. It’s as close to the difference between ‘play’ and ‘pause’ as you can get in an MMO, if that makes any sense.

As most sources actually playing the game have reported, the world truly is huge, and not in a “we have 1000 different zones” kind of way. Having the map open and running for five-ten minutes, only to have your little dot basically not move on the map is impressive. In addition to just overall size, the space actually feels like a world rather than a string of quest locations. More on this later I’m sure, as I have yet to make the trek out to our guilds town.

Graphically everything looks ‘right’ in terms of building size, trees, spacing, etc., and with everything turned up to high at 1900×1200, my FPS never dropped below 60. So far the animations don’t bother me, and while I would not call them anything close to amazing, they are not so bad as to be distracting. State-of-the-art this is not, but I also don’t feel like I jumped back a generation either. It’s perhaps medium settings Oblivion graphics but with some of the fancier lighting and physics off. Ping to the server was always 150-180 and I did not encounter any lag or other technical issues.

In the hour or so that I was actually at the computer (30 minute queue, 30 in-game), the most exciting thing happened on vent, as my guild was out exploring and ran across a rival guilds town. Just the way they were describing the situation and what happened sounded like one of those “would it not be cool if” forum posts people make when wishing for better enemy AI or whatever. Swimming down to a cave, seeing the enemy force swimming out, the chase, etc. Sounded like a good time, even if it ultimately ended in running away and one person being killed.

Oh, and the AI in the game is indeed not brain-dead. The noobie goblins will hunt and kill you if you just run in 3v1 on them, bastards… More tomorrow I’m sure, but so far so good.

Posted in Darkfall Online | 13 Comments

I’m in!

Posted on March 9, 2009 by SynCaine

Finally after a full week of attempts, I got my Darkfall account today.

I can already taste the delicious carebear QQ tears.

Posted in Darkfall Online | 12 Comments

More thoughts on Zone Domination in WAR

Posted on March 9, 2009 by SynCaine

Now that everyone has had some time with the 1.2 patch in WAR, I want to talk a bit more about the Zone Domination (ZD) system and how it’s currently affecting tier 4 RvR. The difficult part of this is that along with ZD, a boatload of other changes have also been made (OP Bright Wizard AoE, yay!), but I’ll try and focus on just the ZD-related aspects.

For starters, ZD simplifies the whole zone locking system, adding clearly visible and accurate timers over objectives and keeps. This is helpful not only for organization, but also for strategic planning. If the enemy is trying to lock a zone, and the timer on a keep still has over an hour to go, you know fighting over objectives is somewhat pointless (they have a 30 minute lock timer). You either take a keep back and try to make your own zone push, or you focus on another area and come back when the zone is closer to its lockdown time. The enemy, who is theoretically dominating you, still has to defend the keeps from potential attack, and this likely weakens their force in other zones, somewhat breaking up the zerg. The attackers on the other hand are free to hit whatever zone they wish, with as strong a force as they want.

Once you are within 30 minutes of a zone locking, the defenders must now protect all four objectives from capture, which further divides the zerg (depending on each zone, as the distance between objectives varies), and can also lead to some small group battles.  A zerg on zerg battle may occur at one objective, while a small strike force sets out to attack a second. Should either force be successful, they delay the zone locking for at least 30 more minutes. As in most PvP games, player moral is often the deciding factor, and denying a superior force progress goes a long way to destroy the attackers moral. The smaller scale battles over objectives are also generally great, as individual players impact the battle far more than when they are a part of the zerg. These battles really separate the elite from the herd, and more often than not both sides bring their top players to defend/attack in small numbers. We had exactly these types of battles this past weekend on Monolith, and even in defeat they still play out great.

1.2 for me was a great step in the right direct, but it was not the patch to put WAR over the finish line. There are still some rather drastic issues (population balance which will NEVER be fixed until a 3rd side is added), performance seems to be hit/miss for people since 1.2 went live, and the city siege is still missing that ‘something’ that will really get people fired up about it (although the change to a two hour window was a good step forward). Perhaps 1.3 will be that patch, or at worst another step forward. Until then, tiers 1-3 will be blazing soon with everyone jumping on a new or old alt and riding the slayer/choppa wave. It will be nice to revisit the lower tiers now that they have also seen some improvement.

Posted in MMO design, Patch Notes, RvR, Warhammer Online | 4 Comments

Users and profit in the MMO space.

Posted on March 6, 2009 by SynCaine

Both Raph Koster and Tobold have posts up about a games user base and profitability. If this at all interests you, check both links out. The overall theme of the discussion is similar to my feelings about the iPhone app store and games on that platform. Lots of apps are very popular in terms of downloads, but few are actually decent enough to be used beyond the first 5 minutes, free or otherwise. The other issue is that anytime something is successfully sold, it’s likely to see someone make a ‘free’ version of it and destroy sales. Why pay $5 for Field Runners when you can download a bunch of similar tower defense games for free? And who would be crazy enough to invest money developing a game to compete with Field Runners when they also have to compete with a glut of similar free titles?

This also somewhat relates to F2P MMO games. Sure tons of people will try them because they are free, but when faced with the choice of progressing farther and paying, or quitting and downloading another free game, odds are most will opt for the choice that costs them nothing (especially in today’s economy). Only if the F2P games is truly pulling them in (arguably even more so than a standard sub game, because the decision to pay is more visible) will someone spend money, and one could argue if your game is THAT good (like I argue Atlantica Online is), why not just go and charge a monthly fee?

One final random thought (it’s Friday, can you tell?), is it harder to offer a product for free and THEN try to charge for it, or charge up front and perhaps lower the rate later? For example, if LoTRO drops its monthly fee to $8 a month, would that give them more profit due to increased users over a game like Atlantica Online closing its item shop and charging $5 a month for access? I mean assuming both are on equal ground to begin with of course. Bad example aside, what I’m trying to get at is I believe it’s MUCH harder to go from free to pay than it is to go from pay to less pay, even if less pay is still HIGHER than the pay of the previously free product.

Posted in Atlantica Online, iPhone, Lord of the Rings Online, MMO design, Random, World of Warcraft | 4 Comments

Getting a Darkfall account, still hardcore.

Posted on March 5, 2009 by SynCaine

The website to order Darkfall has been accepting orders each day for roughly 5-10 minutes before closing again due to availability. During that 5-10 minute window, and roughly 30 minutes before and after, the website is slammed with traffic and takes 3-4 minutes to load (if at all). As you can guess, this makes actually hitting that small window rather tough.

On the one hand, it’s beyond annoying to sit there and reload a website over and over only to ultimately fail and have to wait another day. Granted no one is forcing you to sit there and play the internet lottery that is getting a DF account, but the customer is always right and all that crap, right? Plus guild mates on the outside looking in are starting to get antsy when they keep reading about the current guild war or the work being done to growth the guild’s city.

On the other hand, at least Aventurine is doing their best (while giving up quick cash mind you) to limit the impact of tourist MMO players looking for a week long WoW vacation. Sure only (whatever number they have sold so far) are able to play, but at least you can log in to a lag free experience without login queues or newbie areas swarmed with wide-eyed players looking for the yellow exclamation point.

Given the alternative, reloading a website might not be so bad…

Posted in Darkfall Online, Random | 22 Comments