Noob Comic's Report 8

I'm in love with this game! IN LOVE!

To all the people who've been waiting to read about player cities, thank you for your patience. I'll write it this week. I'd write it tonight but I have a lot of material to go through and I need to check with Aventurine re. NDA lift to make sure that I don't utter any words that break the Seventh Sigil and precipitate the apocalypse. This update instead is just about how beta is going at the moment and PVP in a populated world.

The reason why I didn't post updates earlier is that I wanted to do it once 1500+ people had been added to the beta server and the game had shown its full potential, and this happened two or three weeks later than planned. At the beginning of January the servers were up, but mostly with the same early beta testers, and even the most determined didn't have the drive to farm enough resources to build cities in a world that was going to be wiped as soon as all the new people arrived.

Now that there are lots of players in game, the game is so much fun that I don't even know how to describe it. Hundreds of people are being added on an almost daily basis so I really hope that you'll be able to check it out for yourselves very soon, but everyone is having a ball. I can't count how many people have told me that they're having the best time in a MMO in years.

Mainly the complaints that I've seen on the beta forum were when the devs were testing the queuing system by taking the servers down then back on very often, and even if they had warned us that for some time it'd be a bumpy ride, people were ripping their hair off because they wanted to get back in game, now. NOW! Enough with these testing antics, there are players that need killin', dammit, let us back in!

Aside from the first 48 hours or so of occasional crazy pings while they were running some debug/logging stuff in the background, now the game runs very smooth even with all the new players. As for local lag, on Tuesday night there was a big fight of about 20-25 blues vs 10 reds in Mahirim lands, and even with so many people on screen fps and ping held steady. Here's the comment from one of the participants, quoted from the forum:

"I generally have about a 120-130 ping and I definitely hit in this battle with both magic and melee without too much of a problem. I saw one guy skip around a bit as we were chasing him. . . but for playing across the ocean I have no complaints."

Darwin's law is making sure that people adapt and learn quickly what are the best tactics for PVP in Darkfall, managing stamina, fooling people into burning theirs, fighting in close quarters without hitting friends, where to aim to hit a runner with archery/magic,  etc. etc., and of course how to prepare. This is the post-mortem of the first big fight written by the same guy, who was one of the blue players – I take the liberty to quote him because he describes very well what we're all finding out about consumables:  

"This fight was definitely lopsided our way in numbers. We had about 20, and you had about 10, but I say 25+ just be sure. I do see how important food and potions are when fleeing, as it kept your stamina above ours and we eventually petered out. We were out farming when you started to chase one of ours, so we gathered the troops and went to the bank (note: their player city's bank), and started the fight.

You guys did play better as a unit and it showed in the outcome, we dropped 2-3 people and they got probably 5 or more. I do not know as I made it out alive. So numbers does not always mean better in this game.

It was very hard to follow who the target was expecially since we were both mahirim and wearing similar armor. Clothing and guild colors will be very nice when they get implemented.

Good thing for everyone saying food and stamina give an edge is that it is easy to get. Go fish awhile and you will have a week's worth of food and make some potions. Consumables will give you and edge for sure."

Despite all the problems that they had last week (I'd like to know who hates DF so much to dos their webservers for days) the devs came out on top and are doing a great job of reacting quickly to both bug reports and suggestions from the testers with daily patches.

I could go on and on and on about how this game is turning out to be awesome, but I bet that the nay-sayers would just say that I'm fanboing and that it's just my own subjective opinion. Instead, I'll just show you a screenshot of a poll that a player created earlier on the beta forum, asking "Now that you have seen it, going to preorder?":

Here you go, if I'm fanboing I'm in good company. Oh, and did I mention that I am so annoyed that last night I didn't see how a guy in my party chopped someone's head off, because I was turned the other way reviving someone who'd been incapacitated? Daaaaamn! I hope to see some heads chopped off tonight.

The new overhead attack that you can switch to is very cool, it makes it a harder to hit but it also has less splash damage so it's easier to avoid friendlies. Gank and revive are in. CHOPPED HEADS ARE IN. Sorry, it's a wrap. There could be people chopping heads RIGHT NOW. I don't want to miss it! GOTTA GO!  See you all soon in beta, I hope, and I'll post about player cities in the next few days.