We recently released our newest Developer Blog which goes into a some detail on some of the things our development team has been working on behind the scenes. Please feel free to ask any questions that you have and I will respond directly in this thread. Thank you for reading!
Thanks for pointing out the thread title, I fixed it There's a lot of information in this post we haven't specifically talked about in detail yet, and this discusses only some of the things we are currently working on.
Make sure that you guys fix the casting bugs at the same time as you put in the auto cast etc features. If you don't know what the casting bug is i'll explain. Theres really 2 main ones. First one is pretty common, a spell starts then stops and your hands keep moving like you're casting but the spell is no longer charging. Second one is sometimes you can get stuck in your cast and the only way to fix this is either by remembering what spell you were casting and cast it again or die/relog. @Andrew @MWTaylor @Erock @Suicidesheep
Yup these are both known issues that are in our backend system with detailed explanations as well as videos to better show the issues. It is a very old an annoying but i won't deny that. So many times have i started casting a spell assuming it was going whereas it actually stopped half way and i'm just standing there staring at my opponent.
@MWTaylor So its been a month now.. Have you guys gotten a better handle on how long before we can expect beta?
As I mentioned in the post itself, we hope to have an ETA soon but we cannot give one at this time. We are committed to taking the time and developmental work needed to resolve these security issues to make Darkfall: Rise of Agon a non-hacker friendly game, and the servers will stay down until those tasks are completed.
Starting off new characters with regs and gold is a bad idea, unless you put in a delay for deleting your character. That is easily exploitable by deleting and remaking a character over and over to make gold and regs.....
This is already being considered to prevent exploitation from happening, but we feel the change overall is worth it to help the new player experience.
New character protection isn't available after the first character you make on an account, with a feature like that already in place it can't be difficult to do the same with the starting items.
I actually think you should take it a step further by including a set of armor and some bread. It's important that you give players rank 0 weapons too and explain the process of equipping them for skill gain. I think all of this should be in a bag then explain the concept of easy come easy go in terms of pvp and full loot. Don't make these walls of text, it shouldn't be hard to overlay a voice tutorial to a corresponding action for a new player. You do not want a new player shooting off thousands of mana missiles or transfers to all of the sudden realize they weren't skilling up. That first shot or swing from a weapon should trigger a positive response when they see skill gain. Each race should have a tutorial town while the other spawn locations could be for advanced players that just want to avoid the congestion. It's also important that you vastly scale the spawns in the starter locations. Keep at it but I do concur with a previous poster, this wasn't really an update with "new" things as you claimed it would be in a previous post. It's more a progress report on things which have already been mentioned.
Fish would probably be better since its a more universally easy to obtain food. Bread is easy mid to late game, but early game you are better off using that gold in other areas and not everyone will have access to a farm.
Thank you for the feedback Ron. We have discussed giving basic armor and weapons, along with some basic food/minor potions, for new players but the game design team was a little torn on that. What are other people's thoughts? As for your second point, we have also discussed allowing skill gains with starter weapons, potentially up to a certain point. I personally believe a new player should be able to join the game and see immediate skill gain without having to find out they need a Rank 0 weapon to get them. Your final point in regards to new player spawns is another thing we have been discussing internally. We have another meeting coming up to discuss this aspect further and see how we can expand that area of the new player experience, such as increasing spawns and potentially adding/redistributing spawns.
I think it is imperative to increase spawn size. It doesn't have to be every spawn and it can be toned down after launch but I can remember how horrible the spawns were at launch with dozens of players just standing around waiting to kill the 3-4 mobs in each spawn. Players have been brainwashed to complete quests, the first thing a new player is going to do is want to complete the quests, when that quest involved killing goblins or trolls 99% of the time and they have to stand around just trying to tag 1 they will quit the game in droves. I could see allowing skill gains for just lesser magic and maybe up to 25 skill on starter weapons, nothing after that. But even having 1 rank 0 and teaching the player how to drag it to a hotbar could go a long way to improving someones experience, even initiating a tutorial pop up the first time someone buys a new skill and teaching them how to drag it to a hotbar too. "congratulations you have reached lvl 25 in lesser magic, you can now purchase additional spells" *tutorial that takes them to the spell guy, shows em how to click and drag it etc... PS: the design team was torn on giving new players some low quality armor and bread? ya I'm going to call those guys idiots, don't take advice from those people, they'll ruin the game
