Grind should have been a given, everyone knew RoA would fail if its grind was anything close to the original. That's probably their best accomplishment and it was in a great spot after launch with the scroll system early on and then it kind of went into overdrive some years later to help retain new players which is probably needed so I can't complain. I'm a big fan of scrolls and roughly the time it takes to be viable though.

Portal chambers is a shot yourself in the foot type of deal. They never should have been taken out. It took like over a year to get them back because they were stubborn about their totally not botched wilderness portals being the end all be all transportation. The portal shard market was in shambles in this dark age.

Gathering rates are pretty cool and im a fan of the rare nodes in the world. Although I miss the dopamine hit of getting 1 rare ore every few iron veins. Still a bit mixed on the actual rates as I would love to just pop a movie and go to town rather than actively moving every 30 seconds but I can't complain. Unbreakable tools is a nice quality of life too.

Fast travel is nice if its implemented right. Wilderness portals were nice but poorly implemented. With portal chambers, wilderness ones and capital city recall (really cool incentive to be blue btw, I really like it) that should have been it. The runebook is still something I personally disliked on its first iteration but am tolerating its new version but I really dislike runestones/portal shards being on vendors now. When they revamped mob loot and made 90% of mobs much worse to farm they further hurt it by helping kill some of the few remaining hotspots. Shadow knights, minotaur shamans, cairn giants, and the biggest sacrilege of all - ghost spawns! RIP Oethrain and other similar holdings where those were its lifeblood. Billboard can also suck my ass too.

For a lot of the simple changes required they are about 50% good, 30% taking a step back and like 20% bad ideas implemented poorly.

 

Grind in RoA should have been like in Original DF or even harder for the game to survive, with a daily soft cap on gains to make sure a group of players could not get too much ahead of the rest of the population.

This is an MMO, not an arena/battleroyale.
Instant gratification and Darkfall, chose one.

 

All of these changes were dumb and pretty much ruined what Darkfall was suppose to be about.
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Wilderness portal chambers could have been nice if done right and created a pvp hot spot, there should have been 1 or 2 portal chambers on each of the 4 sub continents that all lead to the center dungeon area, then at the center dungeon area 4-8 portals that each lead to a place on the sub continent, this would have created multiple great pvp hot spots.

 

harder grind than original dfo? lmao. dude, take out meditation (wasnt in df originally), bugged mobs, actually enforce bans for macroing, and you're looking at a 16 hour a day 7 days a week for a year grind to hit max. What other game even has that?

 

Lots of asian games have it, BDO for example you could have spent 24 hours a day since release just grinding away a single char and still not be maxed, but the gear grind is luck based, I suppose if you did that + dropped a lot of money on it you might be maxed.

 

In darkfall 1 I was casual because the skill grind was too high. In fact in pvp everything was more difficult because I was fighting against people who had the character with the maximum skills, this made the game unbalanced because despite playing for a year I was still not competitive enough. In fact it was impossible to bring in new players as it was clear to everyone that before having fun and being competitive you had to have been grinding mobs for at least a year. I think the grind should be a separate thing for those who like to kill mobs and not to be competitive in pvp.
Darkfall is supposed to be a sandbox and as such it shouldn't force me to grind.
The only non-sandbox part of this game is incredibly combat, as we are all forced to choose the same equipment and the same style of play, which in my opinion should be fixed.
You cannot compare DF to BDO as BDO is a themepark divided into zones where if you die you lose nothing. So you can keep the grind high and make all bullshit lovers happy, like pets, skinn, porn clothes and mob killing items.

 

I wasn't trying to compare the 2, was just saying there are games with more grind than df1 had.

The issue is once you remove the grind, you remove the reason people go out to do things. Which means there is no1 out and about to pvp. You also lose one of the biggest reasons to pvp and that is the importance of loot.

By removing the grind they basically removed what created content (pvp) without adding anything in its place.

 

I think that people (during end game) have to go out in the world because of other reasons. Not for grinding. Now grind is ok, but there are other problems, like no enchanting ui, no ingame enchanting recipes, too many objects for a ready bag (i speak about numbers).
And let's not forget that we have all the naval part, ships, cannons, sea towers, sea monsters, which should be improved and upgraded. I think there should be at least 10 events in the sea every day, pvp and pve.

 

can we just get all of those changes + a wipe on the main server too pls?

 

Lemme put it this way: Grind in RoA was fucking fine at launch.

 

Yeah I understand why the character progression is the way it is at the moment. Personally I felt it was perfect around the time scrolls got released. It took two or three weeks get around 75 skill in most of your essentials and scrolls offered a way to power through and double up on it by farming monsters.

The wilderness portal system is a great idea but it just needs fleshing out. I dunno but maybe it should be kept simple in the way that unholy wars did it. The map is much bigger so maybe two per continent would be better than one. When runebooks came out it ended up killing off most of the wilderness portal network travel anyways unless you were in a farming route and one happened to lead to another spawn along the way.

Everything else sounds great too that you list and I hope they eventually make it in. Personally I'd hope the NA server could get that with a wipe/relaunch eventually. There's just too much stuff over 4+ years to make scarcity on items/holdings worth much. The map is big enough that each person could probably own their own tile much less each guild vying for resources. A decent advertisement campaign with something like a steam launch with a lot of those problems fixed that you listed would probably bring a decent amount of people who quit - like myself - back and be a great kickoff for fresh eyes on the game.

Personally I see the launch overseas as a great way to test and learn if the game is ready for a new blood to enter it. As it is now, i'd say its not but its not everyday you get to kick off fresh to see where you can improve your game. Hopefully the team does and NA gets some life back into it.

 

Blood walls for 2 weeks straight (6 hrs a day) just to reach 75 for mastery.



Scrolls were great for grind. Wish it went back to that. You could create value in mobs.

Wilderness portals shouldnt have been scatted. They should have been in a circular loop... for example: 1 portal to each of the chaos cities, in a circle. 1 portal to each island, in a circle, 1 portal to each capital city, in a circle. Done. Not sure what the idea was with the confusing mess that they are.

NPE needs work. You need to have better starting quests with REALISTIC scenarios. For example, craft a helmet and enchant it with encumbrancr, then explain its importance. You kill 2 birds with 1 stone. Go complete a daily dungeon, and sell the reward on the market, 2 birds 1 stone.

 

I quit playing DF ROA a few years ago because the pop got to low for me so I'm not fully aware of the changes you guys have made since then. I really like the market / Begginer areas not being full loot however I personally think that prioritising this list below

-Bring back long term character development
-More scarcity on resources
-Better environment for crafters with research expanded to all crafting skills as the primary levelling of those skills. This system wouldn't be fair to add to existing skills on the NYC server but we will likely be using it in any future new crafting skills.
-A general rebalance across all loot tables to promote more unique tables so there's more mobs and activities that will be useful.
-Addressing high visibility and game breaking bugs to smooth the game experience out more.
-Improving the NPE by prioritizing bugs that are visible or affect them heavily within the first few hours/days of playing, improving the tutorial and UI.

Is a inefficient use of dev time ( except for addressing game breaking bugs that's always good use of dev time ) if your goal is to get DF ROA to a point where player population is healthy(5000 - 10000). I played with "elitist" players (Instinct aka Sluts with Standards) most of my time in ROA but towards the end I took over Drow which was mostly a new player clan and what I noticed is the majority of New Players are coming onto the server competing against a veteran population and aside from raiding another group of New players eg Drow Vs Grief Goons there isn't really any viable PVP content for new guys.

As a new player in this game you join one of the non elitist clans cool now I go grind my character for 1 month because I need to get viable cool. Now I sit in my city and duel all day because 90% of the sieges we drop against other clans which we could have fun fights against get piggybacked by half the server showing up and scroaching not to mention majority of the siege is waiting around snooze fest. Chances are most villages I'm not going to be able to contest because I'm competing against vets, Sea Tower same deal. My only chance of finding a decent fight is raiding other pockets of the map with new players or random chance encounters but the reality is most random open world encounters I'm going to take the L and good competitive fights do exist, they are very fun but they are few and far between.

Now contrast DF with Albion which is the most popping Full loot pvp hardcore game atm 200k player base. You log on and from day 1 you can engage in PVP against players of similar experience EMPHASIS on SIMILAR EXPERIENCE all the way from 1v1 2v2 5v5 10v10 to Zerg V Zerg not only that but the map itself is tiered so that you can choose what level of risk you want to take and this instanced form of pvp which albion uses doesn't take away from the open world fights because there is still plenty of open world PVP content and a lot of people prefer the open world stuff. Bottom line is you can pick up Albion and be pvping actively the same day.

I'm not saying DF has to mimic Albion exactly I don't think Albions exact setup would work in DF but I noticed you guys have put in tiered villages, I haven't tried them personally I would like to see if they are working in practice but I think tiered game content like this is what's going to keep players around and the population growing and it should be your focus. I'm glad to see it because at least its a step in the right direction imo. Also just want to say I understand obviously in the past development resources have been low only reason I post this now is because I feel like with a proper dev team and a relaunch in Asia if you guys focus on tiered content for all levels of player mainly the new players might have a chance of maintaining a healthy playerbase.

 

wow this was seen over Hong Kong

 

We all know how the Asia market works. Long grinds and pay to win microtransactions. It's a bit disheartening to see you guys take your business elsewhere and implement things people have been asking for here.

 

Same people, same ideas, same results.

 

I personally see the asian server being a bust. From what I recall, Unholy Wars died off rather quickly on the Asian launch due to the fact that Asians avoided PVPing each other for the most part and would rather grind all day. I hope this endeavor works for you, but to be completely honest I think you would be much better off by checking those things off your list and implementing them on the NA server with a fresh launch. I think it's always been crystal clear where the Darkfall playerbase is most populous, and it isn't Asia.

 

this is an accurate description of driving in many countries. Im overseas for work right now and there's oceans of people who drive scooters in herds. They will stack 5 or 6 people, an entire family on that shit and drive like this. Its hilarious and scary.

 

Does it bother anyone else that the Asia server is getting all the changes we've been asking for with a fresh start, but the NA server isn't? You said we will get the same patches, BUT the economy is ruined, people literally have a thousand infernal sets and everyone has max character so there's nothing to do, so giving us the same patches does NOTHING for us. What we need is a wipe with the same things that you're giving the Chinese server so our server has a chance to actually be successful. What it is right now is not success. You might say the playerbase is ok, but it can be SO MUCH higher.