This started as a reply to a thread about being jumped at mob spawns, but it turned into a thread before I knew it, so let's have this discussion here instead. It covers quite a bit so it could get messy, but it's just a discussion for now and we'll see where it takes us for further discussions, votes, and such. This turned into a bit of a ramble, but at least it shows some of the thoughts I have regarding these topics. Pvp itself is such a polarizing topic and adding full loot on top of that just makes it that much more of a pve'r deterrent. We all know we need more players and really we need more pve players more than anything. This is an mmorpg after all and catering solely to the pvp mentality doesn't really work that well when those with that mindset can find quicker, easier access to all kinds of pvp without the "rpg" aspect poking it's head in. Any mmorpg that has ever tried to go full pvp, especially full loot, without some kind of "break" for people has suffered in population. You'll always get arguments that UO had a good amount of success, but they also had to make some changes to prevent the player base from bleeding out. Eve Online has high security space which still allows for war declarations and ganking to occur. Albion has non pvp zones. Both of them still get complaints from the pve crowd. In Eve people still complain about war declarations, Albion people complain that not enough can be done solo without going into pvp territory. I don't want to change the game so drastically that we alienate people, but I do think we need to consider our options. I suggest everyone, even those opposed to change, take some time and consider what the game might be like with different scenarios. what would the game be like if we did Eve Style Lawful Areas: Attacking any blue will get you killed - (effectively what happens in Eve with the cops - lots of options here on how to kill the attackers). Wars are the only way around the law. Can attack reds freely without retaliation (in even reds get killed in the higher security spaces). How would it change the game if people could farm in lawful areas without much worry people are going to attack? Albion Style lawful areas: No pvp at all More strict for sure. Part of the problem with making changes now is the shape of the world. There is a rather large section of lawful area and it is not ideal to shrink them if they're going to continue to be separate. Having multiple pockets of lawful with lawless between them could be even more confusing and detrimental to players, but maybe I'm wrong on that. Modifying the world to accommodate a single lawful area that is smaller, like one of the islands, would take a ton of time and effort. Because we have territory control coming soon™ we need to consider changes in lawful areas anyway. A big part of territory control is controlling tiles that are not a part of the one the city resides on. This type of competition doesn't mix well with lawful and it's rules so territory control will be restricted to the islands. This means we'll have cities on the mainland we need to decide what to do with. Do we keep them as is and still allow clans to siege over control individually? I would like to see them turned into daily or weekly events myself. Scheduled sieges that any clan can partake in and when you control it you get the portal and maybe taxes from the land around it. Rambling thoughts: Another thought that goes through my mind when it comes to full loot is we lose out on the concept of legendary items and equipment that we can work for long periods of time to obtain and use freely without worry of losing that hard work. I ask myself what is it that I like about full loot and what would make me like pvp just as much without it? We want full loot not because we lose stuff, that's for sure. It does add to the suspense and heartache, but that's not the main reason we want it. We want it so we can get rewarded for looting our kill. Would looting the inventory alone be enough, keeping the paperdoll safe? Is there something that could replace gear for looting? Some kind of, essence, skill, stat, something? I believe the reward for winning in pvp needs to hurt the loser. Partly because that's part of the victory, right? Making the other guy suffer ☜(ﾟヮﾟ☜) Actually mostly because you can exploit a win scenario if there is no loss on the other end. Anyway now I'm just rambling. I'm curious what everyone thinks about these thoughts, this concept of making some safer areas in roa. How detrimental would it actually be for the game if lawful was changed more? I don't want to alienate anyone, but at the same time... well, I'd like to keep this ship sailing as long as possible. It's not an easy answer for sure or we would have pulled the trigger on more severe changes a long time ago.
sadly the small team and lack of content/patch/fix and social media updates hurts the game way more then full loot. its a big no for me.
I think if you have all sub continents the best loot and lawless as well as vcps, lawless holdings, dungeons? and center. Make everything else lawful where you can attack someone but they don’t lose gear - this will give the noobies practice without the fear of losing anything, maybe make them walk from the nearest bind stone. Or maybe they just drop their inventory that is not equipped. You can make legendary pve weapons with sick damage modifiers skins / glows that work in pve only.base damage will be same as equivalent rank but say fire giant slayer plus 10- you think people wouldn’t want that? Or dragonslayer
For me whitout full loot pvp anyone play roa...its the best part of the game...add message allert when someone enter in the mobs spawn....more guard towers in "safe zones" ....
Why does the thought process instantly go to make areas safe when the truth is, no one is in those areas in the first place other then noobs or fresh characters. Nobody runs anywhere unless it’s for the trade route. I have been back for 2 weeks. I have seen 1 person in a blue zone that wasn’t standing at the bank staring at their pixels. Why not just make there be more of a reason to be in lawless areas. More content, more exclusive resources in certain areas. The new armor mats is a great start. The saddest thing about pve right now is, solo you can make more waddling around Yssam or Niff hitting trees or rocks respectively. You talk about keeping the ship sailing as long as possible. That’s not what this will accomplish, you are talking about sinking the ship and spawning a new one that will just sink as well.
New content will always be needed and yes we're working on it. Everything we're doing right now is for new armors and implementing territory control. Those are the primary focuses right now. This discussion here is a decade in the making for Darkfall alone and has been discussed to death over countless other attempts at full loot mmorpg's. This isn't about today or tomorrow and what it will do with the current player base. This is about what it will do to retain what we hope to bring in with the coming patches and advertising pushes that we'll do for them.
I would like to see lawful areas be pvp-free for a variety of reasons. Protects new players and gives them a chance to explore and learn the ropes. Prevents griefing. Player retainment will be higher. The game needs more chill activities where players can play without having a high chance of losing their stuff, not everyone can handle full loot. Gathering and farming in lawful areas provides a more chill experience. By making it clear that lawless areas are pvp zones it creates a nice kind of tension, you know that going there could be very dangerous. This is more fun than getting griefed at goblins when you barely know what you're doing and if you die, you knew the risks and will be more likely to accept it and try again.
The problem with changes like this is if you go to far you are basically changing Darkfall to another generic mmo, then why bother playing Darkfall? the only good thing about it is the pvp and the full loot. Also the likely hood is that all these pvers that you hope to gather with these safe zones probably wont leave them and its possible that the people who do play now will go there any time they want to farm. Having said that I think if done right it could be okay. I think you would have to set limits within the safe zone to encourage people to go out and pvp, for example make it so you can only get up to q3 mats and r50 Weapons / Armour within the zone. Also balance the economy within the zones, perhaps you could have a completely safe zone that you can farm 10k gold an hour in, a semi safe zone which you can be killed by people with war decs (people will remain unclanned to get around this, so maybe make unclanned people attackable) and make it so you can farm 25k gold an hour, and in the unsafe zones make is so you can farm 50k+ an hour. When I speak of gold an hour I mean in mats + gold, not pure gold. This would encourage pvers to go out into the world when they feel ready. You could also add unique fluff items that can only be obtained outside the safe zones care bears love that shit. As far as safe zones go I would say make it a certain size around a races capital city and 3 starter cities, and make sure there are no high end mobs in there. Also make it so all champs are lawless and to travel from 1 racial city to another you have to go through lawless areas.
That's why I always thought that Shadowbane had a good balance of pvp and loot. People say that its all about the full loot, which i can agree to some point. In DF1 starting off dying meant a lot more then after you have been playing for a while. At some point I had 30-40 million and god knows how many dragon sets so dying and losing gear meant absolutely nothing anymore. Then it just became about the pvp and to me no other game out there captures the level of the player skill than Darkfall. Full loot style pvp is and will and always be the deterrent of the masses. Then you add in actual player skill with fps type combat and thats why you have the population we have now. The game is just insanely hard and actually takes time and practice to get good at to which 99.9% of the mmo player base is used to just tab target combat with zero player skill involved with aiming or prediction. There will always be different opinions on how the looting system should be when it comes to DF. Thinking about it having played so much in the past is I always end up asking the same question. When does loot actually matter? People tend to wear their best shit for sieges (like I said I had tons of dragon so i actually farmed in it lol) so why not just make full loot for siege time only? You can make it inventory drop only on the islands, but you are going to have to increase the quality and quantity of the mob drops i'd imagine. And no loot drop on the mainland so if you want to grief a noob you are only wasting his time and yours and nothing else. I think racial wars was another big one that attracts the rp people, those race only clans were awesome in the past. That and with siege only loot then you might actually start seeing a different type of mmo player that can fit among the mold. Otherwise you will end up fighting the same people over and over as we are now. It's been the same for so long and has always turned out the same, why not change it?
I am all for the lawful zones being safer. Just up the mob drops/gathering/chaos chests/etc in lawless areas so you are more encouraged to go there, and we are set. It is not like there are high end spawns in lawful areas anyway. There still shouldn't be any 100% safe space, though. You should be able to die anywhere, it is just that your killer should die as well. EDIT: Another benefit to making lawful areas safer would be newbs seeing more players at capitols, making the world seem livelier.
The way I see it, if some people want to play in safe areas, let them. I'd rather have them playing this game than something else. These farmers and gatherers can help build empires, teach new players the game, roleplay, etc, they have a place. One of my friends is 55 years old and does nothing but gather, he doesn't craft or anything, he just likes gathering. He does not want to pvp, he just wants to login and relax. An mmo needs many types of players.
Perhaps some sort of tracking skill?? May be even try this buff to tcs to keep up so the lessers in the clan want to keep it up and going cause it effects them most?? I have not read any of this but I see the heading.. I’m not sure how to implement but a warning before jump I feel would go along way to keep the lesser talented players happy?? Just a thought..not sure how it can be implemented. Recently I have had a lot of new player start and one got jumped and he played shadow bane and he asked me if there is a form of tracking at all what ever that means I told him no..but he got killed ganked and looted at goblins lol never seen again..just a thought I’m not sure how the sb tracking worked but he brought it up..just feed back from a one day noob who came from shadow bane..
He just finds gathering fun and relaxing, he literally does not do anything else but gather. He gave me a huge pile of stuff a while ago, he just likes helping out. He also did something similar in WoW, he farmed for a long time to buy his daughter one of the really expensive mounts a while back.
Why you always want drastic change lol....remove full loot and heavy gameplay change are dangerous we want play darkfall whitout bug not another game....you doing to many change to the gameplay for me..only some are good...remove the bug and stop to remove ...start to add new gameplay style whitout nerf to much the old darkfall gameplay....or you go in the same direction of dnd..and close the server...
I will bring up my prior idea that I mentioned before since it's relevant and kilrain knows about it already but at a high level it would essentially make all armour and weapons last longer with more durability but cost way more and then PvP no longer is full loot, at least in lawful zones. At that point you then when you die in a lawful zone lose some of your gear based on your alignment. The more red you are the more of a chance you lose your gear and keep in mind this gear is worth a lot more now so there's still high risk and reward. The chance of losing gear is doubled when you're flagged as the one starting the conflict and potentially doubled again when you're in a lawless zone(or just full loot). Villains would also be perma flagged in this system. In regards to the backpack loot, idk. If items became expensive enough, then people not care much for backpack loot and maybe blues in a lawful area keep all of their backpack or drop a percent of it based on the above stats like alignment, flaggin, and zone. I think this is a very strong middle ground solution to blue pve'ers and also removes a lot of that bullshit regearing issue, especially if you're the one that's not engaging PvP which I would say emotionally is the worst part of the game losing your gear on top of loot after pveing to progress. Pkers can handle losing gear and regearing much easier emotionally since they signed up for pking and the risk as well as using gear they don't care much for.
I think this is being way over thought and over complicated. Add small safe zones to the new player areas around capitals and starting cities, so that new players have a place to learn the game. Nothing else is needed.
I enjoy Glovia Victis loot rules. Their system is based on loot points and time where you have x amount of time to loot x amount of points. Then have certain daily or repeatable activities you can do in the world to increase your loot point cap. Saints get more loot points and Reds get limited unless they increase their cap doing some activities to increase their loot cap. Loot cap can also depend on gear score where the more you risk the more you can loot like village loot. Or have a system where you can take only 1 rare item on their paper doll plus their bag or 1/2 their bag or certain number of loot points from their bag. I am all for a system that will bring lots of people back to the game and turn this into constant state of war. I dearly miss original launch and how I can barely hit 2 rocks without getting attacked. I enjoyed those day. Also the low-end gear pvp was a lot of fun too. Everything doesn't have to be about end-game gear. I enjoy the fights more than I enjoy the loot.
