No way should a game like Darkfall have seasons involved. I am not going to go into detail but, it's NOT what the game needs. Quality of Life and New Player Experience is desperately needed. You're going the wrong way when thinking of how to improve the game. When people start this game now unless they have friends or a clan that helps them they are effed. Yes you can bring a character to pvp viable in a couple days IF you know how to do it. New player starts the game and they have the one silly hotbar setup. after figuring out how to even HIT an npc (If they can figure it out) they will start gaining skills and spells pretty quickly. Then they have to figure out how to bind the skills, and then use them. I know this is the wrong thread so I will stop with the novel I was about to write but, you're putting resources into the COMPLETELY WRONG PLACE to help this game succeed.
We agree that NPE and QoL are important and in constant need of improvement and we are always working on it. We are designing and implementing a tutorial area similar to what UW had (I know "UW" will make people scream, but there wasn't anything wrong with the tutorial per say), but that doesn't mean there aren't other areas the game cant improve in. Like many have stated since the beginning, keeping old players interested is as important as getting new players in. After all that's where those new players will end up at some point as well. Edit: We're also redesigning the paperdoll/hotbar setup to be more in-line with modern MMO's and making the "macro" system far more intuitive. Like you said, it's the wrong thread This is just one of the many topics we felt the need to bring forward to the player base for input.
If you go with seasons or stay with what we have now, things to need to change every 3-4 months anyway. Whether that is the "special nodes" around the city that make it worth taking or any other advantage a city may give. It is important to change this around so people are not trying to take the same city all the time, it gets stale fast. "Seasons" could just mean that the advantage of a city is randomized to a different city after x amount of time, so the need to conquest that new city is greater, creating conflict.
I would just like to say - fuck seasons. I'd just go play Overwatch, Path of Exile or Diablo 3 if I wanted seasons. Keep seasons out of the game - find another way.
what would be good? I think a faction system would be great with separate holdings that can be capture.
This community makes no sense. When I expressed worry over the tcs possibly pushing clans to ally up and causing a very zerg v zerg situation on the server, people shot me down and went on about how 200 vs 200 fights were the funnest thing in darkfall. Now with seasons, those same big fights would be a reccuring event at the start of every season at least, but suddenly everyone hates the implication of having to start over again, and generally want the game to stagnate with clans permanently holding certain territories and getting no fights. Logic fizzled at some point between these two threads. -_-
A lot of people want to have their cake and eat it too. People don't understand that for darkfall to be successful it will have to be something they don't like, large scale combat. The only way ROA stays small scale combat is if it keeps having a low population. Same for the season thing. People want meaningful content but they don't want to have anything change or have to work for it at all.
I do not like the seasons and reset ideas. Darkfall has always had meaningful conflict which is something you can never have in games that do realm vs realm or factions. In those type games you fight others simply because you are yellow and they are blue or whatever color opposes you "color". In this game there is and has always been a reason behind the conflict. That reason could be because they attacked you at a goblin spawn, or because they were just jerks, or because you simply wanted what was theirs bad enough to start a war over it. If you implement this short term contest then you are removing the political aspect from the game. You will HAVE to attack your neighbors in order to win for no other reason than they just happened to be there. Soooooo impersonal. I say leave Agon a persistent world just as it has always been. Implement your territory control system and let us enjoy ruling over however big of an area we can hang on to and let us pick our own fights for ourselves instead of some contest that is ending in 2 months deciding who I fight.
What if seasons didn't change holdings and towers at all. Instead it scrambled mob spawns and regional loot. This would make territorial needs and desires change frequently enough without actually 'losing progress'. It would also be nice to see different cities become 'best' and 'worst'.
Part of the value we see in seasons is for people to have a chance to come-back in the next season. Players and clans in big wars have always had an exodus of activity following the end of a big server war. It creates content for a while with big fights happening but truly even fights lasting for weeks or months is VERY rare. In most cases one side starts winning/pushing back the other and at that point the losing side starts losing steam and members, especially if they end up losing their last holdings. We think that a reset mechanic either based on a set time or a win condition would allow victories to happen but also a chance for players to line up things for the reset. It also allows new clans a chance to get in on the ground floor instead of feeling too far behind to attempt catching up. In addition if we have a seasons time we can make it cheaper to build territories so it's more about the battle over them than stockpiling massive quantities of resources for months to build a city. There's 3 main options we see: Fast/cheap with 3-4 month seasons, a bit slower and more expensive with a win condition which resets territories only if a clan manages to complete the objectives or no resets/seasons and upkeeps/expansion costs must be heavier to prevent a single clan easily taking over a huge part of the world. There's merits to each type of system and our internal discussions are leaning towards somewhere in the middle as we're discussing the feedback and ideas coming forward. We think that the idea of changing the rare spawns and regionalisation might be interesting as a monthly "shake up". The questions arising there are about immersion if we did mob spawns(Rare ore golems can change no problem) as you could see fire giants on niflheim and ice elementals on ruby for example. It would keep things pretty fresh to do that though as there would be a change in value to holdings and territories every time they shake-up. Good discussion guys love the ideas
I say just do whatever you guys feel is best for the game. It seems that a lot of people in this particular thread are still stuck in the Aventurine era DF mindset. The idea of meaningful persistent politics simply can't exist in this iteration of the game, at least not in the same way it used to. RoA is a much faster game, it takes a couple days to max out all stats/schools. What is there for players to do if the political situation never changes and clans sit in the same areas for months on end? Back in DF1, the grind itself kept a lot of people occupied. You could log in every day to the same clans in the same holdings with the same mentality of "not worth it to siege", and still feel that your time in game was well spent because you upped 0.60 strength and finally got those last 2 levels of wall of force. It just won't work that way anymore, and honestly I can't understand why people are so fixated on maintaining the same holdings indefinitely. Portal chambers are no longer a thing, so why not have a reason to siege a different city against different opponents every now and then? I do think a middle ground is needed, with shifting mob spawns or w/e, otherwise the top clans will be going after the same exact holdings every season, and I can see that getting repetitive, but I personally still like the idea itself. And why exactly are people comparing seasons in df to seasons in PoE or OW with a negative connotation? If anything, those games are proof that seasons work to keep things fresh, new players coming and old ones entertained.
Rare spawn "shake up" would have to be far less often than a month or nobody is going to bother taking the holdings.
--- Post updated --- I would agree that having Seasons would help keep people coming back However you should consider only doing this in the outer sub continents as a test. Adding a mechanic that lets a clan trigger an invasion on the main land if a clan can control 3 out of 4 World Wonders on the outer continents would be more interesting for me because then PvP control in the lawless area could ramp on PvE in the Lawful area.
