Combat was the only reason i wanted this game back, without that they got nothing to sale for me. I want dfo back.
Unfortunately there isn't enough of you to keep the servers up. BPG has to do more to the game. They get complaints about the game from people who quit and they felt that there was enough of these complaints to fuck with the combat. It's ugly either way because once again they have no plan (regarding combat).
Well you're not a Mighty Maxx who could keep the game afloat single handedly. Mighty Maxx has already left the building, so they need to either attract him and other big nithron coin purchasers back or try to attract a broader audience. When they have to choose between watering the combat down and going bankrupt the choice is obvious.
That's not the choices though. They have been told since before they relaunched Darkfall that they needed content... the reason the first game died out was due to the fact AV strung out the player base for years without adding any content. A small portion of people stuck around for the combat, none the less. However, the game still eventually died because of the fact there was nothing added to the game past 2010. They relaunched the game and took the combat that was good, and tweaked it in a good direction in beta. They, however, never added content. They still have never added content. Darkfall has never been patched with content past 2010. The lack of content additions is the killer of the game. Watering down the combat is not going to appeal to a broader audience. Changing the loot system at the end of the combat may, and adding other things to do aside from "combat" would appeal to a broader audience. The combat is not the issue. The lack of anything to fight over, or a reason to do combat is, as well as anything outside of combat just not existing. I flamed pre-launch of Rise of Agon not to launch the game until there was something new added to the game that wasn't there in 2010. They ignored me. The game took a quick nose dive after the nostalgia of woooo we have Darkfall back wore off, and people realized it was the same Darkfall they quit for a reason nearly a decade ago... Lack of content or additions to the game. Quit altering what was already good, and what kept people hanging onto this game, and focus on what could bring in new players, and keep veterans interested. New shit to do, new areas to explore, new games to play withen the game itself. "Content". I feel bad I even bothered to post this, because its beating a fucken rotten worm eaten horse like crazy at this point. I've been ignored everytime I brought it up, and here we are with a dead game as a result. Get your fucken heads out of your asses and focus on what you should have been focused on since you got your hands on Darkfall. You would most likely have a player base at this point.
I mean they made so many fuck ups, reducing the character and gear grind without adding any content was one of the major ones, which also made full loot seem a little pointless, the horrible lag for ages, making holdings worthless, making it so every1 spends 2/3rds of their time in blue cities, to easy to fast travel everywhere so you never randomly come across any1, turning the game into essentially a bad arena system and now the combat changes. They made some changes like crafting and the market place that were kinda nice and convenient but ultimately didn't really add much reason to play the game. The champions could have been something amazing if there wasn't 10 of them, you cant really create 10 pvp hot spots, if there was like 2 champions with better loot they would have become crazy hot spots that provided lots of pvp. All they really needed to add was some kinda of end game pvp content that was worth doing. Sure this is hard to come up with but I am sure there have been many ideas thrown around that could have been nice. Like land towers cause lets face it sea towers suck, make it so there is capital cities of each area that provide more benefit that are worth fighting over, crazy unique loot that is rare and is worth fighting over (like the ice dragon could drop water walking boots), which sure sounds like it could be op but it would be so nice to loot something like that. I honestly think that the only thing that could save the game now is to revert combat changes / make it so they are good. Keep character grind the way it is but make gear harder to acquire so its actually worth being a full loot game, add some end game pvp content, remove billboards from blue cities, make houses and holdings worth having again and then wipe and relaunch the game.
Vanilla combat whit stonskin arrow prot haste spell (togle buff) new arrow tipe + relics + all the good recent change like more playable warrior.....
You know what this game really needed? Take that vanilla Darkfall, you have 1.5 years of dev time, make it count, start by adding ONE big change, something that you feel proud of, something that you can put on the front page of your website in big bold font "hey guys, Darkfall now has THIS". Start with that. Something that would make players want to come back, and finally say "thank god they added content, I want to try this shit". After this shit is done, start working on the next big thing. You can have people working in parallel on quality of life stuff, UI, NPE, small combat tweaks like they did at first with fizzles and stuff, but the focus should have been from the start on wowing us, on making us want to come back and stay, and on making new players want to try the game. New pvp objective (100s of ideas were thrown out on the forums), better PVE with monsters with better AI, better housing system, more fluff, farming, etc. All that time spend solely on the famous "low dev high impact changes" or whatever, most of that dev time was wasted imo. I thought that this was supposed to be like a ~2 months thing, but it ended up being the whole pre-beta and beta dev time. Now, if you take these low dev changes, which tbh were in reality low impact (to very low impact... even to no impact at all), and you waste time remaking them again and again, that's how you end up with a launch that has barely nothing new about the game (including new players). This stuff should have been worked on in parallel. Don't get me wrong, I like some of the changes, but I know for sure that most of the people I know that ended up uninstalling within the first month and never coming back, would have stayed if there was more content into the game, new objectives to attain, more challenging stuff to do in game. Nobody would have cared if we still had the old UI, or just a tweaked leveling system instead of a new one, and SPECIALLY nobody cared about a new database. What was that? That one single decision of implementing a new database pretty much killed any chance this game had of being successful at launch. I wonder who decided to do that? Can it be the same person who decided to now change the combat? Anyway, I'm fucking pissed. I have no good game to play right now other than Fortnite, which I really like but can't play everyday since I end up getting bored. I want a fkn MMO to play... and the best I ever played, "DF1", is up and running and I can't even get myself to log in because of all that bullshit. No population, nothing really new worth logging for even after all this time...
Funny you complain about what has happened in the short 2 years, but none of you have any statistics to backup any claims that your way would have had any different result. Nor does anyone have any clue how to run a game or satisfy customers lol. It's hilarious really. "Should have listened to me" - everyone who doesn't know a fucking thing. Then the fact that the core combat hasn't actually changed, it's just less of an annoyance because you don't have to go buy destro or buff all the time. Just because something changed, even though the outcome is great, you piss and moan.
You want statistics? DF1, lack of content: died. DFUW, lack of content, changed combat: died. DFND, lack of content, changed combat: pretty much dead. DFROA, lack of content, changed combat: pretty much dead. All this happened while, from 2009 to now, forums were filled with people asking for content. You are right, nobody can know what would have happened if things were done in a different way. Darkfall has other things stopping players from trying or keep playing it... older graphics (which I like but alot of gamers don't), it's a mmo, it's grindy, there is full loot, etc. Maybe it was destined to fail unless some of these were tweaked. But how can you look at the previous iterations of the game, their success and failures, read the suggestions on the forums, and STILL think that it's a good idea to focus mainly on things that are already in the game and working (combat, loot tables, crafting recipes, food and potions, weapons, leveling system, UI, database, etc, etc) instead of adding new content to the game? If it's not broke, don't fix it. Again, it doesn't mean not to touch anything that is already in game... for example, I like the changes to the UI. But making these things a priority, instead of something you spend time on between big projects (or that you have one separate guy working on), was a huge mistake imo.
