1000 Unique Visitors and Darkfall Build 9 Community Generated Patch Notes

Evil Bastages Darkfall Blog hit 1000 unique visitors today. Averaging about 50 unique visitors per day. Not bad for being around three weeks. Just want to say Welcome to all the continuing new visitors and Thank You to everyone checking back in occasionally.

In other news, AV managed to finally get the fires under control and the servers up after 15 hours of downtime. They also snuck in a new patch, without releasing any patch notes (standard Adventurine Procedure it seems).

So a DF community member started the following thread, Build 9 Community Generated Patch Notes that compiles a list of suspected changes. PLEASE NOTE, these are not official patch notes, but a compilation of player submitted observations.

Some items of note in bold, my comments in italics:

- You now take more damage when naked (C)
OK I suppose but I question hypothesis, there are other factors that could be involved. If its true I guess it is a good change although I will miss killing people who try to gank me while I'm macroing or doing something naked.

- Blocking Improved (1H + Shield) Can now swing faster after blocking and block faster after swing (confirmed)
This is a good change and may make 1H+Shield more viable for PvP if it is substantiated. As it stands shields are VERY situational and parry with a 2H weapon is far an away more effective. I suppose I am indifferent to how they balance this.

- Guard towers may no longer be parried. (Confirmed)
Apparently the Carebear stare owned Tasos and co.! This is a dumb change, there should be no safe zones. Guards as it is were already a good deterent to PKing. You could chase a guy trying to kill him and if he made it to the towers they'd start zapping you. Pre-patch you could throw up parry and retreat, but now they will probably just kill you. This just makes killing a PK take no skill... Not to mention the fact that if you're fighting a warring clan in town and a blue jumps in front of you there is practically 0% chance for survival.

Guards should be balanced so that if an attacker is confronted by them they need to retreat but they should not be so powerful that the target basically gets free loot for kiting a PK or grey-flagging a warring clan member with a blue partner into them. These tactics were still in game before, but at least you could counter these cheap tactics by parrying and retreating outside the guard range.

If you agree this change is stupid let AV know on the official forums here.

- Nodes are now global, but if you get it solo, have more resources (Confirmed Expect higher prices for materials and final products. Expect fights over nodes. Expect city nodes to be constantly empty.)
Good. You won't be able to afk-macro resource gathering in town. Resources in general should become scarcer. I foresee harvesting harvesters to be the most efficient way of gathering resources. I hope the carebears don't throw too much of a fit.

- Queues are much improved (disputed)
Lies. The newbs who posted this did so during the time of day where the workday in EU overlaps with the workday in the US...

- Rigor no longer improves from Lava/Acid pools (confirmed)
OK. I guess I will have to spar for hours to catch up to all the people who abused the shallow dungeon pools. I'll admit I still managed to get mine to 50.7 running back and forth accross the edge of a regular overland acid pool. But it took me two days and I had to be at keys the whole time. I wish they had left this in as it still required being at keys and resting/healing since it was hard to do without damaging yourself. It also wasn't macroable like the dungeon spots were. This is in contrast to the shallow pools in the dungeon where you could just run back and forth without taking damage and receive 5-6 ticks of the acid damage modifier that raised your Rigor skill.

- Chests are now global (confirmed, were instanced before)
Also a good change. Scarcity of resources creates conflict. Conflict leads to PvP. PvP leads to dead bodies. Dead bodies = good.

- Mob loot no longer comes at full durability (C)
OK - I haven't had any issues with durability anyway, does any one know if items can be repaired?

- You cannot queue while playing anymore (C)
OK, as long as they increase server capacity... the whole point for doing this is to combat crashes and random disconnects locking you out of the game for hours.

- When Queued, once PLAY illuminates, you have limited time to click it before it resets (C)
OK - turn the queue music way up so you can hear it while you're AFK or use something like mymouse to click the play button for you every minute or two...