Darkfall US Server to Launch July 7th!

Well no updates in a long time. I have still been playing Darkfall, just so busy at work that I haven't had any downtime to write any updates. Before I get to the news in the headline I'll summarize some of the events that have transpired for EB since my last post.

We captured a hamlet! For two days! Our friends from Lys Noir owned a hamlet in the Alfar lands but gave us the first chance to buy it as they had captured a city on the other side of the map and did not want to defend the hamlet so far away from their main force. They gave it to us cheap for 20k. So the total for us was 30k, which we split with our friends The Tenth. The Hamlet was Velmuna which is actually a very nice hamlet. It has a grove, 3 clan houses, a merchant and a lot of iron nodes in the area. No herbs though. There are some decent mob spawns nearby (Akathar, Earth Elementals, an undead mob Dungeon). There is also a wilderness bank with an Alfar Guard tower to the south, unfortunately we're all agro'd to the tower so we couldn't take advantage of it.

Unfortunately, the hamlet apparently was owned by the SB alliance who made up some bullshit excuses for sieging it from us after two days. They brought 40 to siege our defending force of about 20. The Mercs also showed up and threw a wrench in the whole defense plan. They claimed to have been coming to assist us but didn't communicate that intention clearly enough before hand. When they arrived, we assumed they were hostile and attacked them. They pushed some of our defenders off of some of the high ground we had staked out for defense. 10 minutes later the full SBA force rolled in and started hitting us hard while we were already in combat with the Mercs. Essentially getting hit from both sides and fighting 3x our number we held on as long as we could but were eventually pushed out by attrition. With only 10 bindspots on the stone, each time one of our defenders died, he was essentially out of the battle. The mercs abandoned their defensive position and regrouped outside the hamlet. They rolled through once and disrupted SBA's hammerers, but only for a minute. The clanstone went down about 40 minutes after it went vulnerable. I could speculate and play monday morning quarterback all day but I think we could have won the siege if a couple of things had gone the other way. For one if there hadn't been the miscommunication with the mercs we probably could have done it. Of course there is always the rumour that it was just an elaborate ploy by TM+SBA to make it seem like they were not aligned. There is no way to prove it though, so probably not worth debating. It's been beaten like a dead horse on the official forums already.

As far as my individual character goes, I finally got my elemental magic line. I chose fire as my primary for the DPS, as well as relatively cheap cost/ease of obtaining sulfur as it's main reagent. Right now the only spell I've been using is Firebolt and I already prefer it to archery (which I never got sharpshooter for so it isn't a fair comparison). Despite not having an AOE component, the speed at which the firebolt travels makes it effective in PvP. It travels almost as fast as an arrow but without the gravity effect. I hit people for 25 in the front and near 40 in the bank with a crappy staff and only 36 int.

Now on to the big news:

On the American server: The American server will launch on July 7th. Characters from the European server can be cloned and moved without their possessions 3 months after the American launch. Certain restrictions and charges will apply, to be announced at a later date. In the meanwhile if you want to play on the American server at launch you need to buy the American Darkfall client. More information on the American server will be available in a few days.

Darkfall will launch a massive free expansion update the first week of July, something that the Darkfall team has been working on for a while now. This expansion includes major new features and major content, PvE, and PvP updates.

In the last few patches we had implemented several major optimizations making it possible to support even larger battles and sieges and more concurrent users than ever before. As a result, massive battles now run smoother than ever. We’ve seen some of the largest and the highest frequency of massive battles this past month, which has helped us find even more ways to optimize the Darkfall experience.

As a result of these optimizations we’ve also been able to keep sales open most of the time. We’re still being careful because Darkfall resubscription rates remain very high even though this is a time for exams and/or vacations. It’s still difficult to buy Darkfall but we hope that after the US servers have launched it will be easier for new players to learn about and to buy Darkfall.

To that effect, a new site is coming, along with new forums for Darkfall players only. These forums will be readable by the public and only players with active accounts will be able to post in them. The current public forums will remain active for anyone to post in, but moderation will be stronger. This because we’re getting people from other communities with the sole intention of disrupting our forums. The Darkfall community has always been a source of good feedback, constructive criticism, and inspiration for the Darkfall developers and we'll keep it that way by doing away with the non-constructive elements.

Our next major patch will be included in the Darkfall expansion the first week of July.

Clarification: American players wanting to clone and transfer their characters do not have to buy another client. Everyone else needs to buy the American Darkfall client to play on the American server. The European rights and the American rights to Darkfall do not belong to the same company, therefore you cannot freely transfer between the two territories, as is the case with most MMORPGs. Our offer of character cloning / transfer to American players is because we had said that we would try to accommodate them should they want to start playing on the European server.

Personally, I plan on starting a character on NA-1 on July 7th to help EB hit the ground running. A lot of our core will be making an appearance now (Oakbow, Havock, Dragonfly, Fungus, Naswipp, Visual, Darkstar, etc) who were absent on EU-1. Some of them bought accounts in the last two weeks to check out the game once they made the announcement that the US server would open sometime in July. Looking back now its unfortunate that they'll have to pay $50 again to start day one on the new server. In hindsight they should have just used other accounts from guildmates who went inactive since they didn't want to grind a char on EU-1 just to migrate later.

There are about six of us with relatively well developed characters (Weapon Mastery, high defensive skills, stats in the 40-60 range, elemental magic) who will be staying on EU-1 part time, continuing to develop our characters until it is time to transfer. I am still not convinced there won't be any additional restrictions placed on the transfered characters (ie 25% skill loss, no transfer of the rigor skill) or that the introduction of a skill cap may make the advanced EU-1 chars obsolete once the three months are up.