Play to Crush, Lessons from Shadowbane for Darkfall Online

The announcement of Shadowbane closing its servers has set off a lot of discussions regarding SB's design. Many people believe that the game closing on May 1st somehow validates their ranting that open PvP and siege rulesets will kill any game. As a UO and SB veteran I am compelled provide a counterpoint to these carebear ways. I still remember well how UO was ruined by a vocal carebear community, and I think it is important that the PvP community makes it's voice clear, in a organized and thoughtful manner. A good example is the comments section on Lum's Broken Toy's blog in here, it's worth a quick read but I'll recap my thoughts here.

One commenter wrote:

"A PvP game is essentially a limiting design. PvE means everyone gets to win. PvP means many players have to play the role of the loser. A well-done PvP game can find an audience, but it will always be a small subset of the audience that a popular game like WoW can command."

I beg to differ. PvE is more limiting, players are limited by the length of the roller coaster ride that the dev’s build. Take World of Warcraft for example. People hit level 80 and 90% of the game is obsolete. Soon they clear all the current raid dungeons and there is nothing left to do until more content is released. WoW is popular because it is easy and accessible to casual players.

On the flip side, I don’t believe that true open PvP games are limiting to players at all. If properly designed, it is quite the opposite. The additional risk from a game centered around open PvP yields far greater rewards. It is important here to remember the rewards are not only purple l33t phat lootz, but also the gameplay experience itself. UO veterans will know exactly what I am talking about. There were no scripted raid encounters back then or instanced x versus x PvP. We had complete freedom to do what we wanted, whether it be going into a dungeon to kill such and such hard mob or going out and warring other guilds or even simply hanging out on the roof of deceit, dueling other players to see who is the 'best'.

It’s like playing no-limit hold’em (PvP) vs playing slot machines (PvE). The one takes skill and a willingness to take risks. The other is mindless, caters to those with an aversion to risk and just feeds money to the Casino in the long run. In poker, even if I lose a hand, I still enjoy the experience greatly. I replay it in my head afterwards and adjust my strategy so that the next time maybe I will come out on top. Slots, well, slots is just boring.

I think even the WoW carebears are starting to understand this. Check out this post on Tobolds MMORPG Blog and read the comments. People are complaining that WoW is getting too easy, catering to casual players by dumbing down content for the sake of popularity. It's sad that it is taking them until now to realize how boring it is. Even the PvP gets old, I must have run warsong gulch a thousand times grinding honor. I probably would have done the same with the arenas if I hadn't quit after season 1. It's the same thing again and again, grind BGs/Arenas, get gear. New season starts, new raid dungeon released, old gear is outdated. Grind BGs/Arenas, get gear. Rinse, wash, repeat, tear out eyeballs.

Back on Lum's blog, Mike Darga left a comment and wonders where all the ex-Shadowbane players will go... WAR or DF. As a former SB diehard, I believe we'll be seeing an influx of former SB players into Darkfall in the coming weeks as accounts are made available. Warhammer is a themepark game, and is closer to WoW than SB. Darkfall, with its FFA PvP, city ownership, siege combat, etc is the new SB. Immediately after the SB announcement our guild, Evil Bastages, started getting more traffic in our forums from former SB players from various sub-guilds of our EB nation that dominated Scorn, Vengeance, etc.

I’d say, barring the difficulty of obtaining a copy of the game, the DF release has been much better than Shadowbane’s. They had a few issues where certain methods of raising certain skills that should have been squelched in Beta were left in for a few weeks on the live EU-1 server. Short term, this gives the players who got accounts in the first few weeks an advantage, but long term things will even out. It is a MMO after all, there will always be players with older characters that are more advanced. The game is still in the early stages, high level magic users are still rare and we are only now starting to see naval combat. With a lot of these small issues fixed in recent patches, I do hope that the Adventurine dev team starts taking a closer look at siege mechanics. There were many lessons SB’s devs learned the hard way, and they implemented solutions to combat things like 3 AM sieges, etc. Still, technically the game is 10x better than SB at launch. I can count on one hand the number of times my client has crashed in the past month and a half.

One thing that Tasos and co. needs to do ASAP - is go ahead and open up NA-1… some bastages are still using it as an excuse for not playing!

Darkfall Online, We're Gonna Party Like its 1999!

The inspiration for this post is the comments section from a Broken Toy's post titled Darkfall Improving, Now In 1999 Instead of 1997. I've only been following Lum's blog for a few weeks now but I get the sense that he and many of his readers are of the mentality that games with full loot and limited in game systems to protect players (a la UO in 1999) are destined to fail because the PvPers will run everyone out of the game... This is an argument for another day but for now I just want to tie this into some of my current experiences with Darkfall.

To start, what's wrong with '99? I like playing Darkfall because it does remind me of UO pre-trammel. I quit playing WoW two years ago because it was so carebear (boring). I tried to get into WAR but its just one giant instanced battlefield in which there is no risk and no player investment. I canceled that account before my three months was even up.

Darkfall is an entirely different story. The game is fun even if it lacks a little polish and carebear content. Even mundane tasks can be entertaining and exciting because of the risk vs. reward aspect inherent in a full loot game with open PvP.

For example, the other day one of my guildmates decided to pick up armor smithing. Since the change to make nodes global instead of instanced it is no longer easy to farm crafting materials without leaving the safety of guard towers. Most of the nodes in town are always tapped out. A lot of carebears complained about this change but really it makes sense. A lot of people also complain about how long it takes to harvest a node, 10 seconds per attempt and each node contains around 40 resources. Factor in failed attempts and a single miner could easily take over 15-20 minutes to tap out a metal spawn. That is a lot of time to be standing out in the wilderness in an open PvP game. Add to that that you can't free look while in the middle of mining and you're very vulnerable.

From the perspective of a gamer who has only played single player games or an MMO like WoW which (outside of raiding) are designed to be easy for a solo, casual player, I can see how this seems like bad game design. The perspective of someone who played UO in '99 is very different. Back in those days you had to take your mining alt outside town guard protection with a pack mule. In other words, you had to take a risk (getting PK'd) in order to obtain a reward (ore). Risk vs. reward is essential to MMO games. If there is no risk to gathering crafting materials, then everyone will do it causing a massive imbalance on the supply side. Excess supply in turn depresses the final value of crafted goods. How can crafting be a viable objective for a player if the market is flooded with cheap goods and they can't get any return on their investment of time and materials? This is Macro Economics 101.

We've already seen the positive effects of the resource changes in Darkfall as iron and steedgrass prices have risen since the change to global resource nodes. Armorsmiths and tamers are already seeing higher prices for their finished goods. I'm only speculating but I imagine the net effect here is that crafters who know what they are doing will benefit in the long run from these design choices in Darkfall.

Back to my anecdote... so the three of us grabbed some pick axes and set out to gather some ore to help get our guildmate get started with armor smithing. By working together three of us were able to tap out each metal node we found in about 5 minutes and quickly move on. Staying mobile is a good way to survive in Darkfall. We were also able to position ourselves around each node so that we had complete 360 degree coverage keeping an eye out for hostiles. Just hearing footsteps or a spell going off in the distance kept us alert and raised the tension level. More tension = more fun, even if it is mostly false alarms, like someone running by naked on a mount, etc.

We were attacked once towards the end of our run though. At first we even spotted a lone Maharim trying to sneak up on us. We stopped mining and assessed the situation. Then more bogeys showed up behind a few trees in the distance. Playing it safe we sent our crafter running in the opposite direction with all of our ore. Two of us stayed behind to make sure he got away and before we knew it six Maharim we're charging our position. Six on two odds with just our newbie weapons, some crappy armor and no food, pots or regs against equipped players is a losing battle. Our main objective was to ensure our compatriot made off with the goods so we rush into the middle of their group to get their attention then went into parry mode forcing them to waste tons of stam to take us down. I finally ran out of stamina and died in a hail of arrows but it took them over a minute to kill me and our guildmate was already halfway to the closest bank with a backpack full of ore. Even though two of us died, getting our ore out safely made it feel like we had won in the greater scheme of things. Especially since they wasted a ton of arrows for a couple of pickaxes!

Too long, didn't read version: Risk vs. Reward is good, even crafting/gathering can be fun in open PvP games!

Related posts: Broken Toys - Darkfall Improving, Now in 1999 Instead of 1997