Kieron Gillen discovers that the meta-drama of Darkfall is far more interesting than the actual game of Darkfall, especially after the first attempt at a review was met with much caterwauling.
In short, for one side, there was all the proof in the world. For the other, there was nothing.
From Aventurine’s perspective, they have logs showing that a reviewer who slaughtered their love-child had barely touched the game. They’re happy to show them to Eurogamer. Hell, they’re so confident they’re happy enough to fly a tech guy over to show them the logs. It’s clear the reviewer is lying about how much he’s played. The review is an outrage and a fiasco.
From Eurogamer’s perspective, they have a developer claiming that logs show something. Logs which are entirely within their control. I’d be surprised if Eurogamer has a tech guy in-house capable of ascertaining the meaning of the logs. More so, when changing logs is an absolutely trivial task, what the logs say when that tech examines it is ultimately meaningless. If Aventurine was dissembling, Eurogamer wouldn’t be able to tell.
As long as the reviewer claimed reasonably that he’d played the game for longer, Tom [Bramwell, editor] had to back him because -- really -- it was his word against theirs.
Aventurine should be pleased now, though, as their score is significantly improved from the original 2/10! However, there is a definite paucity of Ayumi Hamasaki videos in the piece, which we’ll rectify here:
#1 by geldonyetich on July 22nd, 2009
When I say “context” I’m thinking more along the lines of a there being a reason to attack those miners in the first place. Other than the fight over resources – of which there are pleanty and which respawn anyway – there’s not. You mostly blow up miners because evoking nerd rage is a middling solution for boredom.
It’s the point of many MMOs, yes. However, I’m bored sick of it. If you’ve got dynamic content, tell a story or something with it. An RPG which is all about number accumulation, because story is prioritized as a minor backdrop at best, eventually fails when you realize that all this grinding is for nothing.
Like any really bad game, there has a be a gem of good to raise your hope and make you think the game has great potential before it dashes your hopes against the jagged rocks of a half-complete implementation. EVE Online’s dynamic content and realistic economy is that gem of good. The complete lack of real story progression not only dashes ones hopes, but it does so in a manner which is really common.
Heh, I knew I decided to ignore that it was misspelled for some reason.
#2 by Vetarnias on July 22nd, 2009
@JuJutsu
In a way, the “level up while logged off” plan is good for people who don’t have much time to play, as opposed to the “grind to level up” approach of most MMO’s. Unfortunately, the downside is that the former gives you no reason whatsoever to log in if you’re just waiting for that essential skill to finish training. Being logged in will not speed things up, so there is nothing you can do about it.
A hybrid system where levelling up offline, with the process going faster while you’re logged in, would have been much better. And I don’t mean the lazy trick of keeping the computer turned on at night; I mean that the game should keep track of players doing something, whether it’s mining, PvP or mission running, and give them a bonus accordingly, whether on the skill currently being trained, or on any skill vaguely related to the activity you’re doing. (If you’re mining for several hours, shouldn’t that give you enough experience in mining that levelling up the mining skill would go faster?)
All of this, as it stands, reeks of “don’t overload our server, please”. And it means that no matter what you do in the game, you can never catch up with older players. But wait, wasn’t EVE supposed to be about commitment, winners win, losers lose, etc? Doesn’t this levelling scheme go against all that? If it’s just about keeping people subscribed even if they don’t play, it’s crass.
@geldonyetich
I think you’re right when you say that there is no believable reason for the RvR involved. Who is winning the game? The Something Awful (“The Internet Makes You Stupid”) Goons. They don’t care about winning the game — which is why they WILL win — and much prefer to be professional griefers instead. How can anyone talk of a meaningful RvR with those guys around?
I also see what you mean (I think) by the vicious circle of economic production (“accumulate power that serves the means to accumulate power”).
When I played Pirates of the Burning Sea, I thought this was a problem specific to that game, as every trade item in PotBS was either a direct component of shipbuilding (which meant, to keep the economy going, that ships had to sink, usually in PvP), or typical Caribbean trade goods (tobacco, cochineal, etc.) which you could exchange for shipbuilding components, and nothing else, at NPC traders. Likewise, any money made would in turn have to be ultimately invested in ships, because there was nothing else to spend it on.
The problem of PotBS was in the way the economy was implemented, which required no investment of the player’s own time (and instead had production pegged to structure labour in real time, with a maximum of ten lots per server), which meant anyone could be a crafter at no time loss to oneself; even your economy-abhorring PvPer put up his ten hemp lots for his society’s effort. The obvious result was internal society production, bypassing the market altogether, and to make matters worse, the official forum was full of brazen threads such as “my ten lots on Server X in exchange for your ten lots on Server Y”. When I briefly returned to the game last April, one French society on my server was derided by their own side for working under a capitalistic model; that old chestnut of “working against the national interest” even made a guest appearance.
But a few days after showing up in EVE, I realized that the problem which I thought to be PotBS’s — the market serving one activity vital to keep the market going — was really EVE’s. I’m pretty sure the same model also applies to WoW, WAR, etc., but in those games the market never struck me as anything more than an afterthought (and an utter joke in WAR). It would disappear overnight that not much would change; people would just discard their unwanted loot drops instead of putting them up at auction. Instead, PotBS and EVE were, ostensibly, RvR games with a robust economy. The former was undermined, as I wrote above, by the designers’ choices in terms of structure time; but the latter, which correctly pegged resource gathering to actual player time, makes the mistake of having a perfectly hermetic economic system, where every trade good must serve one activity, which must be performed in order for the economic system to work.
Somehow I’ve always liked the system of Puzzle Pirates best, where a good chunk of the economy came from non-essential items like clothing or furniture, sometimes using the same resources as essential goods like ships. It added a complexity to the economy which is lacking from EVE’s, which is entirely dedicated to having more pew pew.
#3 by Vetarnias on July 22nd, 2009
@Guy (your latest post, which wasn’t there when I started writing my previous comment)
That’s what makes this utter belief in the free market on the part of some of EVE’s players all the more ironic. I remember one forum poster at MMORPG.com laconically replying to this “sandbox” mantra in his signature: “Even sandboxes have fundamental rules such as; “Don’t eat the cat poop, you’ll die.”" Pretty much like the “free market” that the libertarians espouse: The government sets up a framework. Even if it’s not an interventionist plan, it still provides laws under which a free market can flourish. If they didn’t exist, what would the free market look like? Pretty much like the Mafia, I’d think, or at least like Enron and Madoff — except it’d all be fine and legal. And this is what really, really bothers me about the free-marketeers espousing EVE: The game has nothing against scamming and protection rackets, they’re even encouraged, and those guys are proud of that? It’s so easy to say that if people get scammed, it’s all their fault, but I can’t believe they’re actually in favour of that in the real world.
Okay, so we don’t get a government in EVE, but we do get a framework, courtesy of CCP. Sometimes the developers’ hand is subtle, but it’s the particularly obvious cases which make you realize how it’s done. From PotBS, for example, take the river placement. Rivers increased production, so the developers placed rivers as resources only in cities around the Antilles, the level 40-50 “endgame” area. Which meant, notoriously, that New Orleans, being a continental city, has no river among its resources. A clear example of crafting the map in order to create one type of gameplay.
I’m pretty sure we could pore over EVE to try to figure out the overwhelming popularity (I’m told) of the Caldari, and how Jita became the main trading hub. Or how about jumpgate camping? Isn’t that a blatant example where the developers created the game that way in order to generate a certain way to play the game, and a despicable one at that?
#4 by JuJutsu on July 22nd, 2009
@Vetarnias
“I mean that the game should keep track of players doing something, whether it’s mining, PvP or mission running, and give them a bonus accordingly, whether on the skill currently being trained, or on any skill vaguely related to the activity you’re doing. (If you’re mining for several hours, shouldn’t that give you enough experience in mining that levelling up the mining skill would go faster?)”
We already know how that system is treated in practice don’t we?
“Unfortunately, the downside is that the former gives you no reason whatsoever to log in if you’re just waiting for that essential skill to finish training.”
You have a very strong motivation to log in: making money. EVE doesn’t have a skill grind, it has a money grind. Skills with no money gets you nowhere. You mentioned earlier that you got frustrated by having to wait a week to use an already purchased mining barge. My experience is the exact opposite: I have to wait until I earn isk to buy stuff I’m already qualified to use.
EVE is not the nirvana for casuals with limited time to play that someone might think. Skills keep increasing while you’re not logged in but your wallet doesn’t.
#5 by Vetarnias on July 22nd, 2009
@JuJutsu
“We already know how that system is treated in practice don’t we?”
I assume you mean botting/exploiting, powerlevelling, or both. I can see the concern about botting/exploiting, especially if it leads to a Darkfall scenario where everybody uses the shortcut to gain an early advantage. The question is interesting, though: How much botting takes place in EVE? I’m not familiar with that aspect of the game.
Still, the incentive to log in ought to go beyond mere monetary needs on the part of the player. And the fact that it’s clearly not a game for casuals makes it even worse.
#6 by geldonyetich on July 22nd, 2009
Right, sounds like something I said is clicking with someone for once.
If anyone has actually managed to do a game economy right, even if that anyone is Puzzle Pirates, that would be a model to pay attention to. Why does it work so well? I don’t think it’s simply the ability to use the same components on frivolous things.
Perhaps it’s because the very medium of activity in Puzzle Pirates, the puzzles, reflect a certain level of thought which make the game engaging enough that it isn’t just a grind, and the economy can matter? Or not — I’m just spinning theories here.
Personally, I see it in terms of a scenario where you give somebody a boring, repetitive thing to do, and so they seek out mechanical assistance to do it for them.
Don’t get me wrong: even if you have an exciting activity, there will be people who prefer to take a shortcut to what they perceive to the “good part” rather than bother play the game (and don’t get me started about RMT). However, the prevalence is far decreased if the benefit of playing the game is actually to play the game.
Good question.
On one hand, EVE Online would be easy to bot, given it takes so few GUI interactions to do anything, and there’s a definite benefit to botting in that there’s always some asteroids to grind.
On the other hand, EVE Online practically does the botting for you already through the way they went about designing the GUI (some people play this game on dozens of computers at a time), but this is somewhat compensated for: the stakes are high enough that you won’t want to put anything valuable in the hands of a bot.
Of course, if you want to talk about how badly exploits have undermined EVE Online’s economy, there’s the fact that quickly gets swept under the carpet that apparently there were a number of resource and technology exploits being milked for all they were worth by just about any major alliance in the game. Chances are if there’s a space station in the game, given the massive amount of resources that would involve, over half of it was built from exploited resources.
#7 by Vetarnias on July 22nd, 2009
Well, there are the puzzles, true, but as far as the economy is concerned, they added them gradually and I think some professions don’t yet have puzzles. When I played, the only professions which had an associated puzzle were shipwrightery, distilling, alchemistry and blacksmithing — and in fact, they haven’t added a new puzzle in this regard in over a year. Last thing they’ve added to economic puzzles was foraging, to close a loophole where people would use multiple accounts at once to forage (it never was considered an exploit). At the peak of my foraging industry, I had around five accounts, or 15 characters overall, and that was considered minor-league. A puzzle just meant you could continue using your alts, but you’d waste entire days at it instead of just 10 minutes for each character.
The introduction of the foraging puzzle, by the way, was the reason I left PP. I’m all for closing the loophole, but not when that loophole has been used for years on a server, with older players/crews/flags being able to sit on a cushion of foraging money as opposed to new players. My own take on it was the same it is today: Get rid of the loophole, by all means, but have the courage to wipe the servers; otherwise, let the loophole stand.
But to return to the subject of the PP economy, you’re right, it wasn’t all about frivolous expenses, though the latter made the game more fun than being forced to reinvest everything into shipbuilding. And I think those frivolous expenses were part of the larger reason why the PP economy was rather fun: the large part of casual players. And this may also explain why EVE and PotBS are relative failures as far as their economies are concerned: they target Their Hardcore Leetnesses, players who don’t care about the economy except as a means to an end, which isn’t economic.
I’ve talked about the closed-society shipbuilding operations in PotBS, which is a typical example with their autarkies in miniature that see the open market as a waste of money and productivity — even if it’s just to sell their extra production there. Why should they need the market for their own shipbuilding effort? They’re Hardcore, they’ll grind for all the money they need to produce it, and if they’re good at PvP, they’ll sell the marks of victory on the market for additional funds. But as far as actual production is concerned, they’re fine with what they have (especially since production time is, as mentioned above, pegged to structures and not the player’s time). They don’t need the market, or independent traders, because nothing beats having everything at cost.
EVE works differently in some respects, such as forcing players to actually go out there and grind those asteroids (though I’ve heard that the Goons’ strategy is to steal from miners and never mine themselves). You can’t beat relying on yourself, though: it’s as cheap as can be, and it’s a relatively safe way of guaranteeing supply, especially if you’re out of the way.
PP, however, had tons of casual players who weren’t part of such hardcore guilds (as soloing is actively discouraged in PotBS and EVE), so even though your major flags/crews probably had some form of internal production going, you still had plenty of outsiders who were going to buy from small shopkeepers. The only sector of the economy where you had to be affiliated to be profitable was shipbuilding; not only did the largest shipyards require a building permit (which only an island’s governor could deliver, so you’d have to be politically connected just to be able to erect one), but only the major alliances (flags) could guarantee a steady stream of orders. Otherwise you’d be selling a sloop every now and then, and it wouldn’t be enough to make rent, which was one of the highest in the game. I should know; I owned a small shipyard at some point, and it was a money sink — never had an outside order during the time I owned it. However, I did make great deals of money from selling cannonballs, an item which anyone setting sail would need.
All you needed was enough labour, and a few alts with the proper skill (if a puzzle existed) would be enough. (Here I’m talking specifically about the “doubloon”, or free, servers.) Anyone could create two accounts of three pirates each, equip them with labour badges (with enough capital), and you were in business. If you had friends, even better, and occasionally you’d get complete strangers trying out the puzzle on free days. Maybe it’s another area where alts ought to be eliminated, but when I was there it still worked decently.
So I would say that the reasons why PP’s economic model worked better are multiple: 1) As stated before, you still had room for frivolous expenditures. You didn’t have to spend a penny on clothes, and you didn’t need to paint your ship black, but you could. It’s a vanity expense, true, but it’s something which is available to you. EVE? Sure, make money selling spaceship parts, and you can spend all of it buying spaceships; there is nothing else to spend it on. 2) Casual players who still rely on you and see no reason to start playing the economic game (or maybe tried and failed). EVE? “Oh, but you _must_ join a corp to go anywhere.” In PP, you can be a small shopkeeper in a regional centre and still make a profit (if you know anything about Hunter Ocean, I was based out of Sayers Rock instead of Aimuari Island, the ocean’s hub). EVE? No salvation outside of Jita. Pity for me, I’m Gallente and don’t hang out nearby.
So I’m tempted to think that EVE and PotBS’s economic systems might have failed as a result of those games’ inherent Hardcoreness, whereas PP, with its casual outlook (never mind RMT), encourages a more open economic model. It also raises another interesting question: Could this be possible at all in a subscription-based game? World of Warcraft could have managed it, if it didn’t make the economy a completely insignificant aspect of a game as a result of the gear-and-level treadmill. What you get instead is insignificant — like that 2,000 gold I made selling small eggs during Winterveil. There is money to be made, but for the most part it is so fully integrated into the general treadmill of WoW that the economic game cannot come into its own: you can’t specialize as an economic player while just starting out, and there aren’t enough goods for which a market exists. I took blacksmithing; what a waste of time, since you’re forced to grind mobs for ingredients anyway — mobs which you can’t even kill until you’re of an appropriate level. So you’re forced to jump on the general-levelling treadmill just to play the crafting game.
But maybe a working economy isn’t something to be expected to show up in a subscription game anymore, between the Scylla of games for hardcore leeters who will appropriate the market to themselves (and seek independence) and the Charybdis of mindless treadmills such as WoW that are based on quest rewards and loot drops. The very presence of a subscription model seems to have sucked out any chance of getting casual players, whom I suspect are the real life-blood of a working MMO economy.
But I’m just rambling now.
#8 by geldonyetich on July 22nd, 2009
That is, indeed, a whole lot of text.
For the developer, I could see it as being a definite pickle. By the time an exploit is detected, the damage remains done, and even if you could reverse the damage (perhaps due to excessive logging) most players would rebel outright when you suddenly pull the cushion out from under them.
Not a bad theory, really: to avoid the game from descending into a hell in which only hardcore grinders succeed, make it a game that alienates those kinds of players.
Though it’s sort of a “chicken or the egg” question: which really comes first, the grind or the players who enjoy grinding? Also, I’m not sure sure if casual and hardcore are truly different things in the long run. Don’t casual players become hardcore given enough time in the game?
So, from the sounds of it, it’s a support of a certain middle “casual-friendly” level of economy that made it seem better. Most games just give you necessities and an all-or-nothing approach to economy, while this game gave you frivolous expenditures and the means to be a small cog at your own leisure.
Maybe. Or maybe a working economy is something we see in a F2P game. A casual-friendly price, frivolous purchases available on the item shop, and a store built into every player.
Well, not quite. The “item shop” isn’t really a player economy so much as a means to keep the game float by perpetually enticing players to spend RL cash, but I did find it interesting that Runes of Magic had some access to the item shop using in-game accumulated tokens. The stores built into every player are indeed a small-end storefront, but rarely is there a true crafting system built to facilitate them.
#9 by pxib on July 22nd, 2009
I think it says quite a bit about Darkfall that everyone would rather talk about EVE and Puzzle Pirates. Perhaps Darkfall is unfairly maligned, but nobody can deny that it’s out of the news and off the radar.
#10 by geldonyetich on July 23rd, 2009
In this particular case, it might be because there’s not much about Darkfall we haven’t already said. The game was a novel concept but released badly flawed (Darkfall Defender: WHAT FLAWS? I DON’T CARE ABOUT THE FLAWS) based on a PvP model that never really worked (Darkfall Defender: YOU ARE A CAREBEAR NEWB) and the honeymoon is well over (Darkfall Defender: I LOVE THIS GAME… but I’ve pre-ordered Mortal Online).
#11 by Vetarnias on July 23rd, 2009
@pxib
I think this may have as much to do with Darkfall’s momentum having passed as with people who read and comment on this blog having for the most part never played the game. As far as I know, Geldon never tried it, and I have been too wary of Aventurine (not to mention being cash-strapped) to even bother with it. Even Mr. Jennings stopped playing Darkfall a while ago, instead of delivering further installments of his in-game adventures we were gleefully expecting. Even the resident Darkfall supporter, Owain, was considering leaving the game after Aventurine’s American cash grab, and since he has not commented since, I am assuming that he left (though I hope he’ll stick around here; the more the merrier and all that).
So what’s to talk about? A game we’ve only read of and never experienced first-hand? That protracted Eurogamer controversy provided ample fodder for discussion when it started, as you could discuss reviewing standards or criteria for success without ever having to address Darkfall itself. But now? In a way, you’re right, nobody seems to care about that anymore, and if Eurogamer had stuck to its 2/10, or given a worse score, nobody but the dwindling Darkfall supporters would have been manning the walls, and everybody else would have been pointing out how stupid and deluded those supporters looked. And Eurogamer sure seems to have dragged its feet before bringing us this latest review; it’s been more than two months since the controversy, yet Kieron played what, 20 hours?
@geldonyetich
Regarding the loophole, I was the only one who actually asked, though obliquely, for a server wipe. On the official PP forums, everybody else was seemingly more content with closing the loophole while continuing to enjoy the wealth that some of them had derived from it. But that was the problem, I found, with the PP forums: those reading them were the elites, not ordinary players — and therefore those most likely to be using the scheme on a large scale.
So there was no pickle, or if there was, it did not get expressed by the players on the forums, who were wholeheartedly behind Three Rings, and certainly not by the developers. Because you see, mass-foragers were seen as exploiters, who then used bots to move their fruit to market. Bots were forbidden, and I certainly did not use any, but mass-foraging was not an exploit. It was frowned upon by the devs, but it was not a bannable offense; I made damn sure of that before starting out.
Here is how it worked: The game would keep track of how many accounts you created on any computer, so you could theoretically only create three accounts (or 9 characters overall), but it would only keep records for three months, so at the end of those three months, you could create three new accounts using the same computer. And if you owned more than one computer, it would go even faster as the system worked by computer, not by IP address; so you had the horror stories of one guy going through his college dorm to create accounts from each computer.
So yes, it was being abused, but as long as you didn’t mess with the game files to create more accounts on a computer faster than the three months, there was nothing to be done. All you needed to forage was to have a character stand on a forageable island for ten minutes, then you could forage, log off that character and log in the next one. Not to mention that you could run as many accounts simultaneously as your computer or connection could hold. The maximum this computer could run was four accounts, or twelve characters overall, and it probably took me, with delays, 40 minutes to have them all forage.
Enter the foraging puzzle, and suddenly you’d realize that it would take 10 minutes per pirate to forage, if not more — so 120 minutes in my case, as you were forced to pay attention to the puzzle. People with more characters would have spent more time doing it, so they could have wasted entire sittings just playing the foraging puzzle.
The unraveling of this was quite fascinating, as it brought the hypocrites out of the woodwork, those who were welcoming the new puzzle because it would be a triumph of skill over exploiting. This, in fact, is the darker side of Puzzle Pirates — a class-demarcated game where your puzzling skill in large part determines your status. For example, I excelled at precisely one of the more useful shipboard puzzles, and my status was semi-elite; financially, middle-class.
Instead of repeating myself, I’ll just direct you to a recent post on this blog where I commented on PP’s class system: brokentoys.org/2009/05/15/freerealms-has-a-million-users-not-including-your-raiding-guild/
What I really want to bring up here is how different PP is from EVE in regard to what the game offers to people at the top and at the bottom; the hardcore and the casual. And just to prove that there are enough similarities between the two to warrant a comparison, guess who was running the largest alliance on Hunter Ocean in 2007? If you answered the Something Awful Goons, you’re correct; if they showed up, that says a lot about the game.
EVE sees fit to separate the two games (hardcore-elite and casual) by distance, with Empire space and nullsec as the two extremes, which means the gameplay is affected, and if you stay in Empire space you will see only a fraction of what the game has to offer; Puzzle Pirates, on the other hand, prefers to use a parallel system, where everyone uses the same space, but never run into one another because of the inherent skill-based class system. The elites have their own pillages, etc., and everything short of the political game and some high-end events can be played by everyone (blockades, for example, demand so much manpower that everyone can usually take part). EVE is all about alliances and corporations with nothing outside of them, but PP is more about skill-based connections. To be part of PP’s elite pillages, not only do you need the skills, but you need to know the appropriate people, and as long as they aren’t your political enemies, it’s perfectly fine to team up with strangers as long as you know something of their reliability. Somehow I can’t imagine this being possible in EVE, amid the paranoia.
A new player in Puzzle Pirates has a place, and the better he gets at puzzles, the higher he can climb; it’s perhaps what makes PP unique. None of this really affects the economy, though, so on the latter point, I will add that it is possible to get involved in the economy quite early on, as long as you have the capital for it. You can rent a stall and start making money if you have enough savvy (except shipbuilding, as mentioned above, and tailors/furnishers are also seen as money pits though I never tried them).
You don’t necessarily need a game that will alienate the hardcore grinders; you need a game where it is possible to succeed without being one. If that’s enough to piss them off, all I can say is good riddance. I can’t imagine succeeding in PotBS or EVE without being a hardcore grinder — nor in WoW, for that matter, which makes the hardcore players of that game even more annoying for their weak attempts at denying it.
But I’ll just make an attempt at explaining my general theory of what makes a successful game economy:
1) The economy, including crafting, can be played independently of the general levelling treadmill, without hurdles not economic in nature, such as the impossibility of access to resources in higher-level areas, or a blur between mob-killing and resource harvesting. Hence WoW’s economy is a failure by being based, in large part, on your general level and forcing you to grind mobs for resources.
2) The economy must play a vital part in the endgame (such as RvR) instead of being an aside (making WoW’s yet more of a failure, because it is irrelevant), but at the same time must be broader than just a means to an end, with a particularly faulty pattern being that vicious circle of economic production on which we seem to agree. EVE, for example, would fail in this regard because it limits itself to war production, which must be wasted on making war in order to justify more war production (and keep the game going).
So how about this for a chicken-and-egg dilemma: In an ideal game, should the economy serve the political/military, should the political/military serve the economy, or should the symbiosis be so complex that it becomes impossible to find out which serves which?
#12 by geldonyetich on July 23rd, 2009
I’m not sure I understand. It may not have been expressed as a pickle by the developer, but the very presense of exploited virtual assets is one.
Some choose to write it off entirely (e.g. Asheron Call’s “if it’s in the game, it’s not an exploit” approach) but those who are willing to put a bit more work into trying to maintain a balance face a question of who are you more willing to displease:
1. The players who feel comfortable because they’ve exploited their way into riches. (Therefore, leave the assets in tact.)
2. The players who feel uncomfortable because they know the exploits had allowed people into riches? (Therefore, remove the assets.)
One way or another, you’re going to lose a player. In this case, they lost you because they chose #1. Ironically, it seems you yourself were a privy to exploiting, but you still were upset because you knew the assets shouldn’t have been there. So, even in trying to please your niche as they perceived you, they lost you.
Now, if that isn’t a pickle for a developer, what is?
In my opinion, this is a good thing. Most MMORPGs instead reward your status based off of one thing: persistence. (Of course, social status helps too, but that’s an external asset.)
A game that assigns where you are in the game based off of your actual skills seems a far better alternative. It quickly takes you to the part of the game in which you’re actually challenged. It’s more fun that way, by the definition of fun as Flow Theory would see it.
It’s a good system to promote fairness. I’m reminded of a Guild Wars tournament ladder. Even if instancing isn’t quite as realistic, it certainly provides a means to promote fair play.
It would be a stretch in EVE, I agree.
It gets really tricky when an accumulation mechanic is involved because, under many definitions of ‘hardcore,’ they simply have more time to play. Under an accumulation mechanic, having more time to play means having more time to accumulate (wealth, levels, whatever). The players will come to perceive those who have accumulated more as “successful’ while those who have accumulated less as “unsuccessful.”
So a game in which it’s possible to succeed without being hardcore? Seems like you’d have to ditch the ideals of personal accumulation altogether.
From a design standpoint, I’d probably look at political/military and economy as just different activities in the game. Whether one serves another has a lot to do with what the primary activity.
As such, it would vary from game to game. It’s tricky for me to say which is ideal without a specific case, but I will go so far as to say that there’s fairly obvious ways to do it wrong. For example, forcing people to participate in an activity they hate (like a boring trade skill system) in order to succeed at an activity they like (such as adventuring) is one such snafu. Forcing a real complex symbiosis that no player can truly understand their place within the economy/military relationship is another snafu.
#13 by Guy on July 23rd, 2009
Probably the only reason previous Darkfall threads got so much mileage was because of the incessant back and forth between Owain (who staunchly defended Darkfall against any negative comment at the time) and the rest.
#14 by Trodknee on July 23rd, 2009
I’m mostly argued out about Darkfall with the few rabid fanboys left in my guild who still play. The re-review spawned a little bit of discussion but at this point it’s like arguing with birthers. The majority of my guild who played have bowed out with ‘I like the game but am too busy in RL but will come back someday’ BS… they know the game is flawed but aren’t interested in discussing it. My guild has an unspoken rule about bashing games that other guildies play, but in truth any attempt to discuss pros-cons ends in being labeled a troll. I did play the game hardcore (in a guild, in a large alliance, with multiple cities/hamlets, participating in sieges etc.) for a couple months so I can answer any questions about why the game sucks if anyone’s interested…
My personal favorite example of amateur design: There are no clipping brushes. Thus the climbing up near vertical walls and the ’stuck in the wall’ so the mob can’t hit you while you kill it with your mount exploits.
Regarding the ‘leveling while logged out’ mechanic of EVE… Darkfall does have it’s own unintended version of this. In order to truly compete at the highest level, you need to be logged in as much as possible. When you aren’t actively playing you are either macroing your skills up or standing motionless at a ‘blood wall’ where other players beat on you to an inch of your life to raise their combat skills while you raise your defense skills. I spent a good 75% of my time in game ‘at the keyboard’ farming some of the few mobs that were worth killing in order to get gold to buy reagents (sometimes buying thousands one at a time with a click macro, until they put the ability to buy multiples in the ‘expansion’) in order to set up an afk macro to train my magic skills. There are fanboys who will say “You don’t have to macro to compete, just play the game naturally and have fun” but they are noobs who will never be competitive at endgame… and if Darkfall isn’t about competing at a high level then it’s about nothing at all. Since there are no skill caps or diminishing returns, keeping up with the Joneses is an inflationary system out of control. Also, there is no such thing as a character template… all of the top players had highly trained skills in every area: Melee (both one-handed and two-handed), Archery, Magic (multiple schools) and Defense. Combine this with the fact that early in the game there were multiple exploits (like the above mentioned wall exploit) allowing the min-max hardcore early adopters to raise their skills at a fast rate and you end up with a system in which the inevitable result is an ever growing gap between the haves and the have nots.
Although the discussion about whether Darkfall is an example of poor game design has mostly petered out… I am still interested in the fact that Aventurine has pulled off this North American Publisher pay twice for the same game scam. How do they get away with this, and what does it mean for the future of MMOs milking clueless players out of their cash by any means necessary?
#15 by Gx1080 on July 23rd, 2009
Maybe its just that. The DarkFall hype its officially over. We can talk about other things, like watching Lum choosing a crazy of teh intrawebs, explaining his crazyness, watching a 100+ replies thread grow and finally getting it closed.
Mainly because said crazy are, well, crazy. And they come and post long walls of text defending their crazyness.
About EVE, a slow combat sysem by design its less frustrating than a slow combat system by laaaaaag. And many recent MMOs are learning that the hard way. “Leveling while logged out” it isnt that important because you can only gain a 20-25% more in skills, the rest its depth. Player skill does matter more than ISK or skillpoints. Thats why many people get killed by smaller ships 1 vs 1.
But well, Vetarnias defend Puzzle Pirates (that he plays), i defend EVE(that i want to play but need a credit card) and geldon critics everything (and he doesnt play MMOs anymore-as far as i know).
Its all about tastes, and DarkFall doesnt taste good to nobody.
#16 by Vetarnias on July 23rd, 2009
@Gx1080
“But well, Vetarnias defend Puzzle Pirates (that he plays)”
Not anymore. I played it for quite a few months in the summer of 2007, came back to it last summer for a month, but I don’t think I will return to it.
@geldonyetich
I still insist in saying there was no pickle over closing the foraging loophole, because of the PP financing model. The foraging loophole just allowed you to make insane amounts of money if you pursued it on a grand scale, while I’m pretty sure Three Rings would have much preferred to have all of us buy doubloons with real money. So who would they lose as players? Freeloaders who never bought anything, and so on, so no big loss, but it was probably because of RMT (and the possibility to convert doubloons into game currency, and vice-versa) that wiping the servers was impossible. You paid for stuff with real money, and now it’s gone? Had it taken place, it would have been ethically questionable, to say the least.
That’s why I’m saying there was no pickle, no dilemma. There was just one sensible course of action available: Close the loophole by introducing a puzzle, and don’t do a server wipe.
Yes, I rather like the skill system of Puzzle Pirates. It’s not as annoying as, say, the “if you do something long enough, you will be rewarded” of WoW.
Without having to ditch personal accumulation altogether (and what a boring game that would lead to), I like to think that in an online game you need a possibility to succeed on a smaller scale, that you can open your little store and stay in business against Walmart, even though your corporate bank account doesn’t have as many zeroes at the end of the fiscal year.
What I’m dead set against is the play-to-crush, number-one-or-nothing mentality, where the smaller guys immediately get killed off, are forced to amalgamate with larger groups, or are relegated to eating crumbs. Shadowbane, EVE, Darkfall, they’re all examples of that. The first notoriously had three dead servers when the Asian large alliances took control of the map; the second is a perennial fight between the Goons, BoB and maybe some Russian alliance. The third is still up for grabs, yet the dots on the map seem to appear in patches of the same colours these days: df.urme.com/map/ (It appears to have changed somewhat, but maybe that has to do with the North American release.) And if you’re inquiring about PotBS, it really doesn’t belong in this list because guilds don’t hold genuine power, and alliances don’t stick; you’re still The British, The French, The Spanish or The Pirates, and you play accordingly, as opposed to EVE where Gallente and Caldari players can still mingle and go pew-pew together even though they’re supposedly mortal enemies.
Remember when we were discussing Darkfall (I think) a few months ago, and someone (not Owain) showed up to say that a smaller group should never ever aspire to owning a city but should go guerrilla instead? That’s what I mean. That was a perfect example of being prohibited from playing a large part of the game because you weren’t large enough. Small crews in PP can still achieve something on a smaller scale, because they play a game parallel to Their Leetnesses, best demonstrated by the fact that the Goons couldn’t exactly wreck everybody’s day, except for those who played on their level — high-stakes politics. Those who despised the Goons were mostly their adversaries; average players didn’t give a damn. Yet PP is not exactly “never the twain shall meet” either; if you know the right people, you can still progress, or so I’ve seen, not like EVE where everyone is paranoid of their own shadow.
I think that the problem with EVE’s economy was that it was entirely at the service of the political/military, because it was not designed to be anything else. PotBS had the same problem, though far more acute, because crafting required no time involvement from the player, just money. One of the game’s most famous players once said that he was puzzled that PotBS was “an economic game where your financial success is intentionally gated by grind”. Yep, grind for money, then turn the money over to finance in-house ship production or unrest bundles to flip ports. It was a game where economic players were seen as second-rate, or just cows to be milked by PvP players for funds.
In comparison, the opposite, that of politics/war serving the economy just leads to lopsided maps once a side has access to all the capital it needs as well as strategic resources, because the economy still remains a tool for war. So I don’t really know where this is going, or whether there is any nice exit point/miracle solution.
#17 by geldonyetich on July 23rd, 2009
I play everything… just not for very long. I’ve outgrown sucking at the teat of a grind in order to add a never-ending parade of foobar to my growing banana pile. Now, I demand that MMORPGs entertain me. Disappointingly few can.
Alright, if you insist. My only doubts come from a certain tendency to want to believe there’s never truly a “only one sensible answer” scenario where virtual environments are involved.
I’m working on testing this, really.
Perhaps. But then, if accumulation is to produce any results, there will be things that those who have larger piles of bananas will be able to do that those with lesser piles will not.
True. If there were maintenance costs, or colonists to feed, or magic foobars to find, that might be a bit more interesting.
#18 by Gx1080 on July 23rd, 2009
@Vetarnias
The guy that said about doing guerrilla was me. And i didnt say “never ever aspire to owning a city”. I just watched what the guys that DO NOT are in a huge alliance do in EVE and sugested that the guys at DarkFall that do not are in an alliance do the same. Owning a city or not has nothing to do with it.
Personally, im expacting Global Agenda, mainly because its a heavily instanced MMO that plays like an FPS and where you get more guns, not more powerful ones. Personal acumulation can work based in breath, not depth. At least i hope that.
Other betas like Fallen Earth doesnt atract me because i predicted that due to high costs in ammo, the guys in the faction of the guns were all going to be alts of the melee guys. In a supposed faction vs faction game thats lame.
#19 by Owain on July 31st, 2009
Vetarnarias said, “Even the resident Darkfall supporter, Owain, was considering leaving the game after Aventurine’s American cash grab, and since he has not commented since, I am assuming that he left (though I hope he’ll stick around here; the more the merrier and all that).”
Nope, I’m still around, but I was on vacation for a couple of weeks, away from my gaming rig.
Yes, the North American Server cash grab did torque my jaws enough to take a Darkfall sabatical. In the meantime, I’ve been playing around with Guild Wars, but it is too quest centric for my taste, so Mortal Online looks like the best bet for my next Free For All PvP attempt.
The KGB is still playing Darkfall, but with reduced numbers since the announcement of the North American server situation. In three months, when they permit US players to transfer characters from the EU server to the NA server, I may jump back in, but in discussions with guild mates and friends locally, I’m thinking I prefer the UO pvp model that hopefully Mortal Online will offer more than the ShadowBane pvp model combined with city sieges and conquests provided by Darkfall.
Many of our players prefer the ShadowBane model. In practice, I found it to be too defensive in nature. In many ways, it’s is the Maginot Line implementation of PvP. I’ve never been a happy resource gatherer, and city building does require the gathering of a lot of resources. If I do go back to Darkfall in a few months, I and a group of like minded KGB members will be concentrating more on fighting and raiding than city building. We have plenty of builders that need defending, so it will be a useful division of labor, but first many of us will have to overcome the taste of betrayal about the whole North American server debacle, and that taste is a bitter one.
In the meantime, while watching the Mortal Online development with great interest, I’ve actually been spending most of my time on a free UO server, In Mani Ylem. It recreates the early days of UO, which to my mind is an advantage, since this was a period before the advent of Trammel and much of what crippled UO, in my eyes. Alas, the shard is very unpopulated, and it’s almost like playing a single player game, which isn’t altogether bad in that it lets me see areas I never visited when I was occupied in the endless PK/Anti-PK wars. With all the current easy skill gain Monty-Haul free UO servers around, a slow skill gain old school free UO server is a hard sell. For some of us, it feels just right, and is a nice change of pace.