Vad
05-28-2009, 05:04 AM
I have decided I like Darkfall enough to take the time to write down all the suggestions I and others have been talking about since we started in the game. This is the only sandbox PvP game on the market where I feel like the game has immense potential and also one where I believe that the developers are capable realizing that potential. With that being said I and a number of others feel that there are some areas that are hindering the game. This will be a lot of text but there was no avoiding that in covering everything I could think of.
CRAFTING / HARVESTING
-Reagents gained through harvesting.
These are being bought off the merchants. This is largely due to the fact that harvesting takes far too long with too little reward. This is apparent by watching the trade channel. You will see large masses of people desperately trying to buy or trade for reagents but nearly no one selling them. Its supply and demand. Why sell something that is hard to get when you can use them and if needed simply spend your gold at the merchant to get more, hassle free (except for the carpal tunnel syndrome you receive from clicking a few thousand times at the merchant)? You could buy them from another player but if all the other players are thinking like you then there will not be any reagents up for grabs.
The solution comes in 2 parts. First off the reagent harvests need to drop 2 per pull. So if I am fishing I still get 1 fish on a pull but if I get nacre I get 2. This would make reagents just common enough that there would be some healthy market trading going on. City nodes would remain unchanged as they grant multiple main and secondary resources per pull.
The second part has to do with the level of difficulty in acquiring gold. I will cover it in the next section.
-Crafting items takes *far* too long.
Let me quickly cover why there are crafting times. A time delay while crafting leaves you vulnerable so that gankers have a chance to kill you and take your stuff. A timer based on the thinking that you need to be slowed down on production is largely irrelevant because you still need to invest the time/gold to get the raw materials.
I recently looked in one of my bags and saw at that I had 500 fish to cook. I groaned and realized it would take 83 minutes to cook them. Remember that this is supposed to be a game where we pay for entertainment. I understand that their needs to be some sort of grind but this is beyond excessive. In the case of cooking it should be either reduced to 1 second per cooked item or net 10 items per 10 second session. I say in the case of cooking because a longer crafting time is understandable in less mundane/low value items.
Lets look at arrows. If I were making 2000 arrows and could make 20 a second then it would make my window of vulnerability too small. Most of us are fully aware that we play a game where caution (crafting in small amounts/with escorts in this case) is rewarded and laziness is punished. This is why there are suicide ganks and also why you can't craft out of your bank account. With that being understood I still have to say the current 20 seconds is again, far too excessive. I am not going to go through every crafting profession and recommend times however. That's up to you, Aventurine, to decide. I am merely highlighting the the issue and what I think is a good fix.
-Please give us a “Craft All” button
NPCs AND GOLD
-This is an open pvp sandbox game. PvE is for supplies and money.
Nearly every spawn is currently exploited in some way because it is the easiest way to kill them and get supplies. Most everyone I know does not enjoy PvE, they just enjoy when they can actually get home with the loot. It is a means to get supplies and money to continue pvp/crafting/skilling up. Fighting these NPCs the “honest” way is brutally painful thanks to an AI causes them to dart all over the place and generally make any sort of ranged damage very frustrating.
With enough numbers on the harder spawns you can block a mob in and start a parrying rotation but this is not worth it for a simple reason. Say we have a Raven Standard Officer and 6 good people to block it in. In a real scenario you are also going to have adds, say two grunts which will wreak havoc on your 6 man team. If you manage to kill them and deal with the adds with no one dieing than you've probably blown at least 10 minutes with badly wounded and unlucky people running out of range to heal. Say you get 500 gold and some drops (most of which will be nearly broken). Divide that by 6. We'll say each person gets about 80 gold and maybe an item if they're lucky. Now compare it to 10 minutes of mining iron ore. Each person would get roughly 45 units of iron (assuming good harvesting skills) which sell at 5 per unit. Therefore if you had just gone mining for that amount of time you would have made 225 gold. Almost 3 times as much gold offset slightly by the items/skinning (which again would be split up).
When you harvest you also have the benefit of keeping your health and mana up for possible attackers. In PvE you will often burn all 3 trying to stay alive and kill the mobs. You will also have a lot more trouble hearing attackers moving in while fighting. In short, the PvE system as it stands offers far too little reward for the risk involved. The mobs need to be dumbed down. Fighting mobs should not look like a scene from the Matrix with them pulling crazy maneuvers and occasionally skipping around. This is an on line game and sometimes even a perfect shot will miss to due client or server lag. NPCs should be much easier to kill to make them worth the effort. Once this is in place you could deal with exploiters by having the mobs reset if they can not reach them with melee or ranged.
-Gold can be obtained but is *slightly* too difficult for the average player to acquire.
With gold I am guaranteed to be able to buy skills, reagents, crafting/harvesting supplies and pay for some recipes which require gold. As most everyone uses some form of magic (even if it is to back up archery... mana to stamina) and reagents are very hard to acquire from other players as most people are desperate for gold. The NPC vendors are essentially the crutch that is keeping spell casters going. If you have gold you can still get reagents. If you have wood... good luck exchanging that to a player for reagents (hey it might happen). One simple fix is to significantly raise the amount of gold NPCs drop. However if NPCs are dumbed down this may not be necessary as the ultimate effect would be the same. What is important is that the average player feels they have a bit more breathing room as this will encourage more gold related trading.
MAGIC
-Damage spells can cost 8 times as much as an arrow but in many cases be less effective.
If I cast Icicle it costs me 8 gold (vendor price). It has an almost non-existent aoe, damage that a decent archer could match (while wearing better armor and not incurring any significant penalty) and travels far slower than an arrow. Well it doesn't have an arc.. but I can hit a target a lot easier with an arrow than an icicle. I could also cast shards but it has a cool down, is still expensive to cast and really only adds a small aoe to the equation with a high probability of missing a moving target. I could cast frostbite (mostly instant) but it has a limited range and much larger cool down
Magic damage spells could be fixed in a few ways. You could reduce the reagent cost but it would be hard to balance out with all the various spells. Perhaps a better solution would be to drastically speed up the non-starter magic projectiles to make aiming much easier. This would justify having to wear lighter armor and paying much more per shot. I'm not implying arrow speeds but a large increase would be needed.
-Making damaging magic/archery only level on hits has hurt dueling and practicing.
I know that this change was implemented to stop macroers. The problem is that now I can cast an 8 gold spell in a duel and probably waste it or I can shoot the blood wall and be assured my 8 gold will contribute towards skilling up. The other problem is now that when you miss in real pvp you don't get a skill up. This was supposed to be offset by “faster” leveling but I honestly haven't observed a change in the main water magic school. I think my actual spells are going up slightly faster but no where near fast enough to justify the increased gold I have to dump in to magic to level my damage spells. Unless I want to nuke a parry partner all day. I thought the idea was to encourage us to engage in real pvp, not punish it?
Here is a solution that I think is *better* than the current one. 1 in 10 of any specific damage spell must hit a target. This means that the first 9 consecutive casts of a spell would each contribute towards skill gain but if none of them hit a target the 10th one and any future spells would not contribute to a skill gain until a valid target was hit. As soon as you hit a valid target the counter resets. This means you could still engage in a duel against a good player and not be worried about gold down the toilet. At the same time it would be just as hard as it is now for macroers as they'd still have to use a shield macro partner.
SHIPS/WARHULKS
-Every ship but a raft...
Let me start by saying I believe rafts are fine. However ships are in need of a few tweaks. First they all need to go very slightly faster than a raft. It is quite odd to see something that is about as hydrodynamic as a cinder block go faster than a sleek vessel with large sails. It also helps to justify the great cost of building one. Second the despawning of *all* ships needs to only be possible in extremely close proximity to a harbor. There will never be great naval battles or those “that was cool when” memories so long as a massive warship can be despawned in to someone's backpack at the first sign of trouble. Any ship that can pack weapons needs to be under this rule. If the smaller ship classes can be despawned anywhere then players will gravitate to many of those ships because they are “safer”. The spawn and despawn rules should also apply to warhulks but at some city structure instead of the harbor. It makes the risk versus reward model very clear. You can do devastating things with a ship or warhulk so long as you can keep it alive for the complete trip.
-In the event of a crash..
If the server crashes a spawned ship should go back in to the originating player's pack. It is silly to think that in this event it should go to whomever can log back in the fastest. If the spawning player crashes/disconnects then the ship should remain in the world until claimed. Presumably a player would always have friends along to take over the ship. If they didn't then I'm sure there'll be someone who would be happy to relieve them of their vessel. If the server goes down for maintenance and no one takes control of the ship then it goes back to the owner.
BINDSTONES
-The bindstone griefers and the naked zerg
There are two main scenarios where bindstones are being abused. First is the bindstone griefers in NPC towns. They find a hangout for a clan who uses an NPC city, bind to it, declare war and proceed to try and gank harvesters and crafters. It is very profitable with almost no risk/penalty to the griefer. I have done it and while I made good money I have to confess that it is ridiculous to be able to lock down an entire clan as a single player.
The second form of abuse is the naked zerg one encounters after killing all of a player city/hamlet's inhabitants. It becomes very hard to siege, plunder or do asset damage with a vastly superior force due to the naked zerg constantly trying to nail you with no end in sight. If they stay it is very likely that the attackers will succumb. This is simply because the naked zerg effectively have unlimited health, stamina and mana and they respawn right next to you no matter how many times you kill them.
The solution to both issues is the same. Implement a spawn system where if you die within the city limits of your bindstone once there is no change (this covers things like sparring accidents). If you die twice within an hour then you are sent to the nearest chaos stone but can still bindstone recall to your home. If you die again within your city limits before the hour since your last death is up then you are again sent back to a chaos stone. This would make naked griefing much less attractive due to travel times and also give superior forces a better chance to do what they came for in cities and hamlets. You are supposed to be rewarded for winning the battle not slowly beaten to death by naked people.
MOUNTS
-The never ending mount chase
Most of the mount system is good. You can steal mounts, shoot people off of them and kill the mounts themselves. The problem comes when two mounted parties meet. Say I have a force of 20 people and I see 2 people on mounts at 60 feet. Say both sides know what they are doing. My force is not likely to catch them. This is the nature of most small scale pvp. If you have a mount and are paying attention you can usually get away. If I have 20 people against 2 and they are not close to an NPC city or reinforcements it should be inevitable that they fall.
The solution for this one is to implement a mount sprint system. It would work as a button you pressed to increase your mount speed by 50% for 30 seconds. After the 30 seconds were up your mount would be slowed to 50% of its *normal* speed for the next 60 seconds and the button itself would go on to a 5 minute cool down Here is the effect in the scenario I just mentioned. I would instruct 5 riders to sprint after the 2 players. If the other two players sprinted they would maintain their distance for 30 seconds. However, after that point they would slow down along with the 5 players I sent after them. The remaining 15 players would completely close the gap and maul them. They could dismount and sprint run as per normal but the mounts would obviously still overtake them. The mount sprint button would also not reset if they popped a new mount.
This change would not make it hopeless for small groups of players so long as they were close to a friendly city or reinforcements. However it would stop the daily occurrence I hear in our ventrilo:
“2 Mounts to the east, about 60 feet... oh they see us... everyone wave”.
-Leaning towards tedium
The leaning system on mounts should be automatic. If I swing right my character should automatically lean down right. It is extremely tedious to have to mash Q and E with a player who is trying to sprint run in circles around your mount especially with the 1ish second delay to go from one side to the other. You can ride away but a good player can already make it very hard for you to connect with your mount. There is simply no need for manual leaning.
ALIGNMENT SYSTEM
-Bluewalling
If you've played certain other mmos you are familiar with the term. Let's say I am a player interested in keeping myself blue so I can get in to NPC cities to buy various things with a relative degree of safety. Let's say I own a hamlet too. Now let's say that I have some blue griefers roll up to my hamlet and start tapping on my mine. I can kill them but then I'll go red. They are also bound at a nearby NPC city and just keep coming back naked with a mining pick. They hide, they wait for my clan to get absorbed in something else and then they hit it again. I (and my clan) can kill them repeatedly but at the end of the day I am deep red and either have to grind it out or live with being red while the blue players risked almost nothing.
I believe there is a simple fix for this one. If you enter a player city or hamlet you go purple (random color) until you have left the city limits for 2 minutes. The effect of being purple is that you can be killed without an alignment penalty but you could say, go to a friendly NPC city before the two minutes were up and still be protected by the zap towers. This also greatly helps with hamlet and city defense against random raiders as you won't hear things like “Sorry guys I need to stay blue so I can buy my skills from the NPC city”.
LOOTING
-The drag and drop fast lane to carpal tunnel syndrome.
I am one of the few players who does not use an auto-loot macro. Since you have measures in place to detect this please feel free to call me hypocrite if I am not telling the truth. The problem is the drag and drop system is brutal. It has odd things like dragging an apple is far easier than dragging a 5 foot staff. It is very hard to quickly highlight some items and drag them. It feels... clumsy. I don't believe the solution is to suspend / ban players who use auto-loot macros. I think you should give in on this one and implement a click to loot system. It will save me from wrist surgery and also level the playing field for that juicy post-siege looting frenzy.
-Stacking
Have you ever farmed Akathars solo for an hour? If you have you know your backpack resembles a trash heap. It can take 5-10 minutes just to stack and sell the loot (if you bother to loot the knives). We need an auto-stacking button both for our packs and our banks. We also need to be able to stack or group some currently non-stackable items together. Ever killed a guy with 800 staves at the crafting station? Its like dipping your hands in Novocaine.
-Auditing
Have you ever been in a party and killed a fully gear player, glanced in his grave and watched 3 mounts vanish in one second? Ever heard everyone deny looting them or that a bug must of destroyed them? Put simple loot auditing within the party so that it says who looted what in a loot tab. I've actually seen alliances fail in part because of loot accusations and have also seen players pass on small pvp runs because they feel they always get screwed out of loot. Having some basic auditing would make it a lot easier to pvp and have everyone feel like they got their fair share.
MACROS
-Everyone is doing it.
This is not meant to be disrespectful in any way but at any time of day I can take you on a tour and show you player after player AFK macroing. I can show you many more that are running a macro and watching a show on the other screen while glancing back. The enforcement system is not working and the very scarce few of us who don't use them at all are getting fed up. I know it is a never ending battle. You can check timestamps, known programs running in memory, files etc but it is hard to ever stop it completely. A good question to ask is why are people macroing? Laziness? Rebelling against authority? In truth I think it is because the system is way to tedious. I think you understand this which is why you indicated that you were working on minimizing the effect of macros. Perhaps one of your game testers screamed in agony while cooking 500 fish :bang:. I would say that a good move would be to come out and say specifically where you are planning to put in automation (crafting table, hint hint). As you implement in game features to limit the footprint of macros you will hopefully see them fade away to very minimal use. Doing this would also give non-macroers a light at the end of the tunnel.
SOUND
-Death by footsteps.
If you've been to a few large sieges and have been to at least one with your sound completely disabled for Darkfall then you know it is like night and day. Even with sound at its minimum setting your frame rate will resemble a slide show. On my modest system sieges run extremely well as long as sound is off. The problem is its a huge pain to have to exit the game, kill my sound, launch Darkfall, enable my sound and then launch ventrilo. I'm sure your development team is working on this but in the mean time can you please, please give us a button to kill all sound in Darkfall while in game?
CITY/HAMLET DESIGN
-Have you been to Darkmoore?
If you have you know that walls are suggestions, hiding places are to large to represent with any number and a cannon that used to be there could damage its own walls. There are many cities like this where you can simply walk over the sides of walls and attack from almost any direction with little to no hindrance. The cities need to be revisited. Each one should have walls that require at least a launch to get over. Cities are supposed to be strongholds for a clan or alliance.
-All hamlets need full walls.
For similar reasons. A decent pvper can still launch in but it should at least require that much effort. Some days I feel like people I know get more resources from someone's hamlet than they do. It will still happen but at least this way hamlet defenders will have a slight starting advantage (as it should be for defenders).
BANKS
-Oh I see you've killed me in my city. Please help yourself to my bank kind sir.
This needs to go. It seems pretty ridiculous that an enemy can bank in a player city/hamlet which they aren't welcome in. No need to change NPC cities they're fine. Player city/hamlet banks should be changed to allow anyone friendly or above to use the bank. Everyone else is denied.
CRAFTING / HARVESTING
-Reagents gained through harvesting.
These are being bought off the merchants. This is largely due to the fact that harvesting takes far too long with too little reward. This is apparent by watching the trade channel. You will see large masses of people desperately trying to buy or trade for reagents but nearly no one selling them. Its supply and demand. Why sell something that is hard to get when you can use them and if needed simply spend your gold at the merchant to get more, hassle free (except for the carpal tunnel syndrome you receive from clicking a few thousand times at the merchant)? You could buy them from another player but if all the other players are thinking like you then there will not be any reagents up for grabs.
The solution comes in 2 parts. First off the reagent harvests need to drop 2 per pull. So if I am fishing I still get 1 fish on a pull but if I get nacre I get 2. This would make reagents just common enough that there would be some healthy market trading going on. City nodes would remain unchanged as they grant multiple main and secondary resources per pull.
The second part has to do with the level of difficulty in acquiring gold. I will cover it in the next section.
-Crafting items takes *far* too long.
Let me quickly cover why there are crafting times. A time delay while crafting leaves you vulnerable so that gankers have a chance to kill you and take your stuff. A timer based on the thinking that you need to be slowed down on production is largely irrelevant because you still need to invest the time/gold to get the raw materials.
I recently looked in one of my bags and saw at that I had 500 fish to cook. I groaned and realized it would take 83 minutes to cook them. Remember that this is supposed to be a game where we pay for entertainment. I understand that their needs to be some sort of grind but this is beyond excessive. In the case of cooking it should be either reduced to 1 second per cooked item or net 10 items per 10 second session. I say in the case of cooking because a longer crafting time is understandable in less mundane/low value items.
Lets look at arrows. If I were making 2000 arrows and could make 20 a second then it would make my window of vulnerability too small. Most of us are fully aware that we play a game where caution (crafting in small amounts/with escorts in this case) is rewarded and laziness is punished. This is why there are suicide ganks and also why you can't craft out of your bank account. With that being understood I still have to say the current 20 seconds is again, far too excessive. I am not going to go through every crafting profession and recommend times however. That's up to you, Aventurine, to decide. I am merely highlighting the the issue and what I think is a good fix.
-Please give us a “Craft All” button
NPCs AND GOLD
-This is an open pvp sandbox game. PvE is for supplies and money.
Nearly every spawn is currently exploited in some way because it is the easiest way to kill them and get supplies. Most everyone I know does not enjoy PvE, they just enjoy when they can actually get home with the loot. It is a means to get supplies and money to continue pvp/crafting/skilling up. Fighting these NPCs the “honest” way is brutally painful thanks to an AI causes them to dart all over the place and generally make any sort of ranged damage very frustrating.
With enough numbers on the harder spawns you can block a mob in and start a parrying rotation but this is not worth it for a simple reason. Say we have a Raven Standard Officer and 6 good people to block it in. In a real scenario you are also going to have adds, say two grunts which will wreak havoc on your 6 man team. If you manage to kill them and deal with the adds with no one dieing than you've probably blown at least 10 minutes with badly wounded and unlucky people running out of range to heal. Say you get 500 gold and some drops (most of which will be nearly broken). Divide that by 6. We'll say each person gets about 80 gold and maybe an item if they're lucky. Now compare it to 10 minutes of mining iron ore. Each person would get roughly 45 units of iron (assuming good harvesting skills) which sell at 5 per unit. Therefore if you had just gone mining for that amount of time you would have made 225 gold. Almost 3 times as much gold offset slightly by the items/skinning (which again would be split up).
When you harvest you also have the benefit of keeping your health and mana up for possible attackers. In PvE you will often burn all 3 trying to stay alive and kill the mobs. You will also have a lot more trouble hearing attackers moving in while fighting. In short, the PvE system as it stands offers far too little reward for the risk involved. The mobs need to be dumbed down. Fighting mobs should not look like a scene from the Matrix with them pulling crazy maneuvers and occasionally skipping around. This is an on line game and sometimes even a perfect shot will miss to due client or server lag. NPCs should be much easier to kill to make them worth the effort. Once this is in place you could deal with exploiters by having the mobs reset if they can not reach them with melee or ranged.
-Gold can be obtained but is *slightly* too difficult for the average player to acquire.
With gold I am guaranteed to be able to buy skills, reagents, crafting/harvesting supplies and pay for some recipes which require gold. As most everyone uses some form of magic (even if it is to back up archery... mana to stamina) and reagents are very hard to acquire from other players as most people are desperate for gold. The NPC vendors are essentially the crutch that is keeping spell casters going. If you have gold you can still get reagents. If you have wood... good luck exchanging that to a player for reagents (hey it might happen). One simple fix is to significantly raise the amount of gold NPCs drop. However if NPCs are dumbed down this may not be necessary as the ultimate effect would be the same. What is important is that the average player feels they have a bit more breathing room as this will encourage more gold related trading.
MAGIC
-Damage spells can cost 8 times as much as an arrow but in many cases be less effective.
If I cast Icicle it costs me 8 gold (vendor price). It has an almost non-existent aoe, damage that a decent archer could match (while wearing better armor and not incurring any significant penalty) and travels far slower than an arrow. Well it doesn't have an arc.. but I can hit a target a lot easier with an arrow than an icicle. I could also cast shards but it has a cool down, is still expensive to cast and really only adds a small aoe to the equation with a high probability of missing a moving target. I could cast frostbite (mostly instant) but it has a limited range and much larger cool down
Magic damage spells could be fixed in a few ways. You could reduce the reagent cost but it would be hard to balance out with all the various spells. Perhaps a better solution would be to drastically speed up the non-starter magic projectiles to make aiming much easier. This would justify having to wear lighter armor and paying much more per shot. I'm not implying arrow speeds but a large increase would be needed.
-Making damaging magic/archery only level on hits has hurt dueling and practicing.
I know that this change was implemented to stop macroers. The problem is that now I can cast an 8 gold spell in a duel and probably waste it or I can shoot the blood wall and be assured my 8 gold will contribute towards skilling up. The other problem is now that when you miss in real pvp you don't get a skill up. This was supposed to be offset by “faster” leveling but I honestly haven't observed a change in the main water magic school. I think my actual spells are going up slightly faster but no where near fast enough to justify the increased gold I have to dump in to magic to level my damage spells. Unless I want to nuke a parry partner all day. I thought the idea was to encourage us to engage in real pvp, not punish it?
Here is a solution that I think is *better* than the current one. 1 in 10 of any specific damage spell must hit a target. This means that the first 9 consecutive casts of a spell would each contribute towards skill gain but if none of them hit a target the 10th one and any future spells would not contribute to a skill gain until a valid target was hit. As soon as you hit a valid target the counter resets. This means you could still engage in a duel against a good player and not be worried about gold down the toilet. At the same time it would be just as hard as it is now for macroers as they'd still have to use a shield macro partner.
SHIPS/WARHULKS
-Every ship but a raft...
Let me start by saying I believe rafts are fine. However ships are in need of a few tweaks. First they all need to go very slightly faster than a raft. It is quite odd to see something that is about as hydrodynamic as a cinder block go faster than a sleek vessel with large sails. It also helps to justify the great cost of building one. Second the despawning of *all* ships needs to only be possible in extremely close proximity to a harbor. There will never be great naval battles or those “that was cool when” memories so long as a massive warship can be despawned in to someone's backpack at the first sign of trouble. Any ship that can pack weapons needs to be under this rule. If the smaller ship classes can be despawned anywhere then players will gravitate to many of those ships because they are “safer”. The spawn and despawn rules should also apply to warhulks but at some city structure instead of the harbor. It makes the risk versus reward model very clear. You can do devastating things with a ship or warhulk so long as you can keep it alive for the complete trip.
-In the event of a crash..
If the server crashes a spawned ship should go back in to the originating player's pack. It is silly to think that in this event it should go to whomever can log back in the fastest. If the spawning player crashes/disconnects then the ship should remain in the world until claimed. Presumably a player would always have friends along to take over the ship. If they didn't then I'm sure there'll be someone who would be happy to relieve them of their vessel. If the server goes down for maintenance and no one takes control of the ship then it goes back to the owner.
BINDSTONES
-The bindstone griefers and the naked zerg
There are two main scenarios where bindstones are being abused. First is the bindstone griefers in NPC towns. They find a hangout for a clan who uses an NPC city, bind to it, declare war and proceed to try and gank harvesters and crafters. It is very profitable with almost no risk/penalty to the griefer. I have done it and while I made good money I have to confess that it is ridiculous to be able to lock down an entire clan as a single player.
The second form of abuse is the naked zerg one encounters after killing all of a player city/hamlet's inhabitants. It becomes very hard to siege, plunder or do asset damage with a vastly superior force due to the naked zerg constantly trying to nail you with no end in sight. If they stay it is very likely that the attackers will succumb. This is simply because the naked zerg effectively have unlimited health, stamina and mana and they respawn right next to you no matter how many times you kill them.
The solution to both issues is the same. Implement a spawn system where if you die within the city limits of your bindstone once there is no change (this covers things like sparring accidents). If you die twice within an hour then you are sent to the nearest chaos stone but can still bindstone recall to your home. If you die again within your city limits before the hour since your last death is up then you are again sent back to a chaos stone. This would make naked griefing much less attractive due to travel times and also give superior forces a better chance to do what they came for in cities and hamlets. You are supposed to be rewarded for winning the battle not slowly beaten to death by naked people.
MOUNTS
-The never ending mount chase
Most of the mount system is good. You can steal mounts, shoot people off of them and kill the mounts themselves. The problem comes when two mounted parties meet. Say I have a force of 20 people and I see 2 people on mounts at 60 feet. Say both sides know what they are doing. My force is not likely to catch them. This is the nature of most small scale pvp. If you have a mount and are paying attention you can usually get away. If I have 20 people against 2 and they are not close to an NPC city or reinforcements it should be inevitable that they fall.
The solution for this one is to implement a mount sprint system. It would work as a button you pressed to increase your mount speed by 50% for 30 seconds. After the 30 seconds were up your mount would be slowed to 50% of its *normal* speed for the next 60 seconds and the button itself would go on to a 5 minute cool down Here is the effect in the scenario I just mentioned. I would instruct 5 riders to sprint after the 2 players. If the other two players sprinted they would maintain their distance for 30 seconds. However, after that point they would slow down along with the 5 players I sent after them. The remaining 15 players would completely close the gap and maul them. They could dismount and sprint run as per normal but the mounts would obviously still overtake them. The mount sprint button would also not reset if they popped a new mount.
This change would not make it hopeless for small groups of players so long as they were close to a friendly city or reinforcements. However it would stop the daily occurrence I hear in our ventrilo:
“2 Mounts to the east, about 60 feet... oh they see us... everyone wave”.
-Leaning towards tedium
The leaning system on mounts should be automatic. If I swing right my character should automatically lean down right. It is extremely tedious to have to mash Q and E with a player who is trying to sprint run in circles around your mount especially with the 1ish second delay to go from one side to the other. You can ride away but a good player can already make it very hard for you to connect with your mount. There is simply no need for manual leaning.
ALIGNMENT SYSTEM
-Bluewalling
If you've played certain other mmos you are familiar with the term. Let's say I am a player interested in keeping myself blue so I can get in to NPC cities to buy various things with a relative degree of safety. Let's say I own a hamlet too. Now let's say that I have some blue griefers roll up to my hamlet and start tapping on my mine. I can kill them but then I'll go red. They are also bound at a nearby NPC city and just keep coming back naked with a mining pick. They hide, they wait for my clan to get absorbed in something else and then they hit it again. I (and my clan) can kill them repeatedly but at the end of the day I am deep red and either have to grind it out or live with being red while the blue players risked almost nothing.
I believe there is a simple fix for this one. If you enter a player city or hamlet you go purple (random color) until you have left the city limits for 2 minutes. The effect of being purple is that you can be killed without an alignment penalty but you could say, go to a friendly NPC city before the two minutes were up and still be protected by the zap towers. This also greatly helps with hamlet and city defense against random raiders as you won't hear things like “Sorry guys I need to stay blue so I can buy my skills from the NPC city”.
LOOTING
-The drag and drop fast lane to carpal tunnel syndrome.
I am one of the few players who does not use an auto-loot macro. Since you have measures in place to detect this please feel free to call me hypocrite if I am not telling the truth. The problem is the drag and drop system is brutal. It has odd things like dragging an apple is far easier than dragging a 5 foot staff. It is very hard to quickly highlight some items and drag them. It feels... clumsy. I don't believe the solution is to suspend / ban players who use auto-loot macros. I think you should give in on this one and implement a click to loot system. It will save me from wrist surgery and also level the playing field for that juicy post-siege looting frenzy.
-Stacking
Have you ever farmed Akathars solo for an hour? If you have you know your backpack resembles a trash heap. It can take 5-10 minutes just to stack and sell the loot (if you bother to loot the knives). We need an auto-stacking button both for our packs and our banks. We also need to be able to stack or group some currently non-stackable items together. Ever killed a guy with 800 staves at the crafting station? Its like dipping your hands in Novocaine.
-Auditing
Have you ever been in a party and killed a fully gear player, glanced in his grave and watched 3 mounts vanish in one second? Ever heard everyone deny looting them or that a bug must of destroyed them? Put simple loot auditing within the party so that it says who looted what in a loot tab. I've actually seen alliances fail in part because of loot accusations and have also seen players pass on small pvp runs because they feel they always get screwed out of loot. Having some basic auditing would make it a lot easier to pvp and have everyone feel like they got their fair share.
MACROS
-Everyone is doing it.
This is not meant to be disrespectful in any way but at any time of day I can take you on a tour and show you player after player AFK macroing. I can show you many more that are running a macro and watching a show on the other screen while glancing back. The enforcement system is not working and the very scarce few of us who don't use them at all are getting fed up. I know it is a never ending battle. You can check timestamps, known programs running in memory, files etc but it is hard to ever stop it completely. A good question to ask is why are people macroing? Laziness? Rebelling against authority? In truth I think it is because the system is way to tedious. I think you understand this which is why you indicated that you were working on minimizing the effect of macros. Perhaps one of your game testers screamed in agony while cooking 500 fish :bang:. I would say that a good move would be to come out and say specifically where you are planning to put in automation (crafting table, hint hint). As you implement in game features to limit the footprint of macros you will hopefully see them fade away to very minimal use. Doing this would also give non-macroers a light at the end of the tunnel.
SOUND
-Death by footsteps.
If you've been to a few large sieges and have been to at least one with your sound completely disabled for Darkfall then you know it is like night and day. Even with sound at its minimum setting your frame rate will resemble a slide show. On my modest system sieges run extremely well as long as sound is off. The problem is its a huge pain to have to exit the game, kill my sound, launch Darkfall, enable my sound and then launch ventrilo. I'm sure your development team is working on this but in the mean time can you please, please give us a button to kill all sound in Darkfall while in game?
CITY/HAMLET DESIGN
-Have you been to Darkmoore?
If you have you know that walls are suggestions, hiding places are to large to represent with any number and a cannon that used to be there could damage its own walls. There are many cities like this where you can simply walk over the sides of walls and attack from almost any direction with little to no hindrance. The cities need to be revisited. Each one should have walls that require at least a launch to get over. Cities are supposed to be strongholds for a clan or alliance.
-All hamlets need full walls.
For similar reasons. A decent pvper can still launch in but it should at least require that much effort. Some days I feel like people I know get more resources from someone's hamlet than they do. It will still happen but at least this way hamlet defenders will have a slight starting advantage (as it should be for defenders).
BANKS
-Oh I see you've killed me in my city. Please help yourself to my bank kind sir.
This needs to go. It seems pretty ridiculous that an enemy can bank in a player city/hamlet which they aren't welcome in. No need to change NPC cities they're fine. Player city/hamlet banks should be changed to allow anyone friendly or above to use the bank. Everyone else is denied.