A Solution to Making Small Scale PvP Easy to Find and Travel Easier

[Babu]

IMO, a major problem pertaining to small scale PvP in Darkfall is that there is no centralized PvP location due to the unavailability of *cheap and fast* travel. Runestones are simply not cheap enough. There's a huge problem of coordination failure when it comes to small scale PvP. A lot of people want to do it, but they don't know where to go to engage others looking to do the same thing.

I greatly appreciate the fact that it's a sandbox game and that there is no centrally organized arena. However, the fact that players are not given cheap means to get quick small scale PvP is a problem, especially when the population is small.

An easy solution to this is to make runestones bound in certain public areas (e.g., in dungeons) to be reusable. In a sandbox game, a solution *should* be endogenous, i.e., created by the players. The devs just need to supply players with easy means to create it.

There are actually advantages to the fact that runestones are somewhat difficult to obtain (e.g., city defense), and one doesn't have to toss that away to solve the coordination problem. That's why I suggest dungeons -- they give people something to do (kill mobs) while waiting for PvP, while not interfering with city defense. They also greatly improve travel throughout the map by allowing players easy access to all of the dungeon locations, which are fairly spread out.

Centralized dungeons for small scale PvP (ala Deceit, Wrong, etc in UO) will quickly emerge.

[Cunning]

I think player cities should be one of the "pvp" centralized area in the way Shadowbane had it. If your city was open, anyone could teleport to it. If you wanted your city to be a market place, you put a bunch of guards and vendors and opened the city. Anyone could walk or teleport in and buy you and your guildies stuff and feel semi safe as you and your guild regulated the place.

Same went for PVP. If your city was an arena, you had no guards, put in lots of buildings that would be fun for tactical pvp and then opened the place to the public. Voila an arena where pvp happens a lot and quickly.

Sometimes people are looking to hunt, sometimes people want to go pvp and ride around as a group, but sometimes people want to go to a place where they KNOW they will get a fight because others are there looking for one too. Let this 'sandbox' game be one by letting guilds control the purpose of thier cities. Give GLs the option of deciding who can and cant be bound to thier stone, use the bank, get shot by guard towers (GUARD TOWERS ARE GAY!!!!), or use thier workbenches.

[NetZao]

The game does need better travel.

The dungeon idea is pretty good, but runestones still need to be craftable. There's nothing strategic about running 30 minutes through a totally deserted world, even though the vocal minority of "zomg fast travel is gay why waste the world" is pretty loud here.