Darkfall Day 2

My second day in Darkfall started much easier. After taking so long to even get to play the night before, I had stayed up until 4 a.m. playing. I was having fun in the game, but I also wanted to take advantage of the fact that I was actually getting to play. I'm sure the queue issues will be straightened out within the next couple of weeks, but for now it takes a lot of patience to get logged in.

To avoid that pain, I got back up at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, and this time there was no queue to speak of and I got to play until they brought the server down for updates at 4 p.m.

I had a couple more deaths today, but not from PKs. The first death came while I was fighting goblins. I pushed things a little too far with one of the little buggers and he killed me. Now, in Darkfall when you die you lie writhing on the ground for a bit first and one of three things can happen. First, after a short time you can release yourself from your agony, die, and respawn at your "bind point," in this case the Clan Stone at the village I've been working out of. Second, another player can revive you. I'm the kind of person, and the kind of player, who will try to be helpful to others. The "hardcore" PvP types call this being a "carebear," after the fluffy and lovable children's stuffed animals /cartoon characters. I wear the badge with a bit of irony, I guess. At any rate, I've revived a couple of other players now when they were down and I was glad to do it. So I hoped that when I fell to the goblin, someone might do the same for me.

The third option is "ganking." That's actually what the game mechanic is called. There's a skill for it and everything, I shit you not. You stand over a dying character, hold down the appropriate key, and you finish them off. I assumed it was something put in place for players to sort of gloat when they killed someone else. It didn't occur to me that, as happened to me, someone would gank me just to get to my loot quicker. Ah well. That one hurt a little because I had been fighting goblins around these folks for twenty minutes or so without incident and had a good bit of loot on me. And this human woman offed me. Hard to blame her for wanting to practice the skill, I guess, but it was kind of lame.

But the story has a happy ending! Knowing I could replace most of what I lost with a little more time, I went back to the same goblin camp. My ganker was there still and I kept an eye on her. Sure enough, at one point she turns gray, making her a valid target, and begins to run off. So I gave chase and was soon joined by a couple of other opportunistic folks. Maybe she'd wronged them too? I wish I could have figured out how to switch to my staff so I could have used my Mana Missile spell. She was either running low on stamina, though, or just slower than me because I was able to keep up with her OK and perforate her backside a bit with my sword. Eventually the chase ended in her death and I got some of my loot back. Karma is indeed a bitch. Some pacifist, eh? But I figure I'll be helpful when I can and defend myself when I need to.

The other death I had today was nastier. One of the quests I had called for me to cast the Mana Missile spell at goblins 20 times. There are two big problems with that. One is that I've never seen a goblin without at least two other characters on it doing their best to put it down. The likelihood that I would hit one of them when they stepped between me and the goblin was very high. The second problem is that Mana Missile has a sort of "splash" damage, so even if I hit the goblin squarely, there would be a chance that I'd do some damage to someone engaged with it close up. In either case, I would turn gray and probably be a target. And that's what happened. I had four fellow humans gang up on me and kill me. I figured there wasn't much point in running to town since, being gray, the guard towers would actually help them by firing on me (such is the life of a criminal). So I just used them for spell practice until I died. I'm learning that to run or not will often be situational, and not only determined by whether I can win, but what makes sense at the time.

Eventually I did get the 20 Mana Missiles off successfully and moved on to some other activities. I found another player looking to buy timber, and since I had already gathered over a hundred logs, I sold them to her. She was looking for more, so I alternated gathering wood with practicing my magic and sold her another bundle of 100, fattening my nest egg quite a bit. I'm pretty close now to 25 in Lesser Magic which should let me start learning higher level spells for which I'll need to find or buy reagents.