Darkfall Day 21 & 22

I haven't played much DF this week. My weeknight gaming is fairly limited anyway and I've had other things to do. I picked up where I had left off in my journey from elven to human lands and did some mining along the way. I did skirt around some player towns and saw a few people around, but being mounted it wasn't much of an issue. I did have one player shoot some Mana Missiles my way, but since he was on foot I wasn't too worried about it.

Arriving in human lands with a load of ore, but bound to the elven city of Iriendir still, I decided to put the ore up for sale in either human or elven lands. Usually when you're looking to buy or sell items in-game the practicalities of travel limit you to one area. You will occasionally see players advertising their items offering to travel anywhere for bulk sales. So I made an arrangement to sell my ore...back in eleven lands. I had originally travelled to human lands to do some PvE in some locations I knew about, but the more I thought about my experiences in both human and elven lands and compared the two, I decided I'd probably rather be in elf lands anyway. So when the sale was made for Mir Bellith, I was happy to recall back to my bindstone and walk over to make a nice bit of gold. I donated the proceeds from that sale, as well as a bit more, to my clan for the eventual acquiring of a city. My play style doesn't make me the best of clan members, I imagine, but I do try to contribute to the cause when I can.

Otherwise, I did a little PvE with zombies near the elven cities to gather ash for my spells. There I was able to coexist peacefully with some other players who were there for similar reasons. I don't know if it's because of where I am in my progression or something about the people drawn to the elven lands, but I've found them a lot less cut-throat than in the human starter areas.

I was killed once by a couple of mounted orks, and that experience got me thinking again about predation. I can't quite bring it all together in my head, but there's some analogy to be made there with natural selection and migration patterns and predation. Maybe more than an analogy; perhaps even a parallel dynamic in the virtual world of what happens in the real world. Although the incidence of predation is significant, and it occurs most frequently at known places, it still behooves players to frequent those places if they're gathering more resources than they're losing.

Since death isn't permanent for characters in Darkfall, what's really at stake in any death is time. Time is converted into certain resources -- such as reagents, gold, armor, weapons, ore, timber -- that can be taken away in the event of a death. When the character loses those resources, what's really being lost is the time the player invested in gathering those resources. It also takes time to replace them. Some items may also be very rare, in which case the amount of time it would take to replace them can vary widely depending on luck. Players who bank frequently when gathering resources (such as by farming monsters) are banking their time, past and future. They can then exchange those resources for those gathered by other players in order to maximize their time.

With a PK attack, the player can feel frustration, anger, and shame, but what they're really losing is time. If they're converting their time into banked resources at a higher rate than they're losing them to PKs, then it makes sense to continue to frequent the very same places the PK are known to hunt. There's probably even a mathematical formula you could apply to the situation drawn from real-life studies of animal predation. For instance, if a herd of prey animals is migrating and stops at a certain watering hole, that's a place that can also be used by predator species to find their prey. So the behavior of the prey animals who habitually return to that watering hole would have to result from some quantifiable relationship between the benefits they get from using it and the costs of losing one of their members to a lion attack, for instance. There doesn't even need to be a conscious calculation, just a working out of the numbers naturally. In the case of farming monsters at known camps, there's simply a greater chance of losing some portion of your time and resources to PKs. You have to take that into account.

On the behavior of the predators, there also has to be some give-and-take. If they hit the same spot over and over repetitively, they may very well push the situation to a breaking point at which the prey (players) no longer go there at all. That could mean, as one example, that the predators have to spend more time looking for their prey and less time actually harvesting them. So whether they do so consciously or not, those PKs who run a circuit of camps or alternate their activities may be more successful than those who return to the same place consistently.

On the prey side, that's another factor that can be taken into account. If a camp's been recently hit, what are the chances that the same PKs will visit it again soon? That doesn't rule out other predators coming by, but my own experience at monster spawns is that actual PK visits are often spaced out enough to allow the prey characters enough time in between to keep the site a profitable one in respect to the gains v/s loses.

That reminds me of the situation where a police officer has a motorist pulled over on the side of the road. If the goal of the other drivers is to go as fast as they can without getting pulled over, to me it doesn't make sense to slow down drastically at the sight of a cop giving another guy a ticket. Sure, if you're going excessively fast you want to slow down so as not to get his attention. But otherwise, his attention is on the driver he's dealing with at the moment, so why slow down from 65 to 55? Of course, there could be another police cruiser just over the hill, or I've even seen one cop with another cop "pulled over." But most of the time that's the only cop for miles and he's effectively out of action for a period of time. So although psychologically you've just seen a cop and are tempted to slow down, the odds of seeing another any time soon are low: time to speed up :)

To bring that back to PK activity, there's a calculation that needs to be made, perhaps as just a rough estimation, of whether that spot is a good one to return to. In many cases, it can be. Having just been hit, the players trying to farm the camp for resources may find they're looking at a PK-less period in which they could collect back or even exceed whatever resources they lost. On the other hand, if the PKs are persistent, it could make more sense to go elsewhere or switch to another activity.

This all assumes, of course, that the would-be "prey" characters have little chance of fighting back. This is often the case because PKs tend to hunt weaker characters and, further, time their attacks when their target's health, stamina, and mana may be low. They also prefer odds no worse than 1-on-1 and often climb to 4-on-1, with similar disparities in gear and experience between them. PKs are not brave or resourceful people; they're pragmatists and opportunists. That's not necessarily a slam against them, but more a description of the ecological niche they fill. And of course it's not equating PvPers with PKs, though there is often overlap among them.

Anyway, these are the kinds of things I think about while fighting those nasty trolls, zombies, and such.