Darkfall Day 29-33

Lots of play days to write about but for short times each. I've done a lot of farming this week to put myself into position for some spell practice. Right now my Greater Magic is 30.1 and I need to get to 50 for elemental schools. My next training push will probably get me to just 40 unless I can buy a shitload of reagents. Otherwise I'm herb gathering and farming my friendly neighborhood trolls to gather what I need.

In more interesting developments I had my first experience as part of what I might charitably call a gank squad :) A couple of my clanmates needed to pay off their alignment debt to get blue again, so we formed a little group of four and went hunting in Mahirim lands. I've been the victim of such gank squads more often than I care to think about in the newbie areas of human and elven lands. A group of enemies on mounts will swing through and kill a few folks, loot, and move on. I don't get too upset about it as long as it's spread out enough that I get something done in between. Now I've been on the other side.

The basic tactic was to go to a mob camp, most often goblins, and kill whomever we found there. The goal was more to get my clanmates the alignment credit for having killed them than to gather loot or anything, though we picked up a little of that. Sounds are often the giveaway that someone is fighting nearby and can even provide a clue as to how many there are. We dismounted for our attacks, although I've been attacked by mounted groups plenty of times. Dismounting let us use bows and magic, though. So we'd sneak up on someone and chase them a bit till they were dead. Oddly enough, we'd sometimes kill one to find another still fighting goblins. Got to be more aware of your surroundings, friends :)

The more exciting part was when, near an NPC town and emboldened by the towers there, a good sized group of Mahirim organized a counter-attack. We'd retreat, draw a few out, and charge back in, killing as we went. My magic got a good workout throughout this. All that practice leading trolls with Mana Missile also paid off as I was able to kill a couple of folks who were doing their best to dodge the slow-assed spell. I probably did more damage with the area-of-effect splash damage provided when the spell hit the ground or a nearby object.

We also would attack lone gatherers as we travelled through the wilderness, confirming the wisdom of my usual practice to keep a mount nearby and get moving at the first sound of appraoching hooves whenever I gather in the middle of nowhere.

Overall it was a fun experience and I know with greater certainity now that most often when I get ganked, it's nothing personal.

Darkfall Day 26-28

Another light week and weekend for DF as I ended up playing another game Friday night and working in the yard all day Saturday. I enjoy DF and the sense of making progress, but I'm glad I can say I'm not addicted :D If you read the Darkfall forums (I recommend not), you see a lot of newer folks worried about being so far behind those who started earlier, not to mention those who have macroed and exploited their way higher. I can understand their concern, but it's a wide-open game and you can make of it what you want at any skill level. Sure you'll get ganked and attacked in unfair numbers by people with greater skill and equipment, but it's far from a constant. Mostly you need to vary your activities so that when the PK activity seems particularly high you can retreat to a city and do some quiet gathering and crafting.

As is probably dismally clear from my slowly progressing stats, I'm not too worried about it myself. Yes, I still do some "magic practice." At first I would cast my two starting spells over and over until I ran out of mana then do some logging until my mana regenerated, repeating the process again. As my magic skills have increased to the point of being useful, I've gained a lot more skill while actually fighting monsters in PvE. Now I will do "magic practice" when I'm fairly close to the next level to grind it on up. With the Lesser Magic spell Health the Mana, I'm able to extend my mana a lot longer and continuously cast for a longer time, so I no longer alternate that with gathering. With a judicious use of potions and healing spells, I can carry that on for awhile without macroing. In fact, I think rotating my spells as I do and casting those whose recast timer has just refreshed as soon as I'm able has allowed me to progress at a satisfying rate in a short amount of time.

I finally reached 25 in Greater Magic, which allowed me to purchase Spell Chanting, a little more powerful school of magic. Its first spell is one that minimizes spell failure, but it doesn't last very long right now. I'll probably put it in my training rotation, but not use it much in the field until I can improve its duration. Having Spell Chanting will eventually allow me to learn Arcane Magic, one of the two highest schools, as I understand it.

I also reached 75 in Lesser Magic this weekend. That one snuck up on me so that I only had to grind a few points to reach it. Using the spells in action in PvE (and also to some extent in gathering) has raised the skill in a natural way that's a lot less painful than sitting around casting at a wall :) Getting to 75 LM let me pick up the Launch spell, which is mighty handy, and a supplementary skill to make Lesser Magic spells cast faster. That's good news because Heal Self is Lesser Magic, as is Mana Missile, my current bread-and-butter attack spell. I've also started using Magic Shield more, which mitigates some damage. With my Durable Spells LM skill much improved, the duration on the shield is much better than at first, so I'll continue to work on that.

Buying all those new skills and spells left me broke with less than 80 gp to my name, so I went to my trusty logging and was able to gather enough to sell for 1200 gp. It required a quick trip to human lands again to sell it, but I needed to turn in some quests over there anyway. I also got to hang around Copperdale a bit which has a big graveyard right near town and lots of skeletons. I fought Dire Zombies for a quest and took me awhile to kill the requisite four because they kept ganging up on me. It was a nice challenge, though, and I felt competent at least, using a variety of spells as well as obstacles and geography to good effect. Unfortuantley, I doubt I'd still be much of a challenge for a guy with a polearm, but soon I think I'll be far enough along in magic to hold my own. That's the plan anyway :)

The other interesting thing that happned this week is that my clan got a city in a realtively peacful way through our alliance. So I've moved out there and will get to team up with my clan mates more, I expect.

Darkfall Day 23-25

Mostly stuck around the elven lands this weekend, alternating among farming trolls, killing zombies, and gathering, with a little magic practice thrown in for good measure.

I've gotten pretty good at handling the PvE at the level of monsters I'm dealing with. Using Mana Missile has three basic tactics you can use depending on what the monsters are doing: if they're coming right at you or running directly away you can spam it over and over; if they're moving at an angle towards or away from you, you can gauge windspeed, relative humidity, and the average walking speed of a fully-laden Greek troll and try to lead the monster enough with it to actually hit them; or, if they're moving erratically, as they often do, you can make a wild guess and try to hit the ground near them so they at least suffer splash damage. So you hit one try out of five and count yourself lucky. The Mana Efficiency - Lesser Magic skill is helpful since you end up wasting so much mana.

Of course, I've continued to use my mace and its skill level is slowly creeping up. Melee involves constantly circling around the monster to avoid its spells, a tactic that is surprisingly effective, as is jumping up and down a lot when you're at a distance and they're casting at you.

I don't mean to suggest I don't enjoy the PvE, because I do, but it's something like building a house with nothing but a pipe wrench.

At any rate, I've been able to gather a good bit of spell components, which I then burn slowly raising my spell levels. The most recent patch made it so that you can't gain skill while wielding the newbie staff. The main advantage of using the newbie staff is that it can't be broken. So it's a minor inconvenience, but now I have to stock up on real staffs to use while skilling up, ones that break occasionally. Fortunately my friends the trolls also drop a good many staffs, so I'm not hurting for any.

On the PvP front, I'm still aggressive only in the noblest of ways: a true sign of the carebear :P For instance, two new, no-clan players starting attacking a third at a zombie camp the other day. He wisely ran off, but I attacked and killed them both (with some help from the zombies, of course). This is less a testament to my uber skill than to their lack of same. Still, it was satisfying, and the would-be victim and I teamed up and chatted for several hours. So don't let anyone tell you that Darkfall is all survival of the fittest.

I also ran across a pair of Alfar hunting players around the same area. I was able to creep along behind them without drawing their attention, shadowing them as they moved in to kill some humans and elves. I arrived to find one at low health standing over the grave of a victim, but I didn't see the other. Still, having little on me, I figured I'd give it a go, though I'd never survive two players who know what they're doing. I was able to sneak up behind and kill the one character after a brief chase in which the skeletons of the area were helpful. I saw his friend briefly, but he slunk away. I figured my time was short until he made a counter-attack, but the same skeletons who were so helpful earlier were now in my way getting to his loot. I was able to grab some of it, but was fighting off skeletons when the two came back. I can't imagine where they were bound that the one I killed could make it back so quickly. The nearest chaos stone is a good hike up the river, and as far as I can tell they were never mounted. But anyway, as I predicted, two-on-one was my downfall and I lost what I'd looted from him, but nothing really of my own except some resin I had on me and some random pieces of armor I was wearing that I'd got off some goblins.

But each time I engage in PvP I'm learning a little more. I'm using mainly Mana Missile still, a weak weapon if ever there were one, but ranking it up has helped expand the area of effect and damage from it. Still, it's nothing compared to an archer with a bow, so accurate and fast. I'm hoping the attack spells in the elemental schools, should I ever get to them, will finally put me on a par with them.

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.

Darkfall Day 17-20

At this point in my little Darkfall life, certain things have become common enough to seem unremarkable: a bit of gathering timber and ore; selling these to get money; spending said money on armor and other equipment; losing aforementioned armor and equipment to a PK (Player Killer); chasing away other would-be PKs from newbie areas. These things in themselves make up a lot of the fabric of my gameplay and have thus become unremarkable. And so, though I therefore won't remark on them often here and in the future, you can be sure they form the background noise on which these more interesting experiences take place.

It also becomes, over a weekend, hard to keep track of what happened when, so I'll just relate a few interesting bits, not necessarily in order.

One afternoon in the elven city of Iriendir I had been fighting trolls for quite awhile and decided to do some mining for ore. There's a cluster of four or five nodes all together at the foot of a log bridge right on the edge of town and in my comings and goings I'd noticed no one had been there in awhile, so the nodes were probably ripe for the harvesting. So I got my pickaxe and went to work. Before very long, however, several armored people showed up and one began to attack me; not the token swing to provoke me to attack, but a good four of five whacks. I ran into the relative safety of the area guarded by the towers and banked my stuff.

It appeared on returning that a group of about five members of one clan had decided to "own" the metal nodes. They even had one member perched atop the bridge with a bow to keep other people away. This was all apparently right outside the radius of the town's guard towers because these were humans and dwarves and elves attacking people with impunity.

For the first time in my MMORPG-playing life, I decided I would grief them. What they were doing was within the rules, but what I decided to do was as well. I decided I'd just attack them over and over again until one of us got sick of it. So I banked everything but my permanent newbie weapons and went on the attack. I ran in and blasted the one who'd attacked me with no regard for my own survival; after all, I was close to my bindstone and would lose nothing, unless I happened to kill one, in which case I'd take the hit to alignment happily. I certainly caused confusion and of course died fairly quickly. When I returned a short while later, some other fighting had apparently gone on because several of them were in poor health. I attacked again, running after one of them who, near death, ran into the protection of the towers. Heedless of the towers, I continued to fire on her until I was dead (and she, unfortunatley, was not).

On my third foray out, I decided to cross the river and shoot at them from across its expanse to at least get in some more shots with my Mana Missile. However, on returning I found the whole crew gone. I'm guessing that another clan who makes Iriendir they're semi-permanent base of operations finally drove them off, but I can only guess. At any rate, they were gone and I got back to mining. The disruptions to their plans meant that they didn't actually get much mining done, it appeared, because I was able to drain most of them of resources. I certainly don't mind sharing nodes with others, but trying to dominate them in that way was arrogant and unnecessary. Fortunately, the game gives the players the ability to correct such situations themselves.

On another occasion near the same town I was attacked by two orks using mostly Mana Missiles. I wasn't able to flee very far before dying, but came back with the intention of seeing where they went. As luck would have it, I found them not far away battling another human player, so I joined her. They weren't very well coordinated and kept switching targets. If they'd concentrated their attacks they might have fared better. But as is often the case in Darkfall, those who approach a 2-on-1 or even 4-on-1 situation with confidence are at a lost when the odds are evened up. We killed and looted them both and I got back what I'd lost to them earlier, more or less.

Of course, I also got killed a couple of times by PKs, so it wasn't all win all the time. But in between these disruptive events, I got a lot of PvE fighting done at the troll camp and managed to collect enough bone to use as a spell component to work my Greater Magic up to 18. The next plateau for it is 25, at which time I'll get some new spells.

Two odd occurences also happened. One was the single Alfar who probably could have easily killed me since I was fighting trolls naked and was at low health. But fortunately she was part of my clan's alliance and I even had the chance to help her a bit later. Then there's the Alfar who killed me and revived me afterwards, leaving with a salute. 'Tis a strange world, this Agon.

I also revived other friendly players when they died to the trolls and had them do the same for me. For once there was some comradarie among the anonymous players hard at work slaughtering trolls. Which goes to show that Darkfall can be a civil place and not always the shark tank it often is.

Toward the end of my weekend I decided to ride towards the human lands to visit there again. As I've found before, the cross-country treks can be quiet and interesting, with the occasional fleeting sighting of another player in the distance. I had to log out halfway there, so I'm anxious to see if I can finish the journey successfully.

Darkfall Day 15 & 16

Tuesday I did a little gathering. Not much magic practice this week as I need to farm up or buy some bone so I can get to work on Greater Magic. I did get the chance to spar with a new player and work up my melee skills a bit, but I really have to make that a priority this weekend. I'm not enamored of the melee in this game, but I'll need it to survive.

Last night I was planning to do some PvE for a change when the call came that our clan and its alliance were involved in a siege on another city. Our task was to defend the attacking city throughout its window of vulnerability. This is a feature of the siege system that makes the attacker's city itself vulnerable before and during the siege on the target city. It was important to ensure that the battle didn't end before it could begin.

Riding in a war party can be one of the most fun things I've experienced in Darkfall. All around you are warriors in armor, bristling with weapons, helmets topped with Romanesque plumes. The thundering of hoofbeats drowns out every other sound; I'd hate to be a lone crafter in the forest and hear that sound coming over the hill! On a long journey, though, the excitement of the war party can dull to that of a tedious expedition, especially when the romance of the thing is interupted by people losing their connections, lagging up at server boundaries, etc. I even had the peculiar experience of seeing a comrade's mount countinue on up a hill while he sat suspended in the air!

Meeting up with others of our clan, our war band eventually numbered somewhere around 20. We got to the attacker's city in plenty of time to set ourselves up on top of a building to act as snipers guarding the clanstone. Unfortunatley, there were some enemies who were bound to the city's clanstone (not sure what the story is there) who made a nuisance of themselves for the hours preceeding the attack and during it as well. I say unfortunately, but at least it gave people something to do.

I think I've compared warfare in Darkfall to the real thing before, only in the sense that everything is "hurry up and wait." There is a lot of tedium, especially on defense it seems. In this case, it took quite awhile for anyone to show up and try to attack the city we were defending and even then they didn't advance far enough into the city to make it to our position. Most of our guys ended up back on the ground to meet the attackers at the city gates where the latter were stymied most of the attack. Me being fairly useless in melee, I stayed with the rest on the building to watch the clanstone and occassionaly fire a Mana Missile down on the harrassers. A few attackers did make it through to the clanstone and proceeded to hit it with siege hammers, but the combination of arrows and Mana Missiles raining down on them ended that pretty quickly. I feel a little bad for the city defeders who were on foot and attempting to engage the hammer-wielders because they must have gotten caught in some furious crossfire.

The most interesting part was when some of the attackers managed to get on top of a tower and send a salvo of Mana Missiles at us. I used the Magic Shield spell to some effect, and the cover around, while returning fire. Pretty quickly some defenders made their way up the tower and ended the brief magical battle. The experience does confirm for me, though, that at this stage of the game magic is most effective as an artillery of sorts, best practiced from some height and distance.

Speaking of artillery, this was an alfar-style city and the cannons were pretty cool to see in action :) I've been on the receiving end of cannon fire and I know it can be intimidating. When the shots land, they really shake the screen and make a lot of noise. Plus they seem to have a decent sized area-of-effect. Glad I was inside the city this time.

The pre-emptive attack never got anywhere and after the target city became vulnerable it was essentially done. I ended up joining my clanmates on the ground, prowling around outside the walls. We killed a few stragglers and I picked up a little more positive alignment. But two of us also ended up chasing a lone enemy into a counter-attack and got killed. So what was almost a death-free PvP experience for me ended with a death after all. Lost some scraps of armor and a handful of reagents I'd not had to use. I ended up back at the elven city where I'm currently bound, so that was it for me.

Overall an interesting night with not a lot of action, but the attack was succesful, I hear, so our allies picked up a new city! Which, I expect, will be lost and won again many times over.

Darkfall Day 11-14

Several days to catch up on here with some interesting action having taken place.

On Saturday I made two trips from Ymir's Tear, the dwarf capital, to one of the elven starter cities. The first trip was to buy some armor and try out a different area. But I neglected to bind there, so when I died fighting trolls, I ended back up in Ymir's Tear. I decided to make the trip again since it wasn't too bad the first time and I had wanted to explore more down there.

I rode my horse in an almost direct line southwest across the mountainous lands of the dwarves, through the browning and parched forests of the Mahirim, down into the lush water-coursed woodlands of the elves. I had been told that the interior of Agon was a more dangerous place, but the world is so vast and empty at this point that I hardly saw anything threatening, and those I did see were easily outrun. It certainly makes for a quicker trip than skirting the coasts as I tried to do when travelling from the human lands to our alliance city.

On my second trip, I decided to try some mining along the way. I'd seen lots of metal nodes in quiet, out-of-the-way places on the first trip. Ore sells for a good amount more than timber, is always in demand, and the mining of it also provides me sulphur for my spells.

I decided to try something that might have proven stupid, but in fact worked out perfectly. Instead of despawning my mount, I kept it standing right next me in case I needed to make a quick getaway. This could have been bad if a) my client crashed and I lost the mount or b) someone snuck up on me and stole it or killed it. As it was, I picked spots that were either well concealed or conversely in wide open areas where I could see anyone coming.

As it happened, I was stumbled upon by other players twice. Mining makes a distinctive stacatto sound that can be heard from a good ways off. It can be hard to use only sound to pinpoint the miner, but it'll get you in their general area. The first time I heard hoofbeats coming from over a ridge. Possibly they weren't headed towards me, but I decided not to risk it. I hopped on my horse and sped away. The second time, much further away, I also heard the hoofbeats first and looked up to see a rider headed towards me, Mahirim I believe, but a good ways away. I quickly mounted back up and sped away and there was no use in his chasing me firther, so he peeled away in another direction.

I was sure to take my time and look around a lot while I mined, in case anyone did try to sneak up on me, but I was lucky in that regard. So my test-run on mining worked out fairly well and at the end of my trip I was able to make about 300 gold from the ore I'd collected.

The second notable event of the weekend was accompanying my clan on PvP raids. I'm not sure why we were attacking the particular hamlets and cities we did, but I take it we were harassing some foes. I'm not sure you really need a reason, but when you get to the level of clan warfare, usually there's some political considerations involved.

This was my first experience of large scale skirmishing outside of the city siege I participated in. The general tactics seemed to be to ride en masse towards the target habitation, dismount close by, and run in and kill anything that moved. When the atackees managed to organize a concerted defense, we'd mount up again and ride a ways off while they chased us. This would most often result in the defenders becoming strung out and unorganzied, so we'd dismount and counterattack again. This went back and forth for awhile. Eventually I got killed and had to run back, which wasn't a lot of fun, but my clanmates had saved some of my gear.

We also attacked a city. I won't talk too much about the tactics there, but suffice it to say some thought went into planning both a suprise attack and an escape route. In this battle, I actually had the chance to use my magic some. There were defenders up on the walls shooting down into the city where we were slaughtering their comrades. I was able to send Mana Missiles up at them to keep them harried and forcing them to focus on me for a bit. This was another case where the splash damage from the spell worked in my favor, because although they were dodging, I could hit them with some of the area of effect damage. I also got to kill a couple of guys who were fleeing and picked up some alignment points for that, the first I've earned in the game. I even finished one guy off with the gank skill.

Another satisfying part of this battle for me was after we retreated a bit and regrouped. I was able to use the Lay on Hands spell to help some of my clanmates and our allies regain health faster. I'm finding that magic is fairly useless when the melee is hot and heavy, as you're just as likely to hit your own folks, but this support and artillery role can be effective.

But of course I got killed again, so that was it for me for awhile. Overall, I had fun, but just like the real army, there was a lot of "hurry up and wait" among the action. I don't feel like I contributed a lot, but through experience and increasing my magic skills, maybe I'll get the hang of it.

Darkfall Day 9 & 10

Day 9 was more gathering and spell practice at our clan alliance city.

On Day 10 that city was lost.

One of the things that drew me to Darkfall, despite not caring much for wide-open, free-for-all, full-loot PvP, is the potential for political intrigue and siege warfare. Amusingly, a certain section of the playerbase thinks the game should be about solo PKs killing solo newbies and taking their shit. Fortunately for me, there's a great number who are already engaged in building cities, alliances, and the engines of war. Never mind that our clan and its alliance were just on the losing end of the the latter.

A large alliance helped one of the allied clans attack and capture our allies' city from its stalwart defenders. When I got the news that the attack would be taking place in a few short hours, I made sure to hurry home after work to participate. The outcome was, to my mind, vitually pre-ordanined; I didn't expect us to hold the city, really, not in the face of overwhelming odds. Ironically, by careful study of the rules of war laid out by the game's developer, our undermanned alliance did actually win the contest by capturing the attackers' home village while they were just starting their attack on us. Perhaps that reads a little convoluted, and in fact the rules are full of various suppositions and mitigating clauses. Short version: attack another city but lose your own first and you've lost. Defenders win.

So if we won, how did we lose? Because of a little ruse de guerre called a "fucking bug." Ah, I'll let wiser men debate the finer points. Simply put, the pertinent rules didn't work. And so, fat saved from fire, it was promptly dropped back into the coals.

This is not to say that the attacker's wouldn't have won otherwise. The taking of their home village was a desperate gambit, one that, miraculousy, should have paid off. But kudos to them anyway for amassing a larger and better prepared force.

The siege, or raid, was both awesome and suckified. Seeing the defenders arrayed along the battlements in their armor was very cool. Raining arrows and spells down on the attackers as they finally arrived across the narrow isthmus connecting the city to the land was thrilling. Being in and amongst the chaos of the fray was fun. What sucked: frame rates that made it seem like we were playing a slideshow instead of a game and that also made it nearly impossible to aim at anything; client crashes when respawning after deaths (25% of the time for me); the inability to tell friend from foe unless you happened to know all of the names of the two-dozen-or-so clans involved in the melee; and the lack of a freaking door on the city, making all the walls and fortifications moot.

In its suckitude, the siege reminded me much of those in Shadowbane, which were always insane lagfests once you got above 40 characters on the screen. Last night we had probably a couple hundred, maybe more. I turned down all of my video and audio settings, but it didn't help.

As for me, I died 8 times. I didn't have much equipment to start with, so after the first death it was mainly a matter of running around and trying to attack the enemy with Mana Missile and my newbie staff, although I did try to melee a bit. Having nor armor, though, I tried to keep my distance. I'd look for players sitting down trying to recover their health and stamina, or those relatively low on health. I'd peridodically find a quiet corener outside the walls and rest myself. And at some point, when an alliance commander suggested it, I used my brief time of post-respawn invulnerability to block those smashing our clanstone with siege hammers, to not much effect.

All in all I'm glad I participated. It was about what I expected, which is to say a fun-filled lagfest, even if I did die a lot. Aventurine is going to have to get the siege system worked out if they expect the game to survive for long. It's not much fun to fight by strobe light, and it's no fun at all to play by the rules and get shafted anyway.

As a further irony, this is the city I spent all day getting to on Sunday through many perilous adventures. Now I'm based in the dwarves' capital city. Nice knowing ya, dear city, I guess.

Darkfall Day 8 - Part II

Making your way into the interior of Yssam is what I imagine stepping into the Yucatan is like. But with Raptors. There are fascinating ruins that look like something from Central America but haunted by the shades of fallen elves...and other things. The mountains all around are green and jagged. The valleys are filled with large strange flowering plants that look like they might eat you.

We found out about the Raptors close-up as a couple came to gnaw on us. And we stumbled across a goblin village near a desolate clanstone whose warriors were tough and agile. Fortunately we didn't have too much trouble evading them once it became obvious our Mana Missiles weren't going to do the trick.

As we made our way along the southern coast, we began to hear the sounds of logging, so we switched to crouch-walking through the high grasses and slipping behind trees. At one point Valucis scouted ahead and came sneaking back when he realized there was someone directly on the other side of the tree he was leaning against casting spells and buffing up! Could be they were macroing, and at any rate I suspect now they might have been part of our alliance, but we had no way to know at the time. With one of us naked but for newbie weapons and the other not a lot better off, we decided to practice discretion.

Night fell and we crept along in a purple darkness, sure that some wandering clan would come upon us and send us back to the clanstone. At one point we stopped, Valucis behind a large rock, me behind a tree, and the sounds of someone walking through the forest seemed awfully near. Just as we were ready to move along, Val lost his connection again and had to reboot his computer. Sucked for him, I'm sure, but being the guy sitting there behind a tree waiting for him to come back was no picknick either ;) When he got back, we decided to sprint along and put some distance between us and the sounds of active habitation.

As the sun rose, we finally made our way back to the coast and prepared to head south. I'm not sure if it was then or after we had swam a ways from island to island that we came upon a clanstone near a beach. I do remember that we were glad to be able to bind again further along into our journey so that if we died we at least wouldn't have to make such a long trek back.

It was then that we stumbled on the Mahirim. He was red and naked and at low health, having respawned, I suppose, at the very clanstone we were travelling to. Without a word spoken we both attacked, sending a fierce volley of Mana Missiles at him. For such a big dog he was very quick. He dodged our slow spells fairly easily, and ducked behind a large tree. We ran around it from different sides, but it seemed he'd given us the slip, and quickly, too. All around the little cove we looked, to no avail. But as I was walking back to the clanstone, there he was, hidden behind a tree. A master move, really. He'd given us the slip and set us up for an ambush while gathering his health back. Out came the newbie pole arm, slashing at us mericlessly. We dodged in an out and tried to flank him but were getting hit an awful lot and not doing enough damage back to panick him. I was getting to the worse of it and dove under the water to escpae for a moment. It sounded like he might be behind me, but then I saw Valucis's health meter dropping. I came up for a quick breath and dived again to come around curve or rocks and try to get some health and mana back.

Unfortunately Val went down. I felt bad about saving my own skin, but he rightfully pointed out that I was the one that still had something to lose, including my mount. Still, I would like to be able to say we hung tight and focused our attacks, but it didn't happen. With more practice maybe we'll be formidable. At this point, we got whacked by a naked Mahirim.

Val had bound to the clanstone there, so he respawned in short order, only to be chased again. I tried to get on land and mount to use my horse as a weapon, but they were taking the chase southwards across the water, hopping from small island to outcropping. So I swam in that general direction and tried to coordinate with my clanmate to gather back together. I believe he had a second death then, but swimming and diving, we were finally able to reconnect.

The last part of our journey brought us, drenched in seawater and blood, to the northern peninsula that was our destination. We ended up approaching the city from the south across a narrow bridge beneath imposing walls with ivory spikes and dark towers. The place felt immense and not a little confusing. As we approached the city's clanstone, Valucis kissed it, and I can't say I blame him one bit.

An epic journey, my friend.

Darkfall Day 8 - Part I

On Sunday, a clanmate and I decided to make the trek from the Human starter area to the city in which our clan is based. Valucis is also a Human and we have a similar focus on magic (woe to us). He had tried unsuccessfully to get to the city once before, so we hoped that having two of us would improve our chances.

The problem is that the city is past Ork lands. The various races are arranged along the outer rim of Agon's central continent in such a way that every race has an enemy to either side. Go southwest from the human lands and you end up among the Alfar. Go north and you soon arrive among the Orks. This is a problem because we'd not only have to navigate past potentially hostile Humans (and, to a lesser extent, Dwarves and Elves) in our own lands and the open lands in between, but the last stage of our journey would be through a big area teeming with Orks for whom we'd be open season.

Our initial plan was to head east and travel along the coast, making our way north, then to take to the ocean and swim around the worst part of the Ork lands. We had mounts, so we proceeded fairly well, making good time and avoiding conflict. The coastal lands were fairly empty of players; we probably saw more monsters than people as we made our way north. We saw what we thought might be player hamlets, only to discover goblins of a tougher variety that we were used to. We discovered a toolchest sitting in a little shrine-like structure near the water's edge that we were able to loot for tools and crafting materials. Apparently these are similar to resource nodes in that they respawn over time? At any rate, we got to see some interesting terrain and watch the sun coming up and down over the ocean as we travelled.

At some point we took a short break to take care of real life stuff. We sat down on a high mountain, mostly concealed from anyone passing below, as I went AFK and left Valucis to twittle his thumbs. About the time I got back he experienced a lock-up of his computer and had to reboot. When he came back he said he'd seen Orks passing by below while I was gone. Seems we'd caught a lucky break there.

Heading into the sea now to swim around the Ork lands as much as possible, we came upon a couple of islands just off the coast that had structures on top of them. Some Alfar were swimming back and forth between the islands and we could see their heads bobbing in the water. Presumably they could see us as well. We decided to dive down under the water, but you can't hold your breath very long in Darkfall, so we had to come up for air quite a bit. At this point I guess we took diverging paths around the southernmost island. My thought was to go south around it and avoid the swimming Alfar altogether. If I had enough breath I might have tried to swim under them, but I knew I wouldn't be able to. Where Valucis got off to, I'm not sure, but soon he was in battle with the Alfar. He was killed, losing his mount and everything else he had on him. It was a bad setback.

Fortunately we had taken every opportunity to rebind to clanstones along our route north. These are scattered around the lands and provide a place to bind away from the starting villages. When you die you reappear at these stones naked with just your starting weapons. At that point we had to decide what to do. I recalled to the bindstone using the hideously-long-casting binstone_recall command. Seriously, it takes probably three mintues or so to cast, all the while bobbing in the water with murderous (is there any other kind?) Alfar nearby. Anyway, I showed back up at the clanstone where Valucis was waiting and we reformulated our plan.

To the northeast of the main continent is a large island/small continent called Yssam. We decided to swim up to it, travel along its southern coast, and come down to our city from the north, bypassing the hairy northeast of the main continent. It was a long swim, as it turned out, but fortunately we didn't encounter any sharks (as I understand can happen in deep waters). We made our way up Yssam's southeastern peninsula along the top of a high ridge looking down on verdant jungles. I expected to see some real "Land of the Lost"-type shit any minute and we wondered if you jumped from the highest peak into the ocean if you'd survive the fall or plunge so deep you'd run out of breath before you came back up.

As it turned out, it was neither lizardmen nor dinosaurs we encountered but some sort of earth elemental kind of thing, which we quickly dubbed Bigfoot. He came after us, so we did our magic thing, pelting him from all sides and maneuvering for better position. He hit pretty hard himself with some bleeding spells that did not-insubstantial damage-over-time. Unfortunatly he was a bit too tough and we scattered to get away. If I'd remembered to give Valucis (who was without gear, you'll recall) some sulphur for his Health to Mana spell, we might have beaten the thing. Not much you can do without mana and any protection to go toe-to-toe with Bigfoot, though. So after losing the big guy, we managed to head off further into the continent.

To be continued....

Darkfall Day 7

PvP was the theme for Friday evening. Our pacifist came out of his shell a bit and attacked an ork who was skulking around some of the human newbie hunting grounds near Heart of Eanna. In Darkfall you can attack anyone anywhere with varying degrees of consequences. Generally humans, dwarves, and elves are aligned, so there's a negative consequence to attacking them for me, a human. Orks and Mahirim are aligned, but enemies of humans, so there's no problem attacking them. Alfar are aligned with nobody and are open season. In the twisted logic of the Darkfall community, though, I'm sure it would be considered carebearish to only attack a legitimate target ;) At any rate, me and the trusty laser-cannon town towers slew her (carebear!) and found that she'd likely been looting newbies hunting goblins, so there was a bit of justice there as well.

But lest you think that I think that I'm now the PvP gawd, I did get my ass handed to me by a couple of Alfar on mounts. That running battle convinced me to spend some time reconfiguring my key bindings because while I would be sprinting and trying to switch spells I would instead be switching to different hotbars. Battle's chaotic enough without having unexpected results to your frantic key pressing. I also got ganked by a group of naked humans, which was less expected. I even got a system message after they killed me "Do you want to forgive your killer?" Hell no! I suppose that has something to do with the alignment system, maybe for cases where someone inadvertently kills you? Not in this case. Nope.

There was also a fun bit where I was trying to work on my melee skills at a goblin camp and this clan kept sweeping through. I guess they were running some sort of newbie circuit. It was good to see people firing back at them, and the persistent zap of Mana Missiles behind them seemed to hurry them along. They were definitely not as ruthless as they could have been.

My basic PvP strategy at this point, which isn't much of one, consists of Mana Missile, Heal Self, Magic Shield (if I have time) and lots of Sprint. It didn't take long to figure out that strafing while you run away is fairly useless. Better to make sharp turns to avoid incoming spells and arrows if you hear them in time to do so. Also a jump here and there can help with spells because they're often aimed low. I'm also trying to make use of the fact that you can hold down the left mouse button when casting and hold the spell indefinitely. Helps a little when people dodge expecting the spell to come whizzing at them but you're able to delay it.

To conteract the violence, I also did something I imagine few people have done in Darkfall: I stood by the clanstone in Heart of Eanna and healed people as they respawned after dying. I wanted to work on the Lay on Hands spell, or whatever it's called. You have to shoot it at them like all spells, but it does a few ticks worth of healing. No one thanked me, alas, but I enjoyed it and got to raise the spell level a bit. Pacifist FTW!

Darkfall Day 5 & 6

These little daily diaries have ended up being more of an examination of individual game elements, which is fine, but at some point I reckon I'll have covered most of Darkfall's features and end up doing "What happened this week." In the meantime...

The last couple of days have been more soloing fun, though I have found a guild I like and joined. Small with an interesting backstory, I think it'll be a good fit. Now I just need to schlep my ass out to our alliance city and partake in some heated PvP. I'm encouraged that they have beta experience and seem to approach warfare with some strategic intent.

As for my aforementioned examination of game elements, what came to mind last night as I did the gathering and magic-practice thing again was that the difference in starting stats among the various races may have more influence than I originally estimated. I didn't think a 5 point difference here of there was significant, but seeing how slowly stats increase, I believe I was wrong, at least in respect to the early game. Humans start with 20 in every stat with the eventual maximum being 100. Other races get bonuses and penalties; for instance, dwarves start with 25 in Vitality and Wisdom, but 15 in Dexterity and Intelligence. Other races are balanced towards other strengths and weaknesses. Stats increase over time as the skills they're associated with increase, but it seems to be a slow process. I've gained a little in all of the stats over the last week, but the only stats I've seen a whole point increase in are Strength and Wisdom (because of all the gathering I've done; gathering skills, as "crafts," are associated with wisdom). This all occured to me because it would sure be nice to have an extra 5 points in Intelligence and thus is mana! It would make levelling magic a bit easier for sure.

On the day before, Day 5, I took a break from the gathering and casting Mana Missile over and over and went out to do some quests. This brought me in contact with several different monsters. I was hunting hivekin, for one, and got see a few of the tougher varities, such as the Soldier, who hits a lot harder and has a nastier range attack than the Foragers I had been fighting. In teams of three, as they'd sometimes come at me, they were too much to solo and I retreated several times. I also ran across some centaurs out in the woods. They hit pretty hard with their bows and didn't seem overly impressed with my Mana Missiles. They did a good job of circling around me as well, so I had to high-tail it. I also saw some skeletons in route to somewhere else, but didn't have the time to stop and fight them just then.

As I found a couple of days ago, the new gathering situation doesn't seem to be too bad. I don't know if it's that so many of the players are from Europe or what, but I haven't had a problem finding places to gather relatively close to the cities. Sure, many of the nodes right in town are already exhausted, but there are lots of other places to get resources right nearby. So I'm not too worried about it.

Also last night I bought a horse, but I've yet to ride it. I just stuck it in the bank. A horse in the bank? Well, it's just a little statue you use to summon the actual horse. Should help with travel, and yolu can even fight from them, but I didn't have a need for it last night so I just stowed it away. I'm sure it'll see some use this weekend.

Darkfall Day 4

Last night was a night to warm my little carebear heart. In fact, I didn't intend to play as long as I did, but I was on a roll and having fun. Queue time was more reasonable at about 40 minutes. At some point last night they were supposed to beef up the server to further reduce queue times, but I don't see any indication that's happened yet.

I was in Sandbrook last night, a human starting village. It was oddly vacant. It could just be a weeknight thing, and the fact that a good portion of the population lives in Europe, but I suspect it had more to do with two changes that were implemented in yesterday's patch. The various NPC cities have guard towers that blast criminals (and I assume enemy races, but I don't know that for sure) with lightning bolts. Previously you'd have a dozen players in the middle of a town intentionally going gray by striking someone then parrying the towers' attacks to increase their own parrying skill. It was noisy and chaotic, but didn't particular bother me. People will always find little game quirks that aren't really cheats but maybe "unintentional features." At any rate, the new patch changed it so that towers can't be parried at all. That prevents people from skilling up off of them, but it also means anyone who goes gray near a tower has no chance to block it until they can escape. So the side effect, I think, is that many of the warring clans who would fight inside the NPC towns also left for fear of accidentally striking a bystander and getting hammered by the towers.

The second change affected resource gathering. Previously the various trees, bushes, and rocks that yield lumber, herbs, stone, and metal were instanced so that each player could only harvest a certain amount from each node, but an unlimited number of players could do so. So, for example, if you could only get 20 ore from a rock, that rock would produce 20 ore for everyone who mined it and they'd each have to wait for that rock to regenerate for them individually before they could mine it again. Each node could produce, I guess, a nearly unlimited amount of resources in this way. Under this system, you'd see a lot of people gathering resources in towns, with five or six characters huddled around each node, all pulling in the maximum they could. It's safer to gather in or near town, and since there are a number of resource nodes accessible in each town there was less reason to stray further out. Now with the new patch, each individual resource node has a finite amount that can be gathered from it by all players; no more per-player instancing of resources. If there's, hypothetcially, 100 ore in a rock, then one person might gather all 100, but two people might split it, and three or four will split it even further. When the rock is out of resources, nobody can get anything from it until it regenerates.

This change certainly makes more sense and it will have the effect of pushing players farther out from the towns. There's also a concern among the player base that this will make resources rarer and crafted goods more expensive. It's definitely less convenient for the gatherer/crafter, but in my experiments with it last night, I didn't find it to be too bad. For one thing, the nodes regenrate within a couple of hours to max capacity, so it's stll possible to gather in and near towns. In the nodes further afield there are a lot of resources there to be harvested as well, so once you get down to gathering you can get a lot out of it. I think the combination of these things will mean that harvesting is not as screwed as it might have at first appeared. The sheer number of harvestable trees, for instance, means thaere's a lot of resources out there to be had if you can get to them safely.

And there's the rub. This change makes gathering more dangerous, but that's what Darkfall is about. Last night, even outside the towns, there was a pretty low population level while I was playing. I was definitely more cautious as I did some gathering afield, and I was fully armed, but, at least last night, it wasn't overwhelmingly more dangerous. I expect in the future that it will be hairier, but last night was a soft introduction to the new rules of gathering.

So on to the good stuff. I had a quest to kill hivekin. They're pinkish hairless naked humanoids, about 3/4 the hieght of a human, who apparently spit some kind of acid as a ranged attack. I honestly didn't spend a lot of time reading my logs to se what they were shooting at me! Again, the player population was low enough in my area that I had this particular hivekin camp to myself for awhile. That gave me the chance to use my magic to kill them. I must say Mana Missile is an annoying little spell in that it travels so slow that it's not too hard for even AI to see it coming and dodge. Learning to lead a moving target with it is also tricky, but I got better with it. But then, of course, we're talking about the lowest level damage spell in the game, so you can't expect too much. Apparently the higher level magic spells travel faster, which will be nice.

The splash damage that makes the spell so difficult to use when other players are around was a benefit last night in that when I didn't get a direct hit, I'd often still get some damage in by hitting near the monster. Damage was not great as it would take me about half my mana to kill one of them, but then the spell itself right now is around 26 and my Lesser Magic is around 30. On the plus side, by keeping them at range and dodging as many of their acid blobs as I could, I took very little damage. I also used my new Magic Shield spell to protect myself from the splash damage from my own spells. It's ranked pretty low right now and I'm not sure how much it helped, but I think it helped some when they were right up on me and I was at greatest risk of hitting myself with splashback.

I have to say, I'm still not decided how impressed I am with the AI, but last night the hivekin used cover (whether intentionally or not I don't know) and flanked me to give one of them a shot at my back (where more damage is done). They were also pretty good at dodging spells if they were far enough away. They appeared pretty smart to me.

Pulling put my sword and shield on occassion, it became clear that I've got to go back and fight some goblins to get my sword skill up if it's going to be any kind of effective backup. I did run out of mana a couple of times when I'd finish fighting one hivekin and find two more descending on me. In fact, I died once and had to run back. Fortunately no one had come along and looted me, so I got all of my stuff back and was able to finish killing the hivekin I needed for my quest.

Later a couple of players did come to the camp and I decided to stay on the far side from them. When they moved in my direction, I circled around. I don't know that they intended me harm, but in this game it pays to be cautious, especially since I don't yet feel capable of putting up a good enough fight for two armed guys. Earlier I had seen my first red character, which is to say a player character who had become permanently criminal from attacking too many of his own alliance. We played cat and mouse in a forest for a bit until I was able to work my way around him. His mistake was probably trying to sneak up on me once it was clear I had seen him; he probably should have just run at me, but I wasn't complaining :)

And to keep up my carebear rep, I tried to revive a player who had died near town, but either he didn't accept it or maybe lost connection or something. Anyway, eventully he died and there were a couple of others standing around ready to loot him, so we did. So maybe that's two points carbear, one point dick? ;)

Darkfall Day 3

Day 3 was a Sunday spent idling in the queue to get into the game broken up by a few hours of playing in two different bouts. Lag was worse than usual and my ping was pretty high, so I stuck mostly to gathering near towns. First I got my Lesser Magic up to 25, the first level that allows you to buy additional spells and skills to enhance it. Each of the many types of magic in Darkfall is its own skill with subskills that rank up separately. The spells themselves are also like skills in that they increase their level with use. So, for instance, my Lesser Magic is now around 27, my Mana Missile spell is around that, and my Heal Self spell is around 20. After reaching 25 in Lesser Magic, I picked up a spell that converts health to mana, a spell to heal other players, and some protection spells that protect me and others against the Lesser Magic damage spells.

I'm not sure how useful the protection spells will be. The Mana Missile, and perhaps other Lesser Magic damage spells, do "splash damage" in addition to their regular damage. So, for instance, if I shoot one at an enemy that's right up on me (or even just at the ground at my feet) I take damage from the spell as well. The same would apply if I were working with allies and trying to use these spells while they're engaged with an enemy. My thinking is that the protection spells, levelled up sufficiently, can help mitigate that splash damage so that I won't hurt myself or my allies as much when using them. The problem is that, at its lowest rating, the protection spell for the caster at least persists for only 2 minutes. Which sucks, honestly. Now I also purchased a subskill of Lesser Magic that extends the duration of Lesser Magic spells, so maybe it will have some benefit. I'm hoping for a doubling of the duration, but even a 50% increase would help. It is used automatically, so now that I have it, casting Lesser Magic spells should level it up as well.

The Heal Other is, at this point, not a factor, but when I get to the point that I join a clan, I'll try it out. I'll probably do a separate post on my thoughts on healing soon.

The hinderance with all of the spells but the initial Mana Missile and Heal Self spells is that they require reagents to cast, so I'll need to start carrying around sulphur, mandrake, nacre, etc. I did a bit of gathering to build up a small supply of these, but I'm thinking it will be more effective to focus on one gathering skill, such as my lumberjacking, sell what I gather, and use the gold to just buy the regeants I need. Right now, though, it's cool to try out the different gathering skills and see which will work best for me. After fishing a lot, I took the fish and cooked them up. Food gives a short boost, I think to stamina regeneration, but the specifics, as on everything in this game so far, are murky. I actually kind of like the fact that it requires some experimenting. But again, the buff is only like 2 minutes for some of the basic foods. Better quality foods have longer buffs, but I'd like to see all of the durations increased. Right now food is more annoying to keep up with than worthwhile, IMO.

Travelling from one human village to another, I did encounter a few goblins in the wild that had no other players around. So for once I was able to use only magic to kill some monsters and it worked out well. Fortunately you can cast while moving, so that helped me dodge and weave a bit and still use some offense. As their health would get low, the goblins would run away, and they were pretty good at moving erraticaly enough that I missed a few times shooting at them. It's going to be a LOT harder to use against players, I imagine, especially since most of the offensive spells move slowly enough that an observant player can dodge them.

I also bought a few rank 20 staves from a player who was selling them at a reasonable price. These will make my spells more effective. The item "ranks" correspond more or less to the skill level, as I understand it, so in if your sword skill is in the 20's, you'd want a rank 20 sword to do the most damage. The next rank of item I've seen is rank 40. Obviously this is another area in which, because I didn't play in beta, I really have little idea how it works. I guess I'll find out.

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.

Darkfall Day 1

I don't even remember how long the queue was. Three hours at least. But when I finally got into the game, I had fun.

Darkfall's graphics are fine. Not astounding, but not terrible either. For some reason the game locks up when I try to launch it in any resolution higher than 1024 x 768, although I was able to bump it up when I got in game. The big improvement there was not just overall graphics, but the UI especially. The UI leaves a lot to be desired, but at least at a proper resolution it wasn't hogging all of the real estate on my screen.

In Darkfall, your character starts in one of the sattelite villages near your race's capital. A couple of quests are available immediately, though you won't know that until you talk to one of the handful of NPCs hanging around the village. No giant floating exclamation points here to draw you towards a quest giver. The quests themselves are fairly straight-forward "Kill x goblins", "Bring me x golbin axes", etc. As you complete those, there are also resource-gathering quests that become avaible and that helpfully provide you with a starting tool for each of the gathering crafts.

Goblins are the only mosnters I've encountered so far. I've read a lot of discussion on both sides of the question as to whether Darkfall's monsters display brilliant or erratic AI. They generally won't stand still while you whack on them, preffering to circle you when possible and even setting you up so that their allies can flank you in the back, doing much more damage. So even with PvE, you have to keep moving and use positioning. This is all fine, but it's hardly the stuff of genius. Maybe that's a reflection on the level of creatures I've been fighting. They'll run off suddenly, then stop and face you again. Their pathing seems mostly random. So on the issue of PvE, I guess I'd say the AI is different, but not necessarily better or worse than what gamers have seen elsewhere, particularly in MMORPGs.

But the monsters are admittedly not the draw here for the average Darkfall player. The game really tailors itself to PvP and, yes, I experienced some of that already on my first day.

First of all, I have found the people in the game to be much more civil and cooperative than the fans who show up in forums and blog comments to excoriate anyone who's not a true-believer. Active fan forums always seem to be like that, though, don't they? It helps, of course, that my character is starting among his fellow humans, to whom the game mechanics provide fewer incentives and more penalties for attacking me outright. Darkfall's simple alignment system is much like Ultima Online's in that non-agressive players' names show up in a blue color while those who are consistently aggressive against their alliance members show up in red. More than just a warning sign, the "red" status puts some limitations on the towns the character can visit and their NPC interactions. Unfortunately, enemy races who are not aggressive towards their own alliance also show up in blue, which can be confusing if you take blue to mean "It's NOT OK to attack me!" I'm hoping this is something the game developers will change once they finish fixing all the more serious things that are detracting from play.

All of this is to get around to explaining that there is a third alignment status, the "gray" character. You can "go gray" when you attack your fellow alliance members; the gray status is a sign that it's OK for them to fight you back without triggering any penalties. One hit, most likely by mistake, will turn you gray for ten seconds or so. A second blow, however, makes you an open target for much longer. It's fairly easy to hit other players in combat when you don't mean to because everyone tends to crowd around the monsters when they show up. I would occassionaly go gray during these skirmishes, and I didn't experience anyone trying to take advantage of it, perhaps because of they didn't want to get caught whaling on me right when I turned blue again.

I was attacked, though, by another player when I was alone waiting for some more goblins to show up. I saw him circling around, paddling through the water. I can't say if he was human or perhaps Alfar because he was wearing a helmet and armor and swinging a big polearm. I just watched him, though, because I wasn't carrying much of value and I really didn't want to move. He was clearly better equipped than me, and probably more skilled as well. When he did attack, carebear though I am, I just attacked him back. We went around in circles a bit, me doing some damage, him doing some damage. At least I got a chance to practice using a shield and trying to time the wide swings of that polearm. But in the end he was too much for me and I died. Going back a bit later, I found he hadn't looted everything off of my body, so I was able to save a few things. I've just gone into this game knowing I'm going to be killed and trying not to worry about it too much.

The second time I was attacked by another player I was practicing magic inside a ruined hut just outside of town. The low level attack spell you start with, creatively called "Mana Missle," requires no mystical ingredients to cast, and you can gain proficiency with it by shooting it at pretty much anything, making it one of those skills you can increase by simply standing around and using it over and over again. Not thrilling, but it's better than getting beat on by goblins while you try to cast something that's likely to have little effect anyway. So I guess Mr. Attacker #2 thought I might be macroing in there, basically letting my character skill up while I was physcially away from my computer. Fortunately I was right there, and this time I ran to the nearby safety of the town because I was carrying a good bit of junk to sell.

Towards the end of the night I worked more on gathering wood to sell to other players and practicing my magic near town. So I made a little progress in both and started putting away some goods that may help me finance my career in magic!

Darkfall Day 0

After two days of downloads, a couple of hours or patches, hours of queuing, a sound card spazz out, and a graphics resolution kerfuffle, I finally entered Darkfall to the sounds of violence and death. It's then that it occurred to me that I'd never heard whether one is in any way protected while logging in, especially since I could hear what was going on around me several breaths before I could see anything. Probably that's an intended feature; after all, the world is harsh and you just might get slaughtered upon first waking up any day now. Best not to think about it.

But before the cacophonous login, I got to make a character. For anyone interested in actual role-playing, Darkfall offers some interesting choices. The lore for each race isn't bad, hewing enough to the standard archetypes to be familiar while giving each race a little tweak. Standard CRPG fare for the most part.

The Humans are expansionist colonizers who believe they're descended from a god and on a holy mission to dominate the world. So they're basically Americans under the reign of George W. Bush. The Dwarves are their usual uptight selves, but this time because they have a 20,000 year plan from Chairman Mao - I mean their prophet/philosopher/god - which they stick to religiously. The Mirdain (aka Elves), I don't know, live in trees or something. These three races are loosley allied. Yay team!

An interesting new race is the Mahirim, a tribalistic wolf-people. My wife suggests the females of the race should have six tits each, but then the males would probably never make it out of their starting villages. The Mahirim are allied with the Orks, who for some reason remind me of the Goons from the old Popeye cartoons, except with bones in their noses.

Lastly, the Alfar are a dark elf variant allied with no one. The PK's PK, as it were.

Though the races don't offer a lot new role-playing-wise, the fact that Darkfall has a skill-based system with no classes means any race can fill pretty much any role. True, all but humans start with some pluses and minuses to various stats, but these differences seem minor, and anyway share the same cap (unlike Shadowbane in which your race could limit the upper bounds of your stats).

Character customization in Darkfall suits me fine. To me, the amount of variation possible in Everquest II or Oblivion is just too much; it's too easy to end up with a character who looks like fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. Darkfall gives you more limited choices, but they should be enough to recognize a clan member, for instance, at a glance. I chose to create a human character and discovered the facial choices were more about scars, tattoos, and painful-looking piercings than bone structure or proportions. And honestly, that's probably about right for this game. If I can figure out how to get the camera in front of my character, I'll post a screenshot of his lovely mug.

I only had time this morning to dip my toes into the world, walking around a starting village a bit, before heading to work. An update on my actual "Day 1" should be more interesting.