Holiday Update 09
Somehow I got in the Darkfall Spotlight on the forums. I do not personally read the forums, but it is not because I am lazy. It is simply because I am afraid (that, and I cannot access them at work).
Being that it is the holidays, I hope you do not expect too many posts from me over the coming weeks. I am going to be working all this week but I will have all of next week off work (though Rynala and I may be driving up to see her folks around New Years). I will be gone for the first week and a half of January to fly north and care my mother while she has surgery.
I have been devoting a majority of my time to Darkfall and World of Warcraft. Since Darkfall is not a system resource hog, I am able to play both simultaneously. This works even better for me since I can set up my character in Darkfall to mine or log and go run an instance or work on auctions in WoW. In WoW, I have had to find unique ways of making money as enchanting and engineering are not huge money makers right now. I am thinking of taking my level 70 warlock out of retirement and making them an alchemist.
As for Darkfall, I have been spending majority of my time in small scale PvP. The Goons have largely moved from Aerngardh to Darkmoore since Aerngardh was not so newbie friendly and apparently the spawns are broken all over the frigid north lands. The journey was absolutely terrifying.
When we moved from Janhalek to Aerngardh, there were about ten of us on a raft making the trip, this time there were only four. A third of the way through the trip, there was a cry of pure horror on vent. Closing fast on us was the kraken. One of the people on the raft tried to push me off as a sacrifice but was instead knocked off the raft himself by the kraken. We could not rescue him so we made haste out of there. Fifteen minutes later we saw the kraken once more on the horizon pursing us. One of the other members of the ship sacrificed his life to save the raft. The raft owner and myself made it to landfall safely, never forgetting the sacrifices our two brave comrades made.
I found the move to Darkmoore very amusing because it is about a ten minute mounted journey north of Mir Bellith, the elf area I started at. I had gone from Mir Bellith down to Janhalek and north to Aerngarde only to end up ten minutes north of the start of my journey. Since I was so close to my origin, I returned to Mir Bellith to work on getting some skill ups (and to look for some PvP).
My favorite targets so far have been people in the NEW clan. NEW is the clan for people new to Darkfall, but has lately received some scorn. When they were originally created, Goon Squad declared war on them as a joke, and made a couple enemies from other clans in doing so. Since then, I have seen many clans declaring war on NEW. In clan chat, people were explaining that there were some players exploiting the clan and using it as a safe haven to avoid PvP so a lot of guilds were getting sick of it.
I have had a lot of good PvP in Mir Bellith. Since I am still quite new to the game it is nice finding people that mostly match my skill. I have lost quite a few times though. Luckily, beside my mount, I have not lost anything of any importance. As for the mount, that situation did not make me happy. I was running away from a guy that was killing my mount with arrows and so I ran into the city to safe corner to try to desummon my mount and then bank it before I died. While dismissing it, some blue player came, jumped on it and rode it off. Since they were blue, I could not attack them due to the guard tower and an alignment hit. There should be penalties to mount thieves. It would nice to see them take an alignment hit or go rogue for a while. If that guy had gone rogue, the guard towers could have taken him out. Other than that, it has been a lot of fun in Mir Bellith.
All of this good MMO gaming has made it hard for me to go play any other games. I have yet to finish Borderlands and I still have a load of games from the Steam sale I need to play including Last Remnant, Overlord 2, WH40K: Dawn of War 1 and 2. Plus, the good games are going to keep coming with Mass Effect 2, Bioshock 2, and Final Fantasy 13 coming out in the next few months. What is a gamer to do!