Darkfall: how hardcore are you?

Scott Jennings on his blog, Broken Toys, brought up an interesting observation about the new MMO, Darkfall. Darkfall is an unrestricted PvP MMO set in a fantasy world based on medieval Europe. The game boasts a PvP rule set that is harsh by any standard: free-for-all PvP with full looting. This means not only can you attack anyone at anytime but also when you die, the entire contents of what you are wearing and carrying drops to the ground and can grabbed by anyone. Not only that, but the game will require quite a bit of skill since your attacks have to be manually aimed. The game provides no auto select of your nearest opponent. Read more

High drama in EVE Online

Double agents? A conspiracy from within? Is this a video game or a live action movie? If you’re a fan of MMOs, you need to read the article in Massively about the break up of one EVE Online’s most notorious alliances, Band of Brothers.

The enemy alliance of Band of Brothers (BoB), GoonSwarm, managed to make a turncoat of one of the Band’s highest ranking officers. This officer disbanded the alliance using his officer powers, looted the Band’s treasury, granted access to their private leader forum and made a gift of one of the Band’s powerful ships. Wow, that’s really sticking it to your former comrades. The player-run news site had this account of the day’s events:

A few hours after midnight on 05.02.111, Band of Brothers alliance was disbanded. The loss of formal alliance status forcibly relinquished all Band of Brothers held sovereignty, and thus is expected to render all their outposts vulnerable, pause the construction of all motherships and titans currently being built in their capital assembly arrays and interfere with the proper fuctioning of cynojammers and jump bridge waystations at their control towers. This effect has never been seen before on such a huge scale, so there is much uncertainty about the precise effects.

Details about what motivated the traitor aren’t in the Massively article but one has to speculate that there must have been a falling out of sorts before the betrayal. Player relationships can run pretty deep in MMOs, and no doubt, a betrayal of this nature affected people that were known to the traitor for months, even years.

Meanwhile the former Band of Brothers are scrambling to reorganize themselves and Massively reports that GoonSwarm and many other enemies of Band of Brothers are absolutely storming BoB’s home systems in Delve, and chaos reigns.