During the peak hours of the day, Defiance is fairly boring for me. I run around tagging arkfalls, then run off to do some random emergencies. Only when the server empties out do I actually actively participate in arkfalls, normally in situations where you can count on one hand how many players are there.
The reason is that this game has open world game elements where not knowing what you're doing actually affects the gameplay experience of other players. I think that's fairly unique, at the very least I can't think of another MMO I've personally played where simply being a newbie ruins the game for other players.
Arkfalls scale based on active players. A decent player won't have too much trouble taking on a major arkfall alone, because it's scaled for one person. The more people are there, the harder it gets, because you're bound to have a lower amount of people who know what they're doing than what it's actually scaled for.
Crystal destruction pre-falls are bad. Explosives kill skitterlings before they can bite the crystal, and what takes someone with a Wolfhound less than a minute to clear alone, turns into a 10 minutes slow grind. Scrapper falls are also annoying, because the difference between someone who uses ground pounders on prefalls->wolfhound on arms->pour everything into the core and someone who just uses whatever weapon is at hand is night and day.
There is a lot of talk about people leaving the game these days, and as such, I find it scary that the game experience in some cases improves the less players play it. That is in no way healthy for the life of the game, and the last thing we need right now is a fundamental game mechanic that chases people away


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