There are changes to Villages in July's 30th Patch. Jon was kind enough to put together a document detailing them below:
Village Changes - by Jon Massey, Darkfall Unholy Wars Programmer
We see a lot of discussion and suggestions on the forums on the topic of villages, and would like to take a moment to clarify what we envisioned for the system. When we decided to include villages in the territorial control systems, for “Darkfall: Unholy Wars”, it was not something we did lightly, or without consideration, we saw villages as “the key” to the system; ownership of villages would give income streams to the clans in the local territory, and provoke regional disputes over those resources. We believed, and still believe, that villages increase the value of nearby holdings, and give clans an incentive to spread-out, locally, to enforce tighter control over these resources. We were aware when we made this change that we would be affecting what was, in “Darkfall Online”, an important, and well liked, source of PvP in the world, and so we implemented the stealing feature for villages. Our vision was that villages could serve this dual purpose, to provide small-scale regional conflict for clans, while still remaining as “PvP hot-spots” for any, and all, players.
It quickly became clear that this vision and potential was not being fully realised, which lead us to make the recent changes to village rewards, to 1st address the concept as villages being resource streams for clans in the territory (if clans were not capturing and fighting for villages, the resource stealing mechanic could not succeed); we are very pleased with response to these recent changes, but we are continuing to monitor the system, and are always considering further improvements and rewards.
With this patch, we hope to address the 2nd function of villages; that of “PvP hot-spots” provided using the resource stealing mechanic. We have read many good suggestions on the forums and taken all of your feed-back into consideration, and we believe that the following points are essential, if we are to realise this goal:
- The rewards for stealing must be worth the investment in time
- The owner clans must risk losing enough of their rewards to make them actively work to defend their villages and repel any stealing attempts
- Villages must become “available” as “PvP hot-spots” often enough that, at any time, there should be some villages available in the world, but not too often that defending the villages becomes a full-time job for the clans
- The availability of stealing must be predictable, and globally available information, so players can know where to go to find some “action” at any given time (Note: this will be addressed in our next patch)
We firmly believe that the changes we are introducing will address each of these points, and help to realise the full potential of the village capture/stealing mechanics. As always, we will monitor the system going forward, as well as review and consider all of your feed-back on the changes. The following outlines the changes that we have made:
For Clans:
- Rewards pay-out is now once per-hour (reward quantities/probabilities have been scaled appropriately from their previous levels), instead of the previous 10 minute cycle.
- A notification will be sent to all clan members when a stealer becomes active on one of their villages (and the map marker icon for that village will turn red), the clan will then have 15 minutes to respond and stop the stealer before their rewards from the village will be lost.
- To stop an active stealer, the clan (or any other player) can kill them, force them beyond the 75m radius around the control-point, for 15 seconds or more, or interact with the control-point and simply “cancel” the stealing operation.
- Once stolen from, a village will be “in deficit”, and cannot be stolen from again, until it returns to the point where the clan would receive rewards once again.
- From the moment a stealer becomes “active”, the clan will not receive any rewards, if the stealer is successful, they will take all postponed and future rewards; however, if they fail, the clan will receive their postponed rewards immediately.
For Stealers:
- Stealing is no longer a continuous operation (staying active for “x ticks”); it is now a single timed action.
- Stealer must remain alive, and within 75m of the village control-point, for 15 minutes to successfully complete the steal.
- If an active stealer leaves the 75m radius around the control-point, they will receive a warning, and will have 15 seconds to return to an acceptable distance, or their stealing operation will fail automatically.
- Once complete they receive all rewards that the clan would have received during a 3 hour period, directly into their back-pack; however, the quantities (not the probabilities) of the rewards are scaled to 80% of what the clan would receive, but are rounded-up, in the stealers favour.
- For example, if the clan would have received 1,000 gold, the stealer will take 800 gold. But if the clan would have received 1 Theyril ingot, the stealer will receive 1 Theyril ingot.
- Prowess rewards for stealing have been increased, so the stealer will receive the same Prowess as they would have before, if they had remained as the active stealer for 3 hours.
- All restrictions on who can steal from a village have been removed, now any player, including members of the owner clan and residents of the village can steal from it.
For All Players:
(Note: These changes are scheduled for our next patch; however, all the information is currently available to players when targeting the control-points in the villages)
- To allow all players to participate in the village stealing system, new marker icons will be added to the map, that will globally show which villages have a currently active stealer (along with the time remaining until they succeed), and which villages cannot currently be stolen from (along with the time remaining until they can be stolen from once again).
- All village map marker icons will be located on a new “Villages” map overlay, which will be toggled on/off using the appropriate button on the left-side of the full-screen map.