Darkfall Unholy Wars Developer Diary: The Clans

1 point to make before the developer diary: I know that I mentioned in the MMORPG.com Q&A that pre-orders were to launch this week, and we genuinely tried until a nominal while ago before having to accept defeat, a blend of factors (most we could not control since there are 3 businesses working on this) made it impossible. Clearly our main focus is on the actual game, although this was necessary as well, so it is frustrating for us, as I'm certain it is for you. So will we nonetheless do a pre-order before launch at this late date? Potentially if this can be done on Monday so we can break up the buying traffic before the launch day and be sure everything is working right, and give you the ability to reserve your character name beforehand. There will be men and women working on this over the weekend here, at the provider and at our billing processor's, so we hope we'll be in a position to have the option on Monday.

This Darkfall Unholy Wars developer diary is by Darkfall Unholy Wars game logic programmer Jon Massey:

The basic role/function of clans in 'Darkfall: Unholy Wars' remains as it was in 'Darkfall Online'. When we were considering methods to enhance the experience for clan members in the new game, quite a few themes kept coming up; elevating the clans' freedom to select their own organisational structures, enhancing the clans' capacity to effectively manage themselves, giving clans a greater sense of ownership over the world & helping DFUW gold players find and engage in the clan factors of the game.

To give clans more freedom in choosing their own internal configuration, we have removed the old program of clan rank determining a member's access to clan features, & replaced it with a new permissions based strategy. In the new system, permissions to access clan features are assigned to members individually, making it doable for clans to assign particularly specialized roles to precise members, without them "inheriting" unrelated (and perhaps undesired) access. Permissions in the new method have been grouped by category ("Clan-Vault", "Holdings" and so on.) and each category has a "management" permission associated with it; clan members who are assigned the management permission have the ability to assign (or remove) permissions from inside their own category to (or from) other clan members. This further "tier" of the permissions method, we believe, will enable clans to distribute the activities (& commitments) of managing the clan between any number of members, & allow them to deliver a hierarchical management structure, if they so wish.

We've observed a number of questions about this strategy on the forums, & I'd like to take a moment to clarify some factors:

• The old clan ranks are nonetheless in-game, however we now refer to them as "military ranks"; these have no relationship with the permissions system, and must be earned by way of killing members of enemy clans during active conquest problems to solve. They serve only as an indicator of a clan member's battle skills. Military ranks are "per-clan", if a clan member leaves the clan, their rank is lost, & they start as a "Recruit" in the next clan they join. All clan members (founder & leader included) start at the lowest rank, and must earn their titles.

the clan is forever the "founder" of the clan, & their name will frequently be linked with the clan (even if they pick to leave). The "leader" of the clan (in the beginning the "founder") is the 1 & only clan member that has complete, and irreversable, permissions inside the clan, only the clan leader has the permission to assign (or remove) "management" permissions to (or from) other clan members. Clans now have the ability to modify their leader, if they chose to.

• While we like the perception of letting clans decide upon their own names for the ranks and titles, this is not at present in development. When we find a way to allow it while avoiding the many apparent abuses of the technique, we might reconsider it once again in the future.

A major obstacle to the helpful management of clans was the user interface that was accessible in 'Darkfall Online'. In 'Darkfall: Unholy Wars' a great deal of time and effort has been put into ensuring that the clan management interfaces in our new user interface permit the clans administrators & members access to the facts and setting that they need in a consistent, fluid and highly dynamic way. In the new user interface, adjustments made to the clan are speedily detectable to all other clan members instantly.

To give clans a greater sense of ownership over the world, we have tried to bring more meaning into the territorial control strategies. By linking villages to nearby clan holdings, & providing much improved rewards for village ownership, we hope to encourage clans to consolidate their energy in particular sections or regions of the world, which in turn ought to give rise to more "border conflicts" and even tighter alliances, between neighbors. At the same time although, we understand that player villages have consistently been a hot-spots for PvP activities in the world, and we didn't need to block that, so we have included the "resource stealing" mechanic for Darkfall Unholy Wars gold player villages. This strategy offers any player (clan member or not) the ability to steal the resource rewards from player villages, & means that the clans must police their villages to make certain they hang onto their potential rewards.

A large part of helping players find themselves a clan comes from the new u

ser interface, where players are able to browse via all active clans and conveniently view info about them. Furthermore, clans can now select from a collection of "tags" that may be used to display their principal activities or focus to other clans and players, allowing players to "filter" the clans determined by specific tags; this system is used only for the identification & location of clans whose activities match the player's own play-style, nevertheless if used appropriately by the clans, must be a potent tool for recruiting new members & building up their clan.

We hope these alterations will bring more freedom & control to clan management, & help all players to participate in, & delight in, the clan-based fundamentals of 'Darkfall: Unholy Wars'. We look forward to your feed-back, & cannot wait to see you all in-game.