Self-grading:
2 Log/Crash Deaths for Me
1 Friendly Fire Death by Alliance Member

0 PvP Kills

Looks like I officially suck at PvP!

On a serious note, my rig may not be equipped to handle large scale PvP in this game. I am looking to upgrade, but if I can't, I may be forced to be harvesting & crafting whipping boy...

Other observations:
1) It seems as though there is little support for alliance tags at the moment. This impacts the sieging in two ways:
a. Friendly fire makes defensive towers useless. When we use them, our allies get killed. Conversely, if our allies had them during a siege on their holdings, we would get shot trying to help. The only winning strategy would have been to have the clan hold the stone with the towers up and have the allies attack the siege stone or harass the enemy's flanks.
b. Apparently, having alliance tags does not sufficiently differentiate friend from foe. Maybe we should investigate the player flags...
2) There is no mechanism to prevent sieges at poor times for the guild. The attacking guild sets the time of the siege based on the timer from the laying of the siege stones/war declaration. Therefore, the advantage in sieging is slanted towards the attacker. The attacker will always get to pick the time which works best for the attacker while the defender is stuck with whatever time they get. Therefore, it would be simple to pick a time which allows for the guild to maximize our turnout during an offensive siege, but we are vulnerable to a defensive seige by enemys whom contain a majority of people in Eastern time zones (since most of our players are based further West). I left work a little early today and barely made it in time for the siege this afternoon. We ought to look for alliances with a player base mostly on the East Coast in order to implement a "follow the sun" strategy...
3) Once the siege started, they knocked down the bind stone almost immediately. Therefore, it seems like playing defense on a hamlet is not a winning strategy(unless repair shards> siege hammers and battle spikes). Hence, the winning strategy may be to focus fire on the siege stone instead of defending the bind stone. Instead of launching a defense from the bind stone towards the seige stone, we could launch an attack from the opposite angle and hope we can knock down the stone before the enemy knocks down our holding. Maybe having rival boats with cannons will help as well...
4) Having a city so close to the newbie city favored the side with greater numbers. The only chance we had was to force the larger group to spend more time running to the fight than we spent running from the bind. Having the starter city nearby negated that advantage. In addition, the enemy knew which direction we would be coming from and had the approaches camped.
5) I am not sure what is the best tactic for group PvP. Currently, it seems Darkfall favors a bunch of 1v1 combats. Somehow, we ought to figure to a way to turn the fighting into a 2v1 or 3v1 fight(even if we are outnumbered in total on a sub-scale we can force the odds in our favor). It is kind of like old-school WWII dogfighting -- everyone should have a wingman. In Shadowbane, we used focus-fire on called targets. This was possible due to the cycle-tabbing to locate enemies. Obviously, this tactic will not work. However, the idea of using called targets might still be useful. Of course, the lack of tags make it hard to identify the targets...In any case, with the weapon vs armor balance being what it is at the moment, only through multiple people attacking the same target will we have a shot at damaging enemy warriors in heavy armor.

Finally, we ought to group more with the alliance folks. I suspect some of the issues where caused by not having the lines of communication well-established in advance. I wasn't even sure which guilds were part of the alliance and vice-versa(though that is my own fault for not getting signed up for mumble in time).


Sorry for the long post. Just trying to get my thoughts and observations down.