Clan Ultionis

Ultionis: You are the leader of the clan Scary Bad Guys (SBG). From own experiance (Vanguard) and from what I can tell on the Darkfall forums and your own site you consider yourself a PK/Griefer clan. My personal view on griefers are that they are very egoistic players, would you agree? How is it to lead such a clan?

Darwoth: When most people think of the term griefer they instantly conjure up an image of an angry ritalin raging teenager killing lowbies all day while saying shit like “rofl pwned! u suck! i kicked ur ass dude!”, unfortunately the intelligence level of humanity as a whole has waned over the past decade and this stereotype is generally correct. however we are a completely different type of “griefer” guild not to be confused with the former, for starters the overwhelming majority of our members are in their late 20s and are fulltime professionals with kids, wives and a full load of real world responsibilties, gaming is simply our hobby not our life and as such we play the games in the way that we do because we find it to be far more fun to have an entire server of enemies and be on the recieving end of countless hate tells, attempts to hunt us down and whiney message board posts.

As for being egotistical i can’t speak for other groups but i would agree that our members all have healthy egos when it comes to gaming as anybody that is above average at their given activity would, if you are good at something it is only natural to have some sort of pride in what you do whether it be gaming or anything else. with that said however i would not say that our folks have hyper inflated egos at all, everybody is very down to earth and if we lose we do not sit around and develop some kind of complex over it. in my own experience the most unjustifiably egotistical players belong to the various self proclaimed “uber guilds” that sport 100s of members and do pve shit all day. usually these types are nowhere to be found at the games launch, finally they come out into the field after a 6 month stint spent maxing every stat and getting all of the absolute best shit imaginable promptly get rolled and then call you a nonfactor or insult your gear, go figure lol. these are the types of players/guilds we take great joy in fucking with.

The most difficult thing about keeping a guild like ours together is finding QUALITY members that play the way we do to offset the natural atrophy a guild suffers when folks go inactive and have to succumb to real world obligations, lots of people like watching or hearing about the stuff we do from the sidelines but very few players have the fortitude to play the game on hardmode and jump in with both feet. i could very easily mass recruit several dozen droolcups in the span of a month and run around like a cloud of locusts however that is not enjoyable for me or the other guys in our guild, we would quickly end up spending more time killing our own guildmates than other people.

U: In my eyes, for a griefer/pk clan, you have alot of rules (www.scarybadguys.com). Is that really necessary for a clan such as SBG?

D: I don’t think we have very many rules at all as most of them are just common sense rather than “rules”, the reason they are listed in our charter is because common sense is not very common anymore particularly among the younger generation of gamers. however as to necessity each one is absolutely necessary, with no structure or vision in place to keep the guild on the right track it quickly devolves into a clusterfuck which is why most guilds that start out as pk guilds eventually end up as a mass recruiting guild with no personality that sets them apart from the other 200 guilds just like theirs and from there they inevitably fall apart. our charter serves to help weed out the legions of retards that i do not want to waste my time sifting through, it also offers a quick overview of our guild at a glance for those players that are interested in joining our ranks.

U: “The fun already did begin, thanks!” – The words to someone you killed that claimed to be the alliance leader for Generals of War. Could I assume that you wount care to make any friends come retail the 25th?

D: That guy was one of those unjustifiably egotistical folks we were talking about before =P

as for friends and alliances, with the exception of some under the table friends in other guilds that would trade us favors in return for harassing an annoying guildmate or someone else that they didn’t like we have never had any alliances with other groups in previous games and will almost assuredly have none here either. that said however with the asset destruction/conquest mode of play in darkfall i can certainly forsee situations where we might temporarily assist some of the smaller pvp/pk guilds whom are in danger of losing their city or whatever to the large zerg guilds simply because we do not like zerg guilds nor the fad of recent years where everybody lumps into these faceless entities. games were a lot more fun in the old days when a big guild was considered to be one having 30 people and the playerbase as a whole had pride/loyalty for their guild no matter how small it was or how inconvenient it was to be in it, instead nowadays we have a mentality which promotes jumping ship to whichever group is the largest and offering the most benefits, i laugh my cock off everytime i see some guild promoting itself as a “multi gaming clan, 800 members and growing!” or some such and have a hard time fathoming just how bad someone has to be to want to blend in with that many other players, it has been my experience that quality players tend to gravitate towards small/medium sized groups so that they can stand out whereas shitty players try to find the biggest group they can so that their subpar ability is bolstered to at least mediocrity.

U: What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages in Darkfall to have a small clan?

D: aside from the overall more enjoyable experience of playing with a small group of friends as opposed to being cannonfodder in one of the lethargic juggernauts there are no real advantages to being in a small guild in darkfall. the vast majority of small guilds in darkfall will either fail, be absorbed by large guilds or enter into a large alliance of other smaller guilds and hence turn into a large guild themselves because the game mechanics are set up largely in favor of big guilds. what separates us from these other guilds is that most of our members have been together for a long time and have been playing games from the “guerilla warfare” angle for the duration, similarily our goals and ideas of what “winning” means are completely different, where most guilds want to own a city or curbstomp everyone they see we do not care about owning cities, nor do we care about “dominating” everyone we come across in a fair fight. we are simply out to have a laugh at your expense, if a few of us kill/loot/screenshot your guild leader and he in turn rallies the troops and you chase us around for an hour wasting the time of ten people we are the ones that win not you, if we pick off one or two stragglers all the better. we have no city for you to retaliate against but we can always find your members at yours and as such there is nothing you can do to damage us so we are completely bulletproof in that regard. If anything, down the road once the game has settled a bit the few small guilds that are able to successfully find their niche and do well in it will command a lot more respect and infamy than the larger guilds.

with regards to combat advantages, traditionally in past games superior cross healing, focus firing and maneuverability is what has carried small guilds over the typically sluggish larger guilds, all of these staples are not present in darkfalls combat system as heals are not adequate enough to outheal the damage of even one player, likewise focus firing in darkfall will not be nearly as effective due to the fps mode of play, once you get past two players chasing a target the third and fourth players either end up doing more damage to their guildmates than to the target or having to take longer to make extremely well aimed shots while the targets guild wears them down and in that case they would be more effective on a different target. previously smaller guilds if they were coordinated enough had an advantage in the chaotic combat that darkfall has, however with the addition of markers identifying friendly players that advantage is now gone and the bigger guild that brings more bodies to the fight now has the advantage instead.

U: I watched a fraps you made in Darkfall beta where you alone take out 4-5 players. People on the Darkfall forums often claim to be harcore pvp’ers. Do you think the standard on pvp will be much higher in Darkfall than other popular mmo’s?

D: as a general rule i think that with the lack of efficient heals, movement buffs and the limited amount of defensive counters that it will be harder for one or two skilled players to overcome a larger group than it has been in previous games. however with the friendly fire aspect, proper use of terrain and later on true AE spells i think that if the proper conditions are met that in some circumstances a small group or solo player will completely annihilate a larger group of players that did not think ahead and were able to be caught in a bad position.

As for all the “hardcore” pvpers it has been my experience that the biggest whiners and easiest folks to make fools out of are frequently those very same people that spend time telling everyone how “hardcore” they are, with full item loot i think a lot of these folks that have not played a similar ruleset before are in for a rude awakening, particularly the fps, wow, warhammer and aoc players that are used to a death equalling respawning 10 feet away 30 seconds later.

U: I have seen you argue in different threads on the Darkfall forums on subjects regarding pvp ruleset, guardtowers and cost to declare clan wars etc. Had it been up to you, would you have factions, rouge system etc. in Darkfall?

D: i think that an alignment system can add a lot of flavor to a game and typically i like them, aside from helping to attract sheep for the wolves to snack on it also serves to separate the bad guys from the good guys and give the bad guys a bit of notoriety, in uo if you were a red when you came on the screen people started to scatter because they knew right away what the deal was. the problem however is that alignment systems are very easy to fuck up, in order for them to work well the rest of the game has to be tuned in to support the alignment system, a “bad guy” should not be overly bogged down with tedious bullshit. things like travel have to be sufficiently fast so that the “bad guy” does not have to walk for 3 hours to bank, find targets or go train, individual player housing should be in so the bad guys can have a base of operations and so on. it should be difficult to be the bad guy, but the difficulty should stem from being a constant target of other players and a series of minor inconveniences, not from things like it taking you 5 times as long to do anything and your primary threat is being bored to tears.

If it were up to me i would have an alignment system, but it would be done in a completely different manner and the game mechanics would support it better.

Guardtowers however are idiotic and should be scrapped completely in favor of npc guards that are no faster than a player with comparable damage and hitpoint pools, the biggest threat this game faces to its success in my opinion is due to guardtowers and tedious travel times. nobody wants to spend an hour and a half going to a player city where there may or may not be players to kill only to arrive and discover that everybody is safely hunkered down behind their walls with guardtowers making it impossible to get to them. in past games you could sneak into the town via stealth and the guards you had to deal with were actually guards who could be evaded or killed. i worry about darkfall ending up in a balkanized trench warfare state a few months after release with players safely hiding inside their cities behind the towers and everyone being bored because they can’t find a fight unless they are in a large group, if that ends up being the case and there is no incentive for a player to leave their city walls (right now a player can train, harvest resources, and craft all without leaving town) most of the small guilds/groups will quit and the game will solely be for big guild vs big guild sieges/conquest which will get stale quickly even for those big guilds.

U: What will SBG have to offer Darkfall? From a community perspective and server politics perspective, do griefer/pk clans add anything to the game?

D: Every server needs a few genuine bad guys that everyone loves to hate, we have always filled that role nicely and will continue to do so in darkfall. in the past our “episodes” and videos and the subsequent bouts of message board warrioring and trashtalk that they instigate have always been a favorite in the communities we have been a part of and im sure we will produce some new additions for darkfall. from a political standpoint we won’t really be much of a player as we are more along the lines of a nomadic bandit style of play, however with the new siege mechanics if guild A attacks guild B and for some reason we decide that we dislike guild A you can count on us being somewhere in the fold be it attacking one of their satellite cities or something else if for no other reason than just to be a pain in the ass.