The Daze of Darkfall week 2: AFK your way to fame and fortune
Confused as to why this isn't in Anti-Aliased? Well, "The Daze of Darkfall" month long feature has moved to a new home as a standalone feature! Isn't that grand? Now I can talk about my adventures in Darkfall while still unleashing my biased opinions upon you in Anti-Aliased. It's a win/win situation, if you ask me.
So what's in the picture above? Well that's me AFKing my way to hardcore status in Darkfall. All you need is an old college textbook and a comb cleverly placed on your left arrow key and you too can get to max run skill with just a few nights of AFKing! Forget running into walls, this is the future! I like to call it "hardware macroing."
But this isn't all, dear readers! I have lots more fun inside of this week's Darkfall report! Come, continue reading and enjoy the insanity of Agon, where AFKing is better than playing and naked is the new armored!
Ed Zitron's playtime is a joke compared to mine
It's pretty official -- I still suck at Darkfall. However, I now at least have some armor, a nice mount, a better clan city to come home to, and plenty of new enemies. I say these are all bonuses to my play experience, to be honest.
After last week's column, things were still pretty much the same for a while. Most of what I was making during harvesting was going to the clan, with very little returns for me. Of course I had chosen this route, so I can't complain about it, and it was keeping me decently entertained.
However, I still really wanted to sink my teeth into some PvP action. Lo and behold on Friday, I finally got the call I had been looking for. A group of people wanted to gather together and do some PvE monster hunting and player killing and I soon had my hand in the air.
But wait, you've been crafting; you have no skill with a weapon...
I know what you guys are thinking. "She hasn't been in PvP, she has no weapon skill, why would she volunteer for something like this?" Well, you guys are right. I hadn't been anywhere close to PvE or PvP up to this point. But, thanks to the miracle of AFKing, I wasn't missing the requisite skills.
Aventurine frowns highly on afking or repetitive behavior to increase skills, but it seems to be the only way everyone in the damn game does it. Through my travels of multiple cities and word of mouth from other players, everyone seems to set a macro for something. This includes weapon skills and magical skills. Sure, you need to hit people to increase your weapon/magic skills, but this is where the wonder of afking comes in.
Many clans seem to have a spot in their cities where members not currently playing sit down or are AFKing something, like running in circles, resting, or even jumping. Such wonderful places are called "bloodwalls," due to the amount of blood all over them. These people make sure to take off all of their armor, for they become live target practice while they're AFK. Other players just sit there with weapons and staves, shooting/slashing the crap out of these AFK players (but never killing them, that would be counterproductive.) Sometimes, you even have AFK on AFK action as weapon-wielding players set up a macro to slowly keep hitting someone else AFKing.
So, in short, yes I abused the system. I used AFK to increase my running, rest, sprinting, and swimming skills and repetitive behavior to raise my weapon and magic skills. I bet you never heard a game journalist say that aloud.
