My friend felt travel in darkfall gold is too easy. Darkfall has been designed from the outset as a full-loot PVP game, meaning on death players are able to fully loot other players of their gear and gold on their person.
Runestones are currently limited to the rich/powerful. The spawns that drop them are controlled by the zergs and guilds with high end characters that can lock down the spawns (e.g. deathless mages, knights, etc…) These spawns drop lots of runestones and provide easy access to … well everywhere. I use them to travel from one side of ruby to the other just because I don’t want to run and can make more money in the time I save by running then I would spend on a rune. These should be drastically reduced in drop rate and spread evenly across all mage type mobs.
Houses allow people in one zerg to put a house in the middle of another zerg and at no risk grief their holdings. This is fine since it is balanced by a 10g/hour cost of owning a house. But when combined with other travel options it is too much.
Bindstone kick… this is just broken. It allows the biggest guilds to gain holdings where ever and effectively teleport their players all over the map. Bindstone kicks should rebind to the nearest stone.
Bindstone recall is decent but really detracts from risk vs reward especially since getting out of the map to recall is easy.
For example last night I raided an enemy city during their off hours and spent 15 minutes marking 3 runes in random spots about their city so I could rune in and kill all of their macro’rs for free regs and quick pvp… I still have 30+ runes in the bank to do whatever with.
The world isn’t empty it just feels like it is because people with loot have no need to travel when they can just teleport everywhere. So the only people you come across in the world are naked travellers, pk groups that run away from anything resembling a fair fight, or a farmer at his spawn before he recalls back. Travel times between places are very short its only a 5-7 minute ride from north to south on any of the zerg islands.
The developers have opined that historically successful battle formations and tactics will be widely adopted and adapted for use in Darkfall. Likewise, area-effect spells and abilities affect enemies and allies equally, and so must be used with caution and discretion.