This is the home for our Visual Darkfall Compendium, more commonly referred to as "the YourMom Darkfall Map", Darkfall being a quite recent and definitely awesome PvP MMORPG. The results of our project can be seen through a fully explorable map. Its supporting framework additionally consists of an account and contribution point manager, this forum, and a Google Wave environment.

1. Introduction

We map Darkfall's cities, villages, dungeons, structures in general, and more importantly all of the game's monster spawns, monster inventories, drop rates, item stats, monster weaknesses, monster attacks, item prices and so on. This is realized into a fully search-able database that can instantly display any desired information and show its world locations on the map if applicable. You can, for example, search for the enchanting catalyst "Ichor" and get a complete rundown of all monsters dropping it, visually mapping their spawn locations, spawn chances and respawn times. You can then further analyze their drop rates and figure out the right spot for you, factoring in the respawn time.

About 7 months of work were put into it by Deirh, but it would have never seen the light of day without Isac's indispensable know-how and support, and without the information from all our contributors. Big thanks to all of you, you made it possible.

Our project is not a paid service, however it is not a "free" service either - if you tend to define "free" as "everyone can use it to his benefit and not give anything back." Truly free projects can work only if the information is not changing and requires only a moderate initial investment into the engine. However, this is not the case here as the information we intercept tends to change in every game update and someone has to constantly work on updating it. We would thus rather define ourselves as a contribution-based project, one that is dependent on the efforts of its community to be kept useful and as such, offers its main benefits only to those who are are a part of it and/or willing to support it. For that reason we have recently developed a system granting "contribution points" for your investment into the map.

3. Becoming a YourMom member

If you're ready for more, create a YourMom account. This will enable you to gather contribution points and through them grow and upgrade your account level, reaping benefits in being able to query more and more data daily. Coupled with the YourMom account, it is also useful to create a forum account so you can earn points through the forum.

By default, all the new-coming people start with a "Guest" level account and have only 60 bandwidth credits per day (more on this below). However once you register, you can start working on advancing this limit to much greater heights. And this is done through earning Contribution Points.

It was only after starting this project we realized that the pace of updates to the game world is high enough to be taking several hours updating the map database with them. Aside from that, someone also needs to be spotting them and taking the time to report them to us in a clear manner. We need your help with these things as otherwise the map would not only not get developed further, but would age and gradually grow out of sync with the game, becoming quite useless.

From this, a contribution point-based system was born. We understand that many of these actions are not exactly thrilling and fun (not even to us) so we'd like to give you something in exchange to make it worth the trouble - the contribution points, which you can exchange for upgrades to your accounts. If it means restricting the other users who are doing nothing for the map, so be it and we will shed no tears for them - we need you who contribute and help us, not them who just leech.

You can get contribution points for any actions you do with the intention of helping to make the map better and more accurate. This includes for example collecting loot table inventories in the game, noting down when spawns were moved around or their contents is, correcting any other information when it gets outdated and helping to streamline the updating process so our only programmer will not be swamped by trying to process it all by himself every day.
Monetary donation is the other option if you don't like to sacrifice your time, or simply have more resources in terms of money than of your free time. It is welcome equally as both combined help us to further refine our map and keep it up-to-date with the new updates of, and with current trends on the world of Agon. Aventurine is constantly developing and changing the world and we need to be right behind them.

5. Account types

Here you can find an always up-to-date overview of all the possible YourMom account levels. This list can also be accessed through the Account Manager and selecting "Upgrade your account rank".
It may be a surprisingly long list - however our entire contribution system depends on people being motivated and having all be fans of MMORPGs, what is a better motivator than the promise of getting new levels and powers? ;-) No matter where you start, you can climb all the way up if you give it enough effort. And contribution points are your equivalent of gold that will purchase you these powers.

You will find out that the main difference between the various accounts is the amount of 'bandwidth' credits they offer and whether they can expire eventually. This is explained in the next chapter.

6. Bandwidth
Finally we get to define what are the bandwidth credits.

1 bandwidth credit is the currency of advanced map usage. Many things on the map are completely unrestricted: you can for example view all the basic map layers: cities, villages, hamlets, bindstones, dungeons, treasure chests and user locations to your heart's content; it's completely free to do so.
However much of the advanced functionality can be viewed only as long you have credits to spend. These features are the ones that tax the server most and includes displaying monster spawn locations, monster inventory lists, monster attack lists, and using the search feature to find objects.

These advanced features are available to every user, but there is a limit on how often you can use them. This limit is directly proportional to your account rank which can be increased by having contribution points. Thus the amount of advanced functionality you can get is directly related on the effort you have contributed to the map.
The reason they are called the bandwidth credits is that they closely model the amount of server load we're getting by using these features. I don't want to overly dramatize things, but since the map engine is quite a complex one, anonymous users, knowing they cannot be fought against, can succeed in bringing it down if they tried hard enough. We had our share of that and although it is definitely an issue that can be solved, it has shown us that this bandwidth-limited system actually gives incentive to people to step out of anonymity and put some effort into the map rather than just to leech from it. And that proved to be a definitely good thing!

How the bandwidth credit system works
So here it how it works. Please bear with the system as it is here to protect you, who contribute, against those who care not to.

Every type of account gives you a certain amount of bandwidth credits per day. Let's call them 'day credits'. There credits are refilled on each midnight of GMT+1 time from your total data pool. If you have a Lifetime account, your total data pool is unlimited. For other account types, the data pool is lessened upon each refill, but only by the amount of credits you actually used up.

What increases your credits
Upgrading your account rank always increases either your daily credits or your data pool. You can upgrade your account as many times you want and you always spend only as much contribution points to cover the difference in worth of your current and desired rank. It is not disadvantageous to upgrade several times in small steps instead of one large one.
What spends your credits
Each 'advanced' action consumes 1 bandwidth credit with the exception of showing the monster spawns, which uses 2 credits. These actions will work as long you are above 0 credit balance. Once you hit zero, you can only use the standard map layers until the next midnight (GMT+1). At midnight, your day credits will be refilled as long you have your total data pool above zero. If you have expended your data pool as well, you will only get 60 day credits from then on, till you upgrade your account again.

As was mentioned already many times before - the intended way for you to solve your credit shortage is through contributing to the map. They are not here to keep you out, but rather to entice you to work with us. You can easily earn enough contribution points to have your way with the map without any need to restrain yourself. We'd just like something to show for that, that's all.

Hope we'll see you on the forums!

Can i get YOURMOM account if is easy?