Dungeon Fighter Online Blitz vs Fatigue Guide

Dungeon Fighter Online Blitz vs Fatigue Guide by RiseDFO

Introduction

Hi there, I’m Rise! I’m a pretty hardcore fan of DFO and I wanted to give back to the community. I remember when I was a noob, many people helped me out with builds, tips, advanced techniques, and more. I would love to help out this time around.

I noticed a lot of unrest regarding Blitz and Fatigue. A lot of the newer players are helplessly confused and the veterans are arguing back and forth in regards to which system is the best. I decided to create this..uh…guide (?) to help sort this out. Even if it does not, I hope this increases everyone’s insight on the matter!

I wrote this guide to kind of supplement my video. I say ‘kinda’ because you don’t need to watch and read both. But you can for the full experience.

So let’s begin.

Brief Description

This section is for all you newbies with no idea what I’m talking about! This should help clear things up.

Fatigue Points is a system that gave players 156 points. You lose a point for every dungeon room you visit. You have a different fatigue bar per character. So if you happen to finish the FP bar of one character, you can still play on another. And FP bar only affects PvE. PvP, Towers, and Altar have no such restriction.

PROTIP: DFO Global will be using this system. If you want to make the most of your fatigue bar, enter your last dungeon with only 1 FP left. That way you can visit beyond the 156 rooms you are allowed to visit. And then fully clear the map. This will accelerate your experience compared to the majority of the players! Though the experience gain is minor, they add up. Go to an especially long dungeon for best results.

Blitz Points is the system that replaced Fatigue Points in the American version of DFO. It got rid of the 156 room limit entirely. Not only that, it also increased your EXP gain. After a certain point, drop rate would be decreased while repair bills and durability loss increased. There were several stages involved in Blitz, but the specifics aren’t too important. And know that what I describe here is the original Blitz Points. This was replaced with a newer version later on called Blitz Points Rebirth. I’ll bring that up later when it becomes relevant.

It gets confusing at times, even for veterans. They made it needlessly complicated.

To see what I mean, the original Blitz was broken up like so:

Unless you dug deep into their documentation, the exact amount per stage was left unclear.

Nexon realized how confusing the stages were so later on Blitz was replaced with this:

You can read into the second version of Blitz now, but I won’t bring it up until later on. For the purposes of this guide, when I say Blitz, I refer to the original Blitz.

Advantages/Disadvantages of Fatigue

Fatigue’s limitations are obvious once you read the description! The obvious one is that you are restricted from playing too much on one character. The FP system will discourage people from playing DFO in the first place in the western market. Freedom and control is a big deal here, and the FP system puts a damper on that. This isn’t really the case in Korea as they already have laws that limit their playtime for many other games. And since FP only limits their experience with one character, it isn’t even as bad. So they don’t mind as much.

Don’t get too disappointed now! There are some nice advantages too. Let’s go over the balance portion first. In order to truly make FP work, Neople geared their balance around it. They kept tweaking and changing the dungeon balance nearly every patch. By now, it’s really nice. For the old players, you will remember the days it took months to get near cap. The grind was ridiculous. In present day, the grind is not that bad at all. In fact, the game was reworked from the ground up from level 1-50! The balance made it so that you felt actual progress every FP bar you spent. Suffice to say, it’s great.

There are other advantages. The most controversial one is the skill increase. Since everyone is forced to either not play, play on a different character, or pvp, some argue the skill increases for the average population. Though whether or not you believe that skill increases when a person plays several characters in PvE is up to you. Personally, I believe that PvP skill increases quite a lot. It’s a known fact that the more people involved in the scene makes that scene more competitive. The more competition means the more skill. That’s not even including the fact that people PvP more often, and they do say practice makes perfect. So it’s highly probable that FP inadvertently increases PvP skill.

FUN FACT: There used to be a PvP system called Fair Arena in DFO and DnF. It’s a PvP mode where everything was balanced automatically, everyone was capped out, and gear was standardized. It made the entire scene more competitive and…people in korea got a little too intense with their addiction to fair arena. So some sources say, Neople removed Fair Arena for a hybrid to encourage people to PvE more often. It will have balances in place to make it not broken, but it does use PvE gear. The hybrid is what the new DFO Global will most likely have at launch as the Hybrid was released a patch before Metastasis.

Advantages/Disadvantages of Blitz

There are a number of advantages to Blitz. The primary one being unlimited playtime, and bonus EXP. Blitz as a whole was a huge hit in the western market. Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed it. However, because of Blitz’s EXP bonus, Nexon tended to actually make the grind harder. The balance was different from Neople. So unless you poured in the hours to effectively take advantage of Blitz, it could work against you.

Another minor disadvantage would be the neglect of towers. Before with Fatigue, towers were a necessary part of the grind as they did not cost FP to enter. With Blitz, towers were almost obsolete which was a real shame. I say “almost” because the quest rewards were still pretty good. They were a different kind of gameplay compared to the normal PvE and were a ton of fun too.

PROTIP: This one is obvious considering what I just covered. For you newbies out there, once you finish your FP, make sure to do the towers. There’s a global limit to how many times you are allowed to enter a tower every day, but it’s separate from FP. You’ll stay ahead of the game with that extra bit of experience.

That being said, these negatives are really inconsequential compared to the economical disadvantage to Blitz. In fact, this disadvantage is so great, I’ve decided to create a separate section entirely for it.

Gold Farming and Hyperinflation

Hyperinflation is what happens when inflation spins out of control. In real life, this occurs mostly when the government tries to print more money to pay existing costs. But that only works in the very short term as the newly printed money lowers the overall value. This means the more money you print, the higher the inflation, and the less your dollar will be worth.

Now, why does this matter? Good question! First, we need to consider, who prints money in MMOs? You guessed it right; the players. Gold is generated quite literally out of nowhere and the more generated gold, the higher the inflation. There will always be some sort of inflation involved in MMOs so a lot of games implement gold sinks to slow down the process. In DFO, this is the reason why repair bills and upgrading weapons exist!

Blitz, on the other hand, enables effective gold farming (note, when I say gold farming, I refer to gold farming bots and gold sellers). With Fatigue points, gold farming was slow and took a while. It was doable, but because of the FP restriction, gold farmers can only do so much everyday. And eventually, the captcha system would get gold farmers banned. So although many gold farmers might reach cap, many more will get banned along the way.

This is not the case with Blitz. As there was zero restriction to farming, gold farmers can leave their program running all day and night and reach cap in a very short amount of time. Eventually, by the time the system catches up with them, they’ve already farmed up a pretty number. The drop rate decreased by 50% originally but with unlimited time to farm, that was not a big issue at all.

Nexon realized this a little too late. When they realized what was happening, they reworked their Blitz System to a zero percent drop rate with no increasing gold sinks such as higher repair bills or durability loss after the player spends 200 points. This was not a bad measure, but ultimately even with that rework, it did not matter too much. The damage was done. And not only that, the grind to cap was still doable in a small time frame and so enabled gold farming still. It was a step in the right direction, but it was nowhere near enough. All the gold farmers would have to do is run more accounts at once and switch to a new one once finishing off all their Blitz points.

Let’s talk about the bigger picture. We should first realize that gold farmers aren’t a single entity. They have competing firms. So the easier gold is to come by, the cheaper the gold will be sold for in order to stay competitive. Selling gold for real life cash became cheap at one point because of competition and the amount of gold being farmed via Blitz. I kid you not when I say you could buy 100 mil+ for just 30 bucks. For the newbies out there looking for a point of reference, know that pre-Blitz, 100 million was considered rich!

With the prices so low, everyone and their grandmothers would buy gold. As a direct consequence, that money started to flow into the marketplace. Remember hyperinflation? Money was essentially ‘printed’ magically through the gold farming gods and prices inflated as a direct result. Eventually, prices kept inflating to the point where in order to afford those prices, a player must either be amazing at earning money or buy gold. So the process feeds into itself as people that did not want to buy gold before were now forced into a situation where you HAD to buy gold in order to get the items you wanted. So inflation increased rapidly and boom, hyperinflation!

SUMMARY: The cheaper the gold, the more tempting to buy. The more bought, the higher the inflation. The higher the inflation led to more people buying gold to afford the new price point. However, buying more gold led to even more inflation! This self-feeding cycle became hyperinflation. Really interesting stuff!

Nexon and The Playerbase

As I’ve already mentioned, Nexon did react to this, but too slowly and not effectively. The damage was done and they took no real measure to correct the terrible situation. Nexon would ban bots but because they were trash at it, a lot of innocents would get caught in the crossfire. And because of their poor customer service, the innocent player’s accounts were forever no more.

The only way for Blitz to work is for Nexon to have made some auxiliary programs. The major one is a more dependable algorithm to catch bots. And of course…better customer service but maybe I’m asking for too much? One step at a time!

The increase in prices would ultimately affect the playerbase. The new players would leave upon realizing they could not afford a single thing on the Auction Hall. The veteran players would leave after either realizing they could not afford anything, they got banned for being a bot (joke, but no seriously), and/or they realized how terrible Nexon was with updates. Seriously, when was our last update anyway?

PROTIP: Pray to Neople. They are our holy saviors.

Conclusion

Blitz is great in theory but terrible in practice. Fatigue is easier to manage and effectively slow down botters and reduce the effect they have on the marketplace dramatically. Overall, I vote fatigue points as the best system for DFO to have. It just makes life easier for all of us involved.

Have any ideas on how they could have made Blitz work and not ruin the economy? Or anything else you want to talk about? Feel free to let me know, I’m always willing to learn more!