It would seem that a major patch for Das Tal was rolled out back at the beginning of May:

Das Tal. The newbie experience for sandbox games, especially open PvP ones, will always be a very hard thing to get right. There is so much to learn for newbies and so little hand-holding that your first minutes can feel very overwhelming. Additionally you face the problem that in an open PvP world you can get attacked by other players at any time. And that is totally fine for us, that is after all exactly why we play and design those kind of games. But if you’re in the first couple minutes of playing a new game then any fight will feel very unfair to you and many a new player has rage-quit before being able to get their bearings and find enough “proper fights” to stick around. So in this patch, we’ve addressed a couple issues:

1. You can now see warning signs larger groups of players (who are not invisible) from a certain range. This makes it easier for new players to dodge larger roaming groups. And it adds an incentive for larger clans to split up into smaller roaming bands instead of one big stack. I’ve seen this mechanic in Albion Online and enjoyed that it adds more interesting decisions to the game of roaming PvP. Do you keep all your players close together while being clearly visible from afar? Do you split up into smaller groups instead to be more sneaky and get better engagements but with lower numbers? Do you keep everybody out in the open while being mobile or do you hide a larger part of your army in a brush to lay an ambush?
2. Since new players and semi-veterans currently share a lot of common buildings for crafting and leveling up (that will change soon), it was quite common for fights to start where one players was just using a building where UI obstructed their view. And before knowing what happened they would have lost half their health to an attacker. Now you both get a flashing notice that someone is attacking you and a 30 second grace period in which you can get your bearing and then star the fight on more even terms. I love this mechanic since it doesn’t prevent people from fighting each other (which would happen if we’d just made players invulnerable while using any building) but instead offers a small power equalizer to make for more interesting fights.
3. Mobs have also been a critical point of the newbie experience for a while. Up until now mobs were very hard to defeat for newbies, especially melees while veterans breezed through them relatively easily. And so “ganking” farming newbies was not super challenging. To turn this experience around – without simply preventing it from happening – we’ve made sure that mobs now take a higher HP toll on veterans than on newbies. And they also now prefer more experienced players as targets which means it’s now a lot more challening to fight around mobs for veterans since they not only compete with the other player but also with the mobs. Which again ties into my philosophy of “do not just prevent actions, instead make them more challenging and interesting to all kinds of players”.

As Das Tal is, first and foremost, a PvP-focued game, it’s not surprising to see that the experience of new players was…somewhat on the dismal side; it’s something every PvP-heavy MMORPG from Ultima Online onward has had to find ways to address. As such, it’s good that Fairytale Distillery are addressing it now, while the game is still very much in testing.

Click on through to read the complete change notes. And expect to see another patch for Das Tal drop relatively soon; the development team have been aiming for two week iteration cycles.