Darkfall has fallen on North America

I’m still befallen with a terrible cold/sinus infection, but I wanted to make a quick update before the NyQuil kicks in. I’ve been just lounging on the couch all day trying to feel better, missing all of the big Darkfall Online and Mortal Online happenings today. On that topic, I would go out on a limb and say it is definitely not a coincidence that they both had big “launches” of sorts today. I guess they are going after different audiences, with Darkfall‘s launch being a North American retail launch and Mortal Online‘s pre-order/beta being admittedly for the European audience, but it’s kind of ironic that two “hardcore pvp sandbox” MMORPGs have sales going live today in some fashion.

US server website and account management are now open.

Sales are also open. The download instructions for Darkfall’s US version can be found here:

http://www.us1.darkfallonline.com/dl/DarkfallFull/

Pricing information can be found here

See you all in game!

Thank you,
The Darkfall Team

I’m definitely tempted. I’ll give it more potential thought once my cold passes and I have a some free time to spare later this week. If you are looking for something different in your MMORPG menu, you should seriously consider giving Darkfall a chance. Just try to look past some of the rough edges and you may find the difference you are looking for.

As for Mortal Online, it’s pre-order store has opened with the “Special Edition” going for ~$100 (EUR 71.95) already sold out, and the normal boxed edition going for a whopping $~77 (EUR 54.95). These prices are outrageous to me and have saved me from myself essentially, as I’m not willing to pay that much on, in what my opinion, is such a risky investment and purchase.  If you live in the US and are willing to dish out ~$77, there appears to still be some available from the initial lot of them. Have at it.

Darkfall, Mortal Online, and a cold

I woke up to the discovery that Darkfall has finally moved into the 21st century with a legit looking website and news that the North American launch is schedule for July 13th. I normally wouldn’t give this any coverage because I was utterly disappointed with the European launch of DF, but the first “free expansion” is coinciding with the North American launch and it looks like it is a pretty expansive update.

In the same sub-genre of “sandbox, classless, hardcore” MMORPGs, Mortal Online pre-orders are finally going to be begin this week.

The Mortal Online shop will open on Monday 13th of July 20:00 GMT+1

We have separated the initial shop page from the Mortal Online main site for better performance. On Monday you can go directly to the shop on www.account.mortalonline.com should the main site be slow or unresponsive. Save the link and keep it in handy.

On Monday before the shop opens we will post more information about the first beta phase as well as the current system requirements for Mortal Online.

Hope to see you on Monday!

If Darkfall‘s sales and shop traffic around pre-order and launch are a gauge of the internet’s interest in this niche of MMORPG, then expect Monday’s pre-order allocation to sell out easily within an hour and the site to hammered with traffic, causing page time-outs and frustration. I probably won’t be able to be there amongst the others F5’ing, but I do want to get in on the Mortal Online beta at some point, and pre-ordering looks like the only guaranteed way to reserve a spot so far.

And as the post title implies, I’ve been sick all week with some sort of cold/fever deal. I’ve actually been so achy, sore, and stuffy-headed that I haven’t felt like playing anything besides when I can lean back in my chair with a blanket over me, pop a cough drop, take some NyQuil, and play some World of Warcraft until the drowsiness starts kicking in and summons me to sleep.

Going once, going twi…wait they’re gone

We processed as many orders as we could take in today, we’ll open up tomorrow around the same time. We’ll try to do this every day until things slow down and we can leave sales up.

Those very few of you that show you have pre-ordered rather than ordered will be processed normally and enabled.

Thank you,
The Darkfall Team

http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?p=2890081#post2890081

Darkfall Online sales are sold out and closed for the day.

As for tomorrow, show up and f5 at your own risk. Just showing up on time isn’t enough to get one though; I was following Forumfall, mIRC, and the account management page for a good 4 hours and still didn’t get one. It’s all down to who gets lucky and makes it through the traffic-hammered checkout process with as little time-outs and internal-errors as possible.

Darkfall availability and Aventurine’s stance on macroing/bots

We’ll open up sales of a limited number of Darkfall copies tonight European time Tuesday March 3d. We will try to repeat this every weekday until the extreme demand slows down and we’re able to leave the shop open 24/7. To answer the questions of how you can sell out a digital download, we’re throttling the number of new players in the world to limit queue times and protect the user experience. Server optimizations first and adding new servers in time are the steps we are taking to improve this experience.

From our launch experience, the extreme demand caused the account management infrastructure to lag and often time out. The hammering of the system by the users made things worse. Repeated attempts by users led to charge failures because of bank security rules. Incorrect billing information also led to failed transactions.

We expect the account management system to face extreme demand today as well. In order to try to avoid the issues we describe above, users who refresh before timing out, open multiple windows or tabs, and hammer the system will be temporarily blocked. Please do not refresh unless you have timed out or you will lose your place in the queue.

We’ll post when sales open. If the copies we have available for today sell out, we will repeat this process again tomorrow.

Thank you,

The Darkfall Team

http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=146033

Looks like limited sales will open up this afternoon and probably be a F5’ing mess again. At least they’re punishing those who multi-tab and F5 spam by moving them to the back of the queue and temporarily blocking them. I’ll be watching the site to hit up the account management today and try to snag myself one so I can check on the fixes they supposedly have made since the disastrous launch week.

Anyone macroing within the tower protected areas will be warned once, and then kicked. Repeated violations could result in a ban. Spamming spells or any other disruptive macroing activity within the tower protected areas will be kicked without warning. Repeated violations could result in a ban.

Unattended macroing could get you kicked anywhere in the world depending on the situation. You engage in it at your own risk.

Any use of third party programs which modify or alter the game including cheats, hacks, mods, bots will instantly result in a permanent ban. There will be no appeal. No excuses such as “I was just testing” will be accepted. We will detect and enforce aggressively.

Thank you,

The Darkfall Team

http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=146164

I sure hope they are as stern about it as they are trying to sound. In Brannoc‘s first response on the boards, he sounded very hands-off about macroing, which had me worried. Oh well, free kill if I see some tool out macroing in the wild. I’ll take the law into my own hands and chop him down rather than waiting for the GMs to give him a slap on the wrist.

Brannoc (Aventurine employee): 1 / Random irc troll: 0

EDIT: Obviously this could be 100% fake and just something crafted up by an extremely bored QQer. I was not in the actual mIRC at the time to witness the “chat” and the first place this popped up was on a DF guild’s website forums. Read for entertainment purposes only, as I did.

Here’s a gem I’ve found from a Q&A Brannoc had in IRC earlier. This has at least put a smile on my face in light of this launch fiasco.

ShockWave: atleast good you finaly take the time to talk to us Brannoc
<@Brannoc> I’ve been trying to do that all day, ShockWave
[Yew]Greg: do your fucking job
<@Brannoc> I don’t think you can be anymore informed than you are greg, I’d say your statement is mostly loaded with fail

[Yew]Greg: Well heres a little helpful peice of advise if you ladies plan on keeping any sort of player base. Even in the shittiest circumstances, atleast tell us to just “fuck off we’re working on it”. Thats all most of us want to know.
<@Brannoc> I’d be happy to tell you to go fuck yourselves! But a lot of people say that’s bad PR
<@Brannoc> so…I’m trying not to

Brannoc: 1 / irc troll “greg”: 0

Full transcript can be found here.

Two days after “launch” and still no sign of Darkfall Online

7.00PM GMT

We didn’t manage to completely eliminate the sync issue affecting players in the game earlier today. Our real-time monitor alerted us of this as soon as we brought up the server and players started entering the game. We need to take more time to address this. There is no ETA as of yet. We’ll keep you posted on any developments.

We’ve solved the problem some players in human areas were experiencing not being able to log back in after a crash. We’re looking into an issue some players are reporting about getting an “account not active” message. Finally we have a handle on the issue that caused us to bring down the server the last time, and we’re in the process of fixing it.

3.00 PM GMT

I suggest they start talking about adding more days to our “free month” as those first 3 days they banked us, are about out and I still haven’t been able to play a working game. For the ~24 hours the servers were up, it was a complete broken and out of sync mess with clans exploiting like wildfire. Apparently if you managed find NPCs in water, they are frozen and can’t move so are a free kill and free loot.

Common sense says wipe the servers and launch fresh again. You could hardly call anything yet a launch anyways. This is probably the worst MMO launch I’ve been a part of (I was there for Anarchy Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and WoW and this still takes the cake) but I’m still anxious to actually *try* the game. I won’t lie though, this rocky start in conjunction with the poor communication, rampant exploiters, and complete ignorance or lack of acknowledging said exploiters, has put a sour taste in my mouth that I’m not sure can even be washed out at this point.

Darkfall: servers are up, game is not

I sure wish I could start diving into the game, but as it is now, it is completely unplayable. There is a major problem going on where no one (npcs + palyers) is synced up correctly. You start getting hit with arrows, but all you see is goblins running in place 20 feet away and a other players running in place whiffing their swords at the air. You try to go up to a goblin and give him a good swing, but of course it doesn’t land because he isn’t actually there.

Besides the aforementioned unplayable problem of the server sync, my only grip I’ve noticed so far is the performance. For a game that looks this mediocre-to-decent in the graphics department, it sure doesn’t run as smooth as one would hope. Keep in mind this is on default (pretty much max) settings for me with full shadows and 1920×1200 resolution. Sure I can disable shadows and it gives me a steady 50-90 fps, depending on how particle and lighting effects, but it still bothers me.

I’m obviously withholding judgement until the game is actually working though. A patch is incoming tonight, supposedly that will address the out-of-sync issues.

Update 5.49pm GMT

After addressing a couple of early issues the servers have been running very stable for several hours and we have a large number of players in-game right now.

It’s normal to expect more issues to surface in the next couple of days. We postponed our scheduled maintenance of 10am GMT for later until we can gather some more data and address anything that comes up in a patch later tonight.

We’re aware that some areas are experiencing sync issues for some players. This is a high priority issue that we are working to address as soon as possible. We know the cause for it so it shouldn’t take very long. We will keep the servers up while this is being fixed and we will bring them down for a patch later tonight. For now, players can move away from starting areas to improve their experience.

We have processed the problematic accounts that were never charged but received a successful pre-order notification. Only a small percentage of these were successful and we found out that this is because most of them contain incomplete or incorrect account information. We will try this one last time again tomorrow morning European time, and we’ll open up account management later tonight for these accounts to be able to correct their account data and credit information before we reprocess them. If anyone does not want the pre-order to be processed, they should remove their credit card information from their account. After this is concluded we should be able to open up sales for more Darkfall copies.

That’s all for now, we’ll keep you updated with anything new that comes up.

The Darkfall Team

I’m going to load up some free Shadowbane for shits and giggles while waiting for the Darkfall fixes, and maybe, just maybe, reactivate Warhammer Online to check in on it.

DF Launch: Update

Servers are finally opening up after a 12 hour delay. Processing the pre-orders took much longer than the original estimate we were given, and we caught a bug at the last minute that we didn’t want to launch with. We apologize for the long delay and we hope you enjoy your first day in Darkfall.

For the players that are getting lobby errors, check your version and if you don’t have build 1.0.35, get it from http://www.eu1.darkfallonline.com/dl/Darkfall.exe

We have extended the free month of play to 33 days to thank you for your patience and to try to begin making up for the inconvenience.

We’ll process the problematic pre-orders that were not charged, and have 0 balance later today. If you pre-ordered successfully but weren’t charged, or haven’t received your final notice for the remaining successful charge, you’ll need to be patient a few hours longer. We’ll also look at opening up more sales by tomorrow. We are a little behind schedule but we’re catching up.

Forums have been down due to large volume, almost double our highest traffic to date, people weren’t able to access them. We brought them down in order to be able to post communications so you would know what was going on. MMORPG.com was kind enough to post our first announcement but we need to be able to communicate through the official Darkfall community. Darkfall IRC was causing the Stratics network problems with its volume and it was also temporarily shut down at Stratics request. The forum will be back as soon as possible, and we hope we can keep it up.

We’ll do our best to keep you updated.

Thank you

The Darkfall Team

I was able to get in when the servers *first* came up, followed five seconds later by them being taken down. They’re back up now, but the patcher is refusing to let (and other clan mates) past it. Sleep time, which is kind of a bummer because I know the servers will be even more hammered tomorrow and probably even more unplayable. Woe is Darkfall Launch, at least we’re on free game time basically.

Darkfall Launch: Wait, what launch?

Just kidding. I’m not going to be that guy. I’ll never let myself turn into a Snarky McSnarksauce blogger.

However, it has been a torrenteous launch day for Darkfall. Really, there was no launch, as it’s been the 26th for hours in Europe, where Darkfall was supposed to be having it’s native launch. Even here on the east coast, it’s just minutes from the 26th. Despite the delay, I’m still just as excited to play as I was yesterday. Aventurine was eerily quiet throughout the day however, not updating anyone on the real status till about 11 P.M. GMT – just minutes before going the entire launch day without addressing the community. It’s safe to say Aventurine could have handled the communication way better than they did, but I’m sure they have their reasons. I can’t imagine the amount of stress they must have been under (and still under).

Some good news to come out of all of this?

support@aventurine.gr Dear James Mr Taylor, Thank you very much for your order. You just purchased: Darkfall Client Download for: ?42.00 Total: ?42.00

Guess they didn’t botch my preorder after all, despite the initial charge never showing up.

Selling Darkfall: Why is Aventurine doing such a poor job?

When trying to explain the allure of Darkfall to friends or people on the internet, I’ve found it pretty daunting task. It’s a bad sign when user-created YouTube trailers do a better job of selling a game than the official website or developer does. From the lackluster website to the lack of information flow into the United States, it’s easy to see why Darkfall is getting overlooked by many who haven’t already been following it for years.Wading through YouTube clips of the game and user-created trailers throughout the last week has sparked more life into the game for me than Aventurine has in the last 4 years.

Update: Adding this excellent walkthrough of the GUI (watch it in HD)

Excellent user-created explanation and trailer for Darkfall Online