Don’t buy Darkfall

darkfalljeditrick

… at least not until my credit card is charged for the pre-order.  They’ve sold out on pre-orders (it happened a few days ago) and some people who thought their pre-order went through were never charged due to some issue with lag in their system.   I am (along with Graev and half a dozen of my friends) one of the unlucky ones to not have been billed.  Aventurine has said they will accomodate ‘most’ of the people who were not charged and charge them, thus allowing them to play tomorrow night (Euro Time), when servers go live.  Aventurine will be offering more copies of the game tomorrow, but has not said how many.

So yeah… You don’t want to buy Darkfall.  Please?

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  • Well that’s another BS deal from AV… I was at least hoping to get your review tomorrow. I can’t imagine that I will ever witness such a botched up MMO launch again.

  • This is a hardcore game with hardcore ways of getting your account info up, harcore ways of paying them. If you go to the Darkfall forums you need to be hardcore. This game is so hardcore that I think I can now F5 someone in the face!

    If your not hardcore this game is not for you 😉

  • Mortal Online bosts of 8 hit boxes per toon. That coupled with better graphics sounds like the recipe for severe lag in large scale battles. We’ll see if they can pull it off.

    For the time being, I am going to check out Darkfall. I wanna be hardcore like Russell Gusto. My core is so hard just thinking about it.

  • I have been keeping tabs on Mortal Online. It will be interesting to watch and see if they’re able to launch what they’re promising.

    All of you guys not getting DF, tell your friends not to either. We still need a few more friends to get their copies over here. 😉

  • 20,000 accounts created and they still can’t handle that number of subscribers. The beta server was fairly sparse, so I have a feeling their servers will implode tomorrow.

  • Hey, be glad they’re rolling it out in increments they can handle. They could do what AoC did and launch 50+ servers, only to have to merge them all together eight months later.

    Or maybe they simply need the money so they can buy more hardware so they can expand the server cluster running the game.

  • Don’t worry about me. I am interested in the game for sure but early reviews are causing me to keep this one at arm’s length for the time being. If they clean up major bugs and manage to do away with some of the totally useless hardcore stuff (one accidental hit to go rogue? 5+ minutes to heal up after death?) then I’ll give it a try. So like 6 months from now. =P

  • Knew I couldn’t be the only one thinking about that episode. 😛

    25th there will be much hilarity I garontees it.

  • I feel for Aventurine – web billing systems are tricky to do and the amount of demand they’ve had will make things harder. You’re probably better off waiting anyway because launches are always riddled with errors and downtime.

  • Same thing (kind of) happened to me. I got the preorder confirmation and even the confirmation that I had been charged the 2.52 euro, but it has yet to show up on my CC as a recent transaction.

    Heads will roll if they don’t let me in tomorrow because of their server lag ><

  • Didn’t this happened already to another game around November last year?
    EVERYONE wants in… then they get butchered twice and say “teh game suxxors and all that beat me are haxxorz and teh bunnies are ugly”…

  • Most of my guild got in, they had the website on a feed so they knew when it went up. Sadly that usually happened while I was at work.

    I’m thinking a few days after release, when everyone realizes exactly what full looting means things will calm down. For now we deal with the tourists.

  • Don’t worry I won’t. Probably not ever. This game is very much not the game I am looking for. I’m still glad they made it though for there are people that are looking for it. I hope it is fun for those people!

  • Welp appears they have already over sold, or at the very least over-hyped.

    Hope they at least had the common sense to place the game servers on a seperate server farm than the website/forum.

    So many games have screwed their lauches by having a flood on thier forums, crash the game servers, I am expecting nothing less in this situation.

  • “I am (along with Graev and half a dozen of my friends) one of the unlucky ones to not have been billed”

    You mean one of the lucky ones 😉

  • Well, I just got the email confirmation from Aventurine about 2 minutes ago (2:18pm PST) saying that I have been charged for the game. I’ll check my CC statement here soon to verify.

    They’ll bring up the servers soon I hope. They’re currently waiting for something in their account management to come online. It’s actually a common thing to have happen when you look at the history of MMORPG launches. In fact, it’s more rare for a company to bring servers up “on time” or on a schedule than it is for them to just bring them up when they’re “ready”.

  • We’re going to lock the channel for now folks, I will post updates here as I receive them.

    At this time there is no set ETA for the servers to come up, and account management is a top priority.

    The forums will remain locked for the next few hours while we work on getting it all settled.

    For anyone who missed the update, game time will be added to all accounts to compensate for the inconvenience.

    We are currently hard at work on getting the game and account servers online and working, at this time I cannot provide an ETA, all updates will be posted here as I receive them. All game accounts already created will be credit with game time to compensate.

    Quoted from IRC

  • We’ve been waiting for the pre-orders to process through billing and it has been moving along but not fast enough. We’re almost done with this. Many of you will be getting notifications of this during this process. As soon as this is concluded we’ll process the accounts and open up the servers for the pre-orders. This will be done tonight; the game has been ready and waiting.

    Unfortunately we’re running behind schedule as far as opening up the extra sales which we hoped to do tonight as well. We’ll do this tomorrow as early as possible, likely sometime around noon GMT time, around the time of our first scheduled maintenance. At this time we will also process the problematic accounts which had 0 euro problems, no charges, no balance, but received a successful pre-order message. We are also looking into the few cases that have pre-ordered but have not received a confirmation email and we will resolve all these issues. Most of these problems were due to a combination of lag, multiple sessions, and multiple charge attempts.

    We want to thank you for your patience again, and we would like to let you know that we’re adding a couple more days to the free month of play making them 33 for everyone that pre-ordered and that will buy the game tomorrow. This is to make up for any bad experience with the account management, the lag and the delays you’ve had to face with purchasing.

    The traffic volume we’ve been experiencing has been unbelievably high because of the initial rush and was compounded by users hammering the system with multiple sessions. You should also know that we have been doing everything necessary to resolve all these issues as soon as possible.

    We’ll post again as soon as the server is open.

    The forums will return shortly as well.

    -Tasos

    That’s what’s currently appearing in place of the forum.

    At least they’re more honest about how their launch is going than Funcom was with Anarchy Online. I’d love to play this game, but the launch vibes I’m getting are reminiscent of AO, which (as us old folks remember) was far worse than AOC.

    Hell, worse than UO, which was an abortion of a launch, but had the excuse of being new.

    Shadowbane’s launch looks like WoW in comparison.

  • WoW’s launch is still near the top of my list of horrible MMO launches. It was so, so, so awful. However, the older MMO’s like the original EQ had some bombed launches for sure. We had hours upon hours and even days of downtime right at launch. Sure, they were new and we all forgive it… but not much has really changed since then – especially for a small independent developer.

  • Keen, honestly and (I’m trying) objectively, if you consider WoW’s launch a failure you’re a child. WoW’s launch was just a launch. It had its bad moments, but it was there for most, when promised. The only good launch any MMO has ever had was DAOC, and I remember “falling through the world” a few times there.

    I’d like to see this game succeed too. I’d love it. But based on what’s been promised, and what’s likely to be delivered, you might as well have wasted your time promoting a purposefully retro DikuMUD.

    These jerks have had my credit card number for weeks. I still don’t know whether I bought a copy of their game, which according to what’s above, has launched.

    As for small independent developer, I sympathize and encourage. But as a customer (if they took my card number?), I’m not encouraged.

    At least my Choppa loves me.

  • Immense lag, crashes, servers being brought down, queues into the thousands for hours… am I really a “child” for considering those things “awful”? I never said “failure”. They brought the servers up on the day they said they would and that’s about it. Beyond that it was an epic mess. But most MMORPG launches are.

    It’s not something we make excuses about, but it’s definitely not something new.

    And as for them having your CC info for weeks… it’s been less than one week (Feb 19) that they started even accepting them. Yes, their account system is archaic. Yes, this has been a mess.

    Being realistic here, what did you expect? Aventurine has proven to be atypical at every turn.

    As for calling them jerks and exaggerating to the extremes you’ve gone to… I don’t know SSFC – you sure you should be calling me a child?

  • Oh no! The servers are finally up? And I was having such fun watching the train wreck in slow motion. Maybe this is just a temporary setback.

    We demand more drama!

    Seriously though, I don’t wish any game to fail. I hope you guys have fun. 🙂

  • Just woke up, just logged in.

    Initial thought 30 seconds in: Wow, the game looks way better than I thought it would. The environment and city look amazing.

  • Hey how is the game looking Keen? You’re pretty much my only source of information: Live streams are down, forums are down, IRC is down.

    Thanks.

  • I too eagerly await some unbiased information on Darkfall. C’mon Keen…out with it!

    Jason (resident drunken idiot of Channel Massive)

  • Grats to AV on getting the game going, hope you guys enjoy it. Not easy to do for a small company but there’s still a lot more to do. Like… well I’m sure you all know.

  • I just got back from class. College > Darkfall unfortunately.

    I’ve been able to play for about 30 min – and I love every bit of it (aside from the lag and stuff that they’re working on). Gameplay = great.

    Let me play a bit more and I’ll write about it.

  • The only positive thing I can say about DF is that I am glad that another Indie game has been made it to launch day.