The queues are starting to really bother me.

If you’re one of the many who have had a discussion with me on forums, blogs, or ventrilo, you’ll know that I am usually not bothered by queues.  I see them as a necessary evil.  I’ve even defended games that have horrible queues with a “just wait it out” kind of attitude.  Usually the queues in a mmorpg only last, or the most part, a week or two after launch and then only during prime time.  Well, I’m starting to get bothered by the queues in Darkfall.  Why?  Because they’re not getting any better.  In fact, they’re only getting worse – much worse – and Aventurine is continually making them worse by acting in stark contrast to any solution: They’re constantly adding more people to one server!  Why?!

I wait in the queue an average of two hours every time.  It doesn’t matter what time of day I try to log in – 5am in the morning or 10pm at night – it’s always this bad;  I’m also bound away from newbie zones.  People are hopping in the queue before they go to work and coming home with it ready for them to play.  Players getting disconnected are faced with sitting in the queue all over again.  The game has a few issues with CTD’s (I’ve crashed maybe a total of 5 times since the 26th of February, not bad but others are worse) and these lead to sitting in the queue again.   At least do what Mythic and Blizzard (I think?) do and allow a buffer for you to log back in.

Supposedly the server infrastructure will be upgraded next week.  Rumors abound that Aventurine plans to open a second Euro server.   I can only hope.

I’m going into my 4th hour of queue waiting today.  Took 2 hours 45 min to log in this morning (counting server down-time) and a “You have been disconnected from the server” error has landed me waiting another hour and 20 min now.   At least it has given me time to do my Economics homework.

For those of you online, I hear that pressing ALT+F4 gives you speedhacks and Dragon mounts.

Tags:

  • A queue? I haven’t been able to log in since launch. I wish I were in a queue.

  • i hate the bloddy que aswell.

    i’ll be sending in an APP tomorrow keen, just deleted my ork.

  • Nah man this is a sign that at least the game is being played. Stay patient.

    That’s one reason I don’t play many games at lauch or soon after…I don’t want the game to be a mess when I first start.

    You’ll get in. STAY STRRRROOONNGGG! 🙂

    Beau

  • The queues are actually the one thing that is keeping me from buying the game. The game looks insanely fun, but the 2 hour queues not so much.

  • These queues are, by far, the longest that I have ever been a part of. Seems to me that there may be too many accounts for one server. I’d bet that the number of active accounts could occupy 2 servers alone. Avent needs more than another shard imo. Opening a few servers in North America would be nice.

  • At least they have addressed it in the news, and hopefully next week will be better.

    “… We expect to have queuing issues this weekend especially around prime-time hours, but starting next week you will see a vast improvement as we considerably upgrade the capacity of our server cluster…

    Thank you,
    The Darkfall Team”

    I also think it’s pretty nuts that they don’t auto log folks out. The fact you can stay logged in “forever” just seems wrong. But with the new hardware hopefully it will fix it.

  • Wow…my que time was just 6 min. Granted it’s midnight, but I’m still shocked.

  • Plz could you guys stop playing this game. I want some reviews and adventures that are interesting 🙁

  • I was wondering when we’d hear about the queue. From reading about this issue on the DF forums, this has been the primary reason for my lack of effort in attempting to acquire an account. I’m not a big fan of queues ,myself, so I’m looking forward to seeing what happens after this server optimization.

  • yeah i really like the game but if the queues dont go away soon i will be leaving. most of play time in my first week as been spent in queues.

  • You know, you are one of many MMO gamers who really wish for one or some new, exciting and fresh MMOs. Be it oldstyle or innovative, whatever.

    Just something else than what the new hyper-casual WoW-style has become.

    But… Darkfall is NOT the answer to our prayers. Despite some qualities the game has, you identified and named some of them, it is so horrible in many ways, be it technical or gameplay, that I can really not fathom why you still stand behind this piece of crap.

  • Keen, I’m not sure what’s up with all the CTDs you’re having but I don’t get them in game. The only issue I have every now and then is a dropped connection but my ISP is already workng to fix that.

    As for queues, I get around them by remoting into my PC from work an hour or so before I leave so that there’s no wait when I get home.

  • Hey keen! i have a question. Do you think that darkfall is better that war or wow?

    Because the game that i like more right now is wow, then aoc and finally war :S

  • my guess is that they are waiting for enough people to split the server into 2. I mean, you dont want to have 2 empty worlds. And i dont think they ever expected it to be this popular. Bad planning imo.

  • Yeah I was going to try and pick the game up this week but decided to wait for awhile until the server’s get straightened out…a queue like that would make me quit.

  • @Longasc: Because it is pure fun.

    @Marcus: I can’t say that it’s “better” or “Worse” than Wow or War. Why? Because it would be like asking which is better: a single story or two story house.

    Can you answer that question? Well, several factors come into play ranging from look and layout of the house to whether or not you can do stairs b/c of arthritis or a handicap.

    It really is like asking whether or not an apple or orange taste better.

    Personally, I think all three games are great. I like parts of WoW that WAR lacks. I like parts of WAR that WoW lacks. I like parts of Darkfall that they both lack and so on.

    Right now, I like playing Darkfall the most because it’s just soooo different than everything out there. It brings back the wonderful things from the earlier days of mmorpgs and takes a few revolutionary steps that hopefully will make mmorpgs much more dynamic in the future.

  • @Keen: when you’ve managed to get through the queues, what has the concurrent user count typically been? Is there a /who or /uptime command?

    In the run-up to launch I had heard the number “10,000” used around the number of accounts they would support on a single server. I assume that was concurrency – which seems a decent number of users to drive interesting politics.

    I just wonder how close they are to the 10,000 already, and whether they’ve had problems find the hardward resources to support the 10k target, or software issues limiting the scaling ratios they were expecting from beta.

  • Marcus If you prefer WoW over WAR then you would hate Darkfall. Stick with PvE land dude. Darkfall is about as far from WoW as you can get.

  • @Michael,

    If i understand it correctly then it looks like they added aprox 10,000 users in the past week.

    (5 days of sales that had a number “in the 4 digits” then they had 3 days of “double the amount of the first week”)

    So using that very vague response from the DarkFall team that would be around 11,000 minimum before they stoped the sales all together.

    I think a lot of folks miss what a crazy achievment this game is. An MMO that can hold “100,000” concurrent users with collison detection in both players, ranged missles, and weapons. Add the Friendly Fire Non-Target aspect and I never notice the game’s shortcomings just because I’m so amazed with what they have working and how well it works with so many folks from accross the world. (I still can’t believe I have a ~140 ping to a server in Greece, that’s insane).

    @Keen and Haven crew: If they open a NA server with no character transfers, would you all start new, or stick on the EU1? This question maybe to early to ask, since it’s not there yet.

  • I like the parts that WAR has that DFO doesn’t most:
    A HUGE team of people working on the game.
    A 10 ton gorilla company pumping money into it making sure it can leave breathe and develop.
    🙂

  • @HowdyDoody – that’s for the info. If the 11k account sales is accurate, then I would expect the concurrent login to be a lot lower than that.

    For example, with EVE’s ~250k active accounts, the PCU daily figure is in the 48-52k range. (Live graphs available at http://eve.coldfront.net/status/tranquility).

    If the 1/5 proportion were to hold for Darkfall, then DF’s PCU may be ~2200 – probably higher, given the enthusiasm and dedication the game’s players seem to be showing.

    Still impressive, for all the reasons you give.

  • The game already supported the highest number of online players in any MMORPG besides EVE, which is a totally different layout anyway and we all know it

    When the numbers will be released it will be amazing, much more than 2200

    Dont believe it? Wait and see

  • Woke up – entered the queue – went to work and came back and was able to play for 5 minutes – lost connection – back to the queue 🙁

    Darkfall: The best game I never play!

  • @DM: got any references describing DF’s server infrastructure? I know EVE’s quite well, so I’m interested to learn what steps DF has taken to scale in areas Tranquility doesn’t/can’t/hasn’t had to, since the game designs are different in many ways.

    The relevance of Tranquility’s PCU stats to DF’s is that TQ’s population is global-timezone, just like (I believe) DF’s server currently is. The shape of DF’s CU graphs are probably more like TQ than not (excepting TQ’s daily downtime) – specifically lacking in the steep drop towards zero that a focused-timezone service would have outside core hours.

  • @Michael

    Just to clarify the numbers I was talking about were the sales that started after the presales and the other sales fo the games release. Those numbers were extra sales that happened last week and a half. So for a total number of users I really have no idea.

    I’m guessing ~11,000 + whatever was sold before March 2.

    @Argorius – Wow, that sucks…I haven’t had any crashes yet (knock on my wooden puppet head!)

  • @Howdy Doody

    I ran across a human named Howdy Doody by the Monkfield bindstone the other day. I sent a tell to see if it was you, but I got no response.

  • So is the idea of queueing before work wrong or just a point to illustrate how people are being pushed? Just want to understand.

    I’ve done that twice now because if I didn’t there’d be no playing at all. It’s not the nicest thing but if given a choice between not playing at all and reserving a queue spot early in the day, I’ll always elect to take the spot.

    I can’t wait until they resolve this because I honestly wish it wasn’t a decision like that.

  • You might as well. I know that there are lots of people in my guild that simply NEVER logg off. They just sit in front of the towers for hours when they are gone and then jump back up when they are ready. I que up before I leave for work as well. No point in wasting my precious time in ques if that can be avoided. My gripe is that once im actually in the game, the PvP is almost impossible with the current amount of lagg. I think it will get fun once they fix this… but its pretty weak in its current state.

  • Wow the time when a Age of Conan Fanboi starts hyping the game and trying to put Darkfall down (an indie game) you know there are problems with AoC.. wow how low can you get?

  • I have always had almost no tolerance for queues to get into a server to play. Queues for PvP or other events in-game are fine, but queues to enter the server? That should never ever happen. There are plenty of tools available to developers to avoid this situation.

    It’s pretty straightforward to me. I’m not interested in paying a monthly fee to not be able to play when I want.

  • @Wickidd

    That was me, probably to busy trying to figure this game out. i just now understand that a tell creates a new tab, lol. sorry bout that.

  • I’m not going to wait and see how the server upgrade goes before I get to upset. Currently right now all the NPCs are bugged where I am, and my game has started crashing as well. (Guess I didn’t knock on the wood hard enough).

    But I’ll wait and see if this is is fixed with the server upgrade. I have a crazy busy week, so this is a good time for me anyway, ahaha.

  • There are ways to avoid the queue, although they are rather underhanded. Zero queue time is nice though, even if the mobs in-game are going to lag out. Still makes gathering possible, or long-distance exploration.

    They are upgrading the hardware this week, and they knew this weekend was going to be rough. Before the weekend though, we never got in-game lag, just moderate queues.

  • DM yea i’m such a fanboy, not like i quit a week after aoc launch heh.

    I’m not a fan of any mmorpgs but I want the genre to be respected and darkfall pisses me off

  • @rufus i like more wow because i dont like zerg vs zerg. Right now pvp in wow is broken and dead, everytime i sit to play i feel sick after a while… but is still is more fun for me.
    I think wow is a lot more an individual tactical game where everybody plays together while war is damage and heal vs damage and heal and the effects of some other skills like snares, etc dont have too much importance.

    @keen i know that say that one game is better that other is like compare oranges with apples. But in the end i can say that i play more wow than war or aoc, is as simple as that.
    So, skipping all the factors and summarizing what game i play more, “in my own opinion” i can say what game looks “better”, i think..

  • My main gripe with queues is that when you get lagged out and DC’d, you get sent to the back of the queue.

    Being a non-programmer maybe I’m missing something, but is it that hard to flag an account such that if the user logs out (or is lagged out) and they attempt to log back in within 60 seconds, they are automatically bumped to the front of the login queue?

    Perhaps you could even set up two login queues: a short queue reserved for users trying to log in within 60 seconds of their most recent DC; and one for everyone else. That way someone in the #2 spot in the “everyone else” queue won’t see themselves go to #3 (or higher) when a recently DC’d user jumps to the front of the line. The server could also let in a User from each queue in turn, so even if you’re in the short queue you might still have to wait to get back in, but it wouldn’t be as bad as getting DC’d under the current system.