Darkfall: Cheating, Disconnects, Refunds, OH MY!

Darkfall Online lead developer Tasos Flambouras has posted an update taking on a plethora of issues including cheating, server disconnects and game refunds. Find out how Aventurine is handling these matters below:

Yesterday there were player disconnects from server errors. We discovered that it was an issue with a router at Telia France which impacted several ISPs including Virgin Media. This caused players in the UK, France and other areas to get disconnected from the server. As far as we know this issue has been fixed.

In 48 hours characters with names made in an effort to confuse GMs and other players, for example adding a string of lower cap L's and upper case I's (IlIlIIIl) in their names will start getting their host accounts permanently banned. If you have a character like that, delete him and make a new one with a proper name.

Which brings us to cheating: We hear complaints from some players and some clans that continue seeing cheating everywhere when in fact this isn't the case. We should know since we log everything. The exploiters we ban always deny they were using 3d party programs; they complain and ask for proof. There are also people who continue using 3d party programs to exploit, thinking that if they're careful and not observed by GMs that they'll go undetected. What all these people have in common is that they don't understand that we log everything. Characters are flagged server-side and investigated in-game. Reports of cheating players are verified server-side. We have a combination of automatic and manual investigation. We use them both to be thorough, but we don't rely on one or the other. We know someone's cheating beyond a shadow of a doubt, and if you've even done so once, you're not safe. There's no such thing as "clever use" when you own all the server logs. We'll eventually get to you and ban you. If you're currently using 3d party programs to exploit with, we suggest you uninstall these programs immediately and hope for the best.

We've had complaints about random client crashes during sieges which we have addressed to a certain extent and looking at more cases. We will eventually get to the bottom of all these issues. We are getting a lot of reports by players, we are monitoring the forums, and we're fixing bugs and making improvements to the game every day.

We cannot refund game items under any circumstances, this is Darkfall policy. We are working on making it so that you don't lose any if we need to bring down the server and you're still in-game. Refunding for siege losses is also out of the question. We're working on modifying the mechanics to eliminate this problem. We would rather use our programmers constructively fixing issues like these, than peering through logs to verify who lost what, where and when. We understand your frustration and appreciate your understanding. We're doing our best here.

Some players have been complaining about lowered performance during massive battles. Now, let's put things into perspective here: Small skirmishes in Darkfall are what other games call "massive battles". We recently had approximately 2000 characters involved in battle in the same area. Battles with several hundred characters are the norm and run very smoothly. Of course you'll get progressive frame rate drops when you're working your way up to thousands of players in the same scene. We're seeing a lot more characters in Darkfall battles than you see maximum units in RTS games. One of our first priorities is to continuously optimize this experience. Massive battles in Darkfall will get larger and run smoother and smoother. Now we don't mind if people keep bitching at us about getting this even better, we're never satisfied ourselves, so please keep that in mind.

Later today at 5pm GMT we're opening up the store. The last couple of times we've offered a lot more copies than usual. We're working to keep improving our capacity so we can eventually leave the shop open 24/7.

Tomorrow we patch and we'll have patch notes right after. Until then,

Thank you,
The Darkfall Team

Any current or former players wish to comment? We'd love to hear your thoughts.

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"We recently had approximately 2000 characters involved in battle in the same area."

Video/Screeny or it didn't happen.

I find it hard to believe, that with 6k-8k players total, they had 25% of the games entire population involved a single conflict. Especialy with the history of lag and server crashes they have had.

The bullsh_t runneth over.

why ban people with names like lIlllIIlILLI?
I use to put "spaces" in my name but I used the ALT command spaces so no one could PM me, or GM's couldn't touch me through the game.
Oh wait, answered my own question.
Yeah, I agree with Hemi, screenshot or it didn't happen. Even then the pixles might not match.

I think, from the way I read it, that they have the same font issue Lineage 2 had way back when.

The lower case L and the upper case i look iddentical. So by mixing a bunch of them together, it makes it almost impossible to report them/block in chat/etc...

And by re-reading your post, I see you answered my answer.

What question did you have?

Lol, I was answering yours. But after re-reading it, I had to get out the edit wagon.

-Hemi-:
"We recently had approximately 2000 characters involved in battle in the same area."

Video/Screeny or it didn't happen.

I find it hard to believe, that with 6k-8k players total, they had 25% of the games entire population involved a single conflict. Especialy with the history of lag and server crashes they have had.

The bullsh_t runneth over.

Same area being Darkfall? :P

Perhaps Tasos' finger slipped slightly when he put in that 2000 figure; perhaps he meant 200. I doubt their single server could cope with 2000 players being online at the same time let alone in the same "area".

and again that server is not one machine