Darkfall Update

Darkfall Online's lead developer, Tasos Flambouras, has posted an update to the launch process. According to the post, processing preorder payments has gone slower than anticipated but accounts should be ready to play sometime tonight. However, those awaiting sales to reopen need to keep reading.

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.

-The Darkfall Team

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I am still in line to NOT play this.

Well probably me too, Hemi. Still for all the people who SWORE Darkfall was "vaporware", I guess they've either slunk off to play it or are sitting with the dunce cap on. ;)

There's another update on the forums,

Update made at 4am GMT 2/26

A bug was discovered during final testing, and we need to resolve it before we can open up the servers. We didn't want to launch to just say we launched. We can't apologize enough for the long delay. The current ETA is two hours but it could be longer. We will launch as soon as possible and we will keep you updated.

We have extended the free month to 33 days to compensate for the inconvenience. Problems will occur from time to time but we need you to know that we're committed to supporting this game to the best of our ability. It's unfortunate that we are facing these issues at launch, and we'll do everything we can to make this up to you.

The Darkfall Team

http://forums.darkfallonline.com/

PvP loot doesn't make game interesting: there were plenty of games with loot - but only UO was interesting and that wasn't related just to loot system. And I don't believe game may be good then authors even cannot design decent website for it.

guitar:
There's another update on the forums,

Update made at 4am GMT 2/26

A bug was discovered during final testing, and we need to resolve it before we can open up the servers. We didn't want to launch to just say we launched. We can't apologize enough for the long delay. The current ETA is two hours but it could be longer. We will launch as soon as possible and we will keep you updated.

We have extended the free month to 33 days to compensate for the inconvenience. Problems will occur from time to time but we need you to know that we're committed to supporting this game to the best of our ability. It's unfortunate that we are facing these issues at launch, and we'll do everything we can to make this up to you.

The Darkfall Team

http://forums.darkfallonline.com/

Thing is, they are soo not ready for the sh-t storm that follows every MMO that launches. You "might" be able to develop a game independantly, but you need the resources and manpower of billing and logistics companies to actually get your game out on a global scale.

What part of MASSIVE does Tasos not get when designing an MMO? The servers are going to take a big steaming dump the second they go live, just from the shear numbers of people trying to log in.

I agree there though, how can you expect to solve problems quickly if you never tested with more than 10.000 people

Sigoya:
Give it a year and then we'll talk.

You KNOW I agree with you. I was just being the devil's advocate. ;)

I'm still lookin' for Teedle.

From what I played in beta, certain aspects were nice. I did not like the right-click that brought up all of the player UI, like your loot bag, spells, etc. And when that happened you stopped moving, bad in an open PVP world. You ALWAYS need the ability to move and multi-task.

I am with Sigoya, give it a year, they are small and they're doing their best with what they have.

And yes, I agree with your comment -Hemi-, they are not ready, and I think what we are seeing is a result. Never go into war without enough logistics, troops, and supplies.

More from the website,

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

More from the devs,

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

http://forums.darkfallonline.com/