Based on the treatment of the community so far, Aventurine thinks it is OK to treat their fans/customers like crap.
If you think its bad *before* they get your money, just wait until they already have it!
The moderators on official darkfall forums are clowns - They are super obnoxious and on a power-trip. I've been banned by Brannoc (the chief clown) for saying stuff that is obviously true (e.g. "Just admit that release is going to be delayed from Jan 22"). And I know a lot of others have also.
The developers seem to think that lying to fans is an acceptable hobby. Missing a deadline is one thing, but at a certain point it becomes intentional. When you *OBVIOUSLY* aren't going to meet a promised release date you should be up front and let people know - not wait until a few days before the date, and pretend its not your fault (blame your publisher, etc.). Moreover, you shouldn't ban people from the forums for saying that you are going to miss your deadline - when you KNOW you will.
I'm not buying the game because of their terrible treatment of their fans. Maybe DF will eventually release, but even if it does it will quickly implode.
Don't expect this crappy treatment to magically end just because a game is released.
Aventurine will treat its customers just as poorly as it has treated its fans. People who complain about bugs or other issues will be banned from the forums.
I've been following DF for 8 years and was really excited about the concept. But I would *NEVER* give these people my credit card number!! I wouldn't be surprised if these people just stole credit card numbers and skipped town!!
We are all either dismayed or disappointed at the way things have been going with Darkfall, but I will hold off from calling it a straight FAIL before I even try it -whenever that happens.
Let's just sit tight and wait. When it gets released, not just Beta, and experienced in retail state, we can call the shots then.
Clearly the DF devs have no idea what they are doing.
This is from a beta leaker:
Mike:
The Darkfall server, which the devs claim is designed to support up to 10,000 simultaneous users, can barely stay online with only a few hundred. Since I got into beta, the servers have been down more than they have been up, and crash several times per hour. In all my years of MMO testing, this is by far the most unreliable and laggy server I've experienced.
Conclusion To say the least, I'm disappointed and genuinely disheartened with the current state of Darkfall. I am also extremely disturbed by the fact that it's Associate Producer, Tasos, has been claiming the game is "complete" for months. The game, if released today, might be able to maintain a very small following of ultra-hardcore Darkfall fans, but it could never attract and maintain the sort of critical mass a PvP-oriented game like this needs to be enjoyable. I'm afraid that unless drastic measures are taken by the dev team, Darkfall will go down as yet another multimillion dollar MMO failure.
Oh, and the Devs even censor the beta forums. Thats a real sign of confidence. This is just more proof that Darkfall is going to flop. Hard.
Mike:
To be honest, the devs are pretty strict on the forums. If they deem something is "nonconstructive", the squelch it. Overall, I think a lot of people are puzzled by the date of the game.
The fact that they banned you only speaks in their favor. Thanks, i was pretty much thinking it would flop, but after reading this topic my hope is renewed
I'm with Sigoya on this one. The signs definitely point to a potential flop but the definitive word on the subject can't be given until they have actually released a 'finished' product.
My mother always taught me if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything. Not that I always listen to her, but I think I will take her advice this round.
Draxonicar: So you're saying it will fail because idiots like you want it to? well, maybe if you try REAL hard, maybe Santa Claus will grant your wish.
Not very likely
Santa Claus granted one of my wishes, though. How do you think the Cupcake Empire was formed?
What happened to you is the EXACT same thing that happened to me on the "official" AoC(rap) forums following retail launch. Massive amounts of posters were banned and posts censored in an effort to form some kind of damage control. You couldn't even access the forums unless you had purchased the game!
When a game can't take honest criticism in its own forum, how can it hope to get better. We all know what happened to Age of Conan and it had pretty deep pockets. Darkfall will fail, it just doesn't have the financial backing to become a world-wide MMO.
From my early observations on how the forums were run, I never got a good feeling. Listening to beta testers and others hasn't risen my hopes any. I think that game is trying to accomplish alot in a short amount of time that I worry that there will be too many bugs/issues at/after launch. I'm felling the same way when I played AoC which was a piece of crap.
I intend to wait no less than 3 months after launch to see how things go before deciding if this game is anything worth considering.
auutumn: I think that game is trying to accomplish alot in a short amount of time that I worry that there will be too many bugs/issues at/after launch.
I agree with everything you said except the part about trying to accomplish a lot in a short amount of time. This game as been in some form of development since 2001. That's a lot of time for a game to be in development and have such awful beta leaks.
As far censoring the beta forums goes, I wish they would. That would imply that they even check the beta forums. Which I'm sure they do, but no new builds have come out for a while, so we're all just kinda sitting there with our thumbs up our asses singing the Peruvian National Anthem. So I'm gonna call bullshit on MikeAtUtah, the person who "leaked" the "they're so strict on the forums" crap.
I mean, fuck, they let me post there (maybe).
Of course, I'm saying this all from a purely hypothetical standpoint.
Yeah, I've lost a lot of confidence in AV as well. Perhaps they can turn around their horrible track record but I doubt it.
On a postive note, check out Mortal Online, some of the same concepts and clearly they value communication more then AV. Just the other day I got *gasp* a newsletter sent to me (that I had subscribed to) That one email contained just about as much communication as AV communicated the entire month before release of DF.
absolut187: Based on the treatment of the community so far, Aventurine thinks it is OK to treat their fans/customers like crap.
If you think its bad *before* they get your money, just wait until they already have it!
The moderators on official darkfall forums are clowns - They are super obnoxious and on a power-trip. I've been banned by Brannoc (the chief clown) for saying stuff that is obviously true (e.g. "Just admit that release is going to be delayed from Jan 22"). And I know a lot of others have also.
The developers seem to think that lying to fans is an acceptable hobby. Missing a deadline is one thing, but at a certain point it becomes intentional. When you *OBVIOUSLY* aren't going to meet a promised release date you should be up front and let people know - not wait until a few days before the date, and pretend its not your fault (blame your publisher, etc.). Moreover, you shouldn't ban people from the forums for saying that you are going to miss your deadline - when you KNOW you will.
I'm not buying the game because of their terrible treatment of their fans. Maybe DF will eventually release, but even if it does it will quickly implode.
Don't expect this crappy treatment to magically end just because a game is released.
Aventurine will treat its customers just as poorly as it has treated its fans. People who complain about bugs or other issues will be banned from the forums.
I've been following DF for 8 years and was really excited about the concept. But I would *NEVER* give these people my credit card number!! I wouldn't be surprised if these people just stole credit card numbers and skipped town!!
Actually once your in game they rub your feet and feed you cookies...
Well, I've not had the chance to actually play Darkfall at all yet, but I have been watching a lot of video clips on YouTube. Plus, I've been reading various forum posts about the game. From what I see in the videos, the game looks pretty sweet, but I'm hearing a lot of mixed feelings about the game (more negative than positive). But, I guess that's just the whole "not everyone likes the same flavor" stuff. I mean, Shadowbane looked kick ass, and so I started playing and have been hooked on it ever since. Darkfall seemed to me a little like a cross between Shadowbane and Ultima Online. If that really is the case, then hell yeah. But, I'd have to play it to find out for sure. I played WoW, hated it. Played Warhammer, was kind of lame. Hopefully Darkfall is as good as it looks.
Oh, and I never care what the moderators do to me on forums... I generally never post anything, anyway. Been registered on chronicle.ubi.com since 9/03 and have only posted 26 times. Lol.
Oh, and Shadowbane is free. :D!!! There's a Ubisoft service outage right now, and has been ongoing for the passed 6 days. But, it'll be back up soon. I guess ya can't complain when it's free to play, though, huh?
RiftZM2003: Well, I've not had the chance to actually play Darkfall at all yet, but I have been watching a lot of video clips on YouTube. Plus, I've been reading various forum posts about the game. From what I see in the videos, the game looks pretty sweet, but I'm hearing a lot of mixed feelings about the game (more negative than positive). But, I guess that's just the whole "not everyone likes the same flavor" stuff. I mean, Shadowbane looked kick ass, and so I started playing and have been hooked on it ever since. Darkfall seemed to me a little like a cross between Shadowbane and Ultima Online. If that really is the case, then hell yeah. But, I'd have to play it to find out for sure. I played WoW, hated it. Played Warhammer, was kind of lame. Hopefully Darkfall is as good as it looks.
Oh, and I never care what the moderators do to me on forums... I generally never post anything, anyway. Been registered on chronicle.ubi.com since 9/03 and have only posted 26 times. Lol.
I truly thought Darkfall would be THE next UO, only better. From everything I have seen the game is complete trash. Multiple hacks, queue times of over 4 hours, tons of glitches which are causing downtime, server instability (server hardware already? WTF?), etc.
Not to mention the horrible customer service (is it even considered customer service?) and lackluster communication from the company make this a 1 star rating hands down.
Based on the treatment of the community so far, Aventurine thinks it is OK to treat their fans/customers like crap.
If you think its bad *before* they get your money, just wait until they already have it!
The moderators on official darkfall forums are clowns -
They are super obnoxious and on a power-trip.
I've been banned by Brannoc (the chief clown) for saying stuff that is obviously true (e.g. "Just admit that release is going to be delayed from Jan 22"). And I know a lot of others have also.
The developers seem to think that lying to fans is an acceptable hobby. Missing a deadline is one thing, but at a certain point it becomes intentional. When you *OBVIOUSLY* aren't going to meet a promised release date you should be up front and let people know - not wait until a few days before the date, and pretend its not your fault (blame your publisher, etc.). Moreover, you shouldn't ban people from the forums for saying that you are going to miss your deadline - when you KNOW you will.
I'm not buying the game because of their terrible treatment of their fans.
Maybe DF will eventually release, but even if it does it will quickly implode.
Don't expect this crappy treatment to magically end just because a game is released.
Aventurine will treat its customers just as poorly as it has treated its fans.
People who complain about bugs or other issues will be banned from the forums.
I've been following DF for 8 years and was really excited about the concept.
But I would *NEVER* give these people my credit card number!!
I wouldn't be surprised if these people just stole credit card numbers and skipped town!!