Darkfall's March 21 update addresses lag, macroing and game availability

by Joe Blancato Mar 22nd 2009 at 10:00AM

Filed under: Fantasy, Darkfall, Bugs, Exploits, PvP, Server downtime, News items

Tasos, Darkfall's community guy, posted an update on the official boards on Saturday addressing a litany of concerns that have been plaguing the user base since the game's launch.

While he did include patch notes in the update, the majority of his message dealt with issues beyond the game's live design. Tasos claims server queuing has been resolved, as have lag and random crash issues that have been popping up since release.

He also says Aventurine, Darkfall's developer, will credit players with 34 days of free play time to compensate for the problems they've been experiencing.

Since Aventurine only made the game available to a limited number of subscribers, North American fans of the game haven't yet been able to actually buy the game. The company is hoping to make the game available for sale again "sometime this coming week; again it will have to be a limited amount of copies to allow a smooth integration of new players into the game." But no news on which regions will have access to Darkfall yet.

In addition to availability issues, Tasos specifically mentioned unattended macroing as a problem Aventurine wants to address. The practice of using third-party programs to improve a character while the player doesn't monitor the character's progress is as old as MMOGs; it was particularly popular in another skill-based game, Ultima Online.

The company as yet doesn't have a hard-coded solution to deal with macroers, but Tasos included this note in the update: "we will appeal to players not actually playing the game to log off rather than leaving their character in-game. This will allow more people to be able to enjoy Darkfall instead of unmanned characters taking up server space. If you're skilling up by not playing the game as it was intended, you will be kicked and repeated offenses will result in a ban."

Tags: aventurine, cheating, darkfall, darkfall-online, hardcore, macro, patch-notes, pvp, tasos

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Harmen said on 10:16AM 3-22-2009

*sigh*. There is no difference nor preference between American and European accounts. There is limited server space, so there are not that many accounts for sale, but those which do get sold are not specific to europeans.

Verit said on 1:04PM 3-22-2009

As I recall technically if you live in the US you aren't supposed to be playing yet as it was a European release only.

Harmen said on 1:22PM 3-22-2009

No, they are ok with it and even offered to transfer characters to an eventual American server.

Dude said on 10:45AM 3-22-2009

This is turning into the biggest comedy of all time. Feel like getting popcorn out when I read troll and fanboi responses about this game.

Ariel said on 11:56AM 3-22-2009

what a jerk !!!

Cray said on 1:14PM 3-22-2009

If they don't have a way of controlling the macro-ing via security measures, its not be easy to convince people to follow the rules and log off.

Too many gamers cheat.

Holgar said on 1:31PM 3-22-2009

More stuff that should have been adressed in Beta.......

Let me say right here that if there is ONE single thing to be said about the war against gold famers and macroers and so forth its that banning them AFTER the fact dose not stop them. In fact it usually dosen't even slow them down.....

Why should hackers and macroers in darkfall be any different?

An ounce of prevention= about a ton of cure in this case.

SURE as long as few new accounts are getting made there will be an eventual decrease in the number of Hackers/macroers as they eventually all get banned.

But it still dosen't solve the problem that the game is super macroable and open to hacks.

As long as there is a way to cheat people will cheat and ruin the game for others.

Banning them after the fact will only be effective if you never let another person onto the server and just keep weeding out the hackers and macroers.

You NEED a warden type program if you want to actually SOLVE the problem.....

Somthing that should have been in the ALPHA version.

And while we are on the fact this is coming from Tasos the same dude who said that Darkfall was "Feature complete" 11 months ago...... the person who assured us that the "Advanced internal testing would ensure a smooth launch with only a short beta." taken at face value this post should not be....

The credit thing I'm pretty sure its just a 4 day credit on top of the 30 days you get with purchase of the game not 34 more days.

Finally I would like to say that ever since the "Queue fix" the already small number of Mobs in Darkfall has reportedly gotten even smaller.......