Weekend Update, Thoughts on Server Wipes

Well the EU1 server was up for most of the weekend. Communication from the dev team was pretty slim until earlier today when Tasos posted the following. Two highlights:

To address an issue reported by players: We generally frown on unattended macroing and if you use macros you do so at your own risk, but it should be mentioned that spamming spells and any macroing WITHIN the protective radius of the guard towers in the starting areas will result in a kick, and repeated offenses could result in a ban.

This is a fair solution. This allows us to Macro outside of the protection of town guards, but leaves us vulnerable to being PK'd. I agree with this. It just makes you put a little more effort into finding good spots to do it for long overnight mana missile sessions. And it makes it pretty OK to leave a macro hitting your left mouse button every 11 seconds for 20 minutes while you deplete a resource node.

About Darkfall availability, we will give advanced notice for when more copies will be available. We need to run a few tests first to make sure things have improved and we will let you know when we officially make more copies of the game available. Availability is throttled because we need to make sure that the server population is having as good an experience as possible before we introduce more people and more servers. We hoped to be further along but have been held back by the account management system. We’ve made several optimizations since, and we’re working on a permanent solution as soon as possible.

Well this is rather vague. There is no indication of a ETA or timeline for when new accounts will be available. I suppose I will take the optimists point of view in that the DF team has been working hard troubleshooting problems (i.e. sync issues) and managed to get those under control relatively quickly. The four bastages who managed to get accounts report that the servers have been up and stable all weekend. Hopefully we'll see additional servers and accounts made available this coming week.

This leads me directly into my next topic, which has been causing a lot of noise on the MMORPG Darkfall forums about a server wipe. There is even a poll on the subject on the official forums. I'm glad to see that more than a third of the (potential) playerbase is not retarded. I generally don't expect much from the denizens of the interweb. Here are some of the reasons the 62.79% of the population who is retarded are throwing around as justification for a wipe:

-the poor handling of the preorders meant that not everyone got to start at the launch of the game

-clans that exploited the broken AI got enough gold for cities hours after the servers opened

-people who didn't get to preorder can't play yet and probably won't be able to any time soon

-there are still lots of people who preordered but their account is still not working

This superstar basically repeated one of his arguments three times. Even repeating it three times doesn't make it less stupid. Yes, 90% of the playerbase probably didn't get an account. Do you really think that the 10% who got it are going to dominate the server long term? This isn't like the UO housing rushes where servers were wiped numerous times. In that case, when you placed a house it was permanent. No one could take it from you. The only way they could change hands was through a sale, or someone letting their house decay (rare). Fortunately, Darkfall player created structures are in the same style as Shadowbane. Walls and buildings can (and will) be razed. Cities will change hands. Nothing is permanent. The players will determine the shape of the world. In fact I am looking forward to capturing some of the cities that have already been placed.

The other argument you see a lot is that the clans who placed cities exploited sync/AI issues and other bugs to quickly get enough gold to form a guild and place a city stone. LOD is taking a lot of heat for this as they were the first to create a guild and place a city. Grats to them but people are acting like this is GG already. As I said above, cities will change hands. If they fixed the issues and wiped the servers again I'm pretty sure most of the same guilds would end up placing cities first again, simply due to the amount of players they managed to get into the game. As of earlier this weekend there were 41 players on LOD's roster. I can't check the numbers easily but I'm sure the other guilds who placed early are also rather large (SUN, Drunken Beggars, Winterblades, Redemption, Societas Demonica).

Lastly, if you really have a problem with it, there will more likely than not be additional servers opened when new accounts are made available. Just start on the fresh one. Server pop of the EU1 server is already over 5k. I have to admit I am actually curious to see if EU1 will remain the most competive server of the bunch.

Feel free to comment.