New Update from Tasos on Availability, Cheating, and More

Another update from Tasos yesterday on the official forums, here's the interesting bits:

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.

This is fitting. I was actually going to write a follow up post to my last one regarding cheating. Of course the day after I wrote that post I got attacked by a speed hacker whose name was something like IllIlISimpleIllI IlIIJacklII. I haven't reported anyone yet, but I reported him just because his name is so retarded. If thats not strong evidence that someone is using 3rd party programs I don't know what is. I could only describe his name to the GM but it looks like he's getting banned anyway. I hope he doesn't read the forums.

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.

Good to know. As I said before I really haven't had that many experiences where I suspected anyone of speed hacking. I think a lot of the complaining probably stems from newbs getting owned and whining about it afterwards.

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 haracters 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.

LOL now this is a bit ridiculous. Small skirmishes in DF are in the range of 10-40 people involved with no performance issues. Most other games are able to pull this off just fine. Once you get to siege oriented PvP with numbers in the hundreds, performance definitely becomes an issue. Granted, some people with top of the line PCs are reporting that the game is running fine for them. I have to at least give some credit where credit is due, they are managing to get the small/medium size fights to run smoothly but sieges still have a ways to go. All this exaggeration can't be good though. I think Tasos and Adventurine need to take some business courses on managing expectations...

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

The store has been up longer than usual which is a good thing. It will be nice once it is available 24/7. Now we just need NA-1 to be announced!