Finally, Adventurine to Launch NA Darkfall Server US1 by July 2009

The following press release showed up on Yahoo Finance yesterday. I missed it because I was busy enjoying Memorial Day with a backyard BBQ. Here's the full release, also available here and here:

Darkfall Comes to Light in North America on GNi's Game Optimized Hosting Platform
SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aventurine SA, a computer games developer located in Athens, Greece has expanded its relationship with GNi to host their groundbreaking game, Darkfall Online, in North America with a launch scheduled for release later this summer.
“We’re very happy with our results in Europe with GNi and we continue to add content to the game and rapidly grow the community. GNi’s network has proven to be very fast and robust, allowing us to deliver Darkfall Online in the best possible way to our customers. It is for these reasons as well as GNi’s commitment and dedication to the Darkfall Online franchise, that Aventurine selected GNi as our dedicated hosting partner in North America. We are confident that GNi will continue to deliver the world-class service and unparalleled network performance in North America that we have experienced in Europe,” said Zad Mehdawi, President of Aventurine SA.

“Aventurine has seen great growth in Europe and we are excited to have Darkfall Online running on GNi’s platform in both Europe and North America. Darkfall appeals to the serious PVP gamer looking for large-scale combat and, in turn, has a devoted player base that few other games can boast. We are happy to be selected by Aventurine to provide a dedicated hosting solution for Darkfall Online in North America. We know that there is significant demand for the game and we are ready to deploy servers for the upcoming launch,” said Derek Wise, Founder and CTO of GNi, Inc.

Darkfall Online Offers Highly Immersive Experience
Darkfall Online is a Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) fantasy role-playing game featuring a fun, fast-paced, real-time combat system, massive battles, clan warfare and empire building. Darkfall combines role-playing, action, and strategic gameplay. Darkfall has been designed to create intensely realistic and highly immersive combat and a challenging, realistic environment for a more immersive experience. With full collision detection, battle lines really matter and well-aimed spell blasts will send opponents flying. Darkfall’s goal is to provide players with a fun and challenging experience through a seamless and zoneless, non-instanced, “sandbox” game world.

Game to Be Launched by July in North America
The high demand for Darkfall has made a North American server a priority with Aventurine. The company expects the North American server, US1, to launch by July 2009.

About Aventurine and Darkfall:
Aventurine SA is an independent computer games developer located in Athens, Greece. Aventurine is fueled by passion for gaming and game technologies, which motivates and guides our activities. Aventurine’s main project is Darkfall Online, a groundbreaking MMORPG launched in February 2009. Development of the game, the technology platform, game engine, and tools began in 2003. The Darkfall team consists of thirty five veteran developers. Visit us at www.darkfallonline.com

About GNi
GNi is the leading dedicated hosting provider for online games, Software-as-a-Service, Web 2.0, and Online Digital Media. GNi’s infrastructure supports more than 12.8 million users, 425,000 concurrent connected users at peak capacity, and more than 27 titles. GNi delivers rapid scalability with uncompromised performance. GNi solutions thrive in the most demanding online environments and offer a variety of smart systems including rapid on-boarding and deployment. GNi is headquartered in San Jose, California with infrastructure facilities located across the globe. For more information please visit www.gni.com.

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Still no word regarding character and item transfers. Personally I'm still on the fence, only because I've invested a fair amount of time into my character. Putting that aside, I have to admit that I agree a fresh server with no transfers is most likely the best route. Although I wouldn't mind taking my guy over to US1 and raping all the bastard bastages who refused to play until an NA server came out.

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.