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!

Tasos on New Darkfall Sales and Cheating

There's a new update from Tasos today on the official forums. First some tidbits about new account sales and support requests.

The shop will be open today again for a limited number of copies. This will happen at 3PM GMT.

For the mentally challenged, 3PM GMT = 11AM EST.

Second, having to do with support requests: If you see your support request priority is low, it doesn't mean that we’ve classified as low, it actually means it was handled immediately. Requests are currently prioritized by order received. New requests have a lower priority than older ones.

OK. Here's the good bits about cheating and exploiting:

Concerning cheating and exploiting: We’re banning some people almost every day but the problem is minimal to say the least. We’ve also been working on addressing the issue at the source as time permits.

Most of the people getting banned are confused by claims they cannot be detected because we have a small team and won’t dedicate resources. Trolling posts on this and other forums and videos on Youtube attempt to create the false impression that cheating is rampant. The logic behind this is: everyone is doing it, and so should you. This couldn’t be further from the truth however.

Most of the people posting about cheating in Darkfall aren't even playing the game and are doing so to create an impression. The only way to really know what’s happening in the game is to ask a few players you know for a fact are playing how many times they’ve seen people using exploits since we started banning for it.

We also get reports by players in the game about other players exploiting. In most cases the players reported hadn't been exploiting, in others a lot of people are reporting the same one person, or repeating what others are saying.

The only reason we are addressing this matter is to protect Darkfall players from getting banned by using these programs. We permanently ban all accounts using exploits. It's sad to have to ban someone who just bought the game, but we don't warn, inform, hesitate, or explain. We do this to protect the game and the players. The fact is that if you're using third party programs to exploit, it’s just a matter of time before you’re banned.

Thanks for reading,
The Darkfall Team

This is the interesting part. Especially where he tries to understate the problem as mostly a lot of noise produced by forum trolls and youtube videos.

Personally I have to admit there were only two or three times I ever suspected someone of speedhacking. The first occassion was the day I started playing at the goblin spawn, and for all intesive purposes just could have been lag. The few other times have usually been fights with Alfar and may just be something strange with their sprint animations. It doesn't help that my PC specs aren't the best (E6600, 7950GT and only 2GB DDR2) - my FPS does stutter occasionally.

The only time I really felt someone was speedhacking was at a wilderness bank with a guildmate when I spotted some alfar coming towards us in the distance on foot. I was naked harvesting some steedgrass and my guildmate was geared so I said just run I'll keep them busy. I turned around to put my sickle and herbs in the bank and before I even finished putting 4 or 5 items in the bank they were already right on top of me! They killed me standing at the bank and immediately set off after my guildmate who had a head start on them and somehow managed to catch him as well.

There was one other occasion where I felt someone was using a map/radar hack. Three of us were at a Ciel Fey spawn. I don't remember the exact details but one of my guildmates hid in the nook of one of those big trees in the elf lands with the giant roots you can hide under. It was located on an island in the middle of a lake near the spawn we were at. He was on the island resting while we were on the mainland shore and spotted the enemy approaching. Two of us stood and fought on the mainland while he stayed hidden the entire time. After we were killed 2v6 they immediately went straight for him. We all thought it was fishy, especially when he showed me afterwards. If you were on the shore of the lake looking at the island and ran 360 degrees around it, the angle of view where you could have possibly spotted him was probably less than 20 degrees. Not to mention the fact that he is a Mirdain, sitting in the nook of a tree root in tall grass at a significant distance.

I have to admit that these occurances all occured prior to Tasos announcing their 1 strike and you're out policy with respect to illegal third party programs. Whatever that's worth, it does lend some validity to Tasos' statement.

On a broader level I wholly support their stance and hope that what they're doing to combat cheating is effective.

For the record, EB as a guild has not and does not use nor condone the use of third party cheats. There's no glory in victory if it was done with hacks. This mentality is a carry over from the our old UO days where even using pots in a duel was considered an admission of being a newb.

If you see us in Darkfall, you can rest assured of two things:

1) A fair fight, within the boundaries and ruleset of the game.
2) Dying.

Related Posts:
Mike Darga's Game Design Blog: Make Cheating a Part of Your Game

They're Not Making it Easy, 27 New Accounts Created today and Darkfall Speed Hacks

I tried again to get an account for Darkfall. I must have hit F5 about 100 times over the course of 30 minutes around 7PM GMT when the account management site was open for new subscriptions. I got as far as clicking on the continue to your order button but never any further.

It is hard to tell what the long term implications from this horrible launch will be. Looking at the past, I think it is safe to say that Age of Conan shot itself in the foot because of all the problems it had at launch. The Darkfall devs are essentially staggering in their new players in order to stress test the server. This may allow them to optimize server populations in the future. The problem is they're pissing off a lot of people in the process. I hope that this doesn't end up alienating so many potential players that the game doesn't last.

I really hope that they succeed. But their certainly not making it easy. There are also reports of players using third party programs to speed hack. I was skeptical at first until I came across this YouTube video:


This needs to be addressed immediately. It is one thing to exploit crappy AI or bugs in game but an entirely different ballgame to use third party programs to defeat other players in PvP. There is no point in fighting honorably and fairly if your opponent will simply cheat to defeat you. In my opinion there is nothing more pathetic. An example, last night I was playing Counterstrike: Source (since I still can't play Darkfall...) and some guy joined the server and promptly got owned a few times. He apparently rhee'd in real life and told everyone to F**k off n*****s. Naturally I laughed out loud at his reaction. A few seconds later he was somehow crashing the server. It was funny and pathetic to me at the same time. I took it with a grain of salt since it was just a counterstrike game, but when similiar game breaking hacks are applied to an persistant MMO world then we have a problem Houston...

I hope that the Darkfall development teams is able to resolve these issues quickly. If left unchecked they could end up being the nails in the coffin for Darkfall Online. I have had enough of Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard producing carebear, no consequences, zero risk, mega grind MMO's. I came across an interesting blog post today from Scott Jennings, AKA Lum the Mad from the old UO days. I would venture to say that he is a bit of a carebear himself, but at least he is rooting for us bad guys:

http://www.brokentoys.org/2009/03/02/punching-babies-why-darkfall-can-should-and-must-succeed/

Leave a comment if you believe in Darkfall Online!