Aventurine – Page 2 – MMO Fallout

Darkfall's Return Promo Caveat

Aventurine has launched a brand new promotion to bring in new and returning Darkfall players. Starting February 5th and heading into the 13th, Aventurine has discounted the cost of the client by 75%, as well as 45% off of a six month subscription. Existing players with accounts in good standing will find that they are able to log in and play for free through the same period. The catch? You’ll have to contact support to reactivate your character if you’ve been gone for a while.

Please Note: Regarding the Return to Darkfall players: If your account has been inactive for over 3 months, your character is stored. In order to restore the character you need to contact support by submitting a support ticket and they will do it for you as quickly as possible.

Hopefully Aventurine’s support will be able to get to those characters in a timely manner.

(Source: Darkfall)

Darkfall: Unholy Wars Short On Subscribers

Today’s Taco Tuesday discussion comes to us from the Darkfall: Unholy Wars forum where a rather interesting event has taken place. In a recent stream, Aventurine’s own Creative Director Claus Grovdal revealed some of his own hopes for future content. Grovdal wants to see a new class introduced, one that would deploy turrets and function as a support class much like engineer classes in other MMOs. He would also like to see repeatable prowess quests, introduce more quests into the game, and provide more loot for players, as well as improving the user interface, which Grovdal apparently does not like.

Grovdal also revealed that the game currently holds twenty thousand subscribers, which is quite a feat for a small developer. Unfortunately, he also notes that Aventurine wants thirty five thousand total to cover expenses, putting Darkfall well below its target. With Grovdal as the new creative director, hopefully he can put a plan into action and bring Aventurine up to its target subscription count.

(Source: Stream)

Darkfall Introducing Auction House

Auction houses are terrible, at least that’s what the hardcore sandbox community tells me, because it just isn’t a real sale unless you’ve walked a hundred miles uphill through the snow with everyone and their brother attacking you along the way to steal your goods. And who doesn’t want to put up with that on a daily basis? Alright, not all at once.

But that’s about hardcore MMOs, and we’re talking about Darkfall. In the latest blog post, Aventurine has detailed an upcoming market system for Darkfall Unholy Wars that will allow players to buy and sell items from one of several cities scattered around the world. Similar to games like Guild Wars 2, players will not only be able to place items up for sale, they will also be able to issue buy orders for specific items at specific prices. The article touts that this system will make the game “truly player driven,” with excesses and shortages dictating an overall market price.

You can read more about the market at the link below, as well as incoming changes to villages.

(Source: Epic Blog)

Daily Dose of Melodrama

I almost decided to hold this off until a Community Monday, but in a way it is almost too good to hold back. I found this post floating around several MMO forums, so stay with me if you have already read it. It is a letter by a gamer who refuses to play Darkfall because there is a subscription price, and he doesn’t want to send the message that subscription MMOs are “acceptable.” To add to the drama, the thread I found this post in was prefaced with “I read this post on another forum…and quite literally wanted to vomit.”

There might be more humor in taking the poster at their word, that the thought of someone with a different opinion made them quite literally nauseous.

The Deal Breaker

This is a message mostly towards the devs, but also a statement for my fellow gamers. I’ve seen bits of Darkfall for quite a few years now. I originally lost interest during my highschool years when everything else in life bogged down on me. Seeing it on steam, I was excited and even pondering whether or not to purchase it like I always wanted to. Then I saw the business model…

That death sentence for any mmo in 2013; $15 a month. Can you even fathom how utterly dissapointed I was? I’ve seen gameplay videos of this game; they look interesting! Fun! Good! I really, REALLY wanted to play this game soooo badly. $40? Sure! I don’t mind paying a good lump of cash for an mmo. Pay once to play forever mmos are by far my favorite; unfortunately that wasn’t the case here.

I still considered buying the game for awhile, but eventually came to the conclusion that in doing so, I was making a statement not just to the devs of this game, but all devs for any mmo, that subscription fees are acceptable. They’re not. Cash shops; expansion packs; things like that are more than welcomed. But blatant subscription fees are a thing of the past. An ugly archaic practice that can not compete with other business practices these days. Something I have to vote ‘no’ at with my wallet

It’s the deal breaker for me, and I’m sorry to see it happen to what looked like a really good game. I hope those of you playing this game are enjoying it thoroughly for that extra $15 a month. As for the rest of you considering whether or not to purchase this game, take into consideration what paying may mean for the rest of the gaming community. What will those added votes, your payments, do to influence the industry later on? Are you alright with the return of the subscription era? Do you wan’t to motivate developers and publishers to find compromise in better business models that don’t tax players? Think long and hard about this before you hit that ‘purchase’ button.

Best of wishes.

Darkfall North American Server Hit By DDoS

Indie MMOs, as we know all too well here at MMO Fallout, are dangerously prone to distributed denial of service attacks, often from either disgruntled (and banned) cheaters/griefers or revenge from recently banned gold farmers. Now Darkfall Unholy Wars has a boatload of people from both categories, so the root cause could be any one of the two.

Aventurine has posted a notice on the official blog that there has been a DDoS attack aimed at bringing down the North American server.

In regard to the ping issues on the NA server the past couple of days, this was due to a DDoS attack during NA prime time. We have taken measures in cooperation with our hosting providers to filter this attack, and we’re monitoring the situation. We’ll keep you updated and we apologize for any inconvenience.

The likelihood of the culprit being caught (or even identified at that) is unlikely, given the nature of a denial of service attack.

(Source: Darkfall Epic Blog)

Aventurine Lays Out Roadmap For Darkfall

Darkfall Unholy Wars has launched and is under way for ongoing development. Due to popular demand, and a commitment by Aventurine to stay in touch with their community, the developer has laid out a roadmap for the weeks to come, detailing weekly planned updates in May and June. The updates add new monsters, tweaks to game systems, new content, and more.

These are just some of the things we have planned that we’re reasonably sure will be added to the game according to the schedule. There is also a “Community Issues” component in our content updates and patches that will be addressing player concerns, issues and working on player suggestions on a regular basis.

You can check out the roadmap at the link below.

(Source: Darkfall Forums)

See People Get Banned In Darkfall: Unholy Wars

I have often said that MMO gamers are a notoriously vindictive bunch, and I count myself as part of that demographic. There is something undeniably satisfying about being able to see that a gold farmer or an abusive player that you reported has been banned, a satisfaction that is generally denied by developers unwilling to divulge any information regarding action taken against accounts. In games like RuneScape, where being banned means removal from the high scores, you can generally assume that someone is banned even if it isn’t explicitly stated.

For Darkfall Unholy Wars, there is the Unholy Banhammer, a database where no-goodniks are strung up on display with their username, clan (if applicable) and reason for ban for everyone to see. The list is populated pretty heavily by gold farming accounts with gibberish names like Fdsdgd Cvdfsggb. You can check out the complete list of names (currently 63) below, updated regularly.

(Source: Unholy Banhammer)

Darkfall Unholy Wars Launches April 16th

Darkfall is launching April 16th. Is the game ready for launch after five months of delays? That is not for me to say at the moment, considering the game is still under a nondisclosure agreement. Aventurine has announced today that they are going ahead and gearing up for launch in mid-April, bringing the relaunch of Darkfall to gamers homes all over the world. Unholy Wars brings with it major changes to the Darkfall we all knew and loved, including a brand new method of leveling, a new UI and improved graphics, as well as changing the way players choose their combat roles.

The Darkfall community who participated in the beta provided the development team with invaluable feedback a lot of which led to additions and changes to the game, and will lead to many more in the near future. We believe the game has benefited greatly through the Beta process, and we are excited about what lies ahead. We know we have a lot of work to do and we will never be satisfied as we strive to make Darkfall Unholy Wars the best PvP MMORPG experience.

You can read the full announcement below. Darkfall Unholy Wars has been available for some time for pre-order, with existing members receiving a discount on the initial purchase price.

(Source: Darkfall)

Darkfall Unveils Salvaging and Prowess Points

Darkfall’s remake Unholy Wars still has a way to go before launching, but Aventurine continues to update the game regularly with new bug fixes and features. In a post on the Unholy Wars forums today, Tasos Flambouras discusses two systems new to Darkfall in Unholy Wars: Prowesss Points and salvaging. The first, Prowess Points, is the new way in which players will progress in the game. As players take part in activities, such as fighting mobs, other players, gathering materials, or crafting items, they will obtain prowess points. Prowess points are then used to raise attributes and skills. According to the forum post, crafting skills will still be leveled up in the old-fashioned manner, through crafting items.

Salvaging on the other hand is a new skill that most MMO gamers should be familiar with. Essentially the opposite of crafting, salvaging allows you to take finished items and revert them back into their base crafting materials. All equippable crafted items can be salvaged, as well as new “broken” versions of equippable items that are dropped from mobs, and exist solely for salvaging. You can read the other details about salvaging at the link below.

Darkfall: Unholy Wars is slated for release.

(Source: Salvaging)
(Source: Prowess Points)

Night Cap: When Excitement Expires

Thank you for joining me for a night cap. Remember a time when Darkfall was on track for launch? Neither do I. Now, I’m not going to be mean to an indie developer for not making a release date, I know only enough that much larger companies have just as much of a problem meeting deadlines, but I have to admit: the excitement is waning. It’s been a good month or two since we’ve heard anything of substance from Aventurine on the status of Darkfall: Unholy Wars. My personal diary (this website) says December 11th as the last day anything meaningful was revealed about the release of Unholy Wars, and even then it was a non-direct sometime-in-the-future statement.

It is February 1st, we’ll be heading into three months from the initial November 20th, 2012 target date for Unholy Wars, and even further if you would go as far as to count Darkfall: Unholy Wars as still being the final product of what was once called “Darkfall 2010.” On November 14th, Aventurine delayed launch until December 12th. Late at night on December 11th, the day before launch, Aventurine delayed Unholy Wars yet again to an undisclosed date sometime hopefully in 2013. Mid-December, Aventurine opened up preorders for Unholy Wars, allowing new players and old to join up and play the beta until the new game launched. Those players aren’t in any place to tell us anything, as there is still an NDA in effect.

And again, I’m not going to be mean to an indie dev for not making their launch date, but it begs to question: Did Aventurine really think that Unholy Wars would be ready for November 20th? If you read the news posts, the first delay into December is most closely attributed to the sudden and unexpected approval on Steam Greenlight. The second delay was due to a desire by Aventurine to have the game tested by members of the community. After that, how long can Aventurine keep the public’s attention before they all walk away to check out the other attractions?

After all, there is only so far you can go on trailers and feature lists.

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