Darkfall's forums and chat brought down due to heavy traffic, servers finally online

Well the awaited hour has finally come true, Darkfall is online. While the delays have been numerous and the resulting traffic has basically crippled the Darkfall website, people are queuing up in the log in server to get a taste of what Agon has to offer them.

The delay was due to two problems -- the pre-order load and the staff had caught a critical bug in the game at the last moment. The heavy volume of pre-orders had taken longer to process than Aventurine had anticipated, leading them to delay the launch so more pre-orders could be properly processed. Afterwards, they delayed the launch again due to the wish of the development team to fix that last bug.

The heavy volume of players interested in the game's release had crippled the forums, shooting traffic to over double what it was at the launch of beta. Aventurine made the decision to bring down the game forums, instead only displaying a message regarding launch status on the forums page. This, in turn, brought more people into the Darkfall chat room run by Stratics, overloading that server and forcing Stratics to temporarily bring down the official chat.

Aventurine plans to relaunch the forums sometime today, with the hopes that they can keep the system online under all the duress. All current subscribers (those lucky few with boxes) will be given 33 days of subscription time instead of 30 to cover for all the delays.

Reader Comments (21)

"Gankfall" :O No thanks!

I'm interested in how the servers are running now that they are up. Certainly piling all of these players into a few starting zones at once is not a good thing.

It's not too busy, but there are some problems with laggy mobs. Ping times and stability are fine, it's just some mobs which you can't hit since they are lagged.

I'm also curious, I'm guessing it will quickly turn into a laggy blood bath resembling a frame by frame version of the battle of Iwo Jima.

Except significanly more concentrated.

except for some sync issues (that are to be fixed later tonight according to latest dev message) the game is pretty stable. to many people in newbie area's as you'de expect, a few idiots and the first racial Pk's are born.

except for the delay and server load it's going pretty smooth.

Even some who pre-ordered are still having problems. My CC has yet to be charged and my account is still inactive and yet I have apparently successfully pre-ordered this post-launched game.

Since the 25th, when the game was supposed to launch, the game has been offline more than it has been online.

~Ripper

Although it sucks not being able to get a pre-order (if you can even call it that anymore..) in, I really thought it was a good idea to take the forums and IRC channel down. There are so many trolls on forumfall its not even funny.

Sure we will have to wait a bit. I'm not really gonna miss having to fight the massive crowds of people in the starting areas.....

After getting a record number of 500 people we had to bring the forums down.

what a dick

Lol I have a feeling that this mmo will be one with the most unstable servers ever!

Well Gank Gank Gank!! I hate pvp and this title sounds like the worst mmo for me! As a pve player I like that dead is not a big issue in the end WoW handle it the best with a small dead run to body and if you not wana a 10 minutes debuff!

When a game goes live like this it would be nice for Massively to do a quick wrap-up of what the game's main features and selling points are.

Interesting they still have beta stuff all over the front page. They have absolutely nothing on the main site about the game even going live. Not even in the news area.

How are things going? On the mmorpg.com forums, here are complaints of:

* Inability to play, due to sync issues

* Alleged speedhacks

* Players who were previously able to play, but now have inactive accounts

* Players who successfully pre-ordered, but have inactive accounts

* Aventurine's billing system didn't validate charges (or even charge the nominal fee for the pre-order) during the pre-order process. If it did, there wouldn't be complaints of card information having been entered incorrectly. The cards would have been rejected at that point in time. This has lead many posters to believe that the card charges are being handled manually, or at least processed in batches. This, in turn, would account for the delays in processing pre-orders. After all, if they're handled manually, that could take a significant amount of time.

Aventurine has communicated, as minimally as possible, their issues via their forums page, IRC (when available) and mmorpg.com announcements, but their own website has yet to be updated.

I sincerely hope these issues are ironed out as quickly as possible.

~Ripper

Yeah I've been keeping up with the posts on mmorpg.com (I always do when a new MMO like this comes out) and they are just doom and gloom all around. It certainly is not boding well at all for darkfall and I can't help but say that I saw this coming.

Keep in mind, too, that Aventurine deliberately limited the number of players that could attempt to play at launch. At this point, the online store hasn't even opened up for the launch day buyers, so it's only the pre-order customers that are having trouble playing. On top of that, it's my understanding that there's only one game world (somebody correct me if I'm wrong - it's not like WoW, WAR or another game where you select a world/server/realm on which to play).

So, Aventurine is having trouble keeping up a single "server" (yes, I know it's a server cluster) for what is, basically, a tiny population of players. That's bad.

It's not like they're trying to handle 800k players or even 100k players. Their world can only handle up to 10k concurrent players. Assuming a conservative concurrency ration of 1:5 (concurrent players out of total players), they're still only trying to handle a maximum of 50k players, which is a very, very small population. Subtract the players having pre-order problems (how many are there?) and the total population gets smaller.

None of this bodes very well for Aventurine.

~Ripper

Agreed the whole "Inhouse server clusters than can handle 10-15k of players" is starting to look shaky. There are a few youtube videos released in the last few hours showing some awsome lagg........ I really want the game to suceed server side myself because that would be a technical leap for other mmo's to look to.

at midnight last night there were a total of 5000 players online, with over 7000 characters created.

this was 12 hours after server up.

at that type the newbie areas had over 4000 players (thats 3x 6 areas) in them.

EvE (the only other game that does it's world this way) has to coordinate with players to be able to support 1k people proforming combat in a single location...

As for billing: I have pre-ordered 3 accounts, 2 got in and played fine, one was not billed. that was more likely due to the fact that i made 3 purchases at a single location of the same ammount in a short time trigering the company's "fraud" alarm.

that said except for a lot of whining from people due to "speedhacks" (lag/sync issues - patching as i type this) i have litle to complain about at the moment gameplay wise.

as for billing - yeah.. more webserver power would have avioded all those issues.

While I appreciate the difficulty of handling thousands of players in a single geographic area, the total number of players online is very, very small. Had there been adequate stress testing, perhaps in an open beta, this could have been avoided.

I'm curious as to how many of those 7000 characters created have been deleted/re-rolled. There have been complaints of being stuck in queue for Human characters for which the only solution is to delete the character and create a new one. Additionally, those deleted character names are apparently reserved and can't be re-used when creating the new character.

Regarding the billing issues, it appears that there are some legitimate problems with the processing that aren't Aventurine's fault For example, there are reports of credit card companies fraud detection not allowing transactions due to them being initiated from a foreign country. That being said, it's still obvious that the transactions were processed after they were entered, not at the time they were entered. If they had been, players would have been notified on an unsuccessful transaction when they attempted to pre-order, not after they've already received emails stating their pre-orders were successful. That's definitely a problem and it's Aventurine's fault.

~Ripper

Give em a break. Its a brand new game from a small indie company if Im not mistaken. Every new mmo has issues at launch even WoW.

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Darkfall's forums and chat brought down due to heavy traffic, servers finally online

Reader Comments (21)

Posted: Feb 26th 2009 12:08PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Feb 26th 2009 12:23PM Nadril said

Posted: Feb 26th 2009 12:30PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Feb 26th 2009 12:43PM Holgranth said

Posted: Feb 26th 2009 1:30PM Temko said

Posted: Feb 26th 2009 8:54PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Feb 27th 2009 11:57AM Ripper McGee said

Posted: Feb 26th 2009 3:00PM godlyhalo said

Posted: Feb 26th 2009 3:14PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Feb 26th 2009 11:10PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Feb 26th 2009 3:26PM TheJackman said

Posted: Feb 26th 2009 3:36PM Pingles said

Posted: Feb 26th 2009 4:13PM MrGutts said

Posted: Feb 26th 2009 4:56PM Ripper McGee said

Posted: Feb 27th 2009 1:58AM Nadril said

Posted: Feb 26th 2009 5:16PM Ripper McGee said

Posted: Feb 26th 2009 5:24PM Holgranth said

Posted: Feb 27th 2009 4:53AM Temko said

Posted: Feb 27th 2009 11:13AM Ripper McGee said

Posted: Mar 5th 2009 1:27PM (Unverified) said

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