Darkfall Launch Update
Aventurine's Tasos Flambouras has released a short statement regarding the issues facing the sandbox game on launch day.
We’ve been waiting for the pre-orders to process through billing and it has been moving along but not fast enough. We’re almost done with this. Many of you will be getting notifications of this during this process. As soon as this is concluded we’ll process the accounts and open up the servers for the pre-orders. This will be done tonight; the game has been ready and waiting.
Unfortunately we’re running behind schedule as far as opening up the extra sales which we hoped to do tonight as well. We’ll do this tomorrow as early as possible, likely sometime around noon GMT time, around the time of our first scheduled maintenance. At this time we will also process the problematic accounts which had 0 euro problems, no charges, no balance, but received a successful pre-order message. We are also looking into the few cases that have pre-ordered but have not received a confirmation email and we will resolve all these issues. Most of these problems were due to a combination of lag, multiple sessions, and multiple charge attempts.
We want to thank you for your patience again, and we would like to let you know that we’re adding a couple more days to the free month of play making them 33 for everyone that pre-ordered and that will buy the game tomorrow. This is to make up for any bad experience with the account management, the lag and the delays you’ve had to face with purchasing.
The traffic volume we’ve been experiencing has been unbelievably high because of the initial rush and was compounded by users hammering the system with multiple sessions. You should also know that we have been doing everything necessary to resolve all these issues as soon as possible.
We’ll post again as soon as the server is open.
Best,
Tasos
Update #1: Since the release of the original statement, Tasos has posted once again on the game's official forums, an update as of 4am GMT on the 26th:
A bug was discovered during final testing, and we need to resolve it before we can open up the servers. We didn’t want to launch to just say we launched. We can’t apologize enough for the long delay. The current ETA is 2 hours but it could be longer. We will launch as soon as possible and we will keep you updated.
We have extended the free month to 33 days to compensate for the inconvenience. Problems will occur from time to time but we need you to know that we’re committed to supporting this game to the best of our ability. It’s unfortunate that we facing these issues at launch, and we’ll do everything we can to make this up to you.
The Darkfall Team
Update #2: Hitting the Darkfall Offficial site upon waking up this morning, I notice that the servers are up and running and that the game has officially launched. The game's status on our game list now reflects this.
Servers are finally opening up after a 12 hour delay. Processing the pre-orders took much longer than the original estimate we were given, and we caught a bug at the last minute that we didn’t want to launch with. We apologize for the long delay and we hope you enjoy your first day in Darkfall.
For the players that are getting lobby errors, check your version and if you don’t have build 1.0.35, get it from http://www.eu1.darkfallonline.com/dl/Darkfall.exe
We have extended the free month of play to 33 days to thank you for your patience and to try to begin making up for the inconvenience.
We’ll process the problematic pre-orders that were not charged, and have 0 balance later today. If you pre-ordered successfully but weren’t charged, or haven’t received your final notice for the remaining successful charge, you’ll need to be patient a few hours longer. We’ll also look at opening up more sales by tomorrow. We are a little behind schedule but we're catching up.
Forums have been down due to large volume, almost double our highest traffic to date, people weren’t able to access them. We brought them down in order to be able to post communications so you would know what was going on. MMORPG.com was kind enough to post our first announcement but we need to be able to communicate through the official Darkfall community. Darkfall IRC was causing the Stratics network problems with its volume and it was also temporarily shut down at Stratics request. The forum will be back as soon as possible, and we hope we can keep it up.
We’ll do our best to keep you updated.
Thank you
The Darkfall Team
Interested parties can rate Darkfall Online in our rating system, here.
Update #3: This update came at 5:49pm GMT
After addressing a couple of early issues the servers have been running very stable for several hours and we have a large number of players in-game right now.
It’s normal to expect more issues to surface in the next couple of days. We postponed our scheduled maintenance of 10am GMT for later until we can gather some more data and address anything that comes up in a patch later tonight.
We’re aware that some areas are experiencing sync issues for some players. This is a high priority issue that we are working to address as soon as possible. We know the cause for it so it shouldn’t take very long. We will keep the servers up while this is being fixed and we will bring them down for a patch later tonight. For now, players can move away from starting areas to improve their experience.
We have processed the problematic accounts that were never charged but received a successful pre-order notification. Only a small percentage of these were successful and we found out that this is because most of them contain incomplete or incorrect account information. We will try this one last time again tomorrow morning European time, and we’ll open up account management later tonight for these accounts to be able to correct their account data and credit information before we reprocess them. If anyone does not want the pre-order to be processed, they should remove their credit card information from their account. After this is concluded we should be able to open up sales for more Darkfall copies.
That’s all for now, we’ll keep you updated with anything new that comes up.
The Darkfall Team
