Tasos Responds to Alliance Leader Issues

MMORPG.com:

King Manus of the Hyperion Alliance had an issue with the lack of doors on city gates and cities in general. He complained that the ability of enemy players to come in through the gates or over the walls from elevated terrain is hampering enjoyment of the game's raid and siege mechanics.

Tasos Flambouras:

This has been fixed already by adding gates to cities. We also added guard towers to clan cities. We're working on fixing the few miscellaneous bugs with walls and access points to cities. So this issue has been addressed and will continue to be addressed.

MMORPG.com:

King Manus of the Hyperion Alliance also made mention of the amount of time that it takes the clan tab to load, feeling that the length of time it takes makes clan management "a chore".

Tasos Flambouras:

This is being worked on as we speak in-game, but you'll be able to take care of clan administration outside the game as well. We're going to add this functionality in the next few patches.

MMORPG.com:

King Manus of the Hyperion Alliance complains that players being able to stand on the heads of other players negates the possibilities of battle lines, shield walls and the like.

Tasos Flambouras:

Standing on the heads of other players isn't very realistic, it's true, but neither is magic.

I will disagree strongly that battle lines are negated. We're seeing battle lines being used very effectively. Clans adapt and tactics evolve with what the players are able to do. This is the first MMORPG that we know about that formations are effective in combat, and where smaller, well organized groups can destroy much larger ones.

If a game mechanic gets in the way of a standard formation, then you have the freedom to modify your formation to deal with it.

MMORPG.com:

Lord Gluttony of the Coalition of the Chillin complained that "crashing sucks".

Tasos Flambouras:

Yes it does suck. We're addressing the client crashes some players have been experiencing, most have been fixed but it's time consuming to get to the bottom of all causes of client crashing since this exists at the user level. In our current patch we've addressed the virtual address crashes. As for the server going down while there are sieges in progress, we are modifying the siege mechanics to address this problem. We already made it so mounts and rafts remain in the game.

All these are high priority issues with us and we're heavily invested in solving every one of these cases.

MMORPG.com:

Yomm Hakine of the DUSK Alliance noted that Cheating and Exploits were issues with the game.

Tasos Flambouras:

This is another high priority issue with us.

I'm going to differentiate between macroing, exploiting gameplay mechanics, and using 3rd party programs to cheat with.

We are fixing any gameplay mechanics that can be exploited as fast as we can find them. Every patch has fixes for things that we've discovered since the last one. About macroing, we've taken many serious steps to curbing its use and making it less effective. We will continue doing so and have many more solutions waiting to be deployed.

Now about using 3rd party programs to cheat with: Cheating is an issue with every multiplayer game from Counterstrike to World of Warcraft. Because of Darkfall being a highly competitive game, any hint of exploitation causes quite a stir making it seem worse than it actually is. The truth is that this is not a big issue in Darkfall but we're treating it as one.

We've taken measures to detect and permanently ban anyone using 3rd party programs to cheat in the game. We're also working on many levels to address the problem at the source, from pursuing action against the makers of these programs in cooperation with other game developers, to rendering the 3rd party programs ineffective in our game, to detecting and banning the exploiters.

Don't mistake my saying that this is not a big issue, with a lack of willingness on our part to react. We have dedicated and continue to dedicate serious resources to this until it becomes a non-issue. I'll explain however what I mean:

First, almost every cheater we've banned seems to have created a lot of characters, some accounts more than 50. They delete and create new characters many times a day thinking this will confuse detection. So the same account can be reported dozens of times under different names making it seem like there are a lot more people cheating than there actually are.

It's very often that we see reports about specific players using exploits, and them being used over and over as examples to show how exploits are rampant in the game, and yet we know that these particular guys have already been banned. They are referenced for weeks though to illustrate how rampant cheating is in Darkfall. We don't like the idea of a hall of shame for our players however.

We take reports about cheaters very seriously, but please keep in mind that most of complaining is highly exaggerated, even bogus, and a lot of it is coming from the people making and promoting these programs, from players who are banned already, by players who are using the cheats, by people with an agenda, by people who aren't even in the game, and others who are just jumping on the bandwagon.

Most player reports of cheaters are about players who are not actually cheating. Our own GMs get reported very often if that's an indication. People that lose fights, in the heat of the moment often assume their opponent wasn't fighting fair. Very good players are often accused of using hacks.

Even with all the mistaken reports of people exploiting and the multiple characters per account, there are actually few names reported, and few screenshots or videos of people cheating. If cheating was rampant then we would expect to see reports with specific player names everywhere. It's all really about perception.

And who are the people that use these exploits anyway? We understand that any encounter with an exploiter is annoying and frustrating but are these people actually impacting the server? Are they a factor? You'd think they would be if it was widespread but this is not the case.

All the top players and clans on the server are there without having to resort to cheating. In assessing the significance of cheating in Darkfall, this fact speaks for itself. We won't rest though until the players feel comfortable about these facts too.