Tasos Responds to Alliance Leader Issues

MMORPG.com:

Throne Rage of the Stasis Alliance said, "Lack of varied and meaningful ingame political options, a credible list of city siege features that actually mirror what happens ingame and lack of server optimization for massive siege warfare."

Tasos Flambouras:

Politics is a process where groups of people make decisions. Hard-coding this should be necessary only if your game has limited interaction options. Darkfall is highly political due to the level of interaction and freedom it allows, and because of the sheer number of players it supports in one world. We understand what Throne Rage is saying here however, and we're trying to find a good implementation of political and diplomatic options that won't stifle what's already occurring naturally. We're learning along with the players what's possible in the game. The same goes with the city siege features. We're always working on the mechanics and continuously trying to find if there's a better way. Expect to see major improvements wherever these are possible.

About massive battles, we don't know of another game that gets even close to supporting the size of battles Darkfall is supporting. We've said before that Darkfall's small skirmishes are considered massive battles in other games. Several hundred players on each side are an everyday occurrence, and we recently had over 2 thousand players fighting in the same area. Continuing to optimize performance for massive battles is one of our first priorities. This is what Darkfall is all about, and there will be major improvements in this field as well.

MMORPG.com:

Gordric Hirsh of the Yssam Alliance worries that 6 hours for a siege isn't a sustainable timeframe for moderately busy people.

Tasos Flambouras:

We agree with Gordric, and we're working on improving the siege mechanics so this is no longer such an issue.

MMORPG.com:

Gordric Hirsh of the Yssam Alliance said that there were still a few advertised features that weren't in-game yet.

Tasos Flambouras:

We're adding features to the game in every weekly patch, and we have a long prioritized list of features to be added, most of which haven't been advertised.

MMORPG.com:

Gordric Hirsh of the Yssam Alliance complained that "the ordering process has been terrible", which is splitting clans whose members are still attempting to purchase the game.

Tasos Flambouras:

Well this is of course true, but things are improving every day. This is a temporary problem and it stems from the demand. Consider this: Theirs is no "buy Darkfall" link. It's all happening by word of mouth and still the demand is overwhelming. We're opening up the shop every now and then and thousands of copies are bought up in a matter of minutes. Our first priority is to serve the players who are in the game, making sure they're having a good experience. This is why there are no queues to get into the game anymore, why we're not selling this game 24/7, and why we're just not throwing up servers in a hurry just to meet the demand - and we won't until we're ready to give good service. We're working non-stop on getting our capacity up, to get new servers up and on improving conditions in the existing ones.

This issue will be a thing of the past soon, and what's going to be left is an excellent game and an excellent user experience.