Small company botches MMO release; film at 11

I wouldn't even have thought it to be news, but the fact that the Darkfall launch didn't go all that smoothly caused a lot of commentary in the MMO blogosphere. The best report is probably that by Keen, because he explains a bit where exactly the problems are.

Other commenters let their prejudices for or against PvP games get the better of them. Scott Jennings aka Lum the Mad had problems with the rabid Darkfall fan community before, so he lashes out in what he himself calls an unhealthy level of glee. Which promptly causes Syncaine to call Lum a whiny fat kid. Must be behaving childishly day, the blogosphere isn't doing any better than my guild.

Pretty much every single MMO launch has some sorts of problems. Aventurine being a small company launching their first MMO it was certain from the start that there would be problems with accounting and servers. Warhammer Online in Europe had pretty much the same stupid accounting problems, and the same subtitled Hitler movies on YouTube as response. Whatever future game you are eagerly awaiting, do you really feel safe and comfortable pointing a finger a Darkfall for the bad quality of their launch, being confident that your favorite game won't have the problem?

I do hope that Darkfall gets their technical problems resolved soon, and that everyone who wants to play that game can do so without server or accounting problems. I don't think Darkfall will be a huge success, even if it ran perfectly, because I don't believe that hardcore PvP is a viable business model. But the last thing I want is to be haunted for the next 10 years by people spouting revisionist nonsense here and on every MMO forum how wonderful and successful Darkfall would have been if only it wouldn't have had all those bugs. There are still far too many people believing Ultima Online would have been a bigger success if only they hadn't ruined the game by introducing Trammel. Ruined, I'm telling ya! When in fact UO was bleeding subscribers and would have gone under without Trammel. So I want Darkfall to deliver exactly what it promised, and see how tiny the niche of hardcore free-for-all PvP really is. So that everyone who tells me what a carebear I am, I can respond to "and why aren't you playing Darkfall?". :)