Sitting in a queue...a Darkfall report

At the end of February the hordes of hardcore PVP MMORPG fans have been delighted to put their hands on Darkfall, the long awaited title from Aventurine. Players have spent years (8) reading the forums of the game hoping one day to see the final announcement indicating their dreams come true.

The release of the game encompassed all the drama that gamers are used to associate to the launch of a title of the genre: crashes, shutdowns, bugs, exploits and all the paraphernalia that typically  infests the infancy of a MMORPG. What was unexpected is the inability of buying the game...yes, you can't put your shacking hands on the game that you have been waiting for from the time of un-trammeled UO because it is just not on-sale!!

The interest for the game was so big that the small Aventurine (an handful of smart guys at their first MMORPG release leaving in Athens...) have been forced to close sales to avoid their single (yes, single...) application cluster to go down under the unexpected load. People starved for additional licenses of the game and prices for one of them on ebay went insanely high. Interest peaked so intensely that Aventurine opened the door a little to sell some more accounts during the following weeks creating one of the biggest mess that I have experienced in my life as an on-line gamer.

Unbearable server lag has forced the (still) independent publisher to limit the number of active connections thus creating immense access queues. Outrage and complaints have invaded the forums and people attached the nickname of "Queuefall" to the game. A normal play session requires at least a couple of hours of queueing and it is basically impossible to login during prime time.

Now, you may be asking yourself why bother, why stay in a never ending queue waiting for a slot to enter the Darkfall world? Because it is incredibly fun. I'm not going to give you a detailed review of the game (you can find very good ones out there written by real professionals :) ) but I can tell you that Darkfall is the most addictive thing I have had in my hands since UO, it doesn't compare with other titles (with, maybe, the exception of EVE) and makes you want to login as no other recent blockbusters have been able to.

My "paying customer" soul is revolting, it screams with nerd rage at the hours spent looking at a loading page only indicating a "queuing" status. The fact is I can't stop hoping to see the play button become red telling me that I've won the queue lottery and I'll be able to wtfpwnbbq my enemies for some exciting hours...well, at least until the next crash and the next queue... ;)

Public game information at: http://www.darkfallonline.com