Darkfall On Limited Availability

05 Mar 2009 at 11:47:58 by Bill Vaughan

The recently released MMO, Darkfall, is proving to be so popular that the developer is limiting the number of sales each day.

When the game launched on 26 February, the huge demand on servers resulted in a delay of 12 hours from the official launch time. Since then, Darkfall has experienced numerous setbacks; the game had to be taken down shortly after release to fix a critical bug, but the forums and online store were also badly affected by the overwhelming traffic, resulting in very limited availability of both. In response, Darkfall's developer, Aventurine, has limited the number of online game sales it makes per day and will continue to do so until demand for the game subsides.

Darkfall developer Tasos recently announced this on the official forums:

"We’ll open up sales of a limited number of Darkfall copies tonight European time Tuesday March 3d. We will try to repeat this every weekday until the extreme demand slows down and we’re able to leave the shop open 24/7. To answer the questions of how you can sell out a digital download, we’re throttling the number of new players in the world to limit queue times and protect the user experience. Server optimizations first and adding new servers in time are the steps we are taking to improve this experience."

In addition, many players who thought they had successfully pre-ordered the game have discovered that they have to wait to download a copy with everyone else. However, Aventurine will be compensating those players with a couple of free days of game time... once they get in the game of course.