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Message from the AV CEO. We will not bring back DFO
mmoesports
Member UncommonPosts: 161
https://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?411080-Message-from-the-CEO
It gives me great pleasure to extend my sincere gratitude to all our players in large for their unswerving love and support for us. We are a small independent game developer, with a relentless drive for innovation and a spirit of grand imagination. We started our company in 2002. Back then, we knew we wanted to make great games that people would want to play for years.
We did not create this company to make money. Along the way, many things have changed at Aventurine. But, the core beliefs upon which we founded this company are stronger than ever: we are still a small independent game developer, with relentless drive for innovation and a spirit of grand imagination.
Darkfall Online (DFO) was launched in 2009. Three years later, in 2012, we launched its sequel -Darkfall Unholy Wars (DFUW). Based on popular demand, we contemplated at re-launching DFO. Slowly, we realized that DFO will not be delivering on our original product strategy. It also became clear that the problem is not just with DFO, but with our entire product strategy.
Now, better than ever, is time to make some hard decisions. We decided to kill all ongoing production for DFO, and focus on enhancing DFUW.
We realized, despite the initial excitement, players that played DFUW would not return to play DFO. Players were getting bored with the DFO game after a month or two. It is too hard to get into the game. The sad truth is that this is not a game that anyone would play for years.
Our dream is to create games that people will remember for many years to come. We want to build a company that will last for many years, too. A company whose employees will feel it is the best place they have ever worked.
Certainly, the aforementioned vision requires time to implement and patience to optimize. We are counting on all our players to support us during these times of great challenges. We are looking at building synergies with a partner that will not focus on the next ten years but on the next one hundred years.
It has been an exciting journey for our company, thanks to its dedicated and loyal players’ community. We can make our existing game -DFUW- much better. There is so much more we can do. More than anything, we cannot do it without our players’ wholehearted backing.
We are here today thanks to the confidence and trust our players have in us. Our objective is to become a company that every player can be proud of. That is a commitment we solemnly pledge to all of you.
Thank you so much,
Zad Mehdawi
Founder & CEO of Aventurine S.A.
Comments
I always had a feeling these guys really do try and are not in it for the money.However they are simply games i cannot play or get into.Imo it is really tough to be an Indie/small time developer,no way could they please me as i look for big time production value.
Too bad really,i think they could do a lot better job than most of the big money operations if given the money and manpower.I look at Blizzard drooling in money but they have nothing i want to play,tells me they are not very good at game design and that is Aventurine had their fan base things would be reversed.That is the difference between big and small operations,the big guys have a very loyal and rabid fanbase that buy those games without a care.Small developers have to go above and beyond to convince people to play their games,it really is not fair but such is life.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Would have made no sense to bring it back tbh. For one, DF was dead at the end, so all these people begging for it to come back are just hopping on the wagon. I know tons of people that say they want it back, but then I think about it and realize those people didn't even play the original DF. Honest truth is, DFUW has come a long way and is a great pvp sandbox now...BUT, no one, including myself is giving AV another chance. That speech had me loling hard as it seemed like they care...but they dont. I know people say that often times and its silly. What gaming company really doesn't care about it's fan base right?? I'm telling you, as crazy as it is, AV is that company,...they really could care less about us, they made their money.
Anyway, only chance DFUW has at this point is to come up with a F2P model, I know my DF friends will stab me when they read that, but it's true. Once a dev team screws you over enough, it get's to the point that no matter what you dont' want to give them money, they have had to many chances, unless they figure out a F2P model...it'll never be what it could have been.
Incognito
www.incognito-gaming.us
"You're either with us or against us"
It has better design and foundation than DF1 had.
DF1 was broken and had no one playing it for a reason.
I had all but written off Darkfall but it seems they're not as dumb as I feared. Let's hope the most toxic members of the community are gone for good now. Sadly, a lot of them are now organizing campaigns to smear DFUW on any MMO site it pops up on.
Of course this guy don't have a clue and probably never played its own game because what he said is pratically the opposite of the reality.
First of all, at launch back in 2009, the game was so populated that a lot of people fail to buy it since the system hangs up, also there are tons of clans that stayed for months if not years not just some days as he claim, myself included, while after i tryed Unholy Wars i last a week disgusted by the changes ans the careberization of the game.
Second DF1 died because lacks of support, lacks of action toward hackers, lack of updates and exploit fixes, and moreover the announcement that Darkfall 2010 arena turned into DF 2.0.
Then they made UW, with 80% less content, a fork from the original game, with classes, safe zones, unbalanced skills paper rock scissors, desynch, and so on.
And people leave as fats and log in.
This is a fact, i do not invent or try to troll anyone, every Darkfall player know this, even the devlopers (Axilmar on reddit), so what this guys is talking about make zero sense and is pure PR to try to keep alive the ship from sinking.
In the end is their loss, i stopped to play after the UW beta and tried again 9 month later, but things still the same, no doubt this announcement is the last nail in the coffing for a lot of people and for the old and loyal playerbase that support the game for almost a decade.
Said that, and i'm serious, i move on from this game and i hope they sink one time for all and the emu deliver, if not we will have Crowfall, Albion, and the Repopulation to try out and fullfill our ffa pvp urge.
To conclude, thanks from the bottom of my heart to Razorwax and all the old players i meet in this fantastic game.
See around in other sandbox mmorpgs.
this company managed to do the exact opposite of what a game company should be doing over the 7 years i followed it
I am very happy with the decision tho.. i do wanted to play df1 again.. but then again not with the this company on the steering wheel..
I feel sorry for the people who missed the epicness of what darkfall once was.... and question the people who are still supporting this pile of junk of a company..
Its been 7 years of dissapointing messages insulting updates from the company itself to his playerbase.. most of the community already left... and after this ceo message not many will stick around.
the emulator will rize... have patience
A company that lies about content. Lies about deadlines. Dodges any form of responsibility to their own customers.
I cant believe people are still supporting such a corrupt business model. I dont care about that it's the 'only' game on the market.
I love Axilmar for trying. Goodluck at this company.
"It's pretty simple, really. If your only intention in posting about a particular game or topic is to be negative, then yes, you should probably move on. Voicing a negative opinion is fine, continually doing so on the same game is basically just trolling."
- Michael Bitton
Community Manager, MMORPG.com
"As an online discussion about Star Citizen grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Derek Smart approaches 1" - MrSnuffles's law
"I am jumping in here a bit without knowing exactly what you all or talking about."
- SEANMCAD
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Let's break this down.
THESE are the kind of people AV made the good decision not to cater to anymore.
They turned down dozens of publisher offers over the years that demanded they take the FFA PVP out, or take out the full looting.
If they wanted to make money, they wouldn't have made an extremely niche game.
There's a difference between not making money and losing so much money you can't pay your employees. Splitting their tiny playerbase into 4 different servers and splitting their overtaxed dev team into TWO different code based projects would be the kiss of death. Especially because DF1 has no room for growth.
100 years? lol wtf?
Who do they think they are? the Rothschild? the Hapsburgs? lol
Game makers trying to create a dynasty... imagine that :P
This is ridiculous, they changed the message after the uproar and lots of people leaved their game.
In the end change nothing, he continue with the nonsense about DF1 while unholy wars is atm is a very bad state with very low population, even more low compared to the last days of Darkfall back in 2012.
I honestly don't know what's numbers this guy has for these claims, but imo, they are false statements, UW still years behind as content and gameplay to its original no matter how much they try to copy or import features from it. Is rotten in the core code and is beyond salvation.
There is another thing, they change the original vision of the game, this is one of the big mistakes that a game company can do.
Darkfall was supposed to be an hardcore sandbox like Ultima Online, unforgivable and hard, and for this people loved it, but since Av is a money hunger (even if they said that they don't do it for money and like i believe this bs!), they try to cater to a large audience and watering down everything, making a sequel nobody asked in the first place.
But catering to a large audience mean unavoidable compromises, and in doing so you have to change the core of the game like they did, make unhappy not only long term followers but new players too.
In the end what's the crowd they try to lure in? Not the vets that want an hardcore game, not new players cause full loot and others anti-pve features like ffa pvp and sieges.
They make a disatrous hybrid, and the result is... well everyone already know, low population, low development, underpayed staff, no new content since years, patch every 6-7 months and so on.
Good luck AV with this, you continue to fail and deliver what your loyal playerbase asked, and continue to dig a grave under your foots, so no surprise you ended up with 40 players per server since all veterans and old clans already leaved.
You can't make these claims before taste the demand? You will never know how much players want to play until you try to acquire more info.
Kickstarter cost nothing, is a very good tool for this purpose.
But nothing to do, no matter how much people ask for Darkfall, even if is more high than UW, they have already decided to watering down the game to appeal to a large audience and keep alive UW, and in their logic is the right choice, a choice that, as numbers show, was and still wrong.
I think at this point, they can open a pve server with consensual pvp, i'm sure that with this thay are able to attract a large crowd even if some pvpers will leave.
Kickstarters time time and money to set up.
Only 1,700 signatures, most of which were repeats. They have the data, they saw DF1 fail.
1700 signatures, where lots of old player never knew about the petition because Av didn't sent any mail out. This petition was created by Axilmar to taste the demand of the die hard followers.
But even if some of these signatures are double it was a great success, they are more than the current population of the game (both NA and EU merged):
http://steamcharts.com/app/227400
The game is a desert without the old DF playerbase and new players leave after a while.
Except the steam charts page is super inaccurate. Mainly because most people I know who play UW don't play it through steam, as they didn't give steam keys out to people who paid for it before the steam launch.