Buying Darkfall is hard

Apparently buying a copy of Darkfall, the recently released MMO from Adventurine, is harder than finding a frog’s teeth. After hearing about the numerous complaints on this subject, I went ahead and took a look for myself. Well, the first thing I noticed is that a visible e-store is no where to be seen on the Darkfall Online website. I’m not sure whether or not that’s intentional or just a result of bad design. I sort of suspect the latter. What game developer wouldn’t want an accessible way to sell their games?

So after searching around, I discovered that the online shop is buried in the account creation screen. Yes, you need to create an account first to get a shot at buying the game. Adventurine says that it only releases a handful of copies for sale per day so it doesn’t overload their server capacity or form long queues to get into the game. They also only make the game available on 7 PM GMT (or 11 AM Pacific time). That sort of stinks if you say happen to need to go to work. The store is open pretty much for only 15 minutes as literally thousands of players all vie for the limited amount of copies.

So at around 10:47 AM (Pacific time), I logged onto my Darkfall account and decided to wait until the e-store was opened up to purchase my copy. At 10:59 AM, I decided to try to buy the game. I immediately noticed that the site was sluggish and even was failing to finish loading the purchase attempt I made. The purchase failed and I was confronted with a “the service is not available” message before the web page was even finished.

This is the most backward and stupid way to buy a game that I’ve ever seen. It’s pretty obvious that there are players that are just dying for the privilege of paying for this game and yet they have to go through this virtual gauntlet in the vain hope that they can snatch a game code before the online shop closes. How difficult would it be for Adventurine to simply provide all potential buyers an electronically generated number and then allow groups of buyers to buy based sequentially on number they received? This primitive process works at my state DMV. You’d think that a game developer would come up with something more elegant. This first come, first served, let’s all overload the purchase at 7 PM GMT business is retarded.

Let me be clear that I don’t want to play Darkfall (honest!) If I manage to procure a copy, I will immediately either auction it off at eBay or perhaps give it away as a promotional item for this site. There’s plenty of good games on the market and just about every other game publisher makes buying their game easy. I mean, getting players to pay money for your games is a good thing right?

Tomorrow will be the last time Adventurine will have their e-store open, and again it will be at 7 PM GMT and the store will most likely be opened only for 15 minutes. I truly feel sorry for people that are willing to endure this just so they can play. The hardest thing about Darkfall at this point may be just trying to get into the game.

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