Tasos Responds

Tasos, the lead development person for Aventurine (yeah, I'm too lazy to look up his actual title), has responded to some of the issues brought up in the recent MMORPG.com interview with alliance leaders.

Having read several interviews with Tasos, and of course his own posts, I get this mixed sense of him as being blunt and unapologetic on the one hand while arrogant and dismissive on the other. I tend to lean towards the idea that he's just a blunt person, which is a good thing, I think. He could certainly be more politic, but then you'd get a lot more bullshit out of him, so I'll take the bluntness.

At any rate, I think the developers' continued explanations about cheating in the game are interesting. As someone who's worked in public relations and politics for awhile now, I can believe that cheating via third-party programs and hacks is a far smaller and better managed problem than it would seem from the community chatter. Here's part of what he says in the interview:

It's very often that we see reports about specific players using exploits, and them being used over and over as examples to show how exploits are rampant in the game, and yet we know that these particular guys have already been banned. They are referenced for weeks though to illustrate how rampant cheating is in Darkfall. We don't like the idea of a hall of shame for our players however.

We take reports about cheaters very seriously, but please keep in mind that most of complaining is highly exaggerated, even bogus, and a lot of it is coming from the people making and promoting these programs, from players who are banned already, by players who are using the cheats, by people with an agenda, by people who aren't even in the game, and others who are just jumping on the bandwagon.

Most player reports of cheaters are about players who are not actually cheating. Our own GMs get reported very often if that's an indication. People that lose fights, in the heat of the moment often assume their opponent wasn't fighting fair. Very good players are often accused of using hacks.

Even with all the mistaken reports of people exploiting and the multiple characters per account, there are actually few names reported, and few screenshots or videos of people cheating. If cheating was rampant then we would expect to see reports with specific player names everywhere. It's all really about perception.

I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt on this one because I know how people are, especially the rabid Darkfall community. Game mechanic exploits are something else altogether, and he does address that as well, but I'm willing to believe there's less outright hacks than players may think.