According to an announcement posted on the official Darkfall Online forums, 213 players were banned today from the game's beta phase for using third-party programs to cheat. The announcement states the cheaters were automatically detected, verified manually and warned repeatedly.

These 213 players apparently account for 90 percent of the cheaters in Darkfall right now. The other 10 percent have already been detected and just need to be verified. The post offers this bit of advice: "Do not side with these people just because you may have played with them and didn’t happen to observe them cheating. They were cheating beyond a shadow of a doubt, detected and verified in more than one way. There is no appeals process, our decision is final, and we will not reveal our methods."

The Darkfall team emphasized players who aren't running third-party cheats have nothing to worry about, but the team will continue to agressively detect and ban cheaters from the game. You can read the full post after the jump.

A little less than a week ago, we here at Allakhazam were given the opportunity to hop into the world of Darkfall Online. I have to confess, however, that I really hadn't heard much of this game. Made by indie developer Adventurine, Darkfall Online is touted to be the vicious combination of freestyle PvP, dynamically intelligent enemy AI and a rage inducing 'full looting' system. Full looting, by the way, means exactly that -- players who are killed (in PvP or PvE), drop everything they were carrying, and other players can help themselves to whatever was dangling from the carcass at the time of its expiration (hell, they could have been the ones who killed him). While both Tamat and I had the chance to play, we worked very hard to keep our opinions to ourselves, thereby granting ourselves the fullest chance to experience Darkfall Online with no influence or expectations.

When I say no expectations, I mean that I really did not know anything about Darkfall or Adventurine before I trundled my way into the character creation screen. On the other hand, however, I must admit that I was expecting an MMORPG containing what I have become accustomed to expect -- gear, questing, levelling up, nice graphics, a good amount of hand holding along the way, customizable skills and the vague feeling of World of Warcraftery (but obviously different). In this expectation, however, Darkfall confused me.

Those of you lucky enough to participate in the Darkfall Online Beta reportedly had some problems. This is to be expected in beta testing, and likely the reason why the game has been delayed.  After sorting out the Denial of Service (DoS) Attack against their servers, they posted explanations and detailed plans as to what they are going to do next.

Testers experienced periodic low download speeds and various minor errors and hiccups which were soon dealt with. We increased our patching capacity and corrected small errors, until everything was running smoothly. For launch we will have in place a peer to peer system which should greatly improve download speeds and make the downloading and patching run smoothly.

Nevertheless, as most of these problems could not have been foreseen, Adventurine still manages to make everything turn up rosy. They are handling the issues in stride, and we shall be waiting for the news from the publisher on a release date and any further issues or developments.

Despite the delay for one of this year's most anticipated massively multiplayer games, they are still moving forward: Darkfall Online has just sent out the first wave of invitations to users, today. In no time, people will be flooding the internet with information and crazy problems associated with the game, and we shall all finally get our fill when it comes to knowing what we need-to-know about this game. Shrouded in secrecy, it seems, the developers have managed to make their game into something everyone just must play. Check your email if you signed up for a beta-test, as you might soon be invited to play what may-soon be one of the biggest releases of 2009.

Source: Darkfall Online Official Website

Almost everyone has now heard of Darkfall, and almost everyone at least wants to try it. Well, now everyone will have to wait. They have pushed the European release back to February 25th. North American release information has yet to come forth, but it does not bode well for those dreaming of Darkfall.

"It’s important to understand that there are well over 200 thousand applications by players wanting to get into Darkfall. This number makes it unrealistic to distribute the client and to open up our servers to everyone. We’ll try to accommodate as many players as are possible for us to manage at this stage. Even so, the demand exceeds our current capacity. Interest in Darkfall has surpassed all our expectations to the point that we may need to manage our release differently."

Regardless of where you are or who you are, you're going to have to wait a little longer before you get to play the next-big-thing in Massively Multiplayer. 

Source: Darkfall Forums

Anticipating the launch of Darkfall Online ? Well if you live state-side, you're going to have to wait until Europe gets a turn. Tasos has confirmed on the Darkfall forums that the game will indeed launch in Europe before North America. Sure, it's frustrating to have to wait, but just think; they'll have to deal with all the launch bugs, so hopefully our launch will be cleaner.

First of all, this isn't an issue of us being located in Europe. It just means that things are moving faster for Darkfall in Europe. A few months ago, it was the other way around and that's how fluid things are at the moment.

It would be a publishing and a logistics issue that the European launch might precede a N. American launch. We have a publishing partner in Europe; we haven't settled on one in N. America yet. Unfortunately as things stand right now, we can't launch in both regions at the same exact time but, of course, we would like to.

Read on for more...

Try not to die of shock! They folks working on Darkfall have actually said something !

We're working on two fronts, development and publishing. Development is mainly focused around testing and fixing bugs. We're also optimizing client and servers. We're playtesting a lot, we've also logged many hours of large battles and we're very excited with what we're experiencing. While playtesting we're getting a lot of video footage that's going to end up in a video we'll be releasing next month so you'll get an idea of what we've been talking about.

As far as publishing activities go, we're working on the servers, customer and technical support, billing, and distribution solutions along with our partners.

We've been hiring people in all departments, and we have eight new team members.

Since it's summer and a lot of people are on vacation in Greece, we've been getting a lot of requests to visit the studio. We've already had a few people come over and we had to say no to a couple of others due to the bad timing of their visit. The people who have been here may or may not write about their visit, we didn't make them sign NDAs and we showed them the game.

We enjoy these visits, but unfortunately we can't spare the time unless it's media so we won't allow more visits for at least a couple of months. We've also had some media over here and there should be a couple of articles in the local press.

We've been putting in the long hours, so the next three weeks we're on a weekly vacation rotation, the last chance we'll get to rest for a long time.

I'm floored that they've actually said something, but then again, I'm a skeptic! (Not to be mistaken with skeksis...sorry, Comic-Con on the brain this week folks!) I'm very excited to see any coverage we can get, so as soon as something is released, we'll have it for you!