Eurogamer Responds

[Tasos]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/ed...ath-blog-entry

Our response to this:

Our server logs are at Eurogamer's disposal as we said. This isn't a one man operation. There are 40 professional developers here and 900 people at Audio Visual and to insinuate that a conspiracy to fabricate our logs is possible, while convenient for Eurogamer and for the reviewer, is very insulting to our entire operation.

All events on the server are stored in an SQL database. This database is backed up daily. We have routines for saving the logs and we keep them pristine in case of needing them to prosecute illegal activities. There is no human interaction with the data unless they need to be manually checked because of special circumstances. Since they are kept in multiple places logs can be cross-checked against each other making this alleged doctoring improbable. These logs contain numerous details on a player’s activity. It’s theoretically possible to doctor the logs but it would be a huge operation.

We stand by our logs and we’re willing to prove our claims. Eurogamer can send one of their technicians here, we will be happy to cover this expense, and he can examine our procedures and our logs himself and he will be satisfied that our logs are accurate. That, or they can do what they’re doing at the moment: believe their reviewer blindly and keep an unfounded and damaging review of our game public on a few minutes of actual play-time.

While Eurogamer questions our credibility, we will not go so far as to insinuate that Eurogamer's second attempt at a Darkfall review will only serve to confirm the first one. We will also not insinuate that the situation created by the first review will not affect the second reviewer. We appreciate the gesture; however it seems bizarre to us that Eurogamer would pay someone to try to prove them wrong. This is about as strange as us paying someone to write a review of Darkfall for them.

We also don’t believe that the 9 hours of MMORPG playtime Eurogamer is satisfied with, is anywhere near enough to review a MMORPG game of this size. It’s not even enough to get first impressions and these say very little about the game experience. Most gaming sites understand this and they’re using actual Darkfall players logging 100s of hours before they review our game. We believe that this is the only way to go in writing a complete review of an MMORPG like Darkfall.

In closing we also believe that it's important to understand what Eurogamer is saying about our game with the 2/10 score and I quote from their generic scoring policy http://www.eurogamer.net/scoring_policy.php

"Two - about as entertaining as 'flu

Avoid at all costs - this is less entertaining than setting fire to a ten-pound note. You'll have barely ever seen a 2/10 on EG - and for very good reason. A game this bad almost certainly won't reach our eyes, because publishers generally know better than to send games of this standard to us in the first place. In many cases these are your typical "straight to budget" titles that no sane publisher would try and release at full price, and they certainly wouldn't want us to rip them to shreds in public.
What you're facing here is a game with appalling generic visuals built around an awful design, cursed with cretinous AI, brain-frying audio and controls that feel like they've been designed to upset people or boost sales of replacement game pads. It could just be that the game is just so hideously old fashioned that someone has released the game by mistake. Who knows what goes through the minds of people who feel the need to try and sell crap? Pity them, and pity the fools that stock it and more so the morons that end up buying it without checking first."