I posted this on the DAoC.Catacomb site since the Vault forums are now heavily censored moderated.

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The situation is more complex than how it appears. On the surface it is just another fraud story, one of those that made this country famous. The company failed and the former owner of the group is involved with lawsuits and frauds.

Basically DAoC in Italy was managed by decent-sized company called CTO. This company imported games from the USA and had a strong contract with EA to distribute directly their games. The deal made the company grow with time.

During this expansion a sub-group called CTOnet was created to focus on the online market. The first good and relevant effort has been about acquiring DAoC’s licences, localize the game and open the servers.

Things started to go “wrong” when EA decided to break the contract with the main group and obviously the whole company collapsed on itself since its structure was still strongly based on that type of business. CTO basically became an empty envelope and lawsuits with EA started (and they are still going on, I believe).

From there began a bunch of legal and less legal attempts to both save the CTOnet side and squeeze more money from the goons (both from the administrators and the players).

There’s a whole collection of lies all around. To the players, to the law, to the administrators. Not much that you would hope to “save”, it’s really so bad and dishonest that you would just hope to not hear about it again, wipe everything and restart.

Instead the whole thing keeps agonizing. The servers go on their own, without updates, without support from more than a year and half. Aside speculating on this situation and on the cheated playerbase nothing else really happened. Even when things were good the managment of the game and the relationship with the playerbase was poor, now you can imagine how the situation went to hell even starting from an already terrible status.

Unattended servers, lies to the playerbase and peoples and groups speculating on the carcass. You would hope a quick, painless death. Instead it’s going on and on, like the most awful soap-opera you can imagine. Something that, if happened in the USA, would make the news for the next five years.

All this while the players still play the full monthly fee.

I don’t know what will happen. I fled to the USA servers the week after the launch in Italy, one year before that this whole mess started.

Believe me: what happened isn’t a surprise.