What it is

Azaghal

I played it for a couple of weeks, started as not too bad at all with some issues that can cause distress to some players.

There advertising includes pop ups that appear at a regular interval located in the centre of the screen and not transparent. When you first log in or when you revive from death it is a large popup that has caused the re death of many  players due to the fact you cannot see where your going or need to go to get to safety.

In the end the game is nothing but a grind fest of combat with regular quests that become available at certain levels. It should be pointed out that a lot of the quests are beyond the level you receive them some I needed to go up about 5 levels before I could even attempt them. Other quests you are required to assemble a party and you must be the party leader, problem is that they dont mention the fact so your left to try and figure out why you cant get enough fox hairs or rose wood timbers to complete the quest in the alloted time.

One early quest requires you to get to another region and deliver medicine within 6 minutes, its a hard run and took a while as the timer kept ticking down during the regional tranistion. I entered transition with 3 minutes 4 seconds to go and entered the region with 34 seconds left which made it impossible to complete the quest.

Whats worse is the support roles require hours and hours of grinding buffs and heals, someone calculated around 10,000 key presses just for one. I used a macro to emulate the key strokes but the gameguard update stopped it working which is when i left the game. Three days of macroing skills to get them to raise 2 levels, no way i'm going to ruin a perfectly good keyboard.

GameGuard is probably by the far the biggest cause of problems regarding logging and even a series of game issues that cant seem to be resolved, one person wrote that it was more than likely the cause of 90% of the games faults. There is also a warning about game guard apparently it takes control of your computers API (or something) which means that gameguard determines what will and wont access the internet irrespective of your wishes. In fact what a laugh is that if the game crashes acclaim have a send report feature so acclaim can determine the nature of the fault and rectify it. Heres the joke, so far gameguard refuses to let the report connect to the internet so acclaim have no way of knowing there was ever a fault to begin with.

Gameguard main purpose is to stop hacking, macroes and bot farming. Problem is that the professional bot farmers are able to circumvent gameguard and as a result gameguard basically doesnt do what its supposed to.

My main issue with it though is its intrusive (and some say borders on illegal) forced control of your computer and internet connection. If a worm gets into it then apparently gameguard is not only able to shut down your computer but if I read correctly its able to shut down your fire wall and virus checker as well (though im not sure as to the truth on this) I however do not wish to put it to the test.

In closing, before even downloading 9Daragons be sure you want to play it, over all though for the level of grinding required and lack of in game support to save wear and tare of your keyboard be prepared for weeks of just sitting there pressing quick keys. That is unless your a hacker in which case you get around gameguard and use macroes anyway.

I have to admit though I did enjoy the game but the weird things my computer was doing didint seem worth it just to play a game with more things working against you than for you.

I mean you play games to have fun, not to become a process worker for your heals and buff skills.

Even Ultima had an in game macro tool to take the monotony out of skill grinding, pitty acclaim havent leanrt from there foresight.

Oh and not to forget that if you attack a mob and someone else comes along doing more damage over a second than you they get to take all the loot. Killstealing is a real issue that leaves low level players frustrated and a slightly peeved.

Even with all the above though, I might still play it if they got rid of gameguard, that to me is the greatest negative the game has and I definately will not even consider playing any game that utilises it.