A Memorial to IronFell
Today I found myself thinking back to a game I haven’t played in well over a year, maybe almost two. Easily the most ambitious online game I ever played, it was developed by one man, a New Zealander by the name of David Colquhoun. And it was called IronFell.
He decided to code his very own free online game, with a persistent world that would grow and evolve as the players explored and expanded. It used a hex-based tile grid to form individually sealed areas called realms, all of which could be interconnected with tunnels and teleporters. You could build tunnels into existing realms to forge new connections (where you would usually find another player busily working away), or even tunnel into brand new realms, randomly generating a whole new permanent addition to the ever-evolving game world, that could in turn be tunneled into by other players in their explorations. A truly innovative concept for an MMORTS.
As the months went by, David introduced expansions to the game taking it from an early medieval setting, wherein new players build knights and archers and harvest ore and wood, into new realms of technology, where players harvest oil and electricity to build tanks and warships. One such expansion even added a Prehistoric time period to the game, allowing players access to a second version of every single area the game had, in which you could obtain dinosaurs. All of these wonderful and vibrant expansions all served to grow the upper limits of the game for advanced players, and provide new goals for newbies to one day aspire to. He even had grand plans to add Space travel.
This was truly a game that spanned all genres, and the far corners of time (and eventually, it was intended, Space). I began play late in the open Beta, and made many wonderful friends in the incredibly welcoming (albeit small) online community. The game had a truly devoted following, with older players helping younger ones, alliances and vendettas forming and shifting, and all in the name of good, clean, rivalry-driven fun.
And then one day, while out exploring the realms, I made the mistake of wrestling control of some mines away from a player named Falazar. Falazar was much newer to the game than I was, so I thought little of it. Never has such a minor action in a video caused me so much grief.
I was in University at the time, and so was very busy most of the time. I was also (and still am) quite poor (again: University). But these were not restrictions faced by Falazar. He somehow seemed to be online 24/7, and was able to fast-track himself along a bit by receiving bonus resources for donating money (a system which was basically the only way David was earning any money to keep the game alive).
Within a couple of weeks Falazar went from a nuisance that I would run into from time to time, to a man dedicated to hunting down his ‘foes’ and destroying them with malicious abandon, stealing their mines, using their own tunnels to follow them back to their bases, even going to the lengths of flooding every tile in an area just to stop anyone else from being able to enter it without being slaughtered by tanks and t-rexes. Apparently I, by dint of quarreling with him in even such a small way, had become one of his primary targets.
Pretty soon any time I spent on IronFell was spent checking on my distant settlements, finding they were ransacked, and trying to rebuild elsewhere from scratch. Or, as happened on several occasions, I would find that he had tracked down a way through the inter-realm tunnels to get to one of my primary building areas and flooding them with top-tier troops (see above: T-fucking-Rexes).
He had made the game unplayable for me. He had made it difficult for many, many others, but for me it had become so frustrating I decided to stop.
After a few months, I went back though. It was too good a game to leave, had too much promise, and honestly I really wanted to see the Space expansions come to fruition. I figured maybe I would be able to hide somewhere, not make too big of a splash, and just play casually. The online community was full of friends I had made, and I missed them.
So I went back. And found, to my very pleasant surprise, that David had reset the servers and given everyone a fresh start. All the expansions were still incorporated, but the structuring of how the different realms connected to each other had been almost completely revamped. I thought to myself, okay, maybe the new system will make it easier for new players to stay safe from the bigger older players. Maybe it will be easier to avoid major conflicts. Maybe I will be able to play without ever having to deal with Falazar, if I carefully keep my distance.
Of course, I was wrong. I was overly optimistic because I loved the game so much, and I had missed it. But within a few weeks I realized that the reset had only made things worse, because I had put everyone back to the same page, but in the intervening time I had not been playing, Falazar had become MUCH more powerful than ever before.
I couldn’t go on with it. The game had completely stopped being fun for me. This doesn’t sound like much, but one the best afternoons of my life was spent playing this game. I even have old screenshots on my computer still from when I raised might armies and waged mighty wars. A couple show me in control of one of the games Flagships (a powerful warship of which only 3 could exist in the entire game world at any given time, no lean feat I assure you).
So I left, for the second and final time. But not without the strong urge to have my dissatisfaction heard. I knew I couldn’t make any difference, and I wanted no pity from the GM or other players, but I honestly felt that something had to said to David about Falazar. So I wrote him an email, praising his excellent work, but explaining my reluctant decision to leave the game because of Falazar’s constant bullying.
Normally I would never bother, online games typically have large staffs and player bases in the many many thousands. But IronFell was different. It was entirely coded and run by one man, working his hardest. The player-base was in the thousands, but the consistent players and major members of the community was much smaller, many of whom I had gotten to know as friends. And I knew I wasn’t the only person being plagued by Falazar, and I felt that David needed to know why I was leaving.
...Time went by, and I never went back. Today though I was reminded of it by something else, and I found myself harkening back to how wonderful it was, and even telling my girlfriend about some of my favourite conquests, but how one player eventually ruined it for me. It was a bittersweet moment of nostalgia.
This prompted me to look it up again though, and see how well David had implemented the Space Age expansion. After all this time, surely the game must have expanded incredibly, who knows what might have been added after I left. When I got to the site though, I noticed it looked almost the same. So I went to the ‘Units’ section to see what all had been added in my absence. But I couldn’t really find more than one or two units. Strange. Not even close to a whole expansion...
So I clicked on the link for the Development Blog. And my heart broke.The game had been shut down. And it had been shut down, BECAUSE OF FALAZAR.
According to David’s blog posts, the game and been becoming increasingly less financially viable, and he had lost all the joy he used to derive from working on it. And both of these were in part due to the actions of one, malicious, vindictive player. Falazar had driven away most of the older fan-base which dried up David’s primary source of donations to keep things going. To make things worse, he had become such a nuisance that he now accounted for over 10% of the time David had put into the game. Ever. As in, this man had personally cost David over 400 hours of work.
After reading his post-mortem review of the experience, and his post previous to that in which he said his official goodbye, I poured through the comments, and I almost cried reading how heartbroken everyone was to see it go. I read comments from players new and old, some of whom I had played with years ago. The worst blow though were the final two comments, one by a player, and the last was David’s respone:
Divine Dead says: 11th December 2014 at 5:08am
We have a group that is more than willing to take over the game, and continute funding it if you release the code for it.
davidcolquhoun says: 11th December 2014 at 7:56am
Before Falazar I would have open sourced Ironfell. But after the hell he put me through, there is zero chance of me open sourcing or giving away the code or artwork. :|
So I kept on reading through the old development blog posts, and it turns out Falazar had scared or bullied most people away, exploited game bugs, been banned repeatedly, attempted a phishing scheme targeted against the players, and even threatened to hack the game’s servers just to ruin things for everyone else.
A treasured and beloved game had been completely destroyed, by one man, who under the pseudonym of Falazar had wreaked havoc on an entire online community, and worst of all, had wasted literally hundreds of hours of a truly dedicated dreamer’s hard work and effort, to the point of taking all the fun and even the financial viability out of it.
If you read this, and you ever meet a man named David Calquhoun, thank him for me, please? I know I’ll never get the chance again, which I sorely regret.
And if you ever meet a man named James Ratcliff, or using the pseudonym Falazar, kick him in the fucking balls. For me. For David. And for everyone who ever had the amazing opportunity to play IronFell.
The original website is still intact, albeit without the actual game. And if you’re curious, here’s the website for David’s company. Who knows, maybe someday we’ll be lucky enough to play a game created by this wonderful man again.
R.I.P. IronFell
