History of ORKFiA (Part II)

Posted by admin on Jul 16th, 2009 | 1 comment home title

As MoDo and C4lv1n left the game, the reins fell to two other dedicated players Wish and Reaver. The pair had their work cut out as the code was very buggy and there were multis springing up everywhere bringing the game into disrepute.

It was a fight against time trying to delete the multis and keep some modicum of fairness in the game to prevent the regular players from becoming too disillusioned and quitting.

The community was still going strong though and the two admins vowed to fight against the cheaters and whilst Reaver continued fixing the code Wish was in charge of finding multi’s.

Wish was successful in finding multis but unfortunately for him he wasn’t pleased with what he found… Reaver was one of the players cheating.

This was a massive blow to the community to discover someone who they trusted could abuse his power and Reaver was removed from the game never to be heard of again. Wish was left on his own to tend to ORKFiA.

At this point a very active player volunteered to help Wish out. Australian Skathen worked in IT and had PHP coding skills which he offered forward. Skathen had been playing for some time already and didn’t want to see the game crumble.

Wish accepted his offer and Skathen began coding the next day. After less than a month Skathen became Admin and began becoming more active as the face of ORKFiA.

Wish was not around very long and within an age he lost interest in ORKFiA as he became busy elsewhere, thus Skathen became the sole Admin of ORKFiA for 2 ages following..

Around Beta 3 he called on long time trusted friend fRoSt and another experienced player Bekkar to help him in running ORKFiA.

fRoSt has continued to maintain the server from his native Germany to this day.

Editorial note: this was up to 2007

This was the core team for a few years although further additions in the Admin and mod team came and went as each age passed.

ORKFiA was more and more owned by it’s community as so many of them got involved.

In 2003 active tribes in the game were thought to be around 2300 (figure quoted taken from an interview with Admin Vince in May 2003). Another former staff member, DamadMoo put the figure around 3200 at ORKFiA’s peak.

People were recommending the game to their friends, it may not have had sophisticated graphics or be able to rival the latest console/PC games but the thing that was important was the community feeling in the game. This was ORKFiA’s main drawing point and what made it stand above other games.

Although that appeared to be the heyday of ORKFiA it was by no means perfect. Just like now there were plenty of heated arguments amongst players and staff always. The passion for the game was high, but like all flames it started to burn out for one reason or another and the player base began to drop again.

Where there had been consistency for so long, staff members were changing rapidly, bugs seemed to crop up everywhere.

Age resets due to bug issues were becoming common and players started leaving faster than new ones were joining. The staff in the game, including Skathen, fRoSt and Bekkar became less and less active.

Again speculation abounded as to whether ORKFiA could survive…

To be continued..

~ By Jamzi ~

Original Post

Editorial note: This article was first posted aug 18 2007.

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