So, this is going to be a long post for those of you who want an in-depth review of Darkswords.

I have played this game since two months post release, January 11th 2007 is when I made my first character.
I have 857 hours since it was released on steam, but if we counted entire playtime since 2007 it would be well over 20,000 hours.

I have been staff on both Darkswords servers, having been a moderator, a helper and a dealer. (For those of you who don't know, the game originally had a European server, and a Russian server managed by different companies. They had a falling out, and now are completely separate from each other).

This game is HIGHLY pay to win. Pay to compete. Pay to have fun. The only way I managed to get the items to compete is I had a partner that would farm 24/7, just for myself ONLY to PvP. I still had to spend hundreds every two weeks to get other items. All of that would be used up after only two to three days of fighting, and you won't necessarily even advance that much.

The way it is set up, is you have your normal combat level, then a religion level. You can easily spend $1000 to get a religion level of 70 (mine was 71) and you will still get absolutely demolished by people with a religion level of 100+.

You are unable to walk outside of safe zones without being tracked and hunted by a group of 3+ players, sometimes even 10 players. A lot of the spenders are PvP only, so that is what they do all day every day. They hunt. They set up traps in places you have to walk through, and just wait for someone to set it off.

A lot of people in the main clans have been friends for years. If you don't get along with one of them, you won't be able to hunt with any of them. At all. Ever.

Now, lets move on to staff abuse and the stupid rules they have.

The staff have been known to abuse their powers for years, and how you get treated depends ENTIRELY on who you are, or who you are arguing with, or whatever. You will get muted for sending youtube links. You will get muted for swearing. (barely any children play this game). You will get muted for even questioning why you were muted if you don't understand.

There is no point trying to change the p2w. This game has been this way for over 13 years. They barely get new players. They don't care. Everyone in the game will jump on you for even suggesting it, because they all have thousands invested and are happy with the system the way it is.

The customer support is basically non-existent. I've made new characters just to ask staff for help and judge their responses, half of the time they don't respond at all. Half of them don't speak English.

The admins are Russian and barely speak English.

Avoid this game. Let it die. They won't change for you. There were times when 60-70% of the player base were crying out about it being entirely P2W. You know what happened? They left. Because no one listened.