Ironmace somehow completed two hotfixes from doris89592's blog

Dark and Darker's fourth alpha playtest in February was a surprise hit, pulling a peak of over 100,000 concurrent players as Dark And Darker Gold a Steam Next Fest demo. 

It was a great time to play in a party with friends, excellent fodder for clip compilations, RPG build theorists, PvP lovers, and finally gave me the non-FPS extraction game I've been needing. 

After that high of highs, Dark and Darker has been in freefall for two months. 

Game publisher Nexon, former employer of two members of Ironmace, has accused the developers of stealing code and assets, which resulted in a police raid on the developer's South Korean office, removal of the game from Steam by DMCA takedown request, and a short lived GoFundMe campaign to assist with the developer's expected legal defense fees.

But Ironmace had already announced a fifth playtest to run from April 14-19 and dammit they were going to get players back into the game again. So they asked everyone to torrent it. I can't believe thousands of players had to learn how to torrent in the year 2023. Things only got more wild as the weekend went on:

Dark and Darker servers went down on Saturday for an extended time while no developers were around to fix the issue.

Ironmace somehow completed two hotfixes (also distributed by torrent) over the course of the weekend.

Dark and Darker concept art - a mage casts a light spell carefully exploring a dungeon with a knight and rogue

And despite the total trash fire, players are absolutely loving it. YouTube is full of videos of Dark and Darker players showing off and sharing their builds. Reddit has threads defending the developers and mourning the end of the playtest. The biggest point of contention in the official Discord is disappointment that Ironmace didn't buy Dark And Darker Gold extend the end date of the playtest to make up for the downtime over the weekend.