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Online gamers are an obsessive lot, often racking up dozens of hours each week slaying monsters, casting spells, and doing battle with hundreds of other players. The makers of online games are a bit obsessive themselves. The most elaborate adventures—known as massively multiplayer online role-playing games—require not only huge time commitments but also monthly fees, so even die-hard gamers tend to pick one game and stick with it until something better comes along. For developers, that means constant pressure to keep games interesting and growing.

Launched in 2001, Mythic Entertainment's Dark Age of Camelot was late to the dance. Sony's EverQuest was already a megahit, featuring a similar medieval theme. For Camelot's producers, creating a compelling story wasn't enough; they had to set up a technical infrastructure that could accommodate different styles of play, minimize time lags, maximize customer support, and handle frequent updates to content and graphics. All of these elements were essential to keeping players happy—and paying.

Dark Age of Camelot entertains over 225,000 players who each pay from $11 to $13 per month to inhabit a world based on Arthurian legends. Although EverQuest is still the bigger game—with some 430,000 subscribers—Camelot has captured a fair acreage of the online role-playing realm.

The company in charge of the Dark Age of Camelot servers in Europe finally admitted they have been having security problems, after over a week of unusual happenings for the players of this PC MMORPG. Unknown people have been causing havoc with GM admin tools on live servers and have potentially gained access to account passwords. Sanya (the community relations manager from Mythic, who run the servers in the US) has commented on the whole thing in this thread on the DAoC Catacombs site, saying 'server security has never been compromised... there is an explanation for this that doesn't involve anybody breaking into databases or servers'. Pictures and videos of the situation on the European servers where multiple high level creatures were spawned can be found in this thread on an unofficial forum.