Exploiter Haven

A Promising Future

The founding of the new map heralded a chance for the game to reach great heights. It was bigger, more detailed, and more well put together then any map seen previously. And although that's like saying Chris was the smartest kid on the short bus, it was still an accomplishment. The lab, every elemental cave, and buildings were all updated. ROBLOX released the featherweight update to the engine, which allowed the game to have almost four times the amount of detail without lagging the engine and thus the game. The GUI got an update from a close friend of Chris', and the games popularity and roleplay item variety hit an all-time high.

That was not all either. Deep in the pits of damnation where the likes of Guests were spawned, Valkyrie was making a new system to police the populace. It was described as a panopticon.

The theory behind a panopticon was simple. Imagine a prison where every cell was in the open facing a tower in the middle. The guard in the tower is armed with a rifle, and can see every part of the prison through one way glass. From there he can take care of any rule breaker from one place. The main caveat of this system is that the prisoners didn't know who the guard was looking at, at any given time.

Thus the result of this was a chat logger to trump all other chat loggers, allowing the user to message, kick, and ban all from a website, all without joining a server.

It was dubbed: "Big Brother".

With this new tool in Chris' arsenal he felt he was more than prepared to face any non-compliant ERPer or exploiter. The future of Darkened Dawn looked bright, and nothing could sour the future of this now advanced game.

Well, almost nothing...

When it Rains...

At this point in 2014, ROBLOX was going through a state of transition. They were becoming quite big now and the popularity of the company was going mainstream. OOF was being known to more and more people, and the amount of new players on the website was exploding at an unprecedented level. Because of this though, they decided to take a step back from the exploit moderating.

Before, any exploit made would be patched in a couple of weeks. A game's moderators would only have to hold out for at most a month before a patch would be made and the exploit crushed. Sadly though, as ROBLOX reached critical mass, the time difference between each wave of exploiters became smaller… And smaller… And smaller. Soon places like Darkened Dawn were fighting for their lives trying to hold off the exploiters. Every server was compromised, every sound was an ear blast of low quality meme music, and EVERY person was a suspect.

So Chris started to ban how he usually did when he didn't know what to do.

With a shotgun...

...And a blindfold.



Bans were handed out without trial or jury. Whole servers were banned just to catch one exploiter.

But they just. Kept. Coming.

The player base was waning, many people were moving over to greener pastures. News of FE enabled games was gaining momentum, and while other roleplay games adapted, Darkened Dawn buried their head in the sand, refusing to change with the times.

After a year of constant exploit attacks, Chris finally relented. A new map was needed, and with this update FE would be enabled, stopping exploiters once and for all. This map would forgo the old way of building, it would maximize the detail and scale of the game, and it would have a GUI to stand the test of time. This coupled with a now famous roleplay bio GUI and catalog GUI, it would be an update unmatched till 5 years later.

And as the player base of Darkened Dawn left, like the last blood leaving a mugged civilian, a switch was pulled to instill new life into the game.