Duels.com
9:15 pm August 7th, 2007 by Sal Cangeloso
Everyone has been talking about this today… and it’s pretty cool. I found about it early (from Techcrunch) so I actually got to play it for 30 minutes or so before Digg totally owned the site’s servers (server? shared box?).
If you didn’t get a chance to play before Duels went down like the Hindenburg, it is an online RPG, but all you do it duel other players. You can buy new weapons and earn levels as well as complete quests, but you don’t control the action. You tell the guys to fight and then you either win or lose. Not a lot to it, but that is part of the magic- you can play while reading or on the phone or something like that. No download is required.
The fighting can either be done in this incredibly ridiculous flash animation (I slash you, pause, you slash me, pause, I slashed you back, etc.) or text (much better) and you have no control over either so what will keep people coming back are the new weapons not the fighting. The site is somewhat buggy and has a number of design issues, but it should be enough to keep me interested for a few days.
Apparently Duels.com just doubled their server capacity (good turn around time) so now the site is running okay.
They need to up their server capacity more, because I can’t even get the page to load.
It was working all morning but now Duels is down. I am not getting a timeout, it’s just not loading. Weird.
Maybe it’s getting another big traffic burst?