"We hope you understand that there's nothing we can do at the moment," says the support email we just received from Aventurine, developers of Darkfall. Not exactly what you want to hear from customer service, is it?

Welcome to another issue of Massively's Community Detective, where we're primed and ready to take you into the trenches of MMORPG community and customer service. This week we've got full-blown battlefields complete with land mines, dismemberment, e-peen waving, and all the other things you've come to know and love about PvP. Yes, we're delving into the world of Darkfall, and if that's not enough for you, we'll also be heading for the heavens in a very different (but equally cutthroat) PvP sandbox called EVE Online.

Join us after the cut to see how these two titles fared in terms of community and customer service support.

Before we take the plunge, let's spend a moment to review our current methodology. A few things have changed since last week, both as a result of reader feedback and because the games currently under the microscope are quite different than Age of Conan and EverQuest II in terms of logistics.

Darkfall and EVE Online both feature one server (well, Darkfall technically features two, the North American and European shards, but for the purposes of this column, and for the time being, we're studying American servers). Thus, we don't have the opportunity to ask our questions and file help petitions on multiple server types (PvE, PvP, RP, etc.). That said, we do have the opportunity to interact with a much larger swath of the game's community in one sitting. Whether or not this gives a truer picture is open to debate, but it makes for an interesting comparison with last week regardless.

As before, our intrepid detectives create characters and interact at random with the player population, using everything from global chat questions, to personal tells, to pickup groups. We'll also file support tickets with each game's customer service system, gauging response time, resolution satisfaction, and intangibles such as professionalism and friendliness.

Darkfall presented something of a challenge when we were deciding how and where to ask our questions, as the playerbase is rather fragmented despite existing on one shard. Each racial choice has its own alliance chat channel (as well as a trade channel) shared with other good/evil aligned races, and little to no interaction with opposing races aside from combat activities. As such, we created characters in each racial starter zone and asked our questions in each simply to get a larger feel for the community.

EVE presented no such problem. Even though there are four starting races in New Eden, everyone on the server has access to the same global help channel.

Given the game's group-centric design, it's no surprise that this one netted us a fair number of responses. Responses were immediate and the discussions pretty long-winded, with most players coming down heavily on the side of joining a clan ASAP, while a few dissenters insisted the game could be enjoyed solo. The evil racial chat (alfar, mahirim, ork) featured the longest discussion, while we received personal tells in the good racial chat (dwarf, human, mirdain) and quite a lot of helpful advice on selecting the appropriate clan.

A reference to male anatomy was unfortunately the very first thing that rolled across our chat box as we logged our initial test character into the world of Agon. This was followed shortly thereafter by colorful descriptions of everyone's mothers, and of course a veritable thesaurus of four-letter words.

All that said, the game's community isn't as toxic as you might assume. Yes, it is completely lacking in both political correctness and common courtesy at times (and moderation doesn't exist), but if our week-long session was any indicator, it also features a fairly decent concentration of knowledgeable players, a few of whom are willing to answer newb queries. It reminded us a lot of Xbox Live multiplayer chat, minus the high-pitched pubescent screaming and plus a whole lot of grammatical facepalms. The nice folks are around, but are often drowned out by the riff-raff.

We did have some trouble getting answers for one of the questions, as noted above, but as Darkfall is a PvP-game where every moment is an exercise in paranoia, we can't say for sure whether the cause was community unfriendliness or the nature of the game itself. We suspect a bit of both.