Today’s video comes to us from H1Z1 on PS4, where Daybreak Game Company recently launched a new map. I take a dive in (literally) and see what it’s all about.
Author: Admin
[Column] Champions of Titan, or, Schrödinger’s MMO
What is an MMO? A miserable pile of microtransactions.
Today I’d like to talk about Champions of Titan, or my preferred title; Schrödinger’s MMO. You may recognize Champions of Titan by its previous namesake Wild Buster. Wild Buster along with Guardians of Ember and a few other titles were removed from the Steam store where it was hosted under publisher Insel Games after it came to light that the CEO was manipulating reviews in order to gin up more sales. Insel Games has since gone on to exist in a mostly vegetative state, while its published games were either shut down or spun off to new companies.
Case in point being today’s topic. Wild Buster was spun off to IDC Games whose name does not, as it turns out, stand for “I Don’t Care.” It might, since a quick browse through the forums of many games that IDC publishes comes up with two major topics: The server performance is terrible and customer support is virtually nonexistent, and more than one of the forums just flat out wouldn’t load when I tried to boot them up.
Champions of Titan is alive and well, in a theoretical sense. In a practical sense, it doesn’t seem like the game has been properly functioning in quite some time. People are logging in to find that the game client no longer works, what with there being no character selection screen.
Now comes the hard part: How long exactly has the game been broken and is it broken for everyone? The answer to the second question is evidently no, as the earliest complaint that I found on the forums discussing the above issue dates back to October 21, however another player posted a first impressions piece on December 13. There are multiple threads discussing the fact that the game doesn’t work going through the end of July with sporadic comments from staff asking players to contact customer support.
It seems to be the case that nobody is really trying to play the game so the number of people getting rejected from the client not working is virtually none with even less willing to go on the forums and complain about it. I got a response from the IDC people after submitting a ticket that they are aware of the situation, and you would imagine that the game just being wholly inaccessible would be a major priority to be fixed right away, but after a week since my report and ten months since the earliest report, it’s apparently not the case.
But that’s just my opinion on the whole thing.
Kickstarter Catchup: Fractured – The Dynamic MMO
It’s dynamic! Boogie woogie woogie.
For today’s piece I wanted to discuss a little game called Fractured – The Dynamic MMO. Mostly I wanted to start this column off with MMOs that have a chance of coming out positive before I dive deep into those that were incompetent or possibly outright scams. Fractured is a 3D MMO that raised over £111,000 way back in the yesteryear of June 2018. The game actually hit two stretch goals, that being a hardcore survival challenge in a procedurally generated dungeon, and hatchling dragon pets for backers. Awesome.
But what about the game itself? Fractured advertises itself as an open world sandbox MMO with a fully interactive environment. What does that mean?
It features three races, that of man, beastman, and demon. Humans can be good or evil, beastmen are evidently good nature-loving hippies, and demons are probably doomed to be evil. Just my assumption.
“Levels, skills, achievements. These classic progression patterns always have one thing in common: the grind. In Fractured, an innovative take on horizontal progression allows you to enjoy the freedom and level playing field of a MOBA without losing the persistence and sense of progression of a real MMO.”
I don’t know what that means. By innovative progression, they mean they’re doing the Eve Online thing and just giving you points over time.
“In Fractured, Knowledge Points can be seen as your personal progression currency: you acquire them over time while playing the game, and you can spend them to obtain Talent Points and start learning new abilities.”
By the looks of promised features, Fractured has everything you could hope for from a modern day Ultima Online. Player owned cities, player crafting being the major source of powerful equipment, cartography, a player-driven economy, building houses, open PvP, and destructible environments.
So where does Fractured sit right now? The game just ran its second alpha test and things are looking pretty good. More tests will be conducted in August and September with a clearer roadmap promised to be on the way.
If you want to keep up with Fractured, check out the official website.
[NM] Rockstar North Paid No Taxes, Earned Tax Relief
It’s hard to look at Rockstar North and not see dollar signs (or pound signs) around the massive success of Grand Theft Auto V, but this week’s news is sure to set some fires in more than a few bellies as the company’s finances come into more scrutiny.
TaxWatch UK a thinktank that tracks business earnings reported this week that Rockstar North has made an estimated $5 billion in profit over the last six years. Despite this massive amount of profit, the company still determined that it deserved tax relief and claimed £42 million between 2015 and 2017, or 19% of all government credits issued to the industry during that period. And with all of this income, can you guess how much Rockstar North paid in taxes? That’s right, absolutely nothing between 2009 and 2018.
The thinktank noted:
“It is outrageous that the UK taxpayer is being asked to shell out tens of millions of pounds in subsidy to the developers of Grand Theft Auto, when at the time that the game’s developers put in their tax credit application Grand Theft Auto V had already generated several billion dollars in sales and profits. This is a drive-by assault on the British taxpayer and corporate welfare scrounging at its very worst.”
It should also be noted that no one is claiming any illegal activity on the part of Rockstar North. The news of Rockstar’s nonexistent tax bill is likely to come off as especially egregious considering the company recently opened up a literal casino in Grand Theft Auto V where players from certain countries are able to buy virtual chips with real life currency.
(Source: TaxWatch)
Neverwinter Makes Cosmetic Overrides More User Friendly
Neverwinter players should be happy to hear that the next module coming to the MMORPG will address a longstanding complaint: The appearance system.
The current transmutation system in Neverwinter is, to put it lightly, not optimal. Under the current system you need to destroy a lot of items in order to change the appearance of a single piece of equipment, and when you finally replace that piece you have to go through that process all over again. Under the new system everything is handled by slot instead of by item, so instead of transmuting one item to move its appearance to another, you will instead convert said item into the appearance inventory and be able to select it as an override.
Now, you define how an equipment slot looks, and your equipment takes on that look. If you have an appearance override defined for a slot, anything you put into that slot will take on that appearance automatically without you have to do anything. No matter what you’re actually wearing on your head, it can look like a bright pink fedora! (Fedoras not available in all regions. Some restrictions apply.)
Even better, this system applies to dyes. Instead of having to go out and buy dyes for every single item you want to color, one dye unlocks the color for your library and can be used as many times as you’d like.
More information can be found at the link below.
(Source: Neverwinter)
Maplestory 2 Introduces Dungeon Helper
If you could name one improvement for MapleStory 2, what would it be? That’s right, a dungeon helper system.
Starting with the latest update, players level 50 and above will be considered a dungeon helper when queuing for dungeons below level 50. By completing lower level dungeons and thus helping out the newer players, it is possible to receive up to 10 dungeon coins per day (1 per dungeon). Coins can be used in the shop to buy furnishings, outfits, mounts, and more.
In order to better ease new players into higher level dungeons, Nexon has also instituted an across the map nerf of dungeon enemies. Finally, the benefits of house assistants are no longer locked behind merets and can now be bought with mesos.
Source: MapleStory2
P.S.: Keep an eye out for Lucky August events.
IPE Update: Amro Elansari Files Appeal In RuneScape Lawsuit
In Plain English: Epic and the Generic, Substance-Free Patent Troll
Epic Games is once again back in court, except this time they are taking on a more defensive tone.
As of July 18, Epic Games has filed a lawsuit against Acceleration Bay LLC regarding some bad blood between the two companies that has boiled over in the past few years. According to court dockets filed in the Northern District of California, Epic Games is asking for a declaratory judgment of non-infringement regarding seven patents owned by the defendant.
According to Epic’s filing, defendant Acceleration Bay LLC in early 2015 acquired a number of patents from The Boeing Company. These patents cover a computer network and/or broadcast channel with an m-regular, incomplete topology. I’ll let the docket try to explain some of it, but it has to do with how computers interact on a network.
- The claims of these patents all require that (1) each participant/computer in the network must have connections to at least three other neighboring participants.
- The claims of these patents all require that (2) the network must be “m-regular” where each participant is connected to the exact same number, m, of neighbor participants.
- The claims of these patents all require that (3) the network must be incomplete – m must be at least two less than the total number of participants.
- 31. In other words, each participant must be connected to at least three neighbor participants, and no participant can be connected to all of the other participants in the network.
Fast forward to 2018 and Acceleration Bay’s lawyers sent a letter to Epic with allegedly no explanation or information, and claimed that Epic was infringing on their patents and would require a license. The letter was apparently so poorly vetted by AB’s legal team that they didn’t notice that the threat still contained the name of an unrelated company that AB had presumably also threatened over its patents.
As they say, bad form.
Additionally, Epic asserted that Acceleration Bay couldn’t get through its letter without completely lying about its own existence, claiming that it was founded in 2012 (it was founded in August 2014), and calling itself a “technology incubator” (it isn’t) that “partners with inventors, corporations and entrepreneurs to accelerate growth in creating innovative companies.” AB doesn’t accelerate growth in anything. Acceleration Bay, according to Epic’s attorneys, does not provide any product or service whatsoever, and exists only to monetize patents acquired from third parties. According to Epic’s attorney’s, AB is exclusively in the market of monetizing patents.
On July 10, representatives of both companies sat down to a teleconference and evidently nothing was accomplished. AB’s attorneys don’t appear to understand what their own patent covers, or how Epic operates their games, as Epic states in the court dockets that many online multiplayer games, especially those being asserted in this lawsuit, do not function the way that the patent would cover, as player networks are communicating with Epic’s servers and not each other.
Epic has assembled its Avengers team of lawyers from the offices of Winston & Strawn to convince the court for a preemptive declaration that Epic is not infringing on any patents alleged in this case. Acceleration had not filed a lawsuit against Epic, however the threatening letters are enough for Epic to go to the court and demand an answer to force the letters to stop. Acceleration Bay has 21 days to respond to the lawsuit.
As always, MMO Fallout has acquired at our own cost the dockets for this case and they can be found on our Google Drive. The docket itself is linked here, as Acceleration.pdf, or it will be in a folder titled “Acceleration” once more dockets are uploaded.
I paid way too much for this article. If you really like patents, I recommend checking out the docket because it’s about 25 pages of the actual lawsuit and then 350+ of the patents at dispute presented at evidence. Our condolences go out to the court clerk who had to print this out and file it.
Falling Out #6: Put Your Trademark On It
More like They Break Games.
Maplestory Adds New Party Quest With Squadron of Heroes Update
MapleStory’s latest update goes live this week as Squadron of Heroes continues on from the major Pathfinder update earlier this summer.
In the Squadron of Heroes update, players level 61 and up can take part in a new Ancient Ruins Party Quest for rewards, as well as partying up in cross world party quests that reward currency that can be used to purchase items from the party point merchant shop. In addition to working with other players, one can also create a party of characters across their account to take on the Immortal Gorgons for daily and weekly rewards.
A new theme dungeon called Partem Ruins will be available for players level 135+ with new mini-games and adventure tiers being added to the Adventure Islands.
And finally this wouldn’t be a MapleStory event without another burning event. If one burning character just isn’t enough, this time around Nexon is offering two burning characters who from level 10 to 150 will gain two additional levels.
More information available at the official website.
MMO Fallout 