Throw in $5 for the Humble Bundle and get your hands on a pirate costume and a Dancing Blade companion. The Dancing Blade is just that, a floating sword, and comes pre-packaged with a maximum rank of 30 and will need to be upgraded in order to level any further. The striker companion increases critical severity while active.
The latest Humble Bundle has arrived, this time themed around popular wiki site Gamepedia. Gamers willing to throw in some money will be come out with items for numerous titles including Neverwinter, Dirty Bomb, Heroes & Generals, and more. If you’re not looking to spend a whole lot of money, you’re in luck: The most you’ll need to pay out is $12 for absolutely everything, plus you don’t have to worry about other customers driving the average price up.
For MMO gamers, there are numerous skins and boost packages up for grabs. For everyone else, there is always the free games.
Pay $1 and get the following:
For $5, tack on the following:
And finally, at $12 you get:
(Editor’s Note: As I was gearing up to publish this, the news broke that Blazing Griffin is pushing the release date back to deal with the exact issue that this article covers.)
The Ship Remastered is set to go into Early Access on Monday, and while most developers do their best to get a game in working order before putting it out to the public, Blazing Griffin will be taking a new approach of making the game unplayable for most customers. You see, when the game does go live on Monday, it will do so with neither online play nor bots, meaning if you have no one to play with on a LAN, you have no reason to purchase the game, at least not at first. Assuming all goes according to plan, and the developer keeps up with its schedule, online play will hit the game after a few weeks.
There is little doubt in my mind that launching a game into Early Access with the most important function not yet implemented is going to do some early and likely irreparable damage to Blazing Griffin’s status, between the bevvy of negative reviews that will no doubt pop up to the number of people who will purchase and then very quickly apply for a refund, after giving said negative review. Regardless of Blazing Griffin’s reasons for launching this early, it is pretty irrefutable that early negative impressions can outright kill a game in early access, and in a business format that already has a negative public image, can kill the funding for a game before it even has a chance to succeed.
What more, the very real concern of killing off interest in the game with a misstep right out of the gate is something that Blazing Griffin should be well acquainted with, having tried and failed to grab community interest in a The Ship game just a few years ago. Back in 2012, BG attempted a Kickstarter campaign with a goal of merely £128,000 to create The Ship: Full Steam Ahead. The game just broke eighteen grand from about six hundred people. The Ship on Source only retains its tiny community because you can’t walk two feet without tripping over ten free copies of the game.
As a game that will function primarily over online multiplayer, The Ship absolutely relies on a healthy, active community in order to remain viable in the market, and once people start jumping ship (no pun intended), the population effect tends to snowball. Yes, Blazing Griffin stands to obtain some useful information from launching in Early Access with just LAN, but they also stand to lose a lot more in the long run from the people who will either see the lack of online and put the game on their ignore list, or those who buy the game and refund it within the two week window because online hasn’t been added yet, only to never look back.
I say this not to trash The Ship and Blazing Griffin, but as a long time fan of the series that would like to see its next iteration not fall into the same pit as its predecessor: A dead community leading to a defunct developer, and that doesn’t help anyone.
Rust is the open world survival game by Facepunch Studios, makers of the popular sandbox game Garry’s Mod. As a game that relies heavily on player vs player combat with heavy ramifications for death, it should come as no surprise that cheating has become prevalent in servers. To combat this, Rust employs its own anti-cheat system that bans players on a continual basis. We know this because the Rust Hack Report Twitter account is constantly being updated.
In the time it will take to publish this report, more than a dozen new bans will be reported through the account. Many of the accounts banned appear to be throwaway accounts (new accounts with only one game played) and others are repeat offenders with additional game bans and VAC bans from other titles. Some have tallied more than 100 hours on Rust in the past two weeks, some haven’t even bothered setting up a community page. A few are set to private, while one or two are normal accounts that seem to have large libraries and varied gameplay.
If you’d like to follow the Rust ban list, check out the Rust Hack Report Twitter.
In a rather interesting turn of events, Trion Worlds has taken to the forums to discuss a recent high profile incident of a guild using exploits to kill a boss monster in ArcheAge. The Leviathan is a massive world boss in ArcheAge that is so powerful that it has yet to be defeated in combat in North America. Legitimately, at least. Videos began surfacing on the ArcheAge forums of the guild Rage Quit obtaining the first kill on a very clearly bugged boss, the Leviathan can be seen floating above water and stops attacking, not unlike a giant pinata. As one might expect from such a high profile kill, it didn’t take long to attract Trion Worlds’ attention.
According to senior community manager Seraphina “Celestrata” Brennan, all participating members of Rage Quit have been banned with no chance for appeal, a grand total of 53 players, while the guild as a whole has been disbanded. Accounts that participated in the event and were members of the council have had their membership revoked, while those who were found to be contesting the kill will not be punished. In addition, all loot generated from the kill has been removed from the game world.
First of all, our new policy on exploits is well-known at this point. We do not tolerate exploits or those who abuse them in our game. Any individual taking advantage of an exploit will receive a permanent ban. This is a non-negotiable stance. The Leviathan kill in question was clearly broken and floating to all bystanders in the videos captured, so the guild involved had full knowledge that something was wrong. They made the active decision to proceed forward with the kill regardless.
According to Trion Worlds, only one member of the guild contacted the studio to report the kill, and even then demanded compensation in return for the details. XLGames has been notified of the exploit and should be working on a fix.
(Source: Trion Worlds)
The latest Neverwinter development blog is available and the topic of conversation are strongholds. Guild Strongholds were created as a method of improving player engagement, which while it has worked out great for larger guilds, the smaller groups are finding the costs of progression to be rather frustrating. In response, the Neverwinter team has been gathering data on how to make the process less cumbersome and annoying.
Issue number one became the need for Astral Diamonds, a resource integral to just about every other part of the game meaning that smaller guilds with more casual players would wind up having to give up all of their Astral Diamonds to the coffers, effectively making them unable to participate in other parts of the game. The answer was to reduce Astral Diamond costs, improve rewards for donating harder-to-obtain currencies, and allowing people to collect guild resources through professions.
The changes discussed will go live in the Maze Engine update.
(Source: Neverwinter)
Valentine’s day is just a few days away, and that means plenty of MMO events to whet your item-collecting whistle. Starting Friday and going through Sunday, Perfect World Entertainment will be hosting a number of giveaways across their library of MMOs, with entrance ranging from simple Facebook shares, retweets, and posting in the forums. The giveaways begin at 10am Pacific Friday morning and run until the 14th.
In addition to the giveaways, gamers can also enjoy a 15% charge bonus on virtual currency purchased through the web store. Check out the official website for more details. Check below for a list of possible rewards.
(Source: Perfect World Press Release)
NCSoft has announced that Blade & Soul has surpassed two million accounts, a milestone that comes alongside the launch of the MMO’s latest update. First revealed last month, the Rising Waters update introduces max level PvE content in the form of the heroic dungeon Bloodshade Harbor and its 24-player version, Nightshade Harbor. Solo players can take on the first seven levels of Mushin’s Tower, while they continue to level past the cap with new Hongmoon levels.
Those more interested in PvP will be happy to see that the first pre-season has already begun, allowing fighters to collect Zen Beans, the game’s PvP currency.
(Source: NCSoft Press Release)
Funcom is continuing its work on Conan Exiles, a hardcore survival game set in the Conan universe. It’s up to the player to rebuild the world in their vision, in single player or multi-player on private servers or in public servers. You’ll start with nothing and build up from there, taking on the elements, other players, and dangerous wildlife to form a new kingdom with you as the leader, or go on to bring down someone else’s kingdom.
The latest video promises immersive combat, with players chopping off limbs and armor that visibly breaks as it takes damage.
NCSoft has posted their fourth quarter reports for 2015, and the results are a general mixture of the good and the bad. As you can see from the chart above, while figures were pretty solid across the board over the third quarter, revenue and profit dropped notably over the same period last year. NCSoft pits the majority of the loss on overseas royalties, but that overall the company is growing in profit thanks to a balanced growth from overall IPs.
On the games front, every single title in NCSoft’s library saw growth in the last quarter, including Wildstar. Lineage and Lineage 2, as well as Blade & Soul, grew thanks to content updates and strong in-game item promotions. Guild Wars 2 drove in plenty of new revenue thanks to the sale of Heart of Thorns.
Thank you to NCSoft for plotting out each game on an individual basis, it saves me a lot of time. As you can see from the chart above, while Wildstar’s income grew in the first quarter of free to play, it didn’t grow all that much. Revenue is still far down from where it was when the game launched, and it brought in only $2.23 million USD in its initial free to play rush.
At this point in the timeline, it looks like the upcoming China launch may be Wildstars best, and only, bet at salvation. Assuming NCSoft is willing to shoulder the title to that milestone, we’ll likely be hearing in 2017 about whether or not this title goes on the chopping block. As for Guild Wars, it looks like the Heart of Thorns quarter brought in a bump of $14 million. According to the earnings call itself, while sales were good for Heart of Thorns, they did fall below expectations. This lines up with earlier predictions of Daewoo Securities that Heart of Thorns would sell less than expected.
The first quarter earnings for NCSoft won’t be out for another few months, but they will have some very important information going forward: How has Blade & Soul fared with its western launch? How will Wildstar hold up after its free to play transition?
MMO Fallout 