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Transformers Universe Shutting Down January 2015

Jagex has announced that the servers for MOBA Transformers Universe will shut down on January 31st, 2015. The decision was made mutually between the UK developer and Hasbro, and comes on the hilt of both companies realigning their focus for the year ahead.

The shutdown period will begin from today. As part of the winding down we will be refunding all those that have purchased a Founders Pack, as well as anyone that has purchased relic bundles and starter packs. These refunds should be all processed in the next 30 days. In addition we will be closing the ability for new players to make accounts, those of you that already have accounts will continue to be able to use them until the closure date.

Players who do not receive refunds after January 16th should email customer support.

(Source: Transformers Universe)

Archlord Launches Latest Expansion

Archlord 2 players have plenty to be happy about, as Webzen has launched the second expansion to the game: Eternal Strife. The expansion comes alongside the release of a new server, a Christmas event, and a slew of server bonuses. As described in the release:

Eternal Strife introduces two new races, joining the ranks of the game’s factions. The Dragonscion join the Humans to support the Azuni’s cause, whereas the Moonelves rally under the banners of the Crunn. Specialized in magic, these new races offer unique starting zones, new archetypes and weapons, thus extending the range of choices for the Archlord 2 players.

Check it out on the official website.

(Source: Webzen press release)

Path of Exile PVP Manifesto

The latest Path of Exile patch introduced two new game modes, but the focus of the update was on player vs player combat. In a development manifesto released on forums today, Grinding Gear Games has detailed recent changes to the combat system introduced in patch 1.3.0.

With 1.3.0, damage scaling has changed. It has been split into two algorithms — one for physical damage and chaos damage, and one for elemental. In low-level play, damage is reduced by about 20% for physical skills, but is increased for elemental damage to compensate for assumed resistances. In high-level play, the damage reduction is much sharper.

You can read the entire manifesto at the link below, but unless you’re an avid player of Path of Exile you probably won’t understand many of the changes.

(Source: Path of Exile)

2014 In Review: Best Moments Of The Year

Let’s look at the year with rose tinted glasses, or perhaps a glass of hard liquor. As with any year, we had a lot of bad and a lot of good, so let’s take a minute to focus on the good stuff.

1. Goodbye Mythic Entertainment

This one is a bit cruel, but perhaps the best trend of 2014 was that those business practices that so many of us revile, in a lot of cases, didn’t work. In a world where many of these anti-consumer decisions are smashing successes, in the sense that they make enough money in the short term for the developer/publisher to simply not care about the long term ramifications or damages to their public image, the idea that so many of these blew up does a lot for consumers and sets a precedent for 2015 and beyond.

Just to name a few examples, Mythic Entertainment’s attempt to revive two classic games with the clear impression that free to play mobile was easy access to a lot of money, that being Ultima IV and Dungeon Runners, went down in flames and took the developer with it, along with what remaining goodwill the Mythic community had left.

Trion Worlds has been hit hard over their handling of Defiance as well as the launch and continued mishaps of ArcheAge, and at the beginning of the year cancelled its End of Nations MOBA. Wildstar advertised itself as a hardcore MMO for hardcore raiders, and subsequently only brought in the hardcore raiders. The game hasn’t been doing so well, with layoffs at Carbine Studios, delaying content and seeing a heavy drop in revenue in its second quarter.

Then there are the hundreds of cookie cutter free to play MMOs imported from Korea and China that shut down without any of us knowing that they existed.

There are a lot more examples to throw up, but I think I’ve made my point. It was good to see that, in 2014, the good guys actually made out pretty well while the ones with underhanded intentions just ended up stepping on rakes and getting hit in the face.

2. The Offloading and Revival Of MMOs

While we’re talking about the death of Mythic Entertainment, I’d like to take a moment to thank Electronic Arts personally for offloading Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot onto Broadsword Entertainment rather than allowing the classics to go down with the self-sinking ship. Asheron’s Call and Asheron’s Call 2 (which was also revived years after its death) dropped their subscription fees and will eventually be spun off with players allowed to operate their own servers.

Similarly, we learned that there are deals in the works to bring back City of Heroes as a legacy server with the possibility that the IP might get a sequel or other spinoffs. Pirates of the Caribbean Online is being revived by a dedicated community. Dungeon Fighter Online is returning in English. Also Glitch has multiple projects to bring the game back with new servers and new content.

3. Free To Play Gets Slammed

Speaking of schadenfreude, free to play took a big blow this year in the form of several rulings against mobile publishers Apple and Google. Over in the UK, Google was forced to remove an ad for Dungeon Keeper on the grounds that calling it free was misleading. Apple settled with the FTC back in January and agreed to refund $32.5 million for inadvertent purchases made by children, while Google followed in September with $19 million.

Both companies have altered their stores to require a password always by default when downloading apps or making in-app purchases, and no longer label games as “free” if they have in-app purchases. Korea blanket-banned all Facebook games until they could be individually approved to ensure that they were complying with gambling laws.

We’ve been waiting for a few years now to get some results on what many consider to be predatory tactics, and it looks like our wish has been granted.

4. Classic Servers

Nostalgia is a great thing. If you’ve read MMO Fallout, you know about my fascination with the Old School RuneScape servers, and how Jagex managed to not only revive a great era from RuneScape’s past, but actually develop it in a direction away from RuneScape 3, based entirely off of player polls, with a dedicated team and community. Old School RuneScape continues to go strong, raising the possibility that other developers will take notice.

Lineage II is in the process of testing out a classic server, one that will hopefully come westward, and there has been some talk behind the scenes of other MMOs following.

5. MMOs On Consoles

2014 saw the announcement and release of multiple MMOs coming to the Xbox One and Playstation 4. Over on the Sony side, the PS4 added Final Fantasy XIV, Blacklight Retribution, and DC Universe Online, with the upcoming releases of Planetside 2, H1Z1, and Everquest Next. Xbox One saw the launch of State of Decay, with Neverwinter and SMITE coming eventually.

Both consoles can or will eventually be able to enjoy The Crew, The Division, Warframe, The Elder Scrolls Online, Warhammer 40k: Eternal Crusade, All Points Bulletin, and more. If you’ve been spending the past few years waiting to play an MMO on your console that isn’t Final Fantasy, you’re in luck.

2014 In Review: “Needed To Happen” Moments

Let’s look at the year with rose tinted glasses, or perhaps a rose-tinted glass of hard liquor. As with any year, we had a lot of bad and a lot of good, but whether good or bad some of these just had to happen for the good of us all.

1. Goodbye Mythic Entertainment

This one is a bit cruel, but one of the best trends of 2014 was that those business practices that so many of us revile, in a lot of cases, didn’t work. In a world where many of these anti-consumer decisions are smashing successes, at least in the short term, the notion that this year saw a lot of those practices crash and burn says a lot about the evolution of consumer common sense.

And I can hardly come up with a better example than the final closure of Mythic Entertainment, a company that spent the last years of its life burning whatever remaining bridges it hadn’t yet touched. Yes, this is where I bring up that time Mythic referred to MMO mechanics as “boring crap” while happily revealing that assets from the poorly-launched, severely downsized, and rather quickly abandoned MMO Warhammer Online, had been lifted and used for the developer’s expensive and ultimately failed MOBA Wrath of Heroes.

Add in two mobile games that attempted to exploit classic games to draw in franchise fans only to repulse them with exploitative cash shops, and this is where Mythic is today. Warhammer Online is dead, Wrath of Heroes is dead, Ultima Forever is dead, Dungeon Keeper has fallen in the mobile charts, was critically panned and called a “shame” by EA, and even saw an ad banned for false advertising.

2. The Offloading and Revival Of MMOs

3. Free To Play Gets Slammed

We’ve been waiting for a few years now to get some results on what many consider to be predatory tactics, and it looks like our wish has been granted.

4. Classic Servers

Lineage II is in the process of testing out a classic server, one that will hopefully come westward, and there has been some talk behind the scenes of other MMOs following.

5. MMOs On Consoles

10% Discount Was Never Advertised, Says Trion Worlds

The ongoing saga of ArcheAge, Trion Worlds, and the fabled 10% discount has reached another bend, as Trion Worlds is now flat out denying that the discount was ever a part of the game’s advertising. A user on the ArcheAge forums submitted a complaint to the San Francisco Bay Area Better Business Bureau, to have his complaint addressed by Trion Worlds. Trion Worlds first pulled out the EULA and pointed to the “we can change whatever we want” clause, before denying that the 10% discount was ever officially promoted.

Trion sincerely regrets any inconvenience experienced by the customer. The 10% Marketplace discount was not officially promoted as a benefit as it was never advertised in the ArcheAge purchase flow.

For the record, here is a screenshot of the 10% discount being advertised on Trion World’s own website. Update 12/16/14: This page has since been deleted. See its archive here.

(Source: BBB)

Areal Is Back: Stalker Apocalypse Funding Part 2

S.T.A.L.K.E.R is back! Well, actually STALKER is back, and that is an important distinction to make. Earlier this year we saw a Kickstarter pop up for a spiritual sequel to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R franchise called Areal, by a company made up of former developers of said franchise. It didn’t take long for internet sleuths to figure out that the trailer for the game was shot in Unity, using nearly 100% stock assets from the Unity store, and that several screenshots and pieces of concept art were taken directly from Shadows of Chernobyl.

The whole controversy just got strange from then on. Rather than address the claims, West Games began blaming their criticism on everything from western bias, the information war between Ukraine and Russia, and Forbes being sold to the Chinese. They attacked news websites covering the game, and even attempted to dox trolls. Then someone at West Games thought it would be a good idea to post a letter of congratulations and support from Vladimir Putin, and not as a joke. The campaign was suspended by Kickstarter for suspicious activities, and West Games has since disappeared off the radar.

Now the game is back as STALKER Apocalypse on World Wide Funder, a crowdfunding website that seemingly popped up out of nowhere and is currently home to a library of funding efforts, all but a small handful of which are currently sitting at 0% funding. The funding website was just registered in September of this year, and incidentally has been registered anonymously through domainsbyproxy.com.

While the funding campaign goes to great lengths to differentiate between STALKER and S.T.A.L.K.E.R, likely for legal reasons, there are repeated uses of STALKER with objects that conveniently look like periods to make the logo look like an acronym.

(Source: WWF)

Steam Holiday Auction Exploited, Temporarily Suspended

The Steam Holiday Auction is a temporary event encouraging players to recycle their unused items for gems, which can then be used to bid on games and other Steam goodies. As it turns out, players almost immediately figured out a way to farm gems at no cost to themselves, vastly deflating the value of the gems and causing hyperinflation on the price of even the cheapest games. As a result, Valve has shut down the auction for the time being.

Sorry, but there have been some issues with Gems and the Steam Holiday Auction has been temporarily closed. The elves are working franctically to get the issues sorted out, and the auction will start again as soon as they’re done.

More information will follow as it becomes available.

(Source: Steam)

Top 5: Most Disappointing Moments of the Year

With the year coming to an end, it’s time to start taking stories and sticking them into categories. Since I’m a well known optimist, I decided to start this month’s lists off with a look at the year’s greatest disappointments. Since a lot of what constitutes a “disappointment” is subjective, I ignored specific news pieces and tried to stick with general events.

This article is in no particular order.

1. ArcheAge… Just ArcheAge.

Where do you even start with a story like this? The rampant gold farming, exploits, dupes, and hacks that make it more newsworthy to simply report on when something isn’t going wrong in ArcheAge? How about Trion Worlds misleading their customers with false promises of discounts that would later be recanted because they apparently couldn’t be bothered waiting? Or the server instability? Or the economic turmoil caused by Trion’s greedy obsession with lock boxes?

Or the problem with housing being overrun by exploits? Or the unexplained downtime recently of nearly seventy two hours that still hasn’t been properly discussed by Trion Worlds? Or the fact that you had to have been a patron to receive the full compensation package? How about the forums being so poorly moderated that gold spam, thread spam, and pornography can be found appearing for hours at a time?

It would be a lot harder to lay the blame on Trion as mere publisher were this not the same strategy that caused the Defiance community to leave in droves, with Trion ignoring major game problems to focus on subtly altering core game mechanics to nerf in-game progress and hopefully divert players to cash shop lock boxes. The end result in Defiance was that the game could be found at the bottom of the bargain bin long before it ever went free to play, and ArcheAge would be sitting right next to it if the game had ever seen a box release.

2. That Unlicensed Harry Potter MMO

The string of high profile disasters has lowered my opinion of licensed MMOs considerably, but my disappointment in the unlicensed Harry Potter MMO from earlier this year wasn’t the fact that it was canned barely a week after it was announced, but the idea that the developer thought they could get away with it.

Here’s the story: At the beginning of the year, this group called Bio-Hazard Entertainment popped up and claimed that Warner Bros had given them permission to create a Harry Potter MMO, at least up until beta, and then would decide whether or not to fully greenlight the project. This claim, as it turned out, wasn’t so true. The website went down less than a week later and Bio-Hazard announced that they would be working on a different wizard MMO, one not related to Harry Potter, but encouraged gamers to contact Warner Bros and demand a Harry Potter MMO.

You have to admire the confidence of some no-name team thinking that they could just start working on a Harry Potter MMO and that Warner Bros. would be so impressed that they’d happily license the property. Forgetting of course, or ignoring, the numerous developers Warner Bros. had no doubt turned away, with larger budgets, bigger teams, and the experience to guarantee that such a large project could be seen through to the end.

3.DDOS Attacks

As I said back in 2013:

If I had a nickel for every time some individual or group launched a denial of service attack against a website or service that they didn’t like, I would put those nickels in a sock and use it to beat them unconscious.

Distributed Denial of Service attacks have only gotten worse in 2014, and it looks like 2015 is going to be just as bad. We’ve hit a point where the act has become as casual as racists commenting on the news. RuneScape players DDoS the servers for advantages in PvP, Minecraft players DDoS “competing” servers, almost every MMO to launch or release a major update/expansion has been DDoS’d this year, the console servers were attacked, Xbox Live is under attack currently, and so on and so forth.

I suppose the only upside to this is that eventually these kids tend to get caught because their ego gets the best of them and they do something stupid like trying to hack the CIA, or sending a bomb threat to an airline, and it is pretty fun to read about them crying in court before they’re sentenced to a few years in prison.

4. PMB Kills From Beyond The Grave

Pando Media Booster is so toxic of a piece of malware that it can’t even be dead and buried without poisoning the land around it. After a life spent sapping bandwidth, slowing computers, crashing programs, and being a general nuisance that plagued MMOs and frustrated gamers, we were happy to see the service finally die in August 2013. Like any good plague, however, it didn’t stay dead for long. Pando Media Booster was revived by some digital necromancer back in February to continue spreading its bile, this time distributing viruses and browser hijacks.

The program sent out update notices to users who had forgotten to uninstall it, or were unaware that it was still on their system, infecting computers with the Sweet Page browser hijacker. Can I get one last joke in about Pando Media Booster? When PMB turned into a distribution platform for malware, how did anyone notice?

5. Long Term Cancellations

While the MMO industry is no stranger to sudden cancellations, the long development cycle and a practice of announcing titles long before they are even considered viable to launch, it’s possible to spend a lot of time waiting for a game that just never comes out. World of Darkness was announced eight years ago only to be confirmed as cancelled earlier this year. Blizzard first hinted at Project Titan back in 2007 when they started hiring for a next-gen MMO, only to come out and say that the game has been scrapped seven years later.

Gamers don’t like being strung along, especially when it later becomes obvious that the developer’s outward enthusiasm was a veil covering their real sentiment, that the game wasn’t fun, wasn’t being competently developed or wasn’t coming close to development roadmaps, didn’t have a snowball’s chance of being funded to completion, or would be the first thing to thrown under the bus should profits dip even a little on the developer’s live services. At the very least, and this is more than we can say about certain other games, developers like Blizzard, CCP, and Jagex never asked their community to donate to fund these lost causes, which they likely could have done and recuperated quite a bit.

Take-Two CEO: If You Don't Like It, Don't Buy It

Take-Two CEO and Chairman Karl Slatoff has something to say to the people who want Grand Theft Auto V removed from store shelves: If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. Speaking at the BMO Capital Markets 2014 Technology & Digital Media Conference, Slatoff responded to the news that Target and Kmart have pulled the shooter from stores in Australia, stating that while the decision has not impacted consumer habits, the company is “deeply disappointed.”

“We have 34 million people who bought Grand Theft Auto, and if these folks had their way, none of those people would be able to buy Grand Theft Auto. And that really just flies in the face of everything that free society is based on. It’s the freedom of expression, and to try to squelch that is a dangerous and slippery slope to go down.”

Target and Kmart of Australia pulled the game after an online petition of over 40,000 signatures called for its removal over heavily criticised claims that the game incentivizes players to commit sexual violence against women. Target has come under fire by critics for perceived hypocrisy, as the company has stated that it will continue selling media including Game of Thrones and Fifty Shades of Grey, both of which contain explicit sexual violence.

(Source: Gamesindustry.biz)

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