Gazillion Entertainment has announced that users are now welcome to sign up to beta test the Mac client for Marvel Heroes. Launch for the Mac client is set for later on this Spring, but users can sign up now to beta test. Check out the link below for more information on how to sign up.
(Source: Marvel Heroes)
In case you haven’t seen, Trion Worlds has announced the introduction of a new “forum toxicity” policy. In short, the developer has issued an ultimatum that trolling, threats, and abuse will no longer be tolerated, and swift action will be taken to ensure that the forums remain a squeaky clean place for squeaky clean boys and girls. One issue that seems to have been tossed into the spotlight is the idea that Trion is now suspending and revoking game access for behavior on the forums. That is half true.
As explained on the forums, revoking game access is apparently reserved for players who repeatedly return on alternate accounts to continue trolling.
Users who have previously had their forum access revoked, and create second, third, fourth, fifth…and so on, troll accounts, may now see penalties on their game accounts. (Yes, people really do this.) Those penalties range from suspensions to revocation of game access.
With the proper execution, Rift may actually wind up having one of the few official MMO forums worth visiting.
Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from Aion, where Gameforge and NCSoft have tossed together an infographic detailing the two year anniversary of the game’s transition to free to play. With over seven million characters created with a combined play time of sixty six thousand years, Aion’s most popular class is the Gladiator and Sorcerer. Since its transition to free to play, Aion has seen massive updates to the core game experience including the addition of housing and mounts, not to mention two new classes. Players are also capable of playing in Spanish, Italian, Polish, Turkish, alongside English, French, and German.
Aion’s 4.5 update will introduce the second Engineer specialization, not to mention a number of other content additions. Check it out when it hits Europe on April 9th.
(Source: Gameforge press release)
Hindsight is twenty twenty, and no doubt gamers of days to come will one day look back at Pando Media Booster and remember it for what it was: One of the worst program to plague PC users since the Bonzai Buddy. As advertised, Pando Media Booster became rather widely used by a number of MMOs as a peer to peer sharing system to mitigate bandwidth and hopefully provide faster download times.
It also had the side effect of slowing the internet speeds of many down to a crawl, and was generally seen as bloatware carefully toeing the line between legitimate software and malicious malware. Last August, to the relief of gamers everywhere, Pando closed its business down and shut down the Pando Media Booster servers.
So Pando may be dead, but as decades of Friday the 13th movies have shown us, the dead often do not rest in peace. Pando Media Booster has been hijacked and users are receiving notices that the program requires an update despite the service having shut down last year. The supposed update is actually the Sweet Page browser hijacker virus, which redirects browsers to the Sweet Page search engine.
A number of MMO clients are still being distributed with Pando Media Booster.
(Source: CSTM)
Jagex has revealed the results of their 24 hour gaming marathon for SpecialEffect’s Gameblast weekend. The event, which saw staff and members of the community playing RuneScape and Ace of Spades for a full day, resulted in a total of nearly eighty thousand dollars raised for charity. In addition, RuneScape once again opened its Well of Goodwill, where players can donate in-game bonds and goods that are converted into real money to be donated. To top off the event, Jagex also donated 50% of the profits from Ace of Spades sales to SpecialEffect.
Jane Ryan, Head of RuneScape Community Management, expressed the company’s delight in the good will of its community.
“It’s been a crazy 24 hours; we’ve seen staff rise to the occasion and take on all kinds of challenges in the name of charity. The generosity of our players is both touching and gratifying and we can’t wait to do it all again next year!”
SpecialEffect is a charity dedicated to helping people with disabilities. Find out more about the charity at http://www.specialeffect.org.uk/
(Source: Jagex Press Release)
The drawbridge has been lowered and the hoards are rolling in. Ubisoft has opened up the Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, dropping the NDA and bringing the game into open beta. The game of building up your own base while raiding those of your neighbors is now freely available to anyone without the need for an invitation. Choose from three available heroes (with a fourth available through a cash pack) and hire minions to defend your loot. Raid your friend’s castles and bring their defenses down and steal from their coffers.
Check it out at the link below. Keep in mind that, given this is open beta, a wipe is always possible if called for, although none are planned at this time.
(Source: Mighty Quest)
Turbine Entertainment has announced that Asheron’s Call will be heading free to play as of March 4th, although the game will be heading into maintenance mode at the same time. While there are no plans to shut down Asheron’s Call at any point in the near future, there will also no longer be any updates apart from maintenance, bug fixes, and a few tweaks here and there. There are also plans to allow players to run their own servers, as mentioned in the announcement:
In addition, we have been working within the company to start an initiative sometime near the end of the year to allow players to run their own Asheron’s Call servers. We intend to put the call out to tech savvy enthusiasts that love Asheron’s Call to create a community for players who want to run their own Asheron’s Call servers.
Both Asheron’s Call and Asheron’s Call 2 will be made available to play for free. Given the emphasis on player-operated servers and that the move will shut off what cash flow Asheron’s Call has left, all signs seem to point toward the sunsetting of b0th games in the next year or so, the official servers at the very least. At the very least, Turbine clearly recognizes the passion of their community and is one of an extremely small number of developers willing to hand their game over to the community when it is no longer financially viable for them to keep going.
We will have more details as they approach. Turbine has not commented on whether or not private servers will be possible for Asheron’s Call 2.
(Source: Asheron’s Call)
Here at MMO Fallout, we occasionally like to ask and answer a straightforward question: Whatever happened to that one game we heard about a while back? While looking through the game list, I realized that we haven’t heard from The Missing Ink in nearly a year. Experimental MMOs and indie games built by small studios tend to go for long periods of time with no press coverage and then, out of the blue, we find out that they had already shut down well over a month ago. Sorry Fusionfall!
The Missing Ink is the latest project by RedBedlam, the UK developer responsible for the now defunct MMO Roma Victor. What set The Missing Ink apart from the rest was its unique art style, with characters all crafted out of two dimensional drawings on paper. It didn’t break any new ground, but the presentation was charming enough to warrant some off-again on-again gaming. Part of the fun was simply logging in every now and then to see how the early alpha client was progressing.
As you may have figured, The Missing Ink has shut down without any kind of mention by the game media. The servers went down at the end of January alongside an announcement that the game will receive a full overhaul and release later this year.
“As a result of the feedback from this community and our internal test team, we’re started work on a brand new game design for The Missing Ink. We’ll obviously be keeping our lovable 2D characters whilst expanding the explorable 3D worlds and much, much more.”
The good news is that The Missing Ink will hopefully find its way back into our hearts later this year. The bad news is that it will have to share that space with Sonic drive-ins that will be opened up in my neighborhood soon. Until then, follow The Missing Ink on Twitter.
Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from Neverwinter, where traveling across a bridge built from what appears to be a giant pillar has left me with some second thoughts. In fact, I’ll wait here until the engineers in Protector’s Enclave develop a flying machine, or sturdy handrailing, or both.
Check out MMOrning Shots every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
If you’ve been following Pantheon’s Kickstarter, then you already know that the project has failed to meet its goal within the allotted time. Like many other companies, Visionary Realms has ventured into a self-hosted private funding system where people donate directly to the the company rather than through a third party. Those with money to burn can head on over to the Pantheon website and throw in anywhere up to ten thousand dollars for the highest tiers of rewards. The $100 tier is actually a great deal, when you consider that it includes two copies of the game, plus alpha and beta access and a bunch of exclusive items and titles that gamers tend to go nuts over.
The $100 tier and higher also give lifetime access to the supporter and apprentice developer benefits. What are those, you ask? You must not have looked at the picture at the top of this article. For $5 a month, you gain the privilege of posting in the public areas of the forums and wikis, and access to the supporter forums. For $15, you get all that plus the ability to chat with the developers during live streaming. Oh and you get a special color for your forum avatar for both.
Now I fully understand people wanting to help get a game out the door, which is why Kickstarter exists, but fifteen dollars a month? For the privilege of posting on a forum and being either ignored or drowned out by the sea of voices? For the special opportunity to communicate with the developers while they Live Stream, a feat that a growing number of early-access developers have managed to provide for absolutely free? A special color next to your name? The chance to fully understand how to sink money into a pit and receive nothing in return? Because aside from what is essentially a more expensive and recurring version of Something Awful’s forum fee, you are ultimately paying for the good feeling of saying at least you tried to help. Subscribing over the course of a full year would cost $180, and you get nothing. Not a free copy of the game, no items, no titles, no nothing.
At this point you’re probably thinking “why not just pick a higher tier?” Understandable, but fifteen dollars a month for a lot of people is more feasible than a straight up payment of $180, and easier to convince those who have the money but might simply not want to part with such a sum at once. This is why many stores adopt a layaway plan, and Visionary Realms obviously understands this concept because they are using it themselves. Plans that cost over one thousand dollars all have the option to pay off over the course of a year, plus what appears to be about 20% interest.
So because I’m a problem solver, and I believe that this is a factor of bad planning rather than malicious intent (dear internet trolls), I have devised a method that I believe would bring more interest to the Pantheon forum subscription. The idea is simple, take the subscription and tie it into the layaway plan. Take the standard reward tiers and boost them up, and allow accounts to automatically fall into those brackets once they hit a certain cumulative total.
Just as an example and a rough idea, I’ve listed a personal draft of the new tiers, compared to the one-off price, which I would submit had I worked at Visionary Realms.
And so on and so forth.
If you figure that the Kickstarter estimated date for delivery was January 2017, someone who pays $5 a month starting now would have put in $175 by 2017, or enough to go over the inflated Warder’s pledge by a fair amount. A person who pays $15 a month during that same time period would generate $525. Now I am not a marketing expert, but I think it is safe to say that offering reward tiers, even at the greatly inflated prices I have set above, would bring in more revenue than what I can only assume is a hope that people will simply choose the $100 or higher options to avoid the forum subscription altogether.
Like I said, I’m not a marketing expert, but I do know that $140 for the top pledge over the course of ten months is a lot more money than no dollars over the same time period.
Any thoughts? Drop a comment below.
MMO Fallout 