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MMOrning Shots: Heroes & Villains

Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from Heroes and Villains, a spiritual sequel to City of Heroes in development by the folks at Plan Z Virtual Studio. This is a rather early build of Plan Z’s character creation tool, although as you can see from the image above, work is coming along great on my personal superhero, Contemporary Lounge-chairman. Players will be able to create their character as a hero, villain, or freelancer, and customize their costume, abilities, powers, secret identity, and more.

To check out Heroes & Villains, check out the official website.

Line of Defense Coming 2014

It’s been a while since we heard anything related to Line of Defense. In a post on the game’s official blog, 3000ad inc announced that players should be “rolling in awesomeness by Q2/14.”

Having switched from a custom internal engine to a custom middleware engine (Havok Vision Engine), we did have some setbacks during the transition. Especially in light of the fact that, well, the game uses over twenty-five (!) different middleware engines; all of which do various things. And all the content – include the world – had to be ported over.

Line of Defense is a massive open world first person shooter in development by 3000ad.

(Source: Line of Defense)

Path of Exile Enjoys Successful First Month

The folks at Grinding Gear Games are enjoying a successful first month. One month after launch, Path of Exile has enjoyed a rather sumptuous four million registered users with a quarter of a million logging in every day. Development and release was funded primarily due to founders packs, ranging from fifty to nine hundred dollars in price. Last Wednesday, Path of Exile launched version 1.0.2, bringing with it a host of new features.

Version 1.0.2 includes several new Unique items, vendor recipes, achievements, and microtransactions, as well as final touches on the rapid-fire PvP Tournaments, various bug fixes, and some balancing changes to the game’s damage over time mechanics.

(Source: Path of Exile press release)

Lessons From 2013 #3: Reading Too Far

Can we agree to stop reading into every little comment made by developers as cryptic hints or confirmations? One such case that many of you may remember from this year is back in March when John Smedley said “we like permadeath for EQN” when responding to a question on Twitter. When Dave Georgeson confirmed that Smedley was simply giving his opinion on permadeath and that the feature was not coming to Everquest Next, players accused Smedley of lying or deliberately misleading players.

The lesson? It doesn’t matter what you say or how clearly you say it, gamers will find a way to deliberately misinterpret it and complain.

Jagex Reveals Premiere Club 2014

Last year, Jagex rolled out the Premiere Club. Players were able to buy limited packages of 3, 6, and 12 months of membership for a reduced price and receive added bonuses for doing so. In a post on the official website, Jagex has laid down the plans for 2013 Premiere Club. The packages are only available until “early 2014,” and the deal last year expired on February 4th. At the highest, gold tier full year package, players receive bonus loyalty points, exclusive pets, extra daily spins, access to VIP exclusive worlds, exclusive Q&A’s, chat and forum badges, and cosmetic promotional items that generally can only be obtained through special game cards.

This year’s deal is more expensive than last year, by a margin of about $12. It will be possible to redeem bonds for premiere membership, so dedicated players can get it all for free. You apparently need six, twelve, and twenty four bonds for each package respectively.

(Source: Jagex)

MMOrning Shots: Treasure Trove

What would Trove be without a laundry list of logos and 8-bit sprites being recreated in the game world?

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Lessons From 2013 #2: Triumph of Old School

You can only hope that other developers are paying attention to Jagex. This year marked the announcement and launch of RuneScape’s Old School server, a separate service that originally launched as a snapshot of the MMO way back from August 2007, but has since evolved into its own game entirely. Updates are based entirely off of polls, with each addition being voted on separately and requiring 75% approval in order to be implemented. Rather than vote on ideas from the standard RuneScape ruleset, Old School has gone in a completely different direction with the implementation of features such as pvp worlds, where players are able to fight it out all over the world instead of being relegated to the wilderness.

We can only hope that more developers will see the value of classic servers.

Lessons From 2013 #1: Not Mass Bans

There is an old phrase that says “I can’t define obscenity, but I know it when I see it,” a paraphrase of a quote originally stated by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. The gaming media, as with any other media, loves to use sensationalist headlines, and nothing makes bank in this industry quite like a rolling ban for some exploit. The question is how do you define a “mass ban?” Hundreds? Thousands? I can’t define a mass ban, but I know one when I see it.

Some of you may remember an exploit that popped up in last year’s winter event for Guild Wars 2 resulting in what some referred to as a mass ban. The announcement drew a lot of flak, partially from people not fully understanding just how many were banned at the end of the day. Turns out, according to Arenanet, that the total ban figure came out to less than two hundred. Bans were reserved only for the worst offenders who used the exploit hundreds if not thousands of times and knew exactly what they were doing. I still believe that calling it a mass ban was a poor choice of words, misleading, and probably paints ArenaNet in a poor light.

If you want to see a real mass ban, watch Jagex run a sweep of bots.

XLGames: Goldfarming By Any Other Name

MMORPG.com recently conducted an interview with Yinzi Cheng of XLGames, creators of the MMO ArcheAge. The interview is based entirely around the game’s monetization format, which Cheng believes makes the game impervious to gold farmers. There are three currencies in ArcheAge: Gold, Arcs, and Crystals. Gold is the usual in-game gold, crystals are the real money currency, and Arcs are used to purchase many of the game’s premium goods. Gold and crystals are not tradeable, but arcs are. As Cheng says:

Gold that is earned from game contents is untradeable. Arcs could be earned by purchasing Crystals, by enjoying some contents such as catching boss monsters, or by trading with other users. So ‘gold farmers’ cannot produce gold illegally. Therefore, the ‘gold farmers’ easiest way to earn gold, which is auto playing, will no longer bring them profit.

I don’t think XLGames fully understands how gold farmers work. Don’t believe me? When Jagex introduced trade restrictions to RuneScape, players simply converted to a currency based in junk items, allowing them to bypass the system completely. Materials can be traded between players, so what’s to stop a gold farmer from botting millions of gold worth of materials and trading those materials to the buyer who then sells them to an NPC for gold? Arcs are open season for gold farmers to generate in-game, as they can be mined from bosses.

ArcheAge’s non-tradeable gold idea isn’t new, and XLGames should be aware that the process hasn’t done much to impede gold farming in the other titles, like ArcheAge, where despite a strong insistence that the process isn’t feasible, there is quite a variety of gold farming services with varying methods of delivery. The lesson here is that so long as there is a trade system, people will find a way to farm gold.

(Source: MMORPG.com)

XLGames Prosecuting Staff Leaks

Video games are serious business, serious enough that every once in a while here at MMO Fallout we hear about employees leaking update information to players. Generally this insider information is related to upcoming updates that will cause a rise or drop in the price of certain goods. As for the employees themselves, assuming they are caught, punishment ranges from company to company. Usually they are fired.

In a post on MMO Culture, however, XLGames has promised a very serious reaction. Recently a leak was discovered when several high ranking guilds began hoarding very specific items, with the community taking to the forums to demand action. In response, XLGames has revealed that an internal investigation is going on, with the possibility of criminal prosecution against those held responsible. I assume that the charges would fall under revealing trade secrets. Was it worth it?

(Source: MMO Culture)

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