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[SMITE] New Single Purchase, All Gods

Hi-Rez Studios is one of my favorite companies when it comes to the ease of free to play. Earlier this month we saw a Game of the Year edition of Tribes: Ascend release containing all of the weapon, class, and perk unlocks for one price. Following in that model, Hi-Rez has announced a single purchase option for their deity-battling MOBA, SMITE, and boy is it a good one. The SMITE Ultimate God Pack contains all of the 31 gods currently present in the game. To sweeten the deal even more, this pack includes all future god releases as well.

The pack was originally promoted as an immediate unlock of the first thirty SMITE gods, but has been significantly enhanced to include all future gods as well. Players purchasing the pack, including those who purchased it previously, will automatically unlock new gods as soon as they are released into the live game environment. SMITE has been seeing new god releases approximately every two to three weeks.

The god pack costs $29.99 USD. If you have already purchased this package, you will automatically unlock new gods as they are released.

(Source: Hi-Rez Press Release)

Wrath of Heroes To Shut Down, Mythic Denies Refunds

Eventually someone will realize that despite the success of games like League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth, and Valve’s DOTA 2, the MOBA genre is not the next line of games where companies can put out any product and simply sit back and watch the money print itself. Originally announced in 2011, Wrath of Heroes was supposed to be a slimmed down version of Warhammer Online. All the fun of Warhammer’s scenarios without the countless hours of boring crap that is required by an MMO. Regardless, the game never caught on as well as hoped, and as a result Mythic has announced that the servers will come down on March 29th.

Wrath of Heroes is perhaps another example on why spending money in a game that is still in beta is a bad idea. Wrath of Heroes will shut down having never left beta status, and Mythic has revealed that none of the gem purchases made by players will be refunded. While we have seen other companies perform partial or full refunds when a game is shut down mid-beta, Mythic has decided to not go down that route. Instead, any player who played after January 1st, 2013, or those who have an outstanding balance of gems, will receive one free month of Warhammer Online as well as a treasure chest with items for the MMO.

Undoubtedly this announcement will fuel discussion as to why a game still in beta was required to hit financial goals.

(Source: Wrath of Heroes)

DOFUS Gets Hit By DDOS Attacks

Why would anyone want to hurt DOFUS? Over the past few years, the internet has seen the use of distributed denial of service attacks come into use more often and under increasingly casual motivations (Applebee’s didn’t microwave my food long enough, better DDOS them). Luckily most big companies are protected well enough that a player could never successfully DDOS, say, World of Warcraft offline. Smaller games, on the other hand, don’t have those same protections. Around this time last year, in fact, Perpetuum Online became the victim of a DDOS attack.

DOFUS website, forums, and game were taken offline yesterday as a result of multiple DDOS attacks on the servers. The company has beefed up security and put protections in place to hopefully prevent another attack in the future.

Yep, we had another DDoS attack early this morning. The server team is working on new protections for this.

The problem with DDOS attacks is that they were engineered so you never know who is behind them, since the attack comes from hundreds to thousands of computers. It could be a bitter ex-customer, a gold farming company exacting its revenge for disrupting its business, or a malicious hacker group attempting to find security holes. DOFUS’ sequel, Wakfu, is set to change hands from Square Enix at the end of the month.

(Source: DOFUS Twitter)

Jagex Bans 20,000 In Botwatch Update

Last year RuneScape saw the first stages of Botwatch, a new system designed to end the constant game of cat and mouse between Jagex and gold farmers, and put an end to the rampant cheating, spam, and gold sales once and for all. Instead of altering the game’s code, Botwatch was designed to learn over time how bots behave, and learn the difference between human behavior and those dictated by machine. Botwatch is capable of banning on its own volition, and thus must be tuned to ensure no false positives are detected.

In a recent update to Botwatch, the program banned over twenty thousand accounts accused of gold farming:

We recently introduced the next phase of our anti-bot technology Botwatch, and it’s already showing its teeth in the battle against botting activity in RuneScape. Last night alone, we conducted a mass ban of no less than 20,000 gold farming accounts. This is a huge blow against gold farming, and you should see the difference in game right away. These new anti-bot systems aren’t limited to gold farmers, however – users of 3rd party clients and botting software are also being aggressively targeted by the newly updated Botwatch.

Last year Jagex introduced Botany Bay, where players can watch first hand as bots are executed and banned.

(Source: RuneScape)

ProSiebenSat.1 Suspends Some Planetside 2 Accounts Following Server Breach

ProSiebenSat.1 has posted a notice on the Planetside 2 Europe website to notify customers that an unauthorized party gained access to one of their systems. While it is unknown if data containing usernames and passwords (which are encrypted) was stolen, the publisher has taken steps to prevent unauthorized access by suspending accounts suspected of being affected by the breach.

All accounts that may have been subject to unauthorized access have received an e-mail in which we have requested the user to change their password. If you are not able to log into your game, this means that your account has been suspended for security reasons. You can reactivate your account by following the link below and creating a new password. http://www.planetside2.eu/en/forgot_password

You can read the entire post at the link below, as well as an addition email address to contact in case your account has been deactivated and you are unable to retrieve it.

(Source: Planetside 2)

John Smedley Deploys Lawyer-Grade Weaponry To Fight Planetside Cheaters

Sony Online Entertainment has been taking the fight to cheaters in Planetside 2, and the battle has not been an easy one. Whenever the development team comes up with a new way to combat aimbots and other cheats, the people making said cheats simply find a new way to work around the system. So in a post on the Planetside subreddit, John Smedley appeared to clarify a few misconceptions about the policy against cheat users. In addition to the usual discussions of zero tolerance and constant development, Smedley also pointed to Sony’s newest battle tactic: Lawyers.

After having personally viewed some of the major cheat sites I can tell you I’m blown away by how sophisticated some of these operations are. They are making money on this. We’re working on that from another angle too that I’m not going to go into just yet (hint. it involves lawyers) . But we have the resources to fight this fight and we will keep doing it.

Fighting cheat makers in court will be a lengthy and expensive process, but more power to Sony if they are willing to go through with it.

(Source: Reddit)

MMOrning Shots: Does Preserving Nostalgia Trump Preventing Scams?

RuneScape’s Old School server has been running for four days now and while the game is looking pretty stable, it isn’t completely up and running. Construction and player owned housing needed to be overhauled and are not currently available, and neither is the Barbarian Assault mini-game or one or two quests. The small team currently assigned to the game is still working on a method to accurately gauge player interest in further updates, with the community divided on whether to implement new updates or keep the game as it was.

Among the changes first implemented, Jagex altered the way herbs work to be less friendly to scams. At the time in which the server existed (August 2007), all herbs looked alike and were simply called “herb” until identified. This confusion generated a specific scam in which players would advertise unidentified herbs as being higher quality than they actually were. In an update in September 2007, Jagex changed herbs to “grimy” versions, allowing players to see what the herb was before actually cleaning it. When old school RuneScape launched last week, it came with the grimy herbs instead of the unidentified versions, prompting a backlash from the community. On Monday, Jagex updated the game to revert the system back to its more scam-friendly version in response to player demand.

Players who argue for unidentified herbs do so on the grounds that players voted for RuneScape as it was in August 2007, and that includes all of its features both good and bad. The players who argued to keep grimy herbs generally do so on the grounds that preventing players from scamming each other is more important than preserving nostalgia. Neither side is wrong, really, the question comes down to priorities. Is it more important for Jagex to preserve the nostalgia of RuneScape as it was on August 10th, 2007, or is it a higher priority to implement updates geared toward preventing unruly behavior, even if that means changing the game? The question then becomes about where the line gets drawn as to what is off limits.

So where do you draw the line? Keep everything as it was, or let the community vote on newer features?

The Old Republic 2.0 Condenses Commendation Tokens

In my personal book of stuff, commendations and their ilk have generally leaned toward the side of useless. Ignoring how useful they actually are once you hit that mythical creature I have heard of but never seen, often called “end game,” the commendations you receive on the actual leveling path can range from highly useful to discarded and forgotten. This all banks on the prayer that the developer has made these commendations easy enough to obtain, and requires the player spend enough time in that zone, to obtain enough of that area’s commendations, before they outlevel the area and whatever reward said commendations might bring.

Currently in The Old Republic, commendations are planet-specific. So if you leave Hutta before you have any use of the Hutta commendations, odds are you probably won’t have any use for them in the future. With update 2.0, Bioware is condensing all of the planet-specific commendations into one wallet-sized credit card. Alongside planetary commendations, players will be able to obtain Classic (level 50 flashpoints/operations), Basic, Elite (level 55 flashpoints/operations), and Ultimate (Hard/Nightmare Mode) commendations, each with their own cap on how many can be obtained and stored.

Darth Hater notes that the planetary commendation cap is 100, as opposed to the thousand per planet currently in-game.

(Source: Darth Hater)

OldScape Vote Passes 250 Thousand, Membership Fee Lowered

Jagex recently launched a poll to gauge interest in the return of classic RuneScape servers, bringing back the old school feel of August 2007. The poll, however, had a catch. Because bringing the servers back and maintaining them costs money, Jagex wanted to get a feeling as to how many people would actually participate in the servers should they launch. So for two weeks, subscribers are asked to vote yes or abstain from voting, with each vote contributing to a number of tiers, which will determine exactly how the service is supported post-launch.

At a minimum, the servers needed fifty thousand votes to launch at all, which the community easily blew through. At fifty thousand, the servers would be brought online with no updates, only critical maintenance, and would cost $15 a month. Luckily, however, the community recently struck through the two hundred fifty thousand vote mark, bringing the membership cost down to $5 with basic maintenance, anti-bot updates, and a small team for ongoing development. That $5 membership is on top of the

Should the community hit five hundred thousand, membership will be free and there will be a dedicated team for ongoing development. The poll runs until March 1st, however you can get on the servers starting today providing you are a RuneScape member and vote in the poll.

(Source: RuneScape Official Website)

Star Trek Online Is Perfect World's Best Product

So life isn’t exactly perfect over at the Cryptic Studios offices right now. Long story short, a series of bad choices and oversights on the part of the Cryptic team lead to a very long thread and a long apology from producer Dan Stahl. I will allow Mr. Stahl to explain it in concise detail:

An apology is due, and while I’ve admitted fault in previous posts about this , I’ll do so again in this one. The release that was pushed to Holodeck last week failed in several critical ways. There was a failure on the part of a designer to test their work before it was checked into the game. Similarly, there was a failure in communication with the QA team on the said check in and on top of that, no one headed the concerns on TRIBBLE. Ultimately, this is all my responsibility as the lead on the team and I do apologize. There has been corrective action on our end to address this issue and it is our intention that the build going out to Holodeck tomorrow will resolve problems introduced last week. This doesn’t mean that all bugs on Holodeck are magically gone, it means that we are looking into the processes that cause these bugs and taking action to correct them.

In addition, the removal of Fleet Marks was a heavy handed change. It needed to be done because it was getting out of hand and there was an ever increasing amount of exploitation in the Foundry to maximum Fleet Mark rewards. That said, we should have had the Fleet Mark changes we are making this week ready to go last week so there wouldn’t have been a week with the drop in Fleet Mark earning. Again sorry. It doesn’t make us feel any better when we make stupid mistakes.

One bit of information to take out of this is Stahl’s comment that Star Trek Online is currently Perfect World Entertainment’s most successful title. This puts the game over other big titles in Perfect World’s library, from the Torchlight series, Blacklight, PWI, and more.

While you may not agree with all of our designs and decisions, the proof is in the success the game is having and how much the game continues to grow. While we don’t share our internal information, STO is the best performing game for Perfect World Entertainment and is enjoy month after month increases in new captains.

This also puts Star Trek Online above Cryptic’s other game, Champions Online.

(Source: Star Trek Online Forums)

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