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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)

Square Enix Shows Off FFXIV and Gamepad

If there was ever an MMO in line for “Best Comeback,” Final Fantasy XIV would be it. In the latest video, Square Enix shows off the custom built gamepad, as well as showing off a good deal of combat and controls.

Star Vault Releases Q4 Income

Star Vault has released their fourth quarter releases for 2012, and the news isn’t all bad. Net sales lowered to 463,307 Krona ($72 thousand, approximately) from 501,252 Krona ($78 thousand) in the third quarter. Net profits continued deeper into the red at -895,699 ($140 thousand, approximately) from 706,844 in the third quarter ($110 thousand).

The fourth quarter saw the release of both Mortal Online’s free to play as well as the the launch of a donation system. Overall, according to the report, the model has compensated for the loss of license sales and Star Vault has seen positive development in all areas.

The number of subscriptions in the fourth quarter was approximately the same as in the third, with a slight increase following free to play. Sale of licenses will no longer be reported due to the new business model, as they have been discontinued.

In Henrik Nystrom’s notes, he discusses that the expansion Awakening went well, but did not increase sales as expected. Nystrom references 2012 as a transitional year, noting donations as important to continued development. The company is still working to be listed on Steam, and while the new cash flow has been positive, it has had no effect on the fourth quarter. Star Vault expects to break even in 2013.

(Source: Aktie Torget Press Release)

OldScape: RuneScape 2007 Server Details

Jagex has run a live Q&A today, focusing on the upcoming 2007 Old School servers.

The servers launch this Friday, the 22nd.
The first month will be free for all of those who voted.
The February 22nd launch is an early access phase and is expected to have bugs.
Free players will only have access if the poll exceeds 500,000.
At the current 213,000, free players don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.
Rares (tradeable discontinued) will not be available.*
Gambling will not be removed*
Chat between the two versions (Current and OldScape) will be compatible.
Holiday events will not be added*
Characters will be separate, however accounts will not be able to log into both simultaneously.

*Barring 500,000 votes which is highly unlikely.

Currently, there are only 214,000 votes for the 2007 Classic servers. If the poll hits 250,000 by the end of the week, players can expect the following perks:

$5 a month subscription
A small team for development.
Basic maintenance.
Possible anti-gold farming updates.

If they do not hit 250,000, players will be expected to shell out $15 a month to access the game, with zero possibilities of updates or anti-gold farming systems.

Taco Tuesday: Don't Ban Griefers, Make The Game Unbearable

Today is Tuesday and that can only mean one thing: The cafeteria is serving up hot ground meat in between your choice of soft tortilla or crunchy corn shells. Regardless of your preferences of sauces and toppings, Taco Tuesday is inarguably the greatest day of the week, unless of course you hate life. It is around the taco table that we come together to discuss MMOs, in particular those big things and little things that make the genre great. So grab yourself a shell, load it up, and get ready to dig in.

Ever since MMOs first introduced the concept of open combat, the question has lingered as to how to allow players to battle each other to their heart’s content, while at the same time preventing people from griefing new players and driving away business. Games have attempted to throw in a number of features, all with varying success. Criminal systems are often used which prevent characters from entering certain areas/cities until they either wait out a period of time or grind faction points. The goal in these cases is to allow for free range murder with the penalty of inconveniencing the character for the duration of their criminal reign. Certain MMOs go further by punishing the character with experience/stat penalties if they are killed while flagged.

Two recent games are taking a far more hardcore approach to dealing with griefing and mitigating those with a strong habit of randomly killing/kidnapping everyone they come across, and those games are Wizardry Online and Age of Wushu. Wizardry Online is a hardcore MMO with permadeath and open PvP, a combination which means there is an obligation to ensure that opting to be a criminal is difficult and dangerous. When one player kills another in Wizardry, the victim is able to place a bounty on the head of the killer. Bounties are temporary and will eventually expire. Players with more than five bounties will be imprisoned upon their next death. Imprisoned players are unable to delete imprisoned characters, nor are they able to access other characters on the same account. Between paying back bounties or long hours of grinding to get out of jail, a particularly bad griefer could be punished past the point of being willing to play anymore.

Age of Wushu features a similar jail system. Snail Games may not have implemented any kind of permanent death feature in Age of Wushu, but they’ve managed to make prison almost as bad. Instead of trying to explain it myself, I will allow user Smokefin to give his testimony:

72 hours in jail. I killed 30 people and after that i died to 4 other players and went to jail. Now i need to serve 72 game time hours of jail. I literally didn’t believe it at first, but its true. SO: I play 4 hours a day, that means that i will be released from prison in 18 real life days, IF i managed to be online all those 4 hours a day, after that i will be executed and i will have halved stats for 24 hour game time. So i’m back to normal in 26 days if i play 4 hours a day.

72 game hours in jail followed by 24 game hours with stats halved? That is harsh. Maybe a little more punishing than I would have thought, and apparently enough to cause Smokefin to quit.

Where do you stand on penalties for griefing/rampant ganking? Should the worst offenders have their games essentially rendered unplayable for long periods of time?

Taco Tuesday: Don’t Ban Griefers, Make The Game Unbearable

72 hours in jail. I killed 30 people and after that i died to 4 other players and went to jail. Now i need to serve 72 game time hours of jail. I literally didn’t believe it at first, but its true. SO: I play 4 hours a day, that means that i will be released from prison in 18 real life days, IF i managed to be online all those 4 hours a day, after that i will be executed and i will have halved stats for 24 hour game time. So i’m back to normal in 26 days if i play 4 hours a day.

72 game hours in jail followed by 24 game hours with stats halved? That is harsh. Maybe a little more punishing than I would have thought, and apparently enough to cause Smokefin to quit.

Where do you stand on penalties for griefing/rampant ganking? Should the worst offenders have their games essentially rendered unplayable for long periods of time?

NCSoft Refuses To Censor Blade & Soul For The West

Just once I’d like to see a game receive a mature rating because the content is so hard hitting that it requires an adult mindset to digest. Until then, however, we’re going to have to deal with the fact that an MMO’s ESRB rating is generally directly proportional to the level of exposure of a certain part of the female anatomy. Of course I’m speaking of breasts, whether large, small, and of all shapes and sizes. In the past few years, we’ve seen a number of titles translated for the western audiences that end up being censored out of fear of either controversy or a bad rating by the ESRB/PEGI. These censors usually end up affecting classes/characters who could be misconstrued as underage, when they are simply small and petite.

A few gamers noted that a recent trailer for Blade & Soul that the game appears to have several alterations, adding some clothing where it didn’t exist in the Korean version. NCSoft released a press statement clarifying that they have only the utmost respect for Team Bloodlust, and that the censored models are solely for promotional purposes.

Due to ESRB guidelines, however, our marketing material must abide by a different set of considerations than the final product. This is why Blade & Soul‘s rating is listed as “pending.” It is NCSOFT West’s intention to accurately depict the game in its original, unaltered form, with only minor adjustments for gameplay considerations. In short: We are not planning to censor or alter the actual in-game content you have come to expect from an artist such as Hyung-Tae Kim and a studio such as Team Bloodlust. Rest assured that we love Blade & Soul as much as you do, and any modifications to the marketing material are not indicative of our plans for the final content.

MMOrning Shots: Exhausting Pipe

That piece on the chest plate looks like it might be some sort of coolant system, but it’s actually an Old Republic George Foreman grill for cooking up a grilled cheese sandwich on the run. Bounty Hunters have to eat too.

MMOrning Shots is a (mostly) daily compilation of random screenshots from MMOs played by the MMO Fallout staff. If you would like your own screenshot featured, send it over to contact@mmofallout.com

Final Fantasy XI Is Not Being Ported To Vita

Bad news, bears. All five of you who purchased a Playstation Vita (and I include myself in that) in hopes that Square Enix would eventually port Final Fantasy XI to it, as hinted in a news post from two years ago, are going to be sorely disappointed. Interested in seeing if there was any new details on the port (there were absolutely none at the time), I asked Square Enix over Twitter if there were still plans in place to port the MMO over to the Vita. Whether through technical limitations or the poor sales of the console, I received a very simple and to the point response:

no I’m afraid not.

So that is that idea out. There is still Phantasy Star Online 2 coming to the Vita, but otherwise the market is quite barren in the realm of open world MMOs. There is always hope for the future, and as long as the Vita is still in production we can always hope that someone will care enough to port an MMO over to it.

(Source: Twitter)

ROBLOX Honors Erik Cassel With Charity Drive For Cancer Research

It is never easy to say goodbye to a friend or co-worker. Erik Cassel was the co-founder of ROBLOX, along with David Baszucki. Unfortunately, Erik passed away on February 11th, following a battle with cancer. To show their support and to remember Erik, players attended a memorial held within ROBLOX the following day on February 12th. In order to honor his memory, ROBLOX will be selling special hats and shirts, with proceeds from the sales going toward cancer research.

In honor of ROBLOX co-founder Erik Cassel, we’re featuring some special clothing items until February 25. Longtime users know that Erik could often be found in ROBLOX wearing the “Well Worn Hat” – this hat meant a lot to Erik, and now that he’s passed, it means a lot to us. We’ve re-named it Erik Cassel’s Hat, and we’re now offering it for 20 Robux. We’ve also made new commemorative “Erik” t-shirts, which are only a single ticket. We hope you’ll wear them in remembrance of Erik. Based on the sales of these items, ROBLOX will make a substantial donation to cancer research. Thank you to the entire ROBLOX community all for your respect and support.

We here at MMO Fallout send our thoughts and wishes to Erik Cassel’s family, friends, and coworkers, and hope the best for them in these difficult times.

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