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gPotato Sold To Webzen

Things haven’t been all sunshine and lollipops for Gala Net. In fact, the company has been operating at a notable, and growing, loss for the past four quarters straight. In the most recently released quarterly report, Gala announced an operating profit in the red at -167,145 (thousand JPY). On the heels of this news, MMO Culture has learned that Gala Net’s operations in North American and Europe, as well as Brazil, will be sold off to Webzen. The deal was struck just a few hours ago, and the transaction will take place on February 15th, 2013.

Webzen appears to have picked up Gala Net on the cheap, to boot. According to Reuters, Gala Net was sold for $17.5 million. Gala Net is best known for its publishing of Allods Online, Uncharted Waters, Continent of the Ninth, and more. Webzen has been covered here at MMO Fallout over their publishing of Archlord after Codemasters dropped the title back in 2009. We will have to sit back and see how the two services change as a result of this acquisition, although all likelihood points to gPotato’s games being assimilated into Webzen’s library.

(Source: MMO Culture)

City of Steam Discontinuing Collaborator Packs

The closed beta for City of Steam is over and done with, and while the rest of us are waiting for the open beta to begin, Mechanist Games is busy at work getting the game ready for launch. If you were planning on getting your hands on one of City of Steam’s numerous collaborator packages, know that your time is limited. Actually, you have two days. As of 11:59 PST on Friday, February 1st, the collaborator packs will be removed from the City of Steam store and will no longer be available to purchase.

Some of you are probably thinking: “So what? I’ll just wait for the next batch.” Well, that’s certainly an impression you may have gotten when we phased out the Alpha Collaborator Packs, where we considered ending it then and there, but brought them back for the Closed Beta by popular demand. This time though, this is the last you’ll see of them (for realsies this time)!

After February 1st, City of Steam will still be selling Electrum (RMT currency).

(Source: City of Steam)

Sony Online Entertainment Advises Reinstalling Wizardry Online

Wizardry Online is live and kicking. The hardcore free to play MMO launched today under Sony Online Entertainment, who issued a news piece advising players who participated in beta. For the sake of reducing complications between the beta client and the live client, SOE has advised that players uninstall any beta versions before launching the game.

With Wizardry Online’s Official Launch it’s time for a fresh install. Because the Launch version of Wizardry Online has a number of minor differences in the server environment, a clean install will provide you with the best possible experience of Wizardry Online and avoid technical issues.

Those of you not willing to install a fresh copy of Wizardry will be happy to know that this is simply a precautionary move. You may encounter some bugs that wouldn’t exist on a fresh copy, but the game should work alright.

(Source: Wizardry Online)

[DC Universe] SOE Working On US PS3 Server Issues

Larry Liberty, who is in fact not a super hero himself but the Executive Producer for DC Universe Online, has stepped up to the forums today to issue a notice for players of DC Universe, specifically those who play on the PS3 servers in the United States. Due to heavy load brought on by the launch of Home Turf, the US PS3 server has been experiencing some unplanned downtime and instability, as well as a few other unforeseen issues. Sony Online Entertainment is working diligently to fix the issues brought forward during yesterday’s mishap and may have to bring the server down again.

You can read the full letter below:

I just wanted to apologize for the unplanned downtime on the USPS3 server. Server population has been exceptional since the launch of Home Turf, and it’s brought to light two issues that only happen under very high load. We have addressed one of them already, and are investigating the other. We will be bringing the server back up with an update that will address several issues that were surfaced yesterday. Release notes will accompany the update with more information, but there are a bunch of fixes and polish work as well based on community feedback. One change I wanted to call out was the reduction in the cooldown timer on Base relocation. We’re changing it from the initial 7-day cooldown to 1-hour. It may be necessary to come down for an additional server update today. We’ll monitor load, and broadcast warnings in-game.

(Source: DC Universe)

Redeem Ark Hunter Codes With Defiance

Hello, Ark Hunters!

Want a chance to get some extra stuff for your Defiance character? Trion has opened up a new section of the Defiance website, launching the My Ego feature where players can enter in alphanumeric codes in return for levels and prizes to be distributed in-game. There are 120 codes in total, although only 21 of them have been discovered by the community as of this writing, sprawled all over the web in the form of Defiance advertisements, emails, etc. The codes unlock a variety of rewards for the account, including extra inventory slots, permanent weapon skill buffs, and exclusive titles.

If you want, you can try to search the internet high and low for the codes, or you can just keep track of this Google document and enter in the codes as they are discovered. Defiance is scheduled to ship this year.

UPDATE: The Google Document above has been made private. Instead, you can find the Defiance ARK codes here at the Orkz Video Game Wiki.

(Source: My Ego)

Turbine Consolidates Cash Shop With Mithril Coin

Ever since Lord of the Rings Online went free to play, Turbine has been in a constant state of experimentation with the game’s cash shop. Most of the updates go by with relatively little controversy, and when Turbine steps over the line and draws fire from the community, they are relatively quick to take two steps back and reevaluate their plans. With the release of Update 10, Turbine is experimenting with a new idea: Consolidating multiple niche cash shop items into a single multi-function currency. Or in this case, the Mithril Coin.

With Update 10, players will find that some of their cash shop items have been converted into Mithril Coin. The Mithril coins replace a number of specific-use cash shop items, including fast travel tokens and daily quest resets. The ultimate goal is to streamline one section of LOTRO, allowing for numerous activities to be fulfilled without cluttering an already over-stocked cash shop with even more stuff.

Mithril Coins will replace some existing items, such as Revive Tomes and Stablemaster’s Writs. Our goal is to provide a simple, consistent interface for the services you already use. Ultimately it should be faster and easier for you to reset a quest, travel or quickly revive.

According to the FAQ, Mithril Coins could be expanded into other areas of the cash shop, based on player feedback.

We have no intentions of removing the store, which is a great place to buy bigger ticket items like account-based purchases and unlocks.

Judging by this comment in the FAQ, it would appear Turbine is moving the game toward a system where lesser goods are sold via real money currency (mithril coins) while the cash shop is reserved simply for big items (mounts, regions, expansions, etc).

(Source: LOTRO)

Neverwinter Presents $200 Exclusive Race

Those of you who played Star Trek Universe may remember the controversy that Cryptic Studios caused by encouraging players to purchase multiple copies of the game in order to take advantage of the retailer-specific cosmetic items upon launch. If you wanted to get your hands on the Next Generation Enterprise, as well as an adorable Tribble, you had to buy one copy from Best Buy and one from Gamestop. If you didn’t, according to Cryptic, you would have to go without them. Shortly after launch, Cryptic launched most of the items on to the cash shop, to the uproar of the game’s community.

So with a couple of years behind them and a brand new MMO (and parent company), what has Cryptic learned from Star Trek Online? Judging by today’s pre-order bonus pack, nothing. Kotaku revealed that players will be able to choose from several packages ranging in price from $20 up to the inglorious $200 Hero of the North Founder’s Pack. The packages range in goods, from bags to exclusive mounts, titles and bigger head-starts, the usual fray. The $200 package has something players should immediately sniff out as suspicious: an exclusive race.

Exclusive access to ‘Menzoberranzan Renegade’, a Drow playable race like the legendary ranger Drizzt Do’Urden, complete with unique racial abilities and tattoo

Cryptic has pulled this stunt before, claiming an item to be pre-order package dependent and then going forward and placing it on the cash shop at a significantly reduced price anyway. Knowing Cryptic, the appearance of the exclusive race on the cash shop is just about inevitable. An exclusive race, and a whole lot of lock boxes.

Path of Exile Patch Removes Login Exploit

Donde los yikes! The good news is that Path of Exile is proving itself to be quite popular with the dungeon crawling gamers, bringing the server down yesterday with a peak of almost seventy thousand concurrently. Even better, as often happens when the server is overloaded, Grinding Gear Games was able to patch a bug that had not yet exposed itself prior: In very rare cases, players randomly logged into accounts other than their own.

In addition, there is a very rare bug that caused some players to log in to accounts from other players. The scope of this bug is very limited (and in almost all cases, the players logged out without disturbing anything). Fixes for both are being worked on at the moment. Because the game experience is compromised and people are disconnected due to the crashes, we have turned the game servers off until they can be brought up in a more stable state.

Happily, a patch was deployed quickly fixing the bug and the servers were brought back up, with the number of affected accounts reportedly very small. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an account system go nuts and start giving people access to places they shouldn’t be going, NCSoft’s account service did this back in January 2010, to approximately ten people before the exploit was fixed. Similar fast action from the GGG was responsible for keeping this bug from getting any bigger than it needed to be.

(Source: Path of Exile forums)

Trion Removes Falling Damage

When you have a game centered around exploration, taking a tumble off the side of a cliff can be, well, deadly. One criticism players have held with Rift is over the fact that their character’s bones are made out of crepe paper, as it is apparently rather easy to die from falling off of low heights. In response, Trion added this little note into hotfix #2 for patch 2.1 earlier this month:

Taking damage from falling should be slightly more survivable.

Oh patch notes, you are so silly. The “slightly” is a bit of an understatement, as it is impossible to die after leaping from off of a cliff (unless of course you fall into a pit of spikes or, say, a bag of vipers). Not everyone was entirely pleased with the response of removing fall damage, and Daglar from Rift posted on the forums to explain the update:

When we looked at falling damage, it wasn’t from the perspective of “Zomgz lets dumb down the game because people will fall and then quit” – it was “Will removing this make the game as a whole more enjoyable for the most amount of people, and does it fit into what RIFT is.”

Falling damage, much like the dodo, is gone for good in Rift.

(Source: Rift Forums)

NCSoft Latest Anti-RMT Shot: Bans All Chinese IPs

Gold farming in Aion is a pretty major problem. Similar to NCSoft’s other big name title, Lineage II, Aion players have become accustomed over the years to logging in and going through the ritual of reporting and blocking the new set of bots spamming the multiple chat groups and sending them whispers of cheap gold, fast delivery, and poor English (as opposed to MMO Fallout’s gold farming service which carries high prices, no delivery, and a staff of folks who understand English very well, especially the more vulgar parts of it). NCSoft has put forward various efforts to improving the process, like automatically clearing ignore lists of banned accounts, all the way back to launch when NCSoft sent GM’s in-game to blow up gold spammers.

And now, NCSoft declared all-out war on gold farming by firing the first shot: Banning IPs. NCSoft will be blocking Chinese IPs from creating accounts on Aion, due to high RMT traffic coming from the country. As for proxies, they will be blocked too if they become a problem:

Please note that proxies have become an integral tool for illicit behavior in MMOs, and as a result we do target them when we undertake anti-RMT efforts. However, legitimate latency reduction services are recognized, and a proxy will not be banned unless it is confirmed to be part of unsanctioned behavior.

And what happens if the gold farmers leave China? NCSoft is willing to follow them. The post makes note that should the gold farming become a problem from another country, NCSoft may begin knocking out access from other countries on a case-by-case basis. This only applies to newly created accounts, it does not stop current accounts from using their game.

(Source: NCSoft Aion)

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