Jagex’s MMO RuneScape allows players to pay for subscriptions via several methods including by credit card and by calling a telephone number, receiving a PIN, and having the membership added to their phone bill. But the subscription-by-phone method has become the target of a police investigation after dozens of Telstra customers were wrongly billed during a two week period last month.
Although Telstra, an Australian telecommunications company, has refused to release the findings of their investigation, news source The Herald is reporting that hundreds of phone calls, billed at $13.97 per call, were made from numbers starting with 4963. It is believed that the phone calls were made using equipment that can spoof CallerID numbers, and Telstra is in the process of contacting affected customers.
Unfortunately, systems like Surfpin rely on the CallerID number to know who to bill, which has become increasingly easy to spoof in recent years.
Warhammer Online, despite server closure upon server closure, is still running and allegedly there are still players subscribed and playing. If you are a current or former subscriber to Warhammer Online, odds are you’ve tried Mythic’s MOBA styled around the MMO’s scenarios, Wrath of Heroes. Regardless, Mythic has implemented a cross-promotion system offering benefits in Wrath of Heroes for subscribers to Warhammer Online.
Starting today, Warhammer Online subscribers will receive a 50% increase in gold and experience in Wrath of Heroes. In order to receive the bonus, you will need to have both games on the same EA account. It may take up to 24 hours for the bonus to come into effect.
Alganon is a game that doesn’t get a whole lot of coverage here at MMO Fallout, namely because it suffers from the same affliction that most small studios undergo, which is spending too much time working on actual development to put out press releases. Last we heard, Alganon was set to release an expansion in “Winter 2011,” titled Rise of the Ourobani. The expansion brings in a new race, the Ourobani, a new continent, the new Warden class, and flying mounts. Unfortunately, player housing has been cut for the time being and will probably not be
In Quest Online’s April newsletter, the developer announced that the expansion has been delayed until Q4 2012.
Due to unforeseen circumstances and the massive amount of work that our small team had to do on the expansion, after evaluation of the project, it was decided that more time was needed in order to do some critical bug fixes as well as to spend more time on certain areas and features of the expansion in order to do the best work possible. For this reason, the expansion has been delayed to Q4 2012.
“Long term we actually have to look at servers as a whole. The nice part about it is we have doubled how many people we can put on each server since launch. The down side is that at launch, because people were upset at the long queues we aired on the side of opening up more space. What that has now done is separated our player-base into a larger group.”
When The Old Republic originally launched, servers were staggered in order to ensure that players evened out over the course of launch. Following launch, Bioware has slowly increased server capacity to allow more people into each server. The combination of increased capacity and post-launch player activity has resulted in a number of servers with a dearth of players, and Bioware is looking into server mergers in the future.
First, however, Bioware will be opting for a server transfer approach, allowing players to freely move about to the server of their desire.
“One of the problems we’re running into right now is kind of a classic MMO problem, which is that our overall population of players has not changed, but our peak concurrent users has changed”
Back when the internet was powered by Steam and everything cost a nickel NCSoft sued Bluehole Studios, a company made up of ex-Lineage III developers. There has been a bit of confusion with convictions being upheld while others were later appealed and overturned, and I hadn’t noticed that the case has made its way to the South Korean Supreme Court, who yesterday came out with their ruling.
Bluehole Studios has been found innocent of any charges of wrongdoing. However, three employees were convicted of leaking trade secrets and must both pay two billion won in restitution ($1.7 million USD, approximately). The story might be over for now for Bluehole Studios, but the three employees mentioned now face criminal charges for which sentencing will take place at a later date.
In January, NCSoft launched a lawsuit in the United States to keep TERA from releasing, and from the outside looking in this ruling does not bode well for a guilty verdict. While the case in Korea has successfully taken down those responsible for the theft, NCSoft has failed in their other objective: Shutting down TERA.
So those of you on the bench in regard to preordering TERA can probably breath a sigh of relief and grab those credit cards. TERA launches in just a few weeks.
Part of MMO Fallout deals with the harsh reality of the current market: There are too many MMOs currently competing for players, and even more hit the market each day. For every MMO that dies here at MMO Fallout, another three or four take its place! Considering that MMOs are still releasing under the $50-60 client bracket, and with the increasing amount of free to play titles on the market, there is an overwhelming demand to know whether or not an MMO is worth investing in.
That being said, life expectancy can be very difficult to measure, especially before launch. Below I have a few items that should not be taken as exact, but rather observations of past trends that generally hold true.
1. Hacking Off Limbs Before Birth
This is a very important factor. Keep an eye on your MMO of choice and see if the developer starts discussing features that were planned for launch and had to be “suspended” due to budget restraints, but will be included later on once more funding comes in in the form of boxes and subscriptions. I’m not talking about easy to implement features like Looking For Group tools or cosmetic slots. I mean features that were once major parts of the game’s advertising, like Warhammer Online where each race would have its own living, breathing city. That announcement was in 2008, would anyone like to put money on Mythic ever releasing those cities?
If you see a game being advertised as releasing bare bones with no specific details for release, you can probably expect to see the cut features sometime in the year two thousand and never. Assuming of course the game doesn’t pull a Warhammer Online and go into maintenance mode quickly after launch. If your MMO exhibits these signs before launch, you might want to keep your friends close and your wallets closer.
2. How Many Times Has It Shut Down?
Market viability is very important when determining…well, market viability, and MMOs are like psychotic murderers: Once they’ve tasted blood, they can’t stop. So ask yourself before you make a purchase: Has this game killed a company?
Let’s take a look back, shall we? Perpetual Entertainment died with Star Trek Online and Gods & Heroes still in the oven. Star Trek Online went on to become a horrendously rushed release due to a licensing agreement and Gods & Heroes went on to pull in one of the smallest launches in MMO history. Flagship Studios died after Hellgate London and Mythos, the former spending a few years touring Asia while the latter went on to be picked up by Hanbitsoft where it was shut down in Europe under Frogster and eventually launched as a global edition.
There are plenty more to bring up, including All Points Bulletin killing Realtime Worlds, or Earth Eternal being shut down more times than I can count, but you should exercise caution around any game that has previously been shut down: Especially if the prior company went bankrupt.
3. Is The Developer A Known Face?
I apologize in advance to my dear friends in the independent field who will hate me for saying this: I love indie-gaming. I hate indie-MMO developers. Don’t get me wrong, your developers have a great big vision for the future where you can not only take a chunk of sand and turn it into a sword, but you can also use that sword to commit murder and theft. Assuming that the sand is ever fully implemented.
In order to buy into an indie-MMO, you need zen-like patience. The development team might be completely new to the genre, having never developed an MMO or even a full retail game for that matter. You should expect major features to be cut and not implemented for a good year or two, and for development to be slow and sloppy. If video games are an art, buying an indie MMO is not unlike buying a sculpture before it is completed, you assume the artist doesn’t die sometime in the process.
So, although it guarantees that the MMO will be delayed further, possibly by years, I have always suggested that my indie-developer friends create a game and release it first. It gives the developer credibility in the marketplace, not to mention extra cash in the bank, not to mention a successful product makes them much more appealing to investors.
4. Time Spent Trashing the Competition
I’ve seen this marketing strategy fail time and time again, but publishers still have a habit of spending more time trashing the competition than they do talking about the benefits of their own game. Some of you may remember the Global Agenda “No Elves” campaign which focused on how people were sick of elves and magic and wanted shooting and headshots. Global Agenda was to be everything these games weren’t, which ultimately included the desire to pay a subscription for it, because Global Agenda lost its subscription not long after launch and eventually lost its cover price. This is just one example, but around 2007-2008 there were quite a few MMOs released under the “WoW killer” brand that released with major features broken or delayed.
And as far as upcoming MMOs go, I will include TERA in this with their “Are You An MMOFO?” campaign. While somewhat funny, the fact that Enmasse has started directly naming games (DC Universe, Lord of the Rings Online, World of Warcraft) as boring crap (my words, not theirs), has me worried that the developer is writing a check they have no ability to cash.
5. You Know Who Is Working On It
I’m referring to several different people, and you all know who I am talking about. For the sake of MMO Fallout, however, I cannot name them on this page as these people have a habit for threatening to sue me every time I mention them by name. But you all know who they are, the names who are either head of the pack or somewhere in the middle when everything seems to upend and your big ship suddenly goes the way of the Titanic.
This person, you may not personally know them, but they are well known to you. They seem to pop up everywhere bankruptcy and turmoil follow, the games they work on or lead are released unfinished with a priority on selling cash shop items rather than fixing the broken parts of the game, and when pressed to fix them responds with “well since it was broken no one plays that portion so we won’t work on it because not enough people play it.” To these men, hypocrisy knows no boundary, and integrity is just something you sprinkle on a nice lasagna.
One thing you can always expect out of this man is that he will flee the ship before it sinks. When he leaves, you can expect that the end approaches.
TERA is showing off its new opening cinematic, offering some backstory to the game you likely are well aware of by now. TERA launches May 2nd with the open beta starting April 19th.
[Update] Bioware has extended the free month to anyone who also receives Legacy level 6 on their account. The time to obtain this has also been extended to April 22nd.
[Original Story] Bioware wants to thank its most loyal customers for sticking with the developer during these hard times. Of course, how do you factor in how loyal a player is? You could ask for a human sacrifice, but Human Resources is notorious for requiring long and redundant paperwork to be signed before any such promotion can take place.
So Bioware has decided to rate “most loyal” as anyone with at least one level 50 character. Those of you who have subscribed since launch but have not reached end game? Well, you’re loyal but they are more loyal. Perhaps you shouldn’t be such a casual gamer?
But don’t fret, all players subscribed regardless of loyalty will receive a free Tauntaun pet. in addition, previous subscribers can log in from April 13th to April 19th.
“It’s a persistent game, it has persistent player data, the character grows and gets better over time. I think most gamers expect that now anyway, but this was a design I’d done a while ago. I think it’s pretty valid.”
John Romero is one of the industry’s finest, even if he no longer works with John Carmack, and if the man wants to make his own MMO-ish shooter, then by God he will. In an interview with Eurogamer, Romero stated that while the game is still in pre-production stages, he has a solid vision of what he expects the title to become. Romero discusses his distaste for the current shooter genre, and mentions that his game will play faster than the Gears of War titles currently available, and won’t rely on the slower-paced cover based systems and characters who act as bullet sponges. Not to say Gears isn’t a great game, it just isn’t the type Romero would like to create.
If this makes you think of Quake Live, you probably aren’t too far from the target. Granted, very little about Romero’s game, so we will simply have to wait for more details.
Minecraft is a game that has stolen the hearts, the lives, and a whole lot of time here at the nonexistent MMO Fallout office. I’d love a reason to talk about Minecraft, but sadly the game is not an MMO. Notch’s next game, however, will give me plenty of time to talk about Minecraft. Announced just recently, the game is titled 0X10c (figure out the pronunciation yourself), which we will simply refer to as Notch’s MMO from here on out.
The game is set as a sci-fi title and is very early in development, and appears to be an Eve Online style game with a very heavy focus on engineering, mining, trading, and looting. Players have a spaceship that carries a certain fixed wattage that is consumed by additions added to the ship (very Eve-like). At its heart, each ship will operate as its own fully functioning 16-bit CPU.
You can check out the website below. Notch’s MMO will carry a singleplayer and multiplayer mode, and will likely carry a subscription fee for the multiplayer universe.
![[Update] The Old Republic: Free Month For Most Loyal Players](https://mmofallout.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/starwars.jpg?w=750)
MMO Fallout 