Anarchy Online is one of the oldest MMOs on the market, and for the fact that it never appeared much (read: at all) here on MMO Fallout, the game has brought a number of innovations to the MMO genre, foremost instancing, dynamic questing, and in-game advertising. Funcom also touched upon what we now think of as endless trials, when they made the original game completely free (plus in-game ads) that brought in major money for Funcom.
Last week, Funcom announced that the “new” cash shop would be coming to Anarchy Online. This week, in a forum post, they commented further on the upcoming update. In addition to hundreds of social items, Funcom is looking at adding some non-vanity items in the form of xp stims (boost experience gain for a limited time), time-limited access to expansion content, level packs (boost to level 50, 99, 150, 199 instantly) only available to players who have a level 220 character, and more.
We’ll see how this goes for Anarchy Online. According to the forum post, Funcom plans on rolling out a Funcom Points currency across their games, meaning a similar cash shop may appear in Age of Conan and upcoming The Secret World.
When Champions Online went into preorder, Cryptic offered a lifetime subscription for two hundred dollars, giving players the perks of subscribing (foremost being able to play) as well as a few other bonuses, free swag, etc. The lifetime subscription went away when the game launched, after a few pre-launch issues, and after the usual early adopters finished saying “I paid a lifetime subscription for this?” the subject mostly went away.
Well, with the timely launch of Champions Online free to play this spring, and no doubt the recent return of the McRib, Cryptic Studios would like to announce that the Champions Online lifetime membership is back…for 33% higher cost than you will remember. Now three hundred dollars, the Champions Online lifetime subscription will grant unmitigated access to the subscriber perks, plus access to the hottest place in Millennium City: The VIP lounge (Warning: Escort service not included). At three hundred, the cost of membership roughly equates to twenty months of VIP time, so if you plan on subscribing longer than that, you’re probably better off just paying the money up front and not having to pay more later on.
Well someone will find love in the lifetime subscription, and if you don’t…well, that’s your perogative? People seem to be taking this news too seriously on other websites, and by people I mean the usual Cryptic trolls who follow every news article on Champions Online so they can call Cryptic “Craptic” and giggle like little girls that they’ve won the argument. It’s fine to show your unbridled, and some would say slightly stalker-ish, rage towards Cryptic if you’d purchased the game and were disappointed, but eventually you have to move on from posting in every news article about how Bill Roper/Jack Emmert is the devil and how you will never buy from them again.
Being an MMO Journalist affords one the opportunity to make fun of a company, yell at them for a stupid mistake, and then praise them all in one day, or even in one article. Given that I’ve managed to fake myself as a trusted journalist this far, I think I can afford to take some of those perks with me.
MMO Fallout is all about the PR, so naturally my editorials revolve around public relations, and how developers and publishers react when the times are good, and when the times are bad. I’ve talked about everything from subscription convenience in Final Fantasy XIV, to the turing test for MMOs, to identity crisis, permanent death, to more famously charge-backs. I’ve discussed the public relations nightmare that was the Allods Online cash shop, the Aion server mergers, Turbine’s fraudulent surveys, the Square-Enix HR rep who said Final Fantasy XI was shutting down this year, Atlantica Online’s near-fraudulent charity scheme, and far more.
Forums are a place where we go to communicate with the developers on a mass scale. When something bad happens in-game, like say a bunch of players get banned under suspicious circumstances, or a massive void appeared where a city used to be, killing everyone who was standing in it prior to a patch. It also happens to be a place where developers can keep users up to date on breaking news, like why players should steer clear of ___ because it is killing people randomly.
What irks me the most, however, is that in the grand majority of these cases the developers manage to inflame the situation by, doing what? Deleting threads and posts made on the subject. What this tells your players is that while you have someone with enough time to scan the forums and delete their posts complaining about this issue, you apparently don’t give enough of a rat’s ass to have that same person just give a response and negate the need for the threads.
Of course I am most recently referring to Turbine, and an accidental mass banning on Dungeons and Dragons Online that left thousands of players locked out of their accounts for more than just a while, which Turbine later announced as a glitch in the automated system that handles bans for exploits. Massively had an article on it, since the mass bans happened to crash in on their public event on DDO. Of course, when the rants started hitting the forums players were met with threads being locked, deleted, and forum infractions handed out.
Part of working in retail has taught me that when you screw up, you can’t blame the customer for getting pissed, a point many of these developers seem to have missed. You can’t falsely accuse someone of cheating, ban them with no real explanation or method of appeal, and then expect them to not head to the fastest method of handing feedback in a white hot rage. This compounds when most of them just want information, something that you do not supply until it is at your own convenience.
As much as I’m sure my viewers think it pains me to knock Turbine; this isn’t good PR, especially toward those paying your bills. The bans themselves don’t even factor in as, as I have said, mistakes happen. Instead of letting people vent while you leave them in the dark, you decide to add insult to injury and give up infractions because people had a crazy notion to get angry over unjustified bans. The comments of the developer being too busy fixing the problem to comment on it are also utter garbage. This always crops up when an incident like this takes place, and every time those throwing around this talking point fail to respond to a simple comment: It takes less than a minute to write up “we’re aware of the situation, working on it,” on a forum. Hell, I did it in fifteen seconds, and doing so did not hinder my completion of this article.
So I will reiterate what I have said time and time again: Response means everything, and right now Turbine are about a step behind Star Vault’s “sorry, no patch to fix this gaping void in the map because the developers are off for the weekend,” in terms of taking a bad situation and turning the flames up to 11.
Quest Online has been talking for a few months now about bringing player vs player combat to Alganon, and has recently laid out their plans for the next few months on how exactly this will work. Starting foremost, Alganon will see the addition of open world PvP, allowing flagged players from opposite factions to fight one another anywhere. Additionally, consensual PvP has been added in the form of dueling, non lethal. The next phase will introduce towers and keeps, ala Warhammer Online, into the world for the two factions to fight over. Finally, Alganon is looking to bring in instanced battlegrounds, ala a whole lot of MMOs.
Suffice to say, Player Vs Player, especially that on the keep/tower/instance level, requires players which Alganon, also suffice to say, does not have. As much as I love Alganon and praise it here on MMO Fallout, I fully acknowledge that given how difficult it is to get a conversation going on Alganon, getting a duel or a war going will be next to impossible. I hear Quest Online is going to have some sort of marketing campaign (Not that there’s much better marketing than an article on the MMO Fallouts, right?), but right now the game is for all intent and purpose…single player.
Also, is Alganon trying to be more like Warhammer Online? In the November newsletter, not only have they announced a keep system (capturing towers and keeps, to rush in and kill the keep leader). I brushed this off until I saw the plans to introduce a renown points system that gives access to more powerful PvP weapons and armor. Renown? Keeps? You cunning devils, Quest Online, you had them thinking the whole time that Alganon was pulling from WoW, when in fact it was pulling from WAR!
Of course Alganon does have one up on WAR, for starters it’s free to play, no subscription required.
More on Alganon as it appears. Until then, make sure you’ve paid your tithes to Tzeentch…
Rev up the Wikipedia, because All Points Bulletin has a buyer…well, it always had a buyer, but now we know who that buyer is: K2 Networks. To save some of you the work, K2 Networks is the gaming company behind the Western localizations of Knight Online, WarRock, 9Dragons, among others. Given that K2 operates solely on Asian f2p grinders, the likelihood that All Points Bulletin will follow the free to play cash shop model are very high.
An official statement is coming next week. You can read the full story on Eurogamer, and I guess it’s time to stick All Points Bulletin in the Upcoming category. Bet you never thought you’d see that. But today the Realtime Worlds APB saga comes to an end.
What does baffle me about this is the tolerance or low expectations of MGM, owners of the Stargate license. Either MGM is not paying attention, at all, or they firmly believe that Cheyenne, in all of their continuing downward spiral, is somehow the only choice for a Stargate MMO. Or they don’t care anymore.
Back in March, I announced that Stargate Worlds was officially unofficially defunct, officially because Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment was so far into Chapter 11 bankruptcy and beating up Gary Whiting that the chances of release was somewhere between no chance and not a snowball’s chance in hell. In that article, however, I turned my guns to MGM, asking as simple question: Why have you allowed this to continue?
The legal battle over Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment, over which likely none of you remember, is over, and CME has retained full rights to the game assets in a lawsuit between them and the makers of Stargate: Resistance. Essentially, although people like myself assumed that Fresh Start Studios would be the new enterprise for Cheyenne, the company sued Fresh Start to stop the fraudulent transfer of assets.
So Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment gets to keep their assets…but they have no Stargate License. Answering my question from back in March, the license with MGM expired this month, and MGM decided to terminate the license. Getting the license back will no doubt prove difficult for CME, and Gary Whiting (who has been back in charge for a while now, from court order).
Oh and, dear March 2010 me:
More on Stargate Worlds if it ever appears, but it seems as if this saga is finally coming to an end.
Dan Bull wants a new Elder Scrolls game, and here at MMO Fallout we share his desire, although we aren’t necessarily willing to sing about it. Of course, we can always keep up hope that the next Elder Scrolls is the MMO that Zenimax Studios is allegedly working on.
Oh well. We’re behind you, Dan Bull! We’ll just let you do the rapping, for all of our sake.
Dan Bull wants a new Elder Scrolls game, and here at MMO Fallout we share his desire, although we aren’t necessarily willing to sing about it. Of course, we can always keep up hope that the next Elder Scrolls is the MMO that Zenimax Studios is allegedly working on.
Oh well. We’re behind you, Dan Bull! We’ll just let you do the rapping, for all of our sake.
Back in February, I talked about a fledgling MMO from Perfect World Entertainment called Kung Foo! This martial arts MMO was running through the final days of the closed beta when Perfect World made a remarkable announcement: They were shutting down the game. But unlike the likes of All Points Bulletin, this premature shuttering was not permanent, but rather an elongated downtime to assess the game and its direction, with PWE pleased with its community response, yet displeased with the game’s content. Perfect World promised that the game would see launch sometime in 2010.
As the months dragged on, I will be honest in saying that I forgot all about Kung Foo! and its quirky style, and imagine my amazement when I get an email from PWE announcing that the game is coming back! Those of us like myself who closed beta tested the original Kung Foo! have been invited to test the closed beta for Legends of Martial Arts. LoMA, as it is called, begins closed beta on the 24th of November.
It’s always good to see a thought-dead title gain new life. More on Legends of Martial Arts as it appears.
Codemasters General Manager David Solari has been on MMO Fallout’s news bulletins before, with regards to Lord of the Rings Online Europe, but now I get to talk about him weighing his opinion on something not Turbine related. In an interview with Eurogamer on the topic of All Points Bulletin, Solari wanted to express his optimism that the defunct MMO could absolutely work, given the right time.
“[Realtime Worlds] made some key mistakes there, with some key stuff changed that game could be successful. I do think the game could be turned around but it would need nine months of hard work,” he added. “That game could have been successful but the cost of development and everything else was a huge thing. The money it had to make to support that was very high risk. If you could take a smaller team and make all the fixes and operate at a lower cost then it’s fairly unique: there’s not really anything else in the market out there.”
Solari makes a great point. During APB’s short life, I harped on a few points that the game could be fixed and turned around easily, but that Realtime Worlds would be fighting against the clock to fix the shooting and driving mechanics being lackluster in a driving and shooting game. But who exactly is going to pick up APB, Mr. Solari. You?
“We have not picked up APB,” he said, definitively. “I can answer you definitively,” he echoed, “we haven’t picked that up.”
Damn. Well there is still the possibility of Epic Games taking over. More on APB as it absolutely refuses to die.
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