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Crafting Crime With Crime Craft: A 1 Year Look

Crimecraft launched in August 2009 to not-so-huge fanfaire over the persistent-lobby-based-shooter-on-the-Unreal-3-Engine. A modest title by any means, Vogster quickly moved the game from a subscription base to a free to play cash shop system, not unlike the Turbine model, and since then the game has been trucking along with a healthy population, healthy enough to ensure that the game will stay afloat for a good long time, at least.

Looking into my archives, I haven’t written a non-sales article on Crimecraft since September 2009, so I was quite surprised when I received an email in my inbox regarding Crimecraft. Apparently at least one of the guys over at Vogster Entertainment is a big fan of the MMO Fallout, and noted my prior interest in the title and a lack of news-stuffs since then. The email contained a promo-code with a leveling boost to incite me back into the game, and incite it did.

I’ve clocked in several hours on Crimecraft in the past week, and I am thoroughly enjoying the new changes. My biggest gripe from the launch was that the A.I in the PVE matches was a combination of too unpredictable, and too stupid. All too often it was easy to sneak up on an NPC and kill them without their AI even activating, but this time around I found NPCs moving around and actively seeking cover. If you start a shootout, other NPCs in the area may come to investgiate. The system isn’t perfect, but it is a far cry from the figures who just stood around and waited for you to shoot at them.

ScreenShot00005 — Luckily he only grazed my medulla oblongata.

Another great addition I noticed is the ease in obtaining weaponry. Within a few PVP matches, I had looted a decent shotgun and an assault rifle that gave me a fighting chance over my 3-shot burst SMG. Vogster wasn’t lying about the gibbing/gore mode either, as my character regularly found himself decapitated by close shotgun shells to the face.

I quickly obtained a few boosts in the form of a heart monitor that displays enemy positions on the mini-map, and a few healing drugs that can be consumed in-game. The missions, which will comprise much of your experience, are still pretty basic, not that I’m asking for more depth. You’ll find a myriad of what you would expect, each containing several tiers:

Kill _ with smg/rifle/pistol/etc.
Do ___ damage with smg/rifle/pistol/etc.
Kill ___ of ___ type NPC.
Kill ___ players carrying smg/rifle/pistol/etc.
Win __ matches of ___.

The more traditional missions involve going from person to person in the main lobbies, with a story centered around the protection of the city from the unruly gangs and scum that inhabit the surrounding areas, and generally involves heading into PVE instances to complete one of the above mission types.

Stockpile PVE is still all about collecting crates containing everything from weapons to drugs to crafting materials. I also had the chance to try out Safeguard, a PVE mode where players are tasked with protecting a weapons cache from wave after wave of bots, which I particularly enjoyed as the opportunities to become overwhelmed by the sheer number of bots added to the difficulty if you didn’t clear them out fast enough before the next wave spawned. Headhunter is a test of patience, although killing the prerequisite number of bots to incite the boss to appear isn’t a particularly difficult task.

Ammunition and health are much more prevalent now than at launch, with players and bots dropping both much more often. Aside from the AI, one of my biggest issues was running out of ammunition and forcing myself to die in a PVE match in order to obtain more. Now, with the expected amount of ammunition conservation, I find myself running out of ammo much less.

Oh, and in case I didn’t mention it before, the Crimecraftian in-game advertising is still present, as seen below, and still raising the penetrating question: People still use Napster?

Jokes aside, Crimecraft is still a great game worthy of a look, even if you don’t plan on forking up any cash. The game can be downloaded from the website for free, or if you really want you can pluck down ten bucks on a digital copy and get the extra perks that come with it.

Me? I think I’ll continue sporting my OG (original gangster) title, and Tommy Vercetti lookalike outfit. Crimecraft is a great game, and you might even catch me logged in now and then! My character’s name is Rastlowski, if you didn’t pick it up from the screenshots.

Turbine Trucking In 8 New Servers: LOTRO

Are you an ex-Lord of the Rings Online player who enjoyed the game but couldn’t pay for the subscription for one reason or another? If so, you are very likely aware of Turbine’s highly popularized moved to free to play (with cash shop) that is coming soon, so soon in fact that many of us former players are waking up with the taste of ale and hobbit foot shampoo on our teeth. Current and former subscribers will have access to the head start on September 8th, with everyone else allowed in on the 10th.

I knew Turbine was adding new servers in preparation for the flood of new players, and eight new servers sounds much more logical when broken down across regions.

US:

Riddermark
Crickhollow
Dwarrowdelf
Imladris

EU:

Anduin [DE]
Gwaihir [DE]
Withywindle [EN]
Celduin [FR]

By former subscribers, I should point out Turbine includes beta testers in that category. So if you’re returning for the sweet free to play action, you should be downloading the client now (to beat the rush) and gearing up for the 8th when you can reserve your username on one of the new servers (free players aren’t stuck on these servers, it’s a matter of preference). Turbine, to my understanding, is not allowing transfers to these new servers.

More on Lord of the Rings Online as it descends into free to play.

Looking Back, Moving Forward: August 2010

Video of the month.

There is no doubt that All Points Bulletin stole the show this past month, showing up on MMO Fallout at least once every three days heading towards the middle of the month onward. Although Realtime Worlds announced APB carrying 130,000 active players, I have to question how many of those players are actively paying subscriptions, as I have my doubts that Realtime Worlds would be going into administration if the grand majority were pumping cash directly into the cash shop and game time veins at RTW.

August was filled to the brim with news that makes you scratch your head and question reality. Bill Roper is gone from Cryptic, I was sent a legal threat by David Allen, I had my wisdom teeth taken out and pretty much immediately went back to writing up articles despite being heavily drugged on hydrocodone, I was featured on Biobreak and Tobold’s blog.

On another good note, however, MMO Fallout now has five active backups going. For the sake of my own embarrassment, I won’t mention the incident that lead up to me being paranoid about losing my information, but irregardless I now have five flash drives, each carrying a backup of MMO Fallout that I update on a weekly basis. I backup this website daily, but I only transfer it off of my computer every Saturday.

I’m still disappointed that the Atari versus Turbine lawsuit resulted the way it did. I personally love legal drama (when it doesn’t involve me) and would have enjoyed seeing something come out of this other than secret settlements.

Warhammer Online fans rejoiced this month. Although BioMythArts Entertainment (or whatever they’re calling themselves nowadays) isn’t giving specific numbers, they are willing to announce that Warhammer Online is indeed profitable, with tens of thousands of new players streaming in thanks to the endless trial system.

Over on Sony’s front, Everquest is once again proving that although their alternate rule servers are unique, they more often than not crash due to low populations. Such is the case with Everquest’s 51/50 ruleset servers (players start at level 51 with 50 level AP) which are due to be merged into normal ruleset servers.

Unfortunately, another month brings another game shutting down. After a year of promises and well wishes, Playdom announced the shuttering of Chronicles of Spellborn, after the Facebook gaming company acquired Acclaim. Although Acclaim’s two other MMOs 9Dragons and 2Moon were transferred to other hosts, Chronicles of Spellborn was shutdown late August.

Speaking of which, Earth Eternal came very close to shutting down. The most adorable non-Asian MMO hit a brick wall running when Sparkplay announced that the company had laid off all but two employees, and that the game would be sold at auction, with high hopes that a buyer would pick up the title. Luckily, a buyer did indeed pick up the title, and we’ve received information that many of the Sparkplay employees may be making a return soon enough.

Alganon-WAIT IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK- ditched the initial client purchase completely by going 100% free to play earlier this month. While the free title is restricted in how many quests you may partake in daily, as well as a shorter level cap, players can remove these restrictions with a simple cash shop purchase.

While we’re on the subject of departures, Bill Roper announced that he would be leaving Cryptic Studios. In unrelated news, I’ve been receiving emails of gratitude for reporting on this story.

On yet another sad note, Realtime Worlds and their newly released MMO “Absolving Perot’s Blame” (or APB for short) have been pretty much a weekly staple for MMO Fallout news. What started out as a simple announcement of standard restructuring took a turn for the worst when Realtime Worlds went into administration (Bankruptcy) and announced that they were looking for investors with what was left of the team. With the recently released patch offering major updates to the game’s driving and shooting, we can only hope that these much needed enhancements didn’t come too late.

TERA: No Stinking IP Blocks!

tera-europe — We must bring the fight against TERA.

A few months ago, we talked about area restrictions in MMOs, as a few select incidents brought up questions of legality and responsibility on the part of the publisher. Due to legal agreements, the publisher for an MMO in North America cannot allow players from Europe if another company has publishing rights in that region, otherwise they risk negating their agreement. In cases such as Aika Online, the two companies may come to an agreement allowing existing players to continue using their accounts, while more controversial incidents resulted in players being blocked with no reimbursement even after they had paid sums of money in the cash shop.

Luckily for players of TERA, the community manager Scapes has revealed that players will not be region restricted, although they will have to purchase the correct client. In short: A player from Europe will be able to purchase a North American client, and play on the servers, and vice versa.

Our goal is to give players the choice as to which server they are going to discover the world of TERA. In a time that players are becoming more connected around the world, we believe that IP blocking has no place in a world class Action MMO. Note that accounts created with one publisher will not be able to access the other publisher’s servers. Additionally, player data such as characters or progression will not be shared or transferrable between different publishers’ servers.

So there you have it. Find a server and stick with it.

The Chronicles of Spellborn: What Happened?

Chronicles of Spellborn can be summarized by comparing it to a kid explaining his idea for a video game.

“It’s gonna be awesome! There’s gonna be first person targeting, a bajillion quests to go on with only three classes to choose from but they’re gonna have their own subclasses to branch things out a bit. There’ll be no grind too, and more backstory than you can shake a stick at, and we’re talking a pretty big stick too. It’ll be set in a post-apocalypse environment, and there’ll be explosions and crazy quest series that will allow the player to take control of important people and beat up some bad guys!”

So my above rendition may make Spellborn sound like a bad game, which it isn’t by any means. Chronicles of Spellborn is one of those games that shows up and has the potential to innovate the industry, or at least a small portion of it. The story was detailed and in-depth, the quests were the main staple of the series, and numerous at that, and there was plenty of activity for all varieties of players.

And then Spellborn Works went bankrupt. You can make the best game in the world, but unfortunately without cash the game will shut down. Spellborn Works went bankrupt very shortly after Chronicles of Spellborn launched in North America in 2009 (The game had been running in the UK since the prior November). The game was siphoned by then-publisher Acclaim Games, who announced that they would be performing a massive upgrade to the title, turning it into a free to play cash shop game to be re-released at some point in 2010. Until then, however, Spellborn Live would receive no attention in the form of patches or updates.

Earlier this year, Spellborn’s Asia publisher Frogster announced that they would be shutting down the title. Over in the west, things became less and less hopeful as the months went on. The client on the website stopped working, resulting in the community hosting its own client and patches in order to get new players interested in the game.

Of course, progress without money is no progress at all, and Acclaim went bust shutting down everything. Chronicles of Spellborn was sold to Playdom, who announced that the game would be shutting down.

If anything, Chronicles of Spellborn is a perfect example of a good title that was marred by bad luck with its hosting companies. Due to the bankruptcy of its original developers, Spellborn never saw the attention and maintenance it deserved, and as a result ended up spending over a year on life support being transferred from company to company before finally being shut down.

Biting The Hand That Once Fed You: Realtime Worlds Edition

“APB itself only really came together technically relatively late in its development cycle (and it still obviously has problems), leaving too little time for content production and polish, and lacking any real quality in some of its core mechanics (shooting / driving). It’s not that the team was unaware of these huge issues, but a million little things conspire to prevent you from being able to do anything about them.”
-Anonymous Realtime Worlds ex-employee

Thanks to the wonders of the internet and anonymity, when a company lays off a whole lot of people, we have the avenue for them to anonymously reveal exactly what was going on at said company that lead to said layoffs. The above anonymous ex-employee makes a lot of good points as to why All Points Bulletin performed the way it did in the market, most importantly below:

“They also failed spectacularly to manage expectations. When Dave J spoke out saying there would ‘not be a standard subscription model’, he unwittingly set expectations at ‘free to play’. When it’s announced that we’re essentially pay-per-hour, we get absolutely killed in the press, somewhat understandably.”

Luke Halliwell is not, on the other hand, afraid of sticking his name and face out to give his grief about Realtime Worlds. In his blog, he notes:

There had been mounting discontent internally about the competence of our top management – and what better proof could you need than this. How they could keep operating the company when they couldn’t even pay this month’s wages, I don’t know. Presumably they continued to think we had a chance somehow; the behaviour of a deluded, greedy, addicted gambler.

His wife, Lucy, who posted in the comment section was not as restrained, especially when the subject comes to feeding their family and owed wages:

“Dave Jones and Ian Hetherington have pissed away millions, they are getting away with not paying over 200 employees for the work that they have done and have fiddled their way to being able to buy back Project:MyWorld for cheap. Moreover these very people have enough personal wealth to pay the money owed to the individuals and families whose lives they have left shattered, heck Dave could probably pay them all just by selling one of his beloved cars. So I’m more than a little pissed off, but mothers get like that when their kids are hurting.”

We here at MMO Fallout (me) wish the best for everyone at Realtime Worlds, as well as their ex employees. More on APB as it appears.

Absolutely Brilliant! Episode #1: Final Fantasy XIV

brilliant_medium — I'm legally required to remind you to game responsibly.

Here at MMO Fallout, I try to offer my help to companies more in the form of business decisions, rather than what I might feel that the game needs. I only play a handful of MMOs, and honestly am not the best person to go to in order to find out what your game needs tweaking. Sure, I know that All Points Bulletin needs better shooting and driving, and I know that Blizzard needs to severely crack down on mobile authenticators being used as a free way to manipulate stolen accounts, but I couldn’t tell you how the latest expansion affected drop rates in Lineage 2, or how players in Guild Wars might react if a certain update was implemented.

Absolutely Brilliant! is a new category devoted to people clearly smarter than myself. In this section, I highlight ideas that, even if the company the game is directed at won’t take notice, other companies with similar models could definitely benefit from grabbing up this person’s idea.

Final Fantasy XIV goes into open beta soon, and the closed beta members are throwing suggestions left and right. Our first idea comes from MMORPG.com user ProfRed, who has an idea to make the market system a lot more streamlined. Seeing as how Square Enix is not gracing Final Fantasy XIV with an auction house (at least not for now), players are trying to find new ways to make the retainer system (a character who sits in market areas selling your items for you) as easy to use as possible. Rather than just a simple search engine, ProfRed (or The Professor, as I’ve taken to calling him) suggested:

“They simply need to add a way to browse items in one of the market wards. Say search for an item and it lists what market wards it exists in. Not even prices just where. Something akin to standing at the entrance and yelling, “I NEED A PINK MAGE HAT OF DOOM”, and vendors yelling back, “GET IT HERE!!!”.

Personal trade/merchanting is a great thing. I am sick of MMO’s making everything easy mode and catering to the anti social.”

Having a system like this would be a little shaky at the start, having to type the name of the item out exactly, but if Square Enix would implement this, such a system would do wonders more than some of the other suggestions (holding up signs, descriptions above names, etc), be less cumbersome if only the player speaking could see the feedback, and would remove the prospect of walking through a thousand retainers looking for your pink mage hat of doom, the idea of which sends me back to my years of playing games like ROSE Online, and the myriad of other free Korean games, most of which featured some form of private shop.

So that’s episode 1 of Absolutely Brilliant! For the record, I won’t be accepting direct submissions by email to this category, but if you see someone’s idea on a forum feel free to link me to it, either here or through my email. Special thanks to ProfRed, and all of the people who will eventually spite me for indirectly associating them with this webiste.

All Points Bulletin: 130,000 Players

Despite Realtime Worlds going into administration and laying off a huge number of people, all is not bad at the RTW kiosk. According to the new administration, offers to invest are coming in from “both sides of the atlantic,” and prospects are high for those remaining at Realtime Worlds, including the employees who were rehired as part of the MyWorld team.

Realtime Worlds announced today that All Points Bulletin has 130,000 players averaging about four hours of game time a day.

“These are healthy numbers and reflect positively on APB as a ongoing concern. They prove this is a very enjoyable game, which is shown by the average player daily playtime and an ARPPU (Average Revenue per Paying User) that is highest of any game out there”

Whatever you say, Joint Administrator Paul Dounis. If enough of those who are playing are horking up extra cash in the form of RTW-bux, then Realtime Worlds should be all set, and perhaps hire back what employees Codemasters, Sony, and Blitz haven’t vultured from the Arizona desert?

Atari Vs Turbine: The Aftermath

For people like me, lawsuits are a swing and a miss, mainly because after all of the legal jargon, reading long court documents to figure out what is happening, and trying to get both sides to speak on the case, there comes the inevitable deal breaker: The settlement. A settlement, often out of court, is generally always secret, none of the agreements are released to the public and neither side can talk about who was wrong on what accord.

So you’ll have to accept my apologies when I tell you I was well aware that the Turbine/Atari lawsuit ended, not only that but it ended four months ago, around the time Turbine was acquired by Warner Brothers. The major changes? Not much to speak of, aside from Turbine reacquiring their publishing rights in Europe, although this could be a decision under the new ownership.

The lawsuit went out with a fizzle and not a bang, and it’s anyone’s guess who won, if there is a “winner.” I’m removing the lawsuit category at the end of the month, as it will no longer be needed.

A Little Something To Remember Me By

The Chronicles of Spellborn closes down shop on the 25th, and many of you likely know me as a pretty nostalgic guy. So I got a package in the mail today I think a few of you will like.

Granted, I don’t have any place to put this game. The package it came in was basically a mail sleeve envelope. Luckily, I know just the place Chronicles of Spellborn can go where it will be loved and cherished forever.

Right here in the old nostalgia shelf. I could go for a good read.