Category: Editorials

EA Employees Gear Up For Class Action Lawsuit


Electronic Arts has had its fair share of bad news just here at MMO Fallout. Warhammer Online and All Points Bulletin launched and subsequently took a jackhammer to the publisher’s relationship with its investors and partners, and the recent release of The Old Republic was met with major initial sales and just as much controversy over broken content, bannings, and more.

To top things off, Electronic Arts’ employees may be setting up for a class action lawsuit. According to an employee spouse on Gamespot, Electronic Arts currently mandates shifts of 9am to 10pm, seven days a week with occasional Saturdays off. In return, employees are given no overtime or vacation days for this work.

Unlike EAlouse, this isn’t just the ranting of some alleged employee. Gamespot contacted Schubert & Reed, a San Francisco law firm, who confirmed that preparations are in place for a class action suit.

“We are seeking unpaid overtime for a good number of EA employees who weren’t [properly] paid, EA contends they were exempt,” and Schubert added that “we contend otherwise.”‘

No doubt more to come.

(Source: Gather Your Party)

Guild Wars Hands On Part 3: More Crafting!


In the second part of the hands on, I may have said that GW2’s crafting system was rather familiar. Well, you can string me up and beat the candy out because I missed one key part of crafting: Discovery. But first, I want to talk about why Guild Wars 2’s crafting system is superior to your own.

I Can Craft Whatever I Like

First, crafting is incredibly convenient. While other games allow you the power to craft virtually anywhere you please, Guild Wars 2 does force you to use stations scattered over the main towns and villages. That said, I submit that the ability to remotely deposit your crafting resources, one that is available without the need for a cash shop item (which admittedly would sell like penicillin in the gonorrhea dimension), easily negates the inconvenience of crafting stations.

And inconvenience is a harsh word at that. When you can salvage your items on the field, and then transfer those items directly to your collections box (without taking up precious bank space), and then at your convenience teleport directly to a town and walk the twenty feet to a crafting station, withdraw your crafting items right there at the station and then immediately sell/deposit the goods you’ve made either to an NPC or on the open market, there is no inconvenience. Or about as inconvenient as having to pull that plastic tab out of your Furby before it will begin learning your voice (yes I’m making 90’s references).

2. Discovering New Recipes

This is the feature I wanted to talk about most, and one that I just dived into yesterday after I stupidly punched out my second part preview. Every skill has recipes that are gained as you level up, but each skill also has a set of recipes that can only be learned by “experimenting” with crafting materials and even some finished products. Any item you produce that carries another skill(level) tag is an ingredient for another recipe.

So let’s take a look at some examples. I’m a chef, which means I can bring food into this discussion as much as I like and none of you can complain that it is random. The most basic recipe offered to chefs is a loaf of bread. The bread, however, experimented with can be combined with butter to make buttered toast. Or you can combine bread with red meat and make a hamburger. Or combine yeast, flour, oil, and milk to make biscuits (don’t quote me on this recipe).

I suppose where this falls short is that the whole system is rather casual. When you add your first ingredient, the game tells you outright what could be combined and what cannot. For instance, adding bread to the pool will result in “9 unknown recipes left,” even with a notice as to what cooking level you would need to craft the recipe and have it added to your recipe list. The hand-holding side of this is that the game will just block you from crafting anything that isn’t compatible, or above your level. So you don’t have to worry about wasting ingredients while crafting or looking it up online, you can’t waste ingredients or have experimentation fail, the game won’t allow it.

I’m sure players will decry it as care-bear or hand holding on this feature (oh wait, I already did), but it is an interesting feature that adds an extra level of depth and exploration to crafting. It also gives an incentive to gather as many raw materials as possible, rather than picking one or two recipes still capable of offering crafting experience and leveling those.

Other than that I have no opinion

Jagex Begins Selling Extra Bank Spaces In Cash Shop


File this one under undermining your own values. A good long time ago I reported that Jagex was considering adding an authenticator-style security dongle to RuneScape, an idea that was scrapped after community backlash over a very simple perk. In order to encourage people to buy the dongle, Jagex wanted to offer a small expansion in bank space. Ultimately, of course, the reason Jagex gave for the withdrawal was that the company considered selling bank space as an unfair advantage, and that doing so would violate the company’s policy of not selling in-game advantages for cash.

Welcome to 2012, Jagex. In today’s update, players are now able to buy bank space. Not just a small amount of bank space, up to 250 extra spaces. Nonmembers will be able to expand their bank up to 4.2 (over the current 78) times its current limit, and allow members to increase their bank space by around 50% (over the current 468). Each expansion costs approximately $8 and offers 50 extra bank spaces, the whole group will cost around $40.

So did Jagex lie about the Bank of RuneScape image being fake, or was the appearance of the image last week just a really well timed coincidence?

(Source: RuneScape)

Funcom Q2 2012 Highlights


Funcom’s second quarter finances are out, and the results are rather predictable. Since we already know from previous reports that The Secret World failed to meet up to Funcom’s expectations, and greatly so, it comes as little surprise that the recently launched MMO has pulled in less than half of Funcom’s previous “Conan-like” scenario. The second quarter also has the bad luck of taking in all of The Secret World’s development costs with little of its income, due to head start not beginning until the end of July.

The Company still considers it likely that sales for the 12 months period following launch of the game will be less than half of what was presented in the Conan-like scenario in 1Q presentation.

Revenue was down once again compared to the previous quarter, due to Funcom’s main source of revenue (Age of Conan) taking yet another hit in sales. That being said, all of Funcom’s currently launched MMOs are rated as “cash flow positive.” The Secret World has sold more than 200,000 copies since launch, as noted in the filing, with what Funcom says is a strong and positive reaction from its user base. Funcom recently launched a number of titles, including The Secret World, the MOBA Bloodline Champions, and a couple of free to play social games.

For the future, Funcom has a few titles under its belt. Revealed earlier this year, Funcom has partnered with Lego to create an MMO based on the mini-figures. Additionally, the report mentions a large-scale MMO titled “Project A.” No doubt we will be hearing more about that in the future.

(Source: Funcom Investor)

Guild Wars 2 Impressions Part 2: Crafting, WvWvW


First off, I would like to apologize to the servers currently fighting Blackgate. Sorry we are completely dominating the board, that is. I kid, but seriously my server is whooping some major ass in the world vs world scene. Anyway, in the previous hands on I had a chance at discussing the questing of Guild Wars 2 and the overflow servers. For today’s hands on I looked at the World Vs World Vs World and crafting.

1. Crafting Myself A Better Headline

Guild Wars 2 allows you to take on two crafts at a time, but with a catch: Apparently you can swap them at any time and still retain the levels (don’t quote me on this). Additionally, it doesn’t matter what your professions are, you are able to collect resources from any skill as long as you have the requisite tool. Each tool has a certain number of uses before it breaks and needs to be replaced, and each tool has certain tiers that must be purchased in order to gather higher level items.

Crafting should be familiar to anyone who has played an MMO. You find materials by salvaging items (which, like Guild Wars, is done with a kit and is not its own profession), gathering resource nodes, and gutting mobs for their delicious flesh and skins. Unlike its fellow games, however, Guild Wars 2 has a fancy ability to deposit your crafting goods remotely. So if you are running around and suddenly find yourself filled up with ingots, fibers, pelts, and more, you can hit a simple button and deposit them in your collections bank. Later on when you are at a crafting station, you can just as easily withdraw said items.

Naturally some of the materials you won’t be able to get at all from the wild, forcing your hand to purchase from the many in-game NPCs. Certain resources also can only be purchased with karma points, which are obtained by completing live events. Additionally, crafting is quite a bit more involved than your average MMO. Most crafting skills have raw materials that are crafted into components, but also require another step before they can be turned into armor/weapons. For instance, in order to make a leather vest, one must first create a couple of vest parts which are then crafted into the vest.

The monetary restrictions of crafting prevent you from out-leveling your character in skills.

2. World Vs World Vs World: My Word

There is a word for Guild Wars 2’s world vs world vs world mode, but I’m too busy beating down the hordes of the other servers to think about it. World Vs World allows players to represent their server against select opponents in rounds that last two weeks. At the end of the two week period, the scores are tallied and the servers with the best scores win. This takes place on four massive maps where players fight for control over various territories. The zones act as any normal Guild Wars 2 area, so there are also mobs (both passive and aggressive) and resource nodes to be mined for goods, as well as merchants, trainers, and profession zones.

The number of options to help your team in World Vs World is truly astounding. You can fortify keeps, protect caravans, attack enemy keeps, defend your own keeps, operate siege weaponry, and rebuild after a devastating defense. Handy markers on the map let you know where battle is taking place, and keep assaults quickly turn into massive sieges with well over a hundred players present. The experience of being in one of these sieges, both as attacker and defender, is quite difficult to express without experiencing it for yourself. The guilds already in place are doing their best to make the experience as epic as possible.

It is also possible to gain drops off of your enemies. You aren’t stealing any of their loot, but the game treats it as a mob kill and will spawn loot bags with random materials, weapons, equipment, etc. You won’t gain much experience or loot from PvP in this fashion, but it does provide an incentive for players who might otherwise not bother.

3. Daily/Monthly Achievements

I can only assume my monthly achievements will be reset at the end of August, a pity considering the game only launched the 25th. Guild Wars 2 offers daily and monthly achievements, with rewards for completing sets of achievements as well as the whole list. Daily achievements are rather easy, from number of kills, variety of kills, gathering, etc. Monthly quests are a bit more involved, including salvaging items in mass, experience without death, number of invaders killed, and completing events.

The rewards for completing these events is well worth the effort required, however.

4. Next Time…

Next time I hope to talk to you all a bit more about the auction house. As I said yesterday, it is still offline.

Guild Wars 2 Headstart First Impressions


We interrupt your Saturday broadcast for a piece about Guild Wars 2. The early beta weekends are a long distant past, so much so that I can’t honestly remember anything that I did in them.

1. Saving Features For Next Time…

I can’t get to everything in this hands-on. As no doubt a few hundred thousand players all attempt to force their way through the teeny tiny door that is the login server, not all of the features are presently working. Foremost, I was unable to get into any of the World Vs World or player vs player instances. Secondly, I was also unable to access the gold transfer service and auction house due to connection outages.

Despite these setbacks, the actual servers themselves held up rather well. My server is the second most populated in the North America region, and rubber banding was almost nonexistent. I can also count the number of times I was disconnected from the server on one finger, although I don’t presume that my experience is universal.

2. World Quests Beat Warhammer Out Of The Water

I catch a lot of flak whenever I refer to Warhammer Online, but the quests in Guild Wars 2 do bear a strong resemblance to the public quest system. Unlike Warhammer Online however, where public quests didn’t serve much purpose other than a repetitive distraction from the normal quest grind, Guild Wars 2 revolves around public quests.

And to separate the two even more, the great majority of quests have numerous ways to complete them. For instance, a farmer may ask you to help him, which you can accomplish by feeding his livestock, killing pests, putting out fires, or watering seeds. While you are doing this, you may find yourself in the middle of a live event where bandits raid the farm. So you put down your tools and finish the spur of the moment quest, and then go back to what you were doing.

Live events are spontaneous and not marked on the map. Unlike Warhammer Online, if you fail at one of these events, the timer doesn’t just reset. Instead the event moves down a completely different path. Say, for instance, that you fail to push back zombies rising in a swamp. They populate and the next event has you defending a town that they attack. Fail that and the town is destroyed.

In theory, anyway. Failing events is rather difficult this weekend when people outnumber the event mobs by an easy 10:1 margin.

3. Overflow Is Obnoxious

I understand the need for Overflow in a game with as massive of a community as Guild Wars, and I would prefer to have overflow servers instead of having to sit in a queue line. But as usual, the concept in practice is not the same as in theory. Overflow is based on zone, not server, so in the time since the Guild Wars servers went live, I have experienced the following:

  1. Enter game, immediately put in overflow.
  2. Finally travel to home server.
  3. Enter city, instance, or new zone. Immediately put back in overflow.
  4. Enter regular server.
  5. Return to city, leave instance, or new zone. Immediately put back in overflow.

You don’t spend a lot of time in areas like the city, so to have the game constantly put you back in overflow just because you changed zones becomes incredibly annoying after a while. Again: Better than the alternative, but in need of improvement.

Blizzard: Will Not Up WoW’s Free Trial


World of Warcraft may still be at the top of the game, but if the past few years are any indication, it is a title that may be lost in the foreseeable future. Since it hit its peak just a couple of years ago, World of Warcraft has seen a substantial loss of players, down to the current level of approximately nine million. Still, this figure doesn’t appear to have frightened the top brass at Blizzard Entertainment.

In an interview with Gamasutra, Blizzard stated that the developer has no plans to increase the current free to play limit. Producer John Lagrave commented that there are special parts of the game that he would rather reserve for paying customers.

“We looked at whether Level 20 would give you a good sense of what our game is, and we think it does. We’ve definitely slid some of the pay-for features into the first 20 Levels,”

Sorry, gamers who for one reason or another are still holding out.

Blizzard: Will Not Up WoW's Free Trial


World of Warcraft may still be at the top of the game, but if the past few years are any indication, it is a title that may be lost in the foreseeable future. Since it hit its peak just a couple of years ago, World of Warcraft has seen a substantial loss of players, down to the current level of approximately nine million. Still, this figure doesn’t appear to have frightened the top brass at Blizzard Entertainment.

In an interview with Gamasutra, Blizzard stated that the developer has no plans to increase the current free to play limit. Producer John Lagrave commented that there are special parts of the game that he would rather reserve for paying customers.

“We looked at whether Level 20 would give you a good sense of what our game is, and we think it does. We’ve definitely slid some of the pay-for features into the first 20 Levels,”

Sorry, gamers who for one reason or another are still holding out.

International Sanctions Shut Down World of Warcraft in Iran


Iranian gamers may be waking up to find that access to a number of games will be going away in the coming weeks. According to the BBC, while the Iran government would like you to believe that the games are being banned as “western propaganda” used to “poison the minds of the youth population in Iran,” the real culprit appears to be international sanctions against the country. While many publishers already have no intention of releasing their games in Iran, this does mean that gamers in Iran will find their IP addresses blocked from accessing previously available services.

Blizzard responded to recent comments of Battle.net being blocked in Iran with the following:

We can’t speak to reports surrounding the Iranian government restricting games from its citizens. What we do know is that United States trade restrictions and economic sanction laws prohibit Blizzard from doing business with residents of certain nations, including Iran. We’ve recently tightened up our procedures to ensure compliance with those laws, which means we must restrict access to our games by players in those nations.

Iranian youth may want to consider a proxy if they intend on continuing to poison their minds with western propaganda.

(Source: BBC)

And the Golden Joysticks Nominees Are…


Another year, another Golden Joystick award. Every year I bring up the nominees, and since MMO Fallout is all about MMOs (and gratuitous food analogies), I tend to focus on just the one category. Last year the Best MMO category housed six titles. This year, the list has been expanded to a whopping nine. Luckily for the contestants, the winning won’t entirely be a one-sided race, with titles like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2 absent thanks to release timing. Nominated this year are: Eve Online, League of Legends, Lord of the Rings Online, Rift, RuneScape, Star Wars: The Old Republic, TERA, The Secret World, and World of Tanks. 

Our house favorite Tribes: Ascend has been nominated for Best Shooter, with Age of Empires Online vying for the position as Best Strategy. Diablo III (as if it needs any help) is looking for the trophy of Best RPG, while The Elder Scrolls Online is up for One to Watch. Finally, Diablo III and Star Wars: The Old Republic are up for Ultimate Game of the Year.

Best of luck to the nominees and I will see you when the winners are chosen.

(Source: Golden Joystick)