Category: Editorials

Square Enix Redacts Server Merger Announcement


Remember last week when Square Enix announced the details of their server merger? Well who says that Square doesn’t listen to their community? After an enormous amount of discussion on the forums, Square is taking the server merger back to the drawing board.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for the wealth of feedback you have provided us with following the announcement made on February 9, 2012 (Thursday), regarding the World merge and character transfers. In order to ensure that the most desirable and effective outcome is achieved, we will be reassessing the method of the merger process.

Initially, the server merger was set to take the game’s eighteen servers and merge them down to ten. Square has promised to release more information as the company decides upon what to do next.

(Source: Lodestone)

Star Vault Has 5 Employees, Says Henrik At Web Hearing


Sweden’s Aktie Torget Exchange has posted a web hearing with Star Vault CEO Henrik Nystrom, of which you can find the full translated version below. For the sake of brevity, I have compiled some of the more important points.

If you didn’t catch Star Vault’s Q3 2011 finances, the company reported that they had reduced staff without offering an exact figure. In the first question of the hearing, Henrik directly addresses this topic:

5 people are employed by Star Vault, then we have a team that works in the form of project employment/freelance when there is a need for it.

As he has done before, Henrik discusses why the game has faced its population issues, particularly with regard to the experience new players have upon joining, that the existing community must be helpful to new players who seek assistance, otherwise they may not return.

When asked about how long he expects Mortal Online to survive, Henrik likened the game to MMOs that have survived for over a decade. He also notes that Star Vault expects Mortal Online to break even and start profiting in mid 2012. Publishing with LeKool to bring Mortal Online to China should result in some results this summer.

Star Vault’s long term goal is 50,000 subscribers, a goal Henrik sees as reasonable. The average demographic for Mortal Online is the 18-20 male crowd.

(Source: Aktie Torget Exchange)

Thanks to Slapshot1188 for the tip.

Darkfall's New Investors: InternetQ


Although inevitably someone will come and tell me otherwise, investors have historically had major impacts on MMO development and direction on a fundamental level. For instance, I would never make the direct claim that Insight Venture Partners told Jagex to reverse course and start including exclusive in-game items packaged in with certain vendor cards, but if you look at the history, the two match up. Now, you could also speculate good features coming from such new investors, including the reversal of the free trade restrictions, finally thrashing bots from the game, etc.

InternetQ has announced a €2.6 million investment in Aventurine, affected by a convertible bond set to mature in March 2015, but InternetQ can convert it into equity at any time. If this takes place within 7 months of the Darkfall 2.0 launch, InternetQ will own 40% of Aventurine, with the option to buy more shares to become majority share holder.

The investment is specifically for Darkfall 2.0, the launch of free to play Darkfall in Asia, and development of InternetQ’s AKAZOO network.

With the Darkfall’s sequel launch later this year, Aventurine will have the opportunity to become a successful franchise.

Hold the phone: Darkfall is set to become a franchise? Is InternetQ suggesting that Darkfall 1.0 will continue alongside Darkfall 2.0?

It will be interesting to see the effect InternetQ has on Darkfall’s development. At the risk of sounding pessimistic, the press release tells me that InternetQ doesn’t fully understand exactly what Darkfall 2.0, or for that matter an MMO, really is and may be under the impression that Darkfall 2.0 is a standalone sequel (unless they know something we don’t)

(Source: InternetQ release)

Darkfall’s New Investors: InternetQ


Although inevitably someone will come and tell me otherwise, investors have historically had major impacts on MMO development and direction on a fundamental level. For instance, I would never make the direct claim that Insight Venture Partners told Jagex to reverse course and start including exclusive in-game items packaged in with certain vendor cards, but if you look at the history, the two match up. Now, you could also speculate good features coming from such new investors, including the reversal of the free trade restrictions, finally thrashing bots from the game, etc.

InternetQ has announced a €2.6 million investment in Aventurine, affected by a convertible bond set to mature in March 2015, but InternetQ can convert it into equity at any time. If this takes place within 7 months of the Darkfall 2.0 launch, InternetQ will own 40% of Aventurine, with the option to buy more shares to become majority share holder.

The investment is specifically for Darkfall 2.0, the launch of free to play Darkfall in Asia, and development of InternetQ’s AKAZOO network.

With the Darkfall’s sequel launch later this year, Aventurine will have the opportunity to become a successful franchise.

Hold the phone: Darkfall is set to become a franchise? Is InternetQ suggesting that Darkfall 1.0 will continue alongside Darkfall 2.0?

It will be interesting to see the effect InternetQ has on Darkfall’s development. At the risk of sounding pessimistic, the press release tells me that InternetQ doesn’t fully understand exactly what Darkfall 2.0, or for that matter an MMO, really is and may be under the impression that Darkfall 2.0 is a standalone sequel (unless they know something we don’t)

(Source: InternetQ release)

Stuck in TERA Queue? Enjoy Some Bonus Experience


I don’t know about you, but I hate queue lines, except in those rare moments when I find myself queuing in line for the gas station to open in the morning to buy a slushie. But enough of my small town stories. The point of my story is: I hate queue lines in video games, and if I’m going to be expected to sit around in my chair and leisurely consume carbonated beverages and watch television while I wait for a queue line to diminish, well by golly I better be compensated for it.

TERA has the right idea. I noticed while logging into the closed beta test tonight that the server was under around an 800+ person queue line, with a notice that if my time in line extended over ten minutes, I would be compensated with bonus XP. Ten minutes later, the notice changed to what you see above, and I was granted 13 minutes of bonus XP upon logging in.

See? Make it worth the wait.

Darkfall: Down The Path of Trammel


Whenever the topic turns to a free for all PvP MMO, I often bring up the subject of what I refer to as “Trammeling.” It is also known as “pulling an NGE,” and occurs when a developer makes dramatic changes to underlying fundamentals of a game in order to achieve what they believe will appeal to a broader range of gamers. And like New Game Enhancements, this runs the risk that the current population who are more likely to depart may not be fully replaced by the potential for newer, more casual customers. This is not the same as Ropering, the concept of alienating potential customers by monetizing everything up to each individual breath.

Today’s topic covers death in the upcoming Darkfall 2.0 relaunch. As of now, when a character hits zero health, they enter an incapacitated state during which another player can gank them, or they can wait out the timer or hit a button the bleed out and respawn at their bind stone.

When 2.0 launches, death will work slightly different. Rather than bleeding out, when the bar empties players will revive with minimum health. Aventurine hopes this will add another layer to larger scale PvP combat as downed players will need to be ganked to ensure that they are unable to get back up and start fighting. To balance this feature out in player vs environment situations, higher level monsters will be more likely to outright execute the player, rather than simply incapacitate them.

The changes don’t end at ganking, however. When ganked, a player will enter a state of limbo, during which they will be able to equip items from their bank box and then respawn near their tombstone. This is time based, will cost gold based on how much equipment you take, and is time based: If you don’t hit a specific button in time, you are still teleported back to your bind stone.

Community reaction to this news is naturally divided. More news to come as Aventurine releases more details.

(Source: Epic Blog)

T3Fun’s Services Appear To Be Offline


Update 2: Everything is back to normal, as far as I’m aware. Games are back online and so are the websites.

Update: The T3Fun website is operational, but there seems to beinconsistent access to their games. Still no announcement on the outage.

News coming in from the Google bots and Twitter feeders is that T3Fun (better known as Hanbitsoft) is experiencing unknown technical difficulties resulting in players unable to access their website and game services. My sources believe the outage began around nine hours ago, around the time that Hanbitsoft’s multiple games were announced to be back online following server maintenance.

There has been no comment by T3Fun yet. I will keep this post updated when an official comment is released.


T3Fun's Services Appear To Be Offline


Update 2: Everything is back to normal, as far as I’m aware. Games are back online and so are the websites.

Update: The T3Fun website is operational, but there seems to beinconsistent access to their games. Still no announcement on the outage.

News coming in from the Google bots and Twitter feeders is that T3Fun (better known as Hanbitsoft) is experiencing unknown technical difficulties resulting in players unable to access their website and game services. My sources believe the outage began around nine hours ago, around the time that Hanbitsoft’s multiple games were announced to be back online following server maintenance.

There has been no comment by T3Fun yet. I will keep this post updated when an official comment is released.


Final Fantasy XIV Server Mergers Coming


We’ve known about Final Fantasy XIV’s upcoming server mergers for a long time, since December when Square initially announced them. At the time, Naoki Yoshida commented that Square would be taking a look at the server populations after billing began and judge how many servers to merge afterward. He also stated at the time that the mergers were expected to be temporary, until FFXIV 2.0 launches in late 2012 and an anticipated surge in returning players necessitates for more servers.

On the Lodestone today, Square Enix is finally ready to discuss brass tacks. The original eighteen servers will be merged down to ten, on March 27th. Players will have much of the month in order to designate a destination server to move to, and worlds will be locked as they fill up in order to prevent overpopulation.

Name duplicate rules on characters and retainers are based on whoever has an active subscription as of March 26th, and then on which character is older. Linkshells will be deleted, as will friends/block lists.

(Source: Lodestone)

Earthrise Shutting Down Today For A Better Tomorrow


“We did our best to revive the game in 2011, but the time was not enough to keep up with the user requirements. There is a huge interest in high quality open world sandbox MMORPGs, unfortunately the big publishers do not show any interest in the genre. It is unfortunate that low budget companies like ours are trying to bring innovativeness in the already saturated MMO market. I hope that one day an independent studio will be able to release the long anticipated open world sandbox MMO, which everyone is talking about, but no one is making. We tried, but did not succeed. We would like to apologize to those who were disappointed from Earthrise and to thank everyone who supported us during the years.”

The MMO industry every year becomes a less friendly place for independent developers, thanks in part to the Rule of Saturation. Unlike Square Enix, who have the coffers and investors to pour millions of dollars and well over a year to bring Final Fantasy XIV to a state that could be called enjoyable, Masthead Studios does not have the same kind of funding and as such has announced today that Earthrise will close down.

In a post on the official forums, The Editor mentions that the developer was unable to find an investor, but that this may not be the end for Earthrise:

“We don’t abandon the Earthrise project completely. But it will be postponed for better times. We even thought to continue providing services for game for free, but it would still require investments. Instead of that we decided to focus on other projects, but it will be Ostiak, who can give additional information. Meanwhile we will keep the Earthrise forums and we will still use them. I hope one day I will put much better news there.”

Earthrise had a free to play version that partially launched in December for previous account holders, and then the servers went offline between December 8th and January 7th for server maintenance.

(source: Earthrise Forums)