“Help! Anyone, everyone, we need help! The Risar are attacking!”
GM Events are nature’s way of saying “we’re willing to break from the normal monotony of every day gaming.” In most cases, these events are pretty simple in nature, and result in little change to the game’s landscape, if any at all. The event starts, players do things, and eventually the event ends. We all have fun, and might obtain a cool item to take home with us, but the next day is as if nothing ever happened. Other events, like in The Matrix Online and Tabula Rasa, such GM events can result in the death of major NPCs, entire bases being blown up, or even prelude to bigger expansions.
The above GM event took place just a couple days ago in Cave Camp, players being notified by word of mouth, and by an NPC running around the wilderness frantically screaming of the attack. Players were tasked with fighting off the Risar horde (Risar are Mortal Online’s version of Orcs, for those of you who have not played the game).
Eventually the Risar made way for their leader, the Risar Lord, to step in and finish the job. Although a number of players managed to cut the Risar Lord to size, an alliance of players from the Ascension clan (and others) bolted in, in a coordinated attack, and drove the players off to kill the Risar Lord themselves and no doubt feast upon his sweet, sweet loot.
The event wasn’t full GM-driven, it was a scripted event that was activated and allowed to run its course. Of course, Star Vault has promised to expand upon this in the future, with more GM-driven events, surprise events to come. Players will also recall such “epic bosses,” single-time monsters that only appear once, are gone when they are killed, and are controlled by GMs.
And now, for your viewing pleasure, the Risar Lord slaying (IE: People circling a mob and curb stomping it repeatedly).
It’s around Christmas time, and you know what that means: 24 hours of A Christmas Story! Given that Ralphie Fallout is all about A Christmas Story, how to say fudge without saying fudge, tips on not shooting your eye out, and how packages labeled “fragile” are likely not from Italy, I figured we’d do something special and talk about a few video game sales that Ralphie wouldn’t have been able to play, what with living in an era where sleds were still wooden, and people still named their children Scut.
You know the rules. Prices are in USD, items may not be available in all regions, and please for the love of God, read the page before you purchase, especially if you live outside of North America.
Includes 30 days free game time (new accounts only)
[1] Activation and download may take up to 48 hours after purchase. PayPal, PaySafeCard, and iDEAL are not accepted for purchases of this game in Pound Sterling or Euros.
If you’re lucky enough, you’ll be attending a theater airing a director’s cut edition trailer for Eve Online. For those of you not lucky enough, the trailer is above. The Eve Online trailer airs before Tron.
I wrote an article today talking about how disappointed I was that there was no MMO Calendar this year. I’d sent an email to the website, but had not received a response until tonight.
So there will be an mmo calendar next year. Looking forward to it.
If I accidentally trip or bump into you, generally a simple “I’m sorry” and a hand up with suffice. Then again, if I smash your mailbox with my car because I’m texting while driving, an apology won’t suffice as well. You’ll probably expect me to pay for the mailbox, and won’t be paying for the damage your mailbox caused to my car.
Such is the case with MMOs and various forms of reimbursement that come up over the course of any title’s life. Very extended maintenance, false bans, etc, can put a company in the position where they have to say “alright, now how do we calm tensions between us and the customer?” If you are Jagex, you’ll likely refuse to roll back or compensate, and simply give the middle finger to anyone who lost items or was banned unfairly due to a bug or oversight. If you are NCsoft, XP bonus items are your forte. Turbine? Break out those Turbine points.
I think we can place loss of items at the lowest end of the reimbursement spectrum, extended maintenance somewhere around the middle, and false positive bans somewhere around the top. At the lowest end, reimbursement and perhaps some free xp boosters will suffice, depending on the severity of the loss and the time it took to reimburse. As for extended maintenance, this scales with time. A few extra hours may require a couple xp boosters, but 12+ hours of downtime should generally lead to game time being extended by the respective amount of time (So one day, generally).
In the cases of false bans, however, as a developer you should be putting on your lips of +2 ass kissing, because their durability will be put to the test. By banning someone falsely, as has happened on countless occasions over virtually any game, you’ve accomplished the virtual equivalent of approaching someone, sucker punching them in the jaw, and accusing them of cheating on your wife, before saying “sorry, you looked like another guy.” At this point, you’re looking at shelling out one or more free months of game time, and hoping that the person doesn’t up and quit.
So there you have it. For those companies that do offer reimbursement, they generally do a pretty good job of scaling the compensation to match the severity of the problem. Again, unless you are Jagex and would rather your players quit than reimburse them for issues brought about by faults in your programming.
Big thanks to 'Torotoro Ton,' 'Mikuli Candelilla,' and 'Wyvern Myaji' of the Karnak server for inadvertently creating this beautiful scene.
Quick question: What do you hate most about Final Fantasy XIV? Odds are, the slow patcher is one of your top answers, and one you haven’t been able to find a fix to. If you are like me, you’ve been finding your patches through external hosts, through Mediafire or FFXIVCore until Square Enix started telling their fansites not to host patches. Despite Square’s patcher, peer to peer networking is truly a more efficient way to distribute patches, assuming the company steps in to host peers when not enough players have the patch (such as right after launch).
So I did find a quick fix. As it turns out, the problem lies with Square Enix’s patcher (go figure) not allocating a proper amount of seeders and leechers. Start the patch download in the client, and then cancel it. Go to C:/users/[user]/My Documents/My Games/Final Fantasy XIV/Downloads/FFXIV and the torrent will be sitting in one of the two folders “2d2a390f” or “48eca647.” Open the torrent file with a separate torrent client, and you should have no problem connecting and downloading. Whereas on the Square patcher, I had one running connection at 0.0b/s, using this on uTorrent was able to completely download the latest patch in about five minutes.
Move the patch from wherever it was downloaded to, to its correct folder (hunt around in the two folders until you find the file that the Square patcher created, and replace it with the one you downloaded). This was done on Windows 7, so your file location may have a slight difference. You can find the folder it is in by doing a windows search and typing in the name of the patch, in the case of the latest being “d2010.12.13.0000.”
More on Final Fantasy XIV as it appears. I would offer to host the patches myself, but Square Enix would shoot me.
I love my 2010 MMO Calendar, so much so that I’m keeping it after 2010 is over this year. For those of you who haven’t participated in the past, the MMO Calendar is a yearly tradition that’s been happening for a few years now, and is essentially a calendar (yes) with a different MMO on each month, sold by an independent company with the proceeds going to St. Jude Children’s Research Center. The calendar put out last year also has signatures from the developers at Jagex, Sony Online Entertainment, and Frogster.
Sadly, it doesn’t seem like there’s going to be an MMO Calendar this year, as it is well past last year’s deadline to order, and there is no information on the main website that there will be a new calendar this year. I’ve tried contacting the “email us if you want information on the 2011 calendar,” but that email address is from 2009, and may not be in use anymore.
More on the MMO Calendar, and subsequent charities, as it appears. I guess for now I’ll have to just use my Nintendo Club desk calendar, right? January is Super Mario Galaxy 2 themed.
About a week ago, I put out a warning telling people to be careful about emails claiming to be from Blizzard over their passwords being reset. Apart from the usual worry of the Christmas season putting a spike in the number of spam emails sent, I had an unexplainable feeling that something big was going to happen this month, I just couldn’t put my finger on what.
This weekend, Gawker was hacked, releasing the usernames and passwords of anyone who commented on Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Gawker, Jezebel,
io9, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Deadspin, and Fleshbot, according to the email sent out. If you commented on these websites in the past, you’ve likely already received an email. If you have received an email, you can check this Slate page to see if your account has been released: http://www.slate.com/id/2277768/
Phishers and spammers have been using this information to send out emails claiming to be from Blizzard and other companies. Of course, this doesn’t help the situation that Blizzard has apparently been sending their own legitimate emails, telling users to reset their passwords if they are a commenter on any of the aforementioned websites.
For those of you ready to soil yourselves, the passwords leaked are encrypted, but that should not keep you from changing your passwords.
When the news broke earlier today that the Final Fantasy XIV team is undergoing some noticeable restructuring, it would’ve been nice of Square Enix to also mention that Final Fantasy XI was undergoing a similar change. In a lodestone post on the Final Fantasy XI website, Square has announced that Mr. Mizuki Ito, whom many of you will recognize as the mind behind the Abyssea add-ons, is taking over as director for Final Fantasy XI. Assisting him is Mr. Yoji Fujito, whom you may remember from the Chocobo raising system.
What I said about Final Fantasy XIV still stands, granted, and is quite unchanged in reflection of this information that the restructuring is taking place on a wider scale in the company. More on both titles as they appear.
MMO Fallout 