This article doesn't have much to do with Darkfall.
You find yourself in a room with one thousand small tables, each table adorned with two objects; a button and a number from one to one thousand. A voice comes over the system and says “only one of these buttons will not electrocute you. Good luck.” You gaze upon the legion of buttons as the voice softly cackles.
You are now a Quality Assurance agent for a massively multiplayer online game. Now imagine this scenario: You are in the same room, same tables, same buttons, same numbers. This time, however, you have one hundred helpers at your side. Common sense says that you send each one down the line, starting with number one and moving up (or however you want to do it) shocking each one until you get to the right button.
This article has nothing to do with high level players.
Patch 1.3.2 has come and gone for Warhammer Online, bringing with it the new New Player Journey, the removal of fortresses, and other balances and tweaks to RvR. Mythic hopes to bring back new players and old veterans alike who are either afraid to join or became sick of the title long ago.
Along with this update comes unlimited free trials. Yes, the ten day limit has been removed, you have as long as you want in tier 1 (That’s level 1 to 10) to experience what the game has to offer, and to form your own ideas as to whether or not the title merits your subscription.
This Article has nothing to do with naked women...
If Age of Conan could be transposed into a human being, it would probably call you up at two in the morning, drunk, and wondering why you dumped it so long ago. Whenever it phones up, it has brand new explanations for why we should take it back, new incentives we may not have had several months prior, and new tricks it learned that it can’t wait to show us.
But let’s keep this about the game, shall we? Recently Funcom launched a slew of price reductions on the game, and its subscription rate. The boxed copy currently runs you around twenty dollars USD, and multi-month subscriptions were slashed, up to 45% cheaper as you increase in time prepaid.
Is it working?
“I can’t comment on any numbers,”
-Erling Ellingson
Gee…Thanks, Erling, chief spokesperson for Funcom.
What Funcom can tell us, however, is that the updates have been a huge success at least with the current players. Funcom also launched a veteran system recently, where players accumulate points for each month of subscription, that increases incrementally the longer you sustain a subscription. Funcom is continuing to address concerns of content gaps, and the title has its first expansion pack in the works: Rise of the Godslayer.
Here’s hoping this helps Age of Conan’s subscriber numbers. Otherwise, Funcom can always make the title freemium, offer a free basic version with a paid upgrade, similar to that of Anarchy Online. Doing so might entice more people into putting a 30 gigabyte game on their system.
Imagine this, gentlemen: You’re walking through the streets, and at the corner you come across a beautiful woman, clad in nothing but a frilly bra and underwear. As she looks at you seductively, using the hottest /dance emote available, she says “4g 4 l4p d4nc3.” All of a sudden, you notice something about her is wrong. The chin, the hairy arms, the Adam’s Apple. IT’S A MAN, BABY!
If you’re a player who enjoys the occasional pixelated groping, or you work as a GM on Age of Conan, you’ll be glad to hear that, at least on King of the World that you won’t have to worry about that woman actually being a man behind the screen. Taking the phrase “pics or it didn’t happen” literally, and requires players to submit webcam pictures of themselves, otherwise male players playing as female avatars will be banned.
If you’re a visitor to mmorpg.com, you’ve probably found yourself stepping into the middle of a controversy. Apparently yesterday’s review of Fallen Earth caused such an uproar that mmorpg.com’s staff saw fit to remove it from the website. I decided to get my super sleuth kit, and by super sleuth kit I mean grabbing part 1 off of Google Cache before it was deleted.
If you’re a visitor to mmorpg.com, you’ve probably found yourself stepping into the middle of a controversy. Apparently yesterday’s review of Fallen Earth caused such an uproar that mmorpg.com’s staff saw fit to remove it from the website. I decided to get my super sleuth kit, and by super sleuth kit I mean grabbing part 1 off of Google Cache before it was deleted.
This article has nothing to do with T-Mobile's Sidekick
All two of you who visited my message boards will see that I am not a big fan of being explicit with rules. In fact, there are three rules on the Orb Boards; Don’t incite a flame war, keep your account secure, and don’t be a spambot. Apart from those basic rules, I don’t think the rest needs to be explained. What it comes down to is: Anything you wouldn’t do in real life, don’t do here. Unless you make a living out of stealing people’s identities, in which case…still don’t do that here.
I often like to see Game Masters getting intuitive when it comes to removing problems that may not warrant a complete rule, or that may be such a special case that putting a rule would be far too generalizing. Say, for example, the issues Aion had when it launched last month. Players were clogging the servers by going away from keyboard so they could sleep, go to school, etc, without being logged off. Rather than pull out the ban-stick and taking things far over the edge, NCsoft quickly released a patch making such an exploit impossible.
The idea is that you don’t have to issue permabans to get a point across.
More on Aion, World of Warcraft, and more after the break.
October 15th has come and gone, and with it came the closure of twelve Star Wars Galaxies servers, as I reported this past September. Now, I originally assumed that once the servers shut down, all characters left on them would be lost for good. The reason for the server closures was that the already running free transfer service had been such a success that multiple servers were now dead as players flooded their characters to other, more populated, servers.
If Dungeons and Dragons Online taught us anything, it is that just because a title goes free to play, that is no true indication that the company is hitting some hard times. However much like peanut butter and jelly, when the two come together, you can usually anticipate that someone is making a sandwich. Luckily, this is not the case.
Earlier this year, Turbine announced that Dungeons and Dragons Online would be heading towards a free to play model, with several various forms of subscription payment, in addition to a micro transaction store. Today Turbine announced that the now free to play title has seen a massive upswing in numbers, both in subscriptions and in new players. New subscribers has risen 40%, that is to say players who are paying for the title.
Turbine attributes this to people who previously were not willing to give the title a try, but once they got in for free were willing to shell out a few bucks a month.
Dungeons and Dragons can be downloaded at http://www.ddo.com and played for free for an unlimited time.
Fallen Earth went into live mode on September 22nd, where the title had something of a rocky start. The first few weeks have brought on numerous bugs, server load issues, and recurring problems with the tutorial. Fallen Earth LLC hopes to put the past behind it with an upcoming patch that will address all of these problems.
To start at the top of the list, the new tutorial will allow an optional extension of 30 to 45 minutes, that will give players a more indepth look at the crafting, scavenging, combat, mount, and harvesting systems. Town events will also be given an update, and the patch is followed by eight pages of bug fixes. In addition, October will bring a Halloween event to Fallen Earth.
Forget whether or not Fallen Earth can handle the updates; One can only wonder as to the abuse that the coffee machine over at Fallen Earth LLC is taking.
MMO Fallout 