News – Page 388 – MMO Fallout

Hero’s Song Campaign Cancelled, Funded By Investors

Backers of Hero’s Song, all three thousand of you, were surprised this morning by the sudden news that the campaign was being cancelled. Backers were all sent an email explaining that the campaign would be closed due to predictions showing that the funding would not reach its necessary levels. The campaign had lasted for six days and had raised approximately $136 thousand of the intended $800 grand.

After looking at our funding levels and the reality that we aren’t going to reach our funding goals, we’ve decided that the best thing to do is to end the Kickstarter. We sincerely appreciate all of the support we got from the backers and the Kickstarter community.

The good news is that the game isn’t gone, in fact just the opposite. Pixelmage Games has been able to get the game fully funded by investors, without bringing publishers into the deal and hopefully allowing the developers the freedom to make their vision a reality. The Kickstarter campaign expected a delivery around October 2016, so we’ll have to see if the game continues on track.

Pixelmage Games is the new home of John Smedley, formerly of Daybreak Game Company, formerly Sony Online Entertainment.

(Source: Kickstarter)

Daewoo Securities Predicts Doom For Wildstar

Wildstar’s transition to free to play came on the heels of the game dipping down into virtually negligible revenues, $1.5 million as of the third quarter, and everyone wants to know how well free to play has treated the title. We won’t know the real figures until next month, but Daewoo Securities has issued a new forecast predicting that even a shift to free to play won’t be enough to save the sinking ship.

Daewoo predicts zero turnaround for Wildstar, with Q4 revenues remaining flat and continuing to decline over the following months. For the fourth quarter of 2016, the company either predicts a statistically negligible amount or that the game will no longer be in operation. In addition, they predict that Heart of Thorns, the Guild Wars 2 expansion, has sold less than expected.

We expect NCSOFT to report slightly disappointing earnings for 4Q15, due to 1) weaker-than-projected sales of the Guild Wars 2 expansion pack, 2) a lower-thanexpected increase in revenue from Lineage I microtransaction events, and 3) higher expenses related to marketing (G-Star trade show) and the company’s pro baseball team. We forecast 4Q15 revenue of W236.1bn (+0.4% YoY) and operating profit of W70.8bn (-19% YoY).

We’ll know how accurate this prediction is once NCSoft files their full report next month. Daewoo Securities correctly predicted that a Guild Wars 2 expansion would be released in Q3 2015 for $50 when neither a price nor even the existence of an expansion had been announced by Arenanet. Considering the accuracy of their predictions, I lean toward believing their sources.

(Source: Daewoo Securities)

City of Steam Is Shutting Down This Month

City of Steam developer Mechanist Games has announced that services for the MMO will shut down later this month. The game launched in 2013 and was named MMO Fallout’s ‘Most Disappointing MMO of the Year,” due to a partnership with R2 Games that saw many of the game’s mechanics simplified or outright removed and the overall meta-game transformed into a mobile grinder with energy and an overwhelming cash shop.

The announcement focuses on the declining support of UNITY in browsers.

But we’re sorry to say that this chapter of The New Epoch is coming to an end. A number of factors went into this decision, the decline of Unity support in the browser is one of them – Google Chrome no longer supports NPAPI plugins like the Unity Webplayer, and Microsoft’s next browser, Edge, won’t either.

While City of Steam was relaunched as Arkadia, the changes made to the game between closed and open beta unfortunately kept many players from coming back. The game has been in maintenance mode since November 2014 and no one has bothered to moderate the forums since at least August of last year, leaving nearly dozens of pages of spam.

(Source: City of Steam)

Shroud of the Avatar Community Wants Free Offline Access To Perks

What do you do when your game sells items for real money but also includes a separate offline mode that can’t reasonably be regulated by the developer? For Shroud of the Avatar, the folks at Portalarium figures that no matter what their stance on the issue, there is little doubt that hackers will figure out a way to nab those cash shop items for free. So why not do everyone a favor, since the only impact the player can have is on their own world, and give everyone access to exclusive items in offline mode?

The idea was polled, and so far the response has been in overwhelming agreement. 96.5% of the voting community, approximately 860 votes as of this publishing, agree that it is OK for all add on and pledge rewards to be available in offline mode. This obviously comes with a caveat that items will need to be crafted, with the biggest and best stuff becoming end-game content, and that numerous items will have no real effect in offline mode like Fyndoro’s Tablet, an item that is used to find other players.

Community response to the idea has been overwhelmingly positive, especially from those who had invested serious money into the game:

I have 5k in and my greatest concern is someone will feel I bought a advantage over them. That’s not what I want. I like the nick nacks, their cool, but I don’t want anyone to feel its pay to play outside of the basic costs for the game.

And not all of the ‘no’ votes were against the idea entirely, with many citing the extra development time required to turn the items into craftables and figure out balancing.

I don’t really care either way, but voted NO because I do not want the developers wasting any time on making the items craftable. Just put them all on a special vendor and be done with it please.

If you add up all the hats, cloaks, costumes, weapons, armor, prosperity items etc. you would probably have at least 100 new items, each one requiring a unique recipe. How many unique recipes for hats alone are needed? Can it even be done without adding new ingredients?

How do you feel about pledge items, considering they can run a pretty penny, being available to players for free in offline mode? Let us know in the comments below.

(Source: Shroud of the Avatar)

John Smedley Returns, Crowd Funding New Game

John Smedley, former of the Daybreak Game Company Smedleys, has returned to gaming in the form of Pixelmage Games. The startup has a few names you might recognize, including Patrick Rothfuss, Jon Handy, and Bill Trost, and their first game is Hero’s Song. Hero’s Song is a 2D rogue-like RPG where each world is shaped by its own history. You might find yourself in a world where the dwarves never existed, and neither has their technology, or one where necromancy reigns supreme.

Each server is hosted by players with the capacity for thousands to join in. You can check out more details at the link below.

(Source: Kickstarter)

Eternal Crusade Can Always Use More Cashmoneys

Warhammer 40k: Eternal Crusade is on its way to Steam early access, and Nathan Richardson wants you to know that the game is doing just fine so far as cashmoneys are concerned. The game is launching on Steam early access, yes, but not for the money. Simply put, the game is funded to launch this year, Steam early access offers luxuries like a decent pay system, news delivery, oh and a lot of customers.

As Richardson puts it:

No, our philosophy of being agile, is that we strongly believe that the inclusion of more people, as early in the development process as possible will ultimately make a better game. We are simply continuing this program (previously called Founders) in the Steam Early Access framework.

You can read the rest of the Q&A at the link below.

(Source: Eternal Crusade)

How Blade & Soul Distributes The Wealth

Drops have always been a divisive issue when it comes to raids, particularly when you’re dealing with players using the roll system to hoard items that they don’t need and probably can’t sell, but want anyway because of greed. In the early days, this was dealt with through a need/greed system, but players would simply roll need on everything. To combat this, games like Neverwinter restrict the need button to classes that can actually use said item.

In Blade & Soul, as one Reddit user points out, party leaders can set the loot rotation to a bidding system. Players bid on drops above a certain value with the winner paying out for the item. To ensure that no one comes out empty handed, the winning player’s bid is distributed among the other players. This way, the more you lose bids, the more money you have to win them in the future or just outright buy the equipment.

(Source: Reddit)

Firefall Going Under For 26 Hour Maintenance

Trove isn’t the only game to take an extended vacation this week. Firefall will be launching update 1.6 on January 20th, but in order to do so will be taking down the servers for more than a day to perform maintenance. The servers will go down in the morning on Tuesday and come back online (hopefully) around the same time the following day.

Because of the nature of the changes coming in this update, we need to bring the servers offline for maintenance and migration. On Tuesday, January 19th at 8:00 AM PST we will be bringing all of our production game servers offline to perform this required maintenance. Because of the nature of the work that needs to be performed, we expect to be down for approximately 26 hours.

Update 1.6 introduces the Jetball PvP arena, a new instanced game mode, new missions, new events, changes to battleframes and progression, as well as numerous other tweaks and content additions. You can find all of it at the update preview at the link below.

(Source: Firefall)

Trove To Take Two Days Off, Upgrade Servers

Who’s to say that MMOs shouldn’t get a nice two day weekend every few years? If you’ve been playing Trove recently, you are likely well acquainted with the ongoing server issues. The issue, naturally, is that the game has grown too large in scope for the current hardware to handle, with player clubs particularly outgrowing in size what the server can reasonably process. As a result, the game is going offline from the 19th to the 21st in order to place in new hardware.

For the last few weeks we’ve been testing our new storage system on the on the Public Test Server. We’re happy to say that it’s gone well, and it’s time to do it live! However, it’s going to take some time – up to 48 hours to complete the full upgrade.

The Trion team hopes that the new hardware will result in less downtime, more stability, and faster reboots should anything go haywire. Anyone who logs in between the 21st and the 24th will receive a number of items as compensation for the downtime.

(Source: Trion Worlds)

Gloria Victis Adds NPC Battles, War Is Coming

Gloria Victis’ latest patch is putting focus on player immersion, in the form of NPC battles and exhaustible resources. While the scope is starting out small, with animal hunting and mercenary fights, NPCs will eventually be engaging in all out war that players can join in on or dutifully side step away from. In addition to NPC battles, resources dotting the world will now deplete and be replaced with other goods, forcing players to move around if they want to find the best spots.

The most important change is implementation of fights between NPCs – foxes sneak towards the farms to hunt chickens and gooses, poachers hunt wild animals and mercenaries serving one nation rush on the another faction’s guards in sight in Valley of Death. In the upcoming updates various groups of NPCs will start waging their wars against another ones, bringing even more life to the world of Gloria Victis!

Meaningful NPC battles is a rarity in MMOs, with games like Tabula Rasa allowing NPCs to capture bases and prevent players from accessing quest NPCs, vendors, spawn points, etc.

(Source: Gloria Victis)

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