You may have read that on tomorrow, May 11th, the Playstation Network will be down for nearly ten hours for maintenance. The Playstation network status page originally had Monday’s maintenance scheduled to begin at 10:30pm EST on May 11th and run until 8am EST on May 12th.
Well that isn’t happening anymore. The new maintenance begins 9pm Pacific (midnight EST) on May 11th and ends two hours later.
(Source: Playstation Network)
Daybreak Game Company has quite a history of cracking down hard on cheaters, and in a recent Reddit post John Smedley has claimed that hacking in H1Z1 is down 90% compared to last month.
The honest reality is that we’ve knocked hacking down to about 10% of what it was a month ago. We’re still working on no-clip cheaters. We’ve got a good system to track them, but we’re working on actually preventing it. Not a simple problem. Aimbotters are tough, but we’ve made great progress against them too.
Daybreak Game Company has been ruthless in its hunt of cheaters in both Planetside 2 and H1Z1, both in the effectiveness of its anti-cheat (see previous link) and the company’s habit of publicly shaming cheaters via Twitter.
(Source: Reddit)
Old School RuneScape is gearing up for its 33rd content poll, asking for player approval on changes to the duel arena, among other things. The major parts of the upcoming poll involve duel arena updates, a world switcher, clue scrolls, grand exchange slots, and more.
You can head over to the dev blog to see the entire list. The content poll may undergo some changes before it goes live, based on player feedback.
(Source: Old School)
It’s time for another Weekend Wrapper, where we look at some gaming news that didn’t quite make it to MMO Fallout’s floor.
News/Updates:
Release Spotlight:
While consumer confidence is still pretty shaky for Daybreak Game Studio, John Smedley has once again taken to Reddit to assure fans that, no, this is not the end. For Planetside 2, the team intends on working on the meta-game, the “why are we fighting” question that so far hasn’t had much of an answer aside from the experience of a massive team deathmatch.
We will be moving towards a system where resources are actually going to be a fun part of the game, and you’ll be able to harvest resources directly (in fact, that’s how you’re going to get them). and you’ll be able to use them to finally get to some of the end-game things we’ve been wanting to do – Outfit bases on new continents (and potentially on existing ones). We’re also going to be spending a lot of time to make sure capturing a facility actually matters, as well as looking at the overly-complicated capture system which can be pretty obtuse at times.
Next week will see the launch of a new game mode for Planetside 2, one that has an actual win condition.
In the months between now and September we’re going to be putting all kinds of new things into the game on a regular schedule. We’re also going to be committing to doing a better job on the Roadmap. The criticism that we do a poor job updating it is something that I think is both fair and accurate and it’s simply going to be done right.
Smedley remarks that he sees Planetside 2 being here in ten years and continuing to grow in player size.
(Source: Reddit)
The Old Republic crew has busted up a credit selling ring spanning hundreds of accounts, taking billions of credits out of the economy and ensuring that Han Solo will never be able to pay back Jabba.
Last week, we took action against an entire selling ring. Over multiple weeks, we investigated and compiled evidence about a large Credit selling ring which spanned across hundreds of accounts and a variety of servers. To help thwart any possible reactions from this group, we simultaneously actioned every account in this Credit selling ring. In total, we banned hundreds of accounts and removed over nine billion credits from those accounts.
(Source: SWTOR)
For those of you who follow MMOs to a T, this news will not be that surprising. World of Warcraft is now seven months out of the launch of Warlords of Draenor and hitting a peak of ten million players, and the numbers are beginning to fall. Activision Blizzard announced in its first quarter filings that subscription figures dropped from 10 million to 7.1 million, bringing the number down to just above its trough before the launch of the Draenor expansion.
(Source: Activision Blizzard Q1 reports)
Perfect World Entertainment has announced the next module for Neverwinter, dubbed Underdark, will be hitting PC and Xbox later this year. Players will travel to Menzoberranzan to fight alongside Drizzt Do’Urden in a quest line written by R.A. Salvatore. Before Underdark, Neverwinter will also see the launch of Strongholds which will bring several new features including Guild housing.
In addition to Underdark and Strongholds, the team is still making good on its promise to fix issues with Neverwinter’s latest update, Elemental Evil.
(Source: Neverwinter)
What could be worse than having your account publicly banned on an MMO? When the developer films themself logging into your account and manually deleting your characters. Chris Cleary, game security lead over at Arenanet, did just this against a rather notable cheater, first committing suicide and then logging out and deleting his characters, all uploaded to Youtube.
Cleary posted later in the same thread that the cheater’s other accounts were banned as well. You can see the video at the link below.
(Source: Guild Wars 2)
The recent announcement that Perfect World Co. is going private has sparked an investigation by the Levi & Korsinsky law firm. In a shareholder alert sent out alongside the announcement last week, the firm confirmed that it is looking into the fairness of the sale.
Perfect World Co. is set to go private in the second half of this year, in a $900 million acquisition that will see ownership transfer over to Mr. Michael Yufeng Chi. Shareholders are expected to receive $4.04 in compensation for standard shares, a 28% increase over the price as of December 31, 2014.
Persons or entities that purchased Perfect World stock before April 26, 2015, can get in contact by phone or email at no cost to themselves.
(Source: Shareholder Alert)
MMO Fallout 
