Category: News

Turbine Reveals DDO Player Council


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It looks like Turbine is taking a note out of Eve Online’s book, with the announcement of a player council being set up for targeted feedback.

The DDO Player Council is a group of players selected to provide targeted feedback and valuable suggestions to the DDO Team. This will involve participating in surveys, focused discussions, as well as highly structured and targeted developer chats. Often the topics covered will be elements of game design at their earliest stages, well before they are committed to development or appear in our preview programs like Lamannia.

Applications are being taken through January 20th, with the council launching on the week of the 27th.

(Source: DDO Forums)

1.5 Million Concurrent On Blade & Soul


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Tencent Games is ready to talk about Blade & Soul’s performance in China, and the results are expectedly enormous. According to Tencent, the peak total concurrent players came up over the 1.5 million mark, with over 450 million creatures killed on the first day. Thousand Soul Demon has been slayed over 7.7 billion times, and the average queue time is apparently around six hours. This is hardly surprising when you factor in that the game launched with two hundred servers, and still had major problems with queues. Blade & Soul has so far exponentially outperformed all of Tencent’s previous games.

As far as Blade & Soul launching in the west, nothing to report.

(Source: MMO Culture)

Guild Wars 2 VIP Membership Discovered


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Dataminers on Reddit unearthed the above information regarding a VIP membership for Guild Wars 2. Although no price is detailed, membership includes a bundle of extras, including bank and inventory space, convenient banking/trading, and more. There are at least 20 tiers, going by the VIP badges found in the Mists beta client. Mark Kerstein, Head of Global Community, commented on the forums to point out that the VIP member is an internal experiment and is not intended for western gamers.

This is a testing branch. We conduct internal experiments for various territories on our testing branches. This particular experiment is not being tested for the West.

Whether or not VIP will make it into Guild Wars 2 in any territory will have to be seen.

(Source: Reddit)

Planetside 2 Will Feature Weekly Updates


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Matt Higby from Sony Online Entertainment posted a thread on the Planetside 2 forums detailing that the company plans on expediting updates to better service the MMO shooter. Starting January 15th, Planetside 2 will enjoy weekly updates to address bugs, balancing, and more. There will still be large updates to the game, that will be included with the weekly updates as they become ready for release, but the overall goal is to allow SOE to work on bug fixing and balancing at a faster pace.

One final note, the first couple of these weekly updates are going to be a bit smaller than what you can expect to see later on, as we’re still shaking off the holiday cobwebs and getting used to the new development processes.

You can read the entire notice at the link below.

(Source: Planetside 2)

Square Enix Invites Former FFXIV Subscribers Back


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Final Fantasy XIV has been out for quite a while now and, most assuredly, there are bound to be many of you among the crowd who have unsubscribed for one reason or another. With the launch of 2.1: A Realm Awoken, Square Enix would like to reintroduce you to the wonders of Eorzea, or more specifically the new content. Starting January 11th and going into the 13th, players with inactive accounts will be welcomed back for a free login weekend. After that, you’re on your own.

Check out the details at the lodestone link below.

(Source: Lodestone)

Defiance Third DLC Coming February


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Trion Worlds has announced the next set of DLC for Defiance will be coming this February. No details have been released other than the following snippet and the name of the DLC: The 7th Legion.

When the world fell apart, one group kept their courage. Guided by the teachings of the Code of Bushido, the soldiers of the 7th Legion marched across Canada gathering survivors as they went. From one outpost to another they marched until finally they found a city which did not fall: Manhattan. There, they made their stand against the darkness, and Commander Yoshida Hiro called an end to their long journey. Now they have come to Paradise. What dread news could this herald?

(Source: Defiance)

Eldevin Launches Greenlight Campaign


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We love Eldevin here at MMO Fallout, so any chance to see the game reach a wider audience is just dandy. I think I talked about this back in our quick look, but the browser based MMO is hoping to expand its reach to the Steam platform with a downloadable microclient. If you haven’t had a chance to check out Eldevin, you can already play it through your browser here. If you like it, or even if you’d just like to support the community, throw a thumbs up at the Greenlight link below.

(Source: Steam)

Marvel Heroes Has Ten Year License


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Gamers who follow the news are understandably concerned over the state of Marvel Heroes. The new year brought with it a purge of Marvel titles from digital stores, games sold by Activision, Capcom, and others were unceremoniously removed and it appears are not coming back. Granted, not that many of them were good, but that’s not the point. Marvel’s track record on digital games is one wrought with arbitrary license limits, a factor that will no doubt come into play for Marvel Heroes.

The good news is that, according to Gazillion Creative Director Jeff Donais, the license with Marvel is good for at least ten years.

“Gazillion will always be the Marvel Heroes studio. There may be additional Marvel games – there’s a kid’s game as well, but it’s public information that we have a ten year license with Marvel, and we have many years of content planned for Marvel Heroes.”

You can read the rest of Donais’ comments at the link below, but at the very least it looks like Marvel Heroes will be with us for a long time to come.

(Source: PCGamesN)

SOE Releases Revised List


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Ask and you shall receive. Owing the massive amount of feedback regarding SOE’s recently announced changes, John Smedley has posted a revised list of coming changes to Sony All Access. In short, the “pick an item” system won’t be coming, however players will be forced to claim the stipend monthly.

  1. We’re lowering the price of All Access to $14.99
  2. We’re going to make it so every subscriber to all our PC games an all access member. Basically there will be one SOE membership for our PC games. Please note there are some minor restrictions around our kids titles (simply put – if you’re a 12 year old who signed up for FR you won’t have access to the adult games so we’ll likely leave the lower priced kids offerings as separate subscriptions for under 12 for the same low prices).
  3. We’re keeping the 500 SC included with the subscription instead of going to the “pick an item” system. We heard you. You didn’t like the change. The only change we are making is that we’re now going to make you claim it monthly. You can still hoard it though I realize this is a bit of a pain but honestly it’s the best compromise we could come up with that solves the problems I mentioned in the other thread.
  4. we are going to be giving our members a 10% discount in our marketplaces.
  5. European players – we have an idea on how to include you in this but we need to discuss with our partners.We have a pretty good idea on this though. give us a bit of time to suss this out.
  6. Nothing is changing with Player Studio items – you’ll still be able to buy them with your 500SC.
  7. Console titles – you’ll notice I only mentioned the PC titles. Our goal is to include the PS3 and PS4 games that we have, but I want to be up front and say that isn’t a done deal.

So you can still hoard station cash, but you will have to claim it manually rather than allow it to accumulate automatically. I have a feeling that something is coming to alleviate SOE of the station cash hoarded on accounts that haven’t been used in years. While a few things have been reversed and cleared up, the details surrounding Sony’s plans for all access are undoubtedly not over yet.

(Source: Reddit)

Station All Access Could Become Cheaper


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So not everyone is happy about the recent announcement that Sony Online Entertainment would be replacing the free five hundred Station Cash included with subscriptions and All Access passes, but John Smedley would like to explain a few things. In a Reddit Ask Me Anything, Smedley has explained that the change was for a few reasons. First to allow for larger items to be obtained more quickly, second to deal with the problematic accrual of Station Cash on accounts, third because gamers on SOE’s growing list of console games cannot use Station Cash, and finally because of a new plan for All Access:

We are considering (and are likely going to move forward with) a plan that means if you subscribe to one of our games you are a subscriber to all our games (this applies to PC titles only btw).. all for the current $14.99 a month. That’s a benefit most companies simply can’t offer because they don’t have our portfolio of games.

All Access for SOE’s library currently costs $20. So why is this accumulation of points an issue? User Israellopez explains it best:

In accounting something you owe someone (sc cash) is a liability. Its a benefit that we are given but some of us don’t use, and that’s a problem for accountants. Because on the books the business is saddled with a debt that is just virtual. Its not like it owes a webhosting company a six month Bill, but in accounting they are both liabilities. Its similar to gift cards at a small store, the money paid into a gift card is not income, it’s a liability until it is used … and typically the spend is more then the gc amount. I expect that if the 500sc was more often than not spent in 2 months the accountants wouldn’t care. However I expect that it was accumulating, and increasing on the number of memberships.

In the case of player studio items, Smedley says in the thread that Sony may allow users to buy the items with free station cash and simply eat the cost themselves in terms of providing royalties to the creator. The AMA is still in progress, so head on down.

(Source: Reddit)