Albion Online Goes Free To Play April 10


Albion Online is officially going free to play. Starting April 10, you’ll be able to jump into the fray without being required to buy a game pack. Free accounts will be under no gameplay restrictions and can take part in all aspects of the game. The business model will not be changed, being built on premium status as well as a vanity-only cash shop.

As a thank you to their present customers, Albion players who buy the game before April 10 will receive a Specter Wolf mount, 1,000 gold, and 3 days of claimable premium. Starter packs will be discontinued as of April 10 and will be discounted until that point.

Overall, the game is doing very well. We have a fully staffed development team of 35 people, just released our sixth major post-release update, and have a stable and growing player population.

However, we’re also convinced that Albion Online can be taken much further. Our mission is to bring back that old-school, hardcore MMORPG feeling, to as many players as possible.

In today’s world, a 30-dollar paywall – the price of our cheapest game pack – is a massive deterrent for trying out a new game, especially one as unconventional as Albion Online. We believe that by removing the initial paywall we will be able to grow Albion Online as a game and continue to further expand our development team to bring you even more content updates and exciting new features going forward.

Ultimately, we believe this step will help us realize our long-term vision for the game.

Survived By Is Being Survived By Everything Else, Sunsetting In April


Early Access bullet-hell roguelite Survived By has been officially declared deceased. Human Head Studios announced the impending closure today with supporters receiving full refunds. The title released on December 5, 2018, and unfortunately just hasn’t gone as well as Human Head had planned. Steam Charts shows that Survived By launched to a peak of 2,500 players in December which quickly plummeted to 369 in January and slightly over 100 in the last month. As of this publishing there were 13 people online.

The announcement has been posted below for brevity.

After much deliberation and sadness, beginning today, we will be ceasing development of Survived By. We greatly appreciate the time you’ve spent playing Survived By since our launch in Closed Beta and all of the feedback you’ve provided.

This decision hasn’t come easily. We still believe in the core idea of Survived By, but after careful consideration of the game’s progress since its inception, we feel we won’t be able to reach the vision we originally conceived.

We plan to keep the Survived By servers up until April 19th, 2019 and disabling all in-game real money purchases later today. To anyone who has supported Survived By’s development, we’ll be giving full automatic refunds to everyone who has ever purchased items or packs in the coming weeks.

Thank you all, Ancestors.

–The Survived By team

Source: Steam

World of Warcraft Hosts Welcome Back Weekend


In case you really wanted to rekindle your addiction, Blizzard has announced the next Welcome Back Weekend for World of Warcraft. Running March 21 to the 24, you’ll be able to log back in and have access up to the last expansion purchased, or Legion, whichever is greater. In addition, players will be able to complete the Battle for Azeroth trial experience which allots three hours of gameplay in Battle for Azeroth (or up to a certain quest). The trial experience can be played with up to twelve characters per account.

New allies have entered the fight for Azeroth, and you’re needed on the frontlines. This weekend, we’re upgrading all inactive WoW accounts to allow you full access to the game and all of your characters without a subscription. You’ll also be able access the Battle for Azeroth™ trial experience, even if you do not own the expansion.

Rejoin your guild, rally your comrades, and get back in the fight.

Source: World of Warcraft

Story-Driven RPG Lyn: The Lightbringer Arrives On App Store and Google Play


Acclaimed illustrator Jeong Juno, best known for his work on Lineage 2, has teamed up with Nexon for LYN: The Lightbringer, a new story-driven RPG. LYN boasts a beautiful cast of 3D-rendered models converted from two-dimensional characters, all designed by Jeong himself.

“Many centuries ago in the realm of the godlike Daeva, Light and Darkness erupted into war. After 200 years of peace, a pillar of light burst forth and the Girl of Light arrived, compelling the world to move once more. In this stunning RPG, players join the mysterious hero Jean to explore an enchanting but treacherous landscape, ripe with countless collectable characters.”

In addition to its story mode, LYN also offers an adventure mode, rank blitz, online PvP Arena modes, three-player cooperative boss raids, and more. More information can be found on the official Facebook page.

Snapshots: Trust In Destiny


Today’s Snapshots comes to us from Destiny 2 where I’m going to take a moment to bring attention to my beautiful hand cannon Trust. It probably isn’t the best hand cannon in the game by far, but it has heart and looks pretty damn cool with the copper skin I attached to it.

Look forward to a new Snapshots every whenever-I-remember-this-column-exists.

Valve Promises To Nuke Review Bombs


It’s safe to say that (outside of the revenue share) one of the best promises that Epic Games has made to potential games is the option to avoid a phenomenon that is becoming more and more prevalent on Steam and the internet as a whole: Review bombs. A review bomb, for those living in bomb-proof shelters, involves large numbers of people leaving negative reviews for a game. In the last few years, this has ranged from insertion of DRM, something stupid said by a community manager, the developer entering a publishing deal, an anti-China joke, bad updates, etc.

Valve, in their consistent refusal to deal with community issues, has remained silent on the problem of review bombs. They have instituted what amounted to a bandage in the form of a graphical chart where customers can see if the negative reviews are consolidated to a very short time span.

In a blog post released this morning, Valve has announced that the company will revisit user reviews starting with off-topic review bombs. According to the post, once Valve identifies a review bomb, it will mark the time period and remove those scores from the review score calculation. The reviews will not be deleted. If your review is caught in that time frame, unfortunately you are out of luck as well as the system does not go into each individual review to curate them.

“Once our team has identified that the anomalous activity is an off-topic review bomb, we’ll mark the time period it encompasses and notify the developer. The reviews within that time period will then be removed from the Review Score calculation. As before, the reviews themselves are left untouched – if you want to dig into them to see if they’re relevant to you, you’ll still be able to do so. To help you do that, we’ve made it clear when you’re looking at a store page where we’ve removed some reviews by default, and we’ve further improved the UI around anomalous review periods.”

Source: Steam

Reminder: Playing PUBG Is A Criminal Offense In Gujarat


PUBG Mobile: It’s not just a shooter you can play while walking down the street, it’s also a crime if you live in the Indian state of Gujarat.

It may sound like a joke that over a dozen people have been arrested after being spotted playing the battle royale shooter, but more than a dozen people in India found out the hard way just how serious the police are taking this law. The Indian Express reported this week that ten people were arrested for playing the shooter, following the game’s ban earlier this month. According to the same news story, twelve cases have been registered so far in the city of Rajkot.

“Our team caught these youths red-handed. They were taken into custody after they were found playing the PUBG game. We have registered two cases against them under IPC Section 188 for violating the notification issued by Police Commissioner and under Section 35 of the Rajkot police arrests 10 for playing PUBG despite ban Gujarat Police Act,” SOG police inspector Rohit Raval told The Indian Express.

Six more youths were arrested for playing PUBG despite the outright ban on the title. PUBG received a ban by police commissioner Manoj Agarwal, who stated his opposition to addictive mobile games negatively impacting behavior, attitude, and language of students and children.

Bad Press: How The Net Got Scammed By (Yet Another) Marketing Scheme


In the world of marketing, you’re only as valuable as the number of people still talking about you. This is why Coca Cola, a company who you could only be unfamiliar with if you live in one of those tribes that hasn’t yet come into contact with outside society, spends billions (with a B) of dollars on advertising each year to remind you that Coke exists, that you should drink Coke, and that you should definitely drink Coke and not Pepsi. I recommend the caffeine free version of the standard Coke, it tastes less syrupy.

But if there’s anything that should calm your nerves in the era of mass data collection, it’s the knowledge that the bozos in marketing for the most part don’t have the faintest clue on what to do with that information. Case in point, Aldi supermarkets recently launched a marketing campaign that has been compared to that disastrous Bully Hunters program, the one that turned out to be a giant scam so Youtuber Casanova could get a free Vertagear chair to more comfortably shout homophobic slurs at tweens online.

The program is called Teatime Takedown and the concept should be familiar to those who watched the Bully Hunters con. Hand over your kid’s gamertag and Aldi will send an elite hit squad to kill your child. In the video game, that is. The whole idea is that it forces the kid to go downstairs and have dinner, presumably in silence as their parental figures sit at the dinner table browsing cooking recipes they’ll never make via Instagram on their phone while taking a few moments to complain about how playing video games rots your brain. It’s an actual program, allegedly. Sign up on the main Facebook page and Aldi will send a team of adults to fail at disciplining your child as much as you did.

To the layman, the marketing campaign may seem stupid since all it has done is generated a discussion about how the program is ridiculous, it won’t work, it relies on parents knowing their kid’s (1) gamertag and (2) what game they are playing at that moment, (3) that the game is joinable, (4) that the elite team can beat the kid, and (5) that beating him won’t simply change the situation to a family watching their dinner get cold while also listening to the muffled sound of a kid throwing a tantrum while probably throwing many, many vulgarities at the television upstairs. This followed by a lovely dinner with some kid fuming, slamming his utensils, and generally ruining everyone’s meal. And since you signed up for Aldi’s elite gamer service, we all know you’re not a competent enough parent to do anything about that either.

To the Aldi marketing team, however, this is more than just ginning up a bunch of comments about how their local Aldi is dirtier than a unkempt KMart and a poor man’s Trader Joe’s, and more about generating that free coverage. Because in the heads of incompetent marketing teams, attentive eyes means paying shoppers. In fact, the folks at Aldi did so much research that they can shoot your child dead over Xbox One, PS4, and Twitch. You just know some out of touch, 50+ year old executive threw Twitch on there. It’s a gaming platform, his granddaughter spends all day Ninja’ing the Fortnights on it or some rubbish.

As one commenter on Destructoid put it; if you want to troll your kids into not playing a game, you can always dab in front of the TV until they stop.

Normally I would fault the press for giving attention and free marketing but I’m going to hold off in this case since it’s clearly not going to go in Aldi’s favor. With virtually no positives coming from this campaign, the company has instead painted itself as hiring creepy adults to stalk children and likely be paid to be humiliated on Call of Duty by some nine year old who shoots them in the head and teabags their corpse. The concept is so incompetent that the only people outraged are streamers who are already paid to feign outrage and act like reactionary children. Ultimately, all Aldi did was shout “who farted” in a crowded elevator, bringing attention to the fact that they’ve clearly soiled themselves.

The announcement tweet has managed to amass 182 retweets and 572 likes in the course of three days, making the campaign about as viral as the Measles in a properly vaccinated society. Still, who knew that Aldi existed in the UK? You learn something new every day.

No Man’s Sky Dropping Beyond Update This Summer


No Man’s Sky is seeing another big content drop this year in the form of Beyond, set to launch this summer. Not a whole lot of information is available right now, however Beyond appears to be an overhaul to the game’s online multiplayer mode.

As stated by Hello Games founder Sean Murray:

“No Man’s Sky Online includes a radical new social and multiplayer experience which empowers players everywhere in the universe to meet and play together. While this brings people together like never before, and has many recognizable online elements, we don’t consider No Man’s Sky to be an MMO — it won’t require a subscription, won’t contain microtransactions, and will be free for all existing players.”

More information on Beyond is set to release in the coming weeks.

Source: Playstation Blog

IPE Update: Settlement Negotiations and Sanctions Ahoy!


On the last episode of In Plain English: Trion Worlds was issued a subpoena to produce information regarding the sale of assets to Gamigo, we learned about Golden Gate Games Inc, another entity that may possess some of Trion’s assets and whom the plaintiff intended on serving with deposition paperwork and possibly add as a defendant. The next conference was set for March 15.

Well you can throw that out the window, because it looks like we’ve taken a sharp (and predictable) left hand turn into settlement territory. The March 15 discovery conference and case management conference were both vacated with a 60-day delay to discovery, and a delay in the motion for class certification. Why the sudden cancellations and delays? The parties are seeking settlement negotiations.

“Counsel indicated that they have no pending discovery disputes, and that they jointly stipulate to 60 day stay of discovery, and delay in bringing the motion for class certification, in order to facilitate settlement negotiation.”

This isn’t too surprising, considering 97% of civil cases are settled before they even go to trial. It looks like Aaron Van Fleet’s crew are discussing negotiations with Trion’s insurer because the company’s insurance policy is literally the best remaining asset.

“On March 7, 2019, Plaintiffs’ counsel had preliminary discussion With counsel for Trion’s Directors and Officers Liability insurer. Trion’s Directors and Officers Liability insurance policy appears to be Trion’s most significant remaining asset. The policy is depleted by defense costs. The parties have agreed to explore potential resolution of the matter. Plaintiffs
request sixty-day stay of discovery between the parties (Plaintiffs and Trion Worlds, Inc.), so that the parties may explore potential resolution Without fithher depleting the limited resource potentially available to satisfy the claims of Plaintiffs and the proposed class. Trion agrees that sixty-day stay of discovery is appropriate.”

On the lawsuit side, the plaintiff’s lawyers have still been attempting to serve subpoenas to Golden Gate Games and Gamigo, evidently having no luck in either field.

“Plaintiffs have been unable to serve With subpoenas either Golden Gate Games, Inc. or Gamigo. They have not completed their investigation of whether to add either entity to the case, but do not anticipate doing so at this point. As discussed below, the parties have had preliminary discussion regarding potential resolution of the case. If those efforts are unsuccessful, Plaintiffs will make final determination about adding additional parties in advance of the next Case Management Conference.”

In other news, the plaintiffs are not happy at all with how Trion Worlds has been handing over requested documents, by which I mean how they have been refusing to hand over documents. Trion has allegedly been passing the buck on providing documents related to the illegal lottery, instead pointing to either Gamigo or the Trion shell that the assets were initially transferred over to. Due to Trion’s lack of cooperation, the plaintiffs are giving serious consideration to filing a motion for sanctions for failure to preserve documents despite having filed those requests nearly three years ago. If the sanctions are approved, it would be bad news for Trion and their legal team.

In fact, it seems like Trion Worlds is just in general refusing to cooperate. Trion’s council believes that the documents that the plaintiff have requested may be in the possession of Trion ABC or Gamigo. As for how to get in contact with Gamigo, Trion has so far not provided any information. Virtually every piece of documentation that Trion Worlds objected to was under claims that it was overly broad, vague, and oppressive, or violated attorney-client privilege.

As always, if you want to check out the dockets you can do so at the MMO Fallout Google Drive. If you’re hoping that this lawsuit doesn’t end up in a settlement, I would probably curb your expectations now. Especially with the insurance company taking over negotiations.