I present to my audience the first part in the Medal of Honor retrospective. With Call of Duty finally returning to World War 2, I figured now was as good of a time as any to take a look at the series that started it all and is partially responsible for how we game today.
[NM] Shovelware Developer Quits Industry After Steam Ban
Shovelware developer Silicon Echo is apparently pulling out of game development after action by Valve led to more than 170 of their games getting yanked from Steam. Silicon Echo is the renowned game developer known for hit titles including Shapes, Shapes 2, Shapes 3, Shapes 4, Shapes 5, Shapes 6, Shapes 7, and Shapes 8. Their library of games consists primarily of minimal effort asset flips pushed onto the Steam storefront in an effort to turn a quick profit using quantity over quality.
All of that came to an end when Valve, without warning, yanked the entire Silicon Echo library, including titles hidden away via separate Steam accounts. In a statement to Polygon, Silicon Echo expressed that it is giving up game development as its reputation is in tatters and its primary source of income now gone.
“This situation has completely destroyed everything we have been working for in the past 3 years and we are forced to give up game development at this point for more that [sic] one reason,” Silicon Echo said. “Mainly because our reputation is destroyed beyond repair, but also for financial reasons. We wish we have been warned about this before, in that case we would focus on a different business plan of development.”
Valve has increased its commitment to removing shovelware titles from Steam this year after mounting criticism that the barrier of entry is too low, and after a large series of low quality asset flips and outright fake games have flooded the market. The situation of Steam being flooded with titles has gotten so bad that 2016 accounted for 40% of all games on the store.
Guild Wars 2: Unlock Waypoints With Real Money
Waypoints serve as fast travel markers in Guild Wars 2, allowing players to teleport for a small fee to the main areas that they have already been to. In terms of game progression, this is also another set of things to collect. With today’s update, Arenanet has introduced the ability to buy waypoint unlocks. Waypoints are unlocked per region for 600 gems, or for the entire region of Tyria (pre-expansions) for 2000 gems (about $25 USD).
East Nowhere to stop a rampaging whatever from eating Fill-in-the-Blank Village, but you’re new in town. Good news*—we’ll instantly register you at all the waypoints in a region of your choice. Buy the Waypoint Unlock Box to unlock one of the regions on our list, or buy the Central Tyria Waypoint Unlock Package for all of them.
How do you feel about Arenanet selling waypoint unlocks? Let us know in the comments below.
(Source: Guild Wars 2)
And Then There Were 5: The Old Republic Merges Servers
Star Wars: The Old Republic has come a long way since its 2011 launch, and Bioware has plenty in store for the game going forward. Details regarding the upcoming United Forces update hit the official website today, and a big part of the update involves merging the seventeen remaining servers down to five. There will be two North American and three European servers, one for English, French, and German in the latter category.
The United Forces update expands your connection to a galactic-sized community of players. We will be integrating our existing seventeen servers to five new servers, one for each existing region and language. Our goal is to make this experience as simple and rewarding as possible.
The FAQ goes into detail in regards to legacy ranks, achievements, and more. Premium subscribers who have more than 52 characters per server following the merge will be accommodated for but will be unable to create new characters as long as they are above the limit. Free players will have all characters above the 2 per server limit deactivated.
Currently, a Premium (Subscriber) account is allowed a maximum of 52 characters per server. Following the United Forces update, accounts with more than 52 characters on a server will be accommodated. You will still be able to access and play each of those characters. However, if you wish to make any new characters after that point, you will need to delete characters until you are back at or below the cap of 52. For Free-to-Play accounts, this process will work a little differently. Following the United Forces update, if your account has characters beyond the Free-to-Play limit of 2, then all your characters will be set to ‘deactivated’. This allows you to log in and choose which characters you would like to activate and play.
Bioware’s announcement of the mergers has received some criticism from players on Role Playing servers being merged into standard servers.
(Source: The Old Republic)
Chaturday: The Story of In Plain English and how Atlus Got Copyright Wrong
If I had to give an award for the part of MMO Fallout that fills me with equal amounts of pride and disappointment, it would be the In Plain English column. For those who haven’t been following this website long, In Plain English is one of those columns I started as a direct response to the media’s coverage of events, specifically lawsuits, particularly in the sense that it is generally impossible to find someone willing to cover a lawsuit once it has started.
What got me started on this was the complete lack of coverage regarding Turbine’s lawsuit against Atari, and subsequently Wizards of the Coast’s lawsuit against Atari, regarding the Dungeons & Dragons license, a lawsuit that could have affected every single video game based on D&D. While the lawsuit between Turbine and Atari was settled out of court, we were able to surmise some of the terms of the settlement through actions by both companies shortly thereafter, such as Cryptic (who was owned by Atari at the time) suddenly declaring that Neverwinter would not be an MMO (this was later rescinded once Perfect World Entertainment took over).
For the most part, however, covering lawsuits isn’t good press unless some major groundbreaking decision is on the line or unless one or both parties is utterly insane and is permanently filing nonsense in the court records (read: James Romine v 100 Steam Users). From my perspective, I’m dealing with a story where neither side will ever comment publicly, if they know what’s good for them, due to the potential damage that commenting on an ongoing case can cause. So I’ve tried to take a different approach, by discussing the claims, looking at precedent provided, and digging up cases not presented to use for my own analysis. I never want this column to turn into "this person claimed this, the other guy denied it, who knows what is right."
More often than not, these cases end on a disappointing (for the reader) note, being settled out of court under terms that are never released to the public, with both sides gagged from ever revealing the terms themselves. Speculation in this industry is often fruitless since, as I’ve become tired of repeating on social media, most of these cases have no precedent in court.
Which ultimately leads me to this week’s controversial developer action, and of course I am speaking of Atlus attempting to DMCA a Patreon page for a Playstation emulator because the emulator can be used to play Persona 3.
They later put up a statement which didn’t so much offer legal justification as it did make excuses barely related to copyright law while repeating how much they just want everyone to have the best time possible.
"We believe that our fans best experience our titles (like Persona 5) on the actual platforms for which they are developed. We don’t want their first experiences to be framerate drops, or crashes, or other issues that can crop up in emulation that we have not personally overseen."
While a nice sentiment, this has absolutely nothing to do with copyright law, nor would it be covered under a DMCA claim.
"Unfortunately, when our content is illegally circumvented and potentially made available for free, in a format we do not think delivers the experience and quality we intend, it undermines our ability to do so by diverting potential support from new audiences."
This next part is important because Atlus isn’t just misinformed on copyright, they are veritably wrong in their interpretation of the law. First, the creator of an emulator would not be responsible for people pirating the game. Second, and going by this and other statements, Atlus believes that its rights are infringed on because people are playing Persona on a system that they did not intend it to be played on.
It’s story time.
Back in 1999, a company called Connectix released the Virtual Game Station, a commercially available emulator for the Playstation on Mac. Yes, I said commercial, as in the thing was sold on a disc and for money. It was even shown off by Steve Jobs himself at MacWorld. Sony sued, as you would expect, and the miraculous thing about it is that they lost, the court ruled in favor of Connectix that the emulator did not diminish Sony’s brand.
But here is where it specifically connects to Atlus. The court even ruled that copyright law does not grant Sony a monopoly on devices that play Sony branded products.
"Sony understandably seeks control over the market for devices that play games Sony produces or licenses. The copyright law, however, does not confer such a monopoly."
In the lawsuit, Sony argued that the availability of the emulator would lose them sales on consoles. The court’s response was essentially "tough," declaring that the emulator was a legal market competitor, and that Sony losing sales to the competition did not affect its fair use defense.
Ultimately, Patreon refused to comply with the takedown and the group is still up and operational, likely with more funding than ever thanks to the new round of publicity. All references to Persona have been removed from the Patreon page and website as a precautionary measure.
You can be completely against emulators while also acknowledging that this is out of Atlus’ reach.
Call of Duty Gets Slammed In Steam Ratings In Open Beta
The Call of Duty World War 2 beta is officially live on PC, and Steam players are not happy. Just hours into the beta being available, the game is already sinking in reviews with 30% (of more than five thousand reviews) as of this writing having a positive outlook on the title. While there are plenty of reviews that are simply trolling or missing context, the general contention among the crowd of haters relates to performance issues, matchmaking problems, and the game just generally being “another Call of Duty.”
A thread has popped up on the forums asking players for bug reports regarding performance issues. It appears that the developers are paying attention, and are not happy with the early review scores, noting:
NOTE: Please don’t review the game without actually giving it a try, it’s unfair to the developers when you rate a game beacuse of an issue that could very well be your own.
The latest Call of Duty title is going to have to work hard to bring PC users back after Infinite Warfare virtually bombed on the system in 2016. Steam charts show that Infinite Warfare peaked at 15,312 on launch, barely three thousand more than Battleborn. Its accompanying title, Modern Warfare Remastered, peaked at just under 1,400 on launch. Both titles carry a “mostly negative” rating with less than 40% positive reviews, and Modern Warfare Remastered has dropped below a full Battlefield server in terms of peak concurrent users. Raven Software, who worked on the PC version of Infinite Warfare, is also working on the PC version of WW2. Steam Spy suggests that less than half a million people own Infinite Warfare on Steam.
Minions of Mirth Goes Offline, But Single Player Still Functions
Cult indie MMORPG Minions of Mirth: Undead Wars is dead, long live the single player Minions of Mirth! Minions of Mirth is a rather quaint fantasy MMO that many of you may not have heard of until right this very moment. Following a hard drive failure on September 18, the official MoM Twitter account announced late last week that the servers will be down indefinitely. Minions of Mirth launched in 2005 and can take the credit of being free to play before the genre was cool.
Minions of Mirth is OFFLINE indefinitely. Thank you for years of adventurous fun!!!
— Minions of Mirth (@MinionsOfMirth) September 21, 2017
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Thankfully those of you looking to give this undiscovered gem a go, the single player still functions. Check it out at the official website.
[NM] Gravity Rush 2 Servers Shutting Down Just One Year After Launch
Sony Japan has just announced that the servers for Gravity Rush 2 will shut down on January 18, 2018, just one year after its launch on the Playstation 4. While the game itself will still be playable, the following services will be shut off:
- Receive, send a challenge
- Ranking browsing
- Receive, Post Treasure Hint
- Receive, post, review photo ghost
- Obtaining a dusty token and obtaining its remuneration
Gravity Rush 2 was developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment Japan Studio in conjunction with Team Siren (aka Team Gravity) and released in January 2017 on the Playstation 4. For the remainder of the service, players will see an increase in dusty token drops to obtain desired items before the servers go down for good.
Diaries From Guild Wars 2 Part 1: Path of Fire
(Disclosure: I received a copy of Path of Fire for the purpose of writing about. As always, this has no bearing on my opinion on the game)
Guild Wars 2 has been my on-again off-again MMO for the past few years (five, it’s been five years since Guild Wars 2 launched. Crazy, right?) The past year or two, it’s been more off again as I found my interest waning as Arenanet seemed to be confused as to where they wanted the game to go. Still, Guild Wars 2 has gone down in my books as one of the most polished MMOs on the market.
Path of Fire ditches the jungle atmosphere of Heart of Thorns and heads straight into the desert, in a world that is just stunning to look at. Head off in any direction in the multiple zones and you’ll see that there is much more to the world than just sand and stone. In fact, your first real taste of the world sets the tone for what is ahead, as you come across massive, sprawling, crumbling pyramids.
Similarly, the main city of Anmoon is beautiful, a massive city with giant pyramid buildings and tons of activities going on. The first moment I set foot in Anmoon, I ignored the story quest and started to check out what the city had to offer. The major events takes place around the casino, with players collecting coins while also taking care of some seedier troublemakers. I found myself in a race around the desert on the game’s mounts, which was fun even though I was clearly outmatched by my fellow racers.
And speaking of mounts, it looks like Path of Fire is all about the mounts. Very early on in the story, you get your hands on a raptor mount that is capable of jumping farther distances, allowing you to get to previously inaccessible areas. The mounts are great not just because they add a new mechanic, but by how well built they are in terms of usefulness and animation.
As you travel throughout the lands and complete activities, you’ll gain mastery points to make your mount even more useful. They’ll jump higher, leap farther, and just generally do things better. Mounts have been a long time coming for Guild Wars 2, and it’s great to see that they serve more of a purpose than simply boosting your speed.
There is plenty more to do in Guild Wars 2, so I’ll be getting back to it. Expect more detailed coverage in Part 2.
Jagex Disqualifies Deadman Winner Over Cheating
The Autumn Deadman tournament survivor has been disqualified after it was discovered that they were cheating. In a post on the official website, Jagex discussed criticism surrounding the latest Deadman final regarding certain disqualifications. What isn’t in question, however, is that the latest winner was cheating by using a bot farm to boost their account.
The last survivor of the final has been disqualified. A standard subsequent investigation into the winner of the tournament took place and the winner was responsible for the creation of a bot farm. Naturally all accounts linked to this botting activity have now been banned. This then raises the question of what to do with the prize money. At the moment we’re discussing what to do with it. A few ideas we have at the moment are another charitable donation, dispersing the money among the finalists, or carrying it over to the next season (or a combination of all of these).
In the same post, Jagex has promised to provide guides for players to avoid DDoS attacks which have become more common in Deadman mode, as well as tackling issues of cheating that naturally crop up in an event where $10,000+ of real money is on the line.
Deadman is a hardcore mode for Old School RuneScape that trades higher experience rates for open pvp and higher loot risk on death. Deadman Seasonal is a time-limited event where players race to level their accounts, with the 2,000 highest level players going on to a last man standing tournament, with the winner taking home $10,000 in prizes. The latest Deadman Seasonal tournament ended at Runefest 2017 this month.
(Source: RuneScape)
