Weekend Wrapup: Iron Man MK3 Edition


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Another week has come to an end, and that means it’s time to look at the news you may have missed or forgotten. Weekend Wrapup goes over the highlights of the previous week, not all of which were covered by MMO Fallout.

For Marvel Heroes players, today (Saturday the 2nd) is the only day to grab Iron Man’s MK3 armor.

  • Perfect World Entertainment is going privately owned. No more investors, no more shareholder meetings, no more quarterly earnings for me to dive through.
  • Daybreak Game Company shows its support for Project 99. The developers can rest easy without the worry of overzealous lawyers.
  • Goblinworks CEO Ryan Dacey isn’t happy with player recruitment, perhaps showing unrealistic expectations for an MMO that is already charging a subscription fee for early access.
  • Alganon is still receiving support and will launch on Steam in May.
  • The Secret World’s cinematic director is going on to different projects.

Perfect World Entertainment Is Going Private


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Perfect World Entertainment has announced that it is going private. In an announcement posted to investors earlier this week, Perfect World will merge with parent company Perfect Peony Holding Company Limited, a limited liability corporation located in the Cayman Islands and owned by Mr. Michael Yufeng Chi. The acquisition will take place to the tune of $900 million bankrolled by China Merchants Bank and Wing Lung Bank.

Shareholders will be bought out at the tune of $4.04 for ordinary shares, $20.20 for American Depository Shares, and no payment for shares held by the parent company or any of its subsidiaries. The price marks a 28% increase over PWE’s closing price at the date that privatization was originally announced (December 31, 2014).

All of this, of course, is still subject to a majority vote at the next shareholder meeting.

(Source: Pwrd.com)

Marvel Heroes Introduces Achievements


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Marvel Heroes players have another set of things to collect, with the introduction of in-game achievements. Today’s update adds hundreds of achievements, rewarding players with credits, costumes, pets, and more. Achievements span everything from leveling up, collecting items, defeating enemies, and more.

You can find the announcement at the link below. Also coming with today’s update is new content tasking heroes with battling Ultron, tying in with the new Avengers movie.

(Source: Marvel Heroes)

Daybreak Game Company Embraces Project 99


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It isn’t too often that developers acknowledge, let alone embrace a private servers emulating their games, especially if the title in question is still in operation. Daybreak Game Company, however, has decided to embrace the Project 1999 private server, an emulation project of Everquest as it was in its early days, to officially recognize and approve its existence.

We have recently entered into a written agreement with Daybreak Game Company LLC that formally recognizes Project 1999 as a fan based, not-for-profit, classic EverQuest emulation project. The agreement establishes the guidelines that we as a project must follow, but it will allow to us continue to update the game without risk of legal repercussions.

P99 players can rest easy knowing without the threat of legal action hanging above their heads.

(Source: Everquest)

Perfect World Consolidating Forums


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On May 4th, Perfect World Entertainment will merge all forums into a single location. The changeover affects all games in Perfect World’s library except for those that are already on the new system (APB, Swordsman, etc).

If you only play one of our games, this migration will positively affect you as well. Beforehand, we were using vBulletin to host our forums, but now, we’ll be hosted by Vanilla – anything that shares the same name with ice cream is good, right? The main features of the Vanilla forums are the customization options and the ease of access.

The new forums go up May 4th.

(Source: Perfect World)

Mortal Online Hit By Another Hack


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Star Vault is assuring players that payment data has not been stolen in what appears to be a breach of Mortal Online’s servers. Servers for the MMO were shut down after players noticed alterations to in-game menus, text changes, and strange dialogue shouted by town crier NPCs. The website is down as of this writing, however Star Vault has acknowledged the breach via their Facebook page.

As we use Global Collect as our primary payment processor, they would need to have been breached for any payment information. They have not been, so there is no need to worry about your payment information. This information is not stored on Star Vault servers so you won’t need to worry about that.

There are unverified reports of the attacker being able to ban and unban accounts. You can see some images from in-game at the link below, they contain heavily offensive language.

(Source: Images #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6)

Valve Shuts Down Paid Skyrim Workshop, Refunds Everyone


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Valve’s controversial decision to introduce a system where mod makers could put their creations up for sale is dead in the water just a couple of days after it was introduced. Last week Valve announced that creations in the Skyrim workshop would be able to charge a fee for use, with the creator taking a 25% cut of earnings.

The resulting backlash inspired groups of customers boycotting Valve, protest creations popping up in the Steam workshop, and a Reddit AMA by Valve’s own Gabe Newell.

In an announcement posted to the Steam Community, Valve admitted to underestimating the differences between the revenue sharing models in their previous ventures (TF2/DOTA cosmetics) and the mod community.

We’re going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop. For anyone who spent money on a mod, we’ll be refunding you the complete amount. We talked to the team at Bethesda and they agree.

Going by the announcement, it seems that this isn’t the last we will hear from paid mods. Perhaps Valve will introduce some donation method to help mod creators.

(Source: Steam)

 

Alganon Patches In Steamworks Support


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Quest Online has revealed that Alganon will be coming to Steam next month. Alongside a number of other fixes and tweaks, support for Steamworks was added in the latest Alganon patch. According to Quest Online, Alganon will officially be on Steam next month.

Implemented support for SteamWorks backend services. Yes, Alganon is coming to Steam next month! This is the store landing page.

The link does not work as of this publishing.

(Source: Alganon)

Benchmark Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward Update


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Final Fantasy XIV’s first expansion, Heavensward, releases June 23rd and introduces new stories, an increased level cap, a new race, new battles, new dungeons, and new mounts. More significantly, it introduces DirectX 11 graphics, offering better quality visuals at the expense of higher system requirements. To better prepare players for the road ahead, Square Enix is offering a benchmarking tool.

You can download the benchmark tool here.

(Source: FFXIV Press Release)

Pathfinder Online’s Recruitment Is Flat


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Pathfinder Online is currently in “early enrollment” (read: alpha/beta) while charging a subscription, a combination that doesn’t exactly see customers falling over each other to sign up. Regardless, Goblinworks CEO Ryan Dancey took to the forums to express his disappointment in player recruitment being “almost zero.” He suggests that players head to other websites including Reddit, news websites, and the Eve community to openly discuss their activities.

Settlements that are committed to growing should have someone delegated to be visible in these places making regular posts and talking about the cool stuff their Settlement is doing. When the wider community sees activity and fun, that is a powerful attractant.

Dancey’s comments have been criticized by community members, pointing to the game’s early access state coupled with the subscription putting players off.

Ryan, I strongly feel that mass recruiting efforts now are premature. The kind of people we’d be able to pick up from the mainstream sites are people who will login for a week, see a game which is very immature, draw incorrect conclusions, and never come back. The longterm success of the game will be much better if we wait to recruit those people until we have a chance to actually keep them.

I think the real failure was in the original business planning by the people in charge. Seems like what they suspected was a MVP that the target audience would pay money for was grossly miscalculated. Maybe this would have worked 10 years ago.

I will not go and try to make the game look like a million, using sugar-coated words and focusing on telling the positive stories, while completely ignoring or downplaying the negative parts in front of other gamers. So I’m doing the best I can for GW, and that is, being silent.

(Source: Pathfinder)