MMO Fallout

Top 5: Most Disappointing Moments of the Year

With the year coming to an end, it’s time to start taking stories and sticking them into categories. Since I’m a well known optimist, I decided to start this month’s lists off with a look at the year’s greatest disappointments. Since a lot of what constitutes a “disappointment” is subjective, I ignored specific news pieces and tried to stick with general events.

This article is in no particular order.

1. ArcheAge… Just ArcheAge.

Where do you even start with a story like this? The rampant gold farming, exploits, dupes, and hacks that make it more newsworthy to simply report on when something isn’t going wrong in ArcheAge? How about Trion Worlds misleading their customers with false promises of discounts that would later be recanted because they apparently couldn’t be bothered waiting? Or the server instability? Or the economic turmoil caused by Trion’s greedy obsession with lock boxes?

Or the problem with housing being overrun by exploits? Or the unexplained downtime recently of nearly seventy two hours that still hasn’t been properly discussed by Trion Worlds? Or the fact that you had to have been a patron to receive the full compensation package? How about the forums being so poorly moderated that gold spam, thread spam, and pornography can be found appearing for hours at a time?

It would be a lot harder to lay the blame on Trion as mere publisher were this not the same strategy that caused the Defiance community to leave in droves, with Trion ignoring major game problems to focus on subtly altering core game mechanics to nerf in-game progress and hopefully divert players to cash shop lock boxes. The end result in Defiance was that the game could be found at the bottom of the bargain bin long before it ever went free to play, and ArcheAge would be sitting right next to it if the game had ever seen a box release.

2. That Unlicensed Harry Potter MMO

The string of high profile disasters has lowered my opinion of licensed MMOs considerably, but my disappointment in the unlicensed Harry Potter MMO from earlier this year wasn’t the fact that it was canned barely a week after it was announced, but the idea that the developer thought they could get away with it.

Here’s the story: At the beginning of the year, this group called Bio-Hazard Entertainment popped up and claimed that Warner Bros had given them permission to create a Harry Potter MMO, at least up until beta, and then would decide whether or not to fully greenlight the project. This claim, as it turned out, wasn’t so true. The website went down less than a week later and Bio-Hazard announced that they would be working on a different wizard MMO, one not related to Harry Potter, but encouraged gamers to contact Warner Bros and demand a Harry Potter MMO.

You have to admire the confidence of some no-name team thinking that they could just start working on a Harry Potter MMO and that Warner Bros. would be so impressed that they’d happily license the property. Forgetting of course, or ignoring, the numerous developers Warner Bros. had no doubt turned away, with larger budgets, bigger teams, and the experience to guarantee that such a large project could be seen through to the end.

3.DDOS Attacks

As I said back in 2013:

If I had a nickel for every time some individual or group launched a denial of service attack against a website or service that they didn’t like, I would put those nickels in a sock and use it to beat them unconscious.

Distributed Denial of Service attacks have only gotten worse in 2014, and it looks like 2015 is going to be just as bad. We’ve hit a point where the act has become as casual as racists commenting on the news. RuneScape players DDoS the servers for advantages in PvP, Minecraft players DDoS “competing” servers, almost every MMO to launch or release a major update/expansion has been DDoS’d this year, the console servers were attacked, Xbox Live is under attack currently, and so on and so forth.

I suppose the only upside to this is that eventually these kids tend to get caught because their ego gets the best of them and they do something stupid like trying to hack the CIA, or sending a bomb threat to an airline, and it is pretty fun to read about them crying in court before they’re sentenced to a few years in prison.

4. PMB Kills From Beyond The Grave

Pando Media Booster is so toxic of a piece of malware that it can’t even be dead and buried without poisoning the land around it. After a life spent sapping bandwidth, slowing computers, crashing programs, and being a general nuisance that plagued MMOs and frustrated gamers, we were happy to see the service finally die in August 2013. Like any good plague, however, it didn’t stay dead for long. Pando Media Booster was revived by some digital necromancer back in February to continue spreading its bile, this time distributing viruses and browser hijacks.

The program sent out update notices to users who had forgotten to uninstall it, or were unaware that it was still on their system, infecting computers with the Sweet Page browser hijacker. Can I get one last joke in about Pando Media Booster? When PMB turned into a distribution platform for malware, how did anyone notice?

5. Long Term Cancellations

While the MMO industry is no stranger to sudden cancellations, the long development cycle and a practice of announcing titles long before they are even considered viable to launch, it’s possible to spend a lot of time waiting for a game that just never comes out. World of Darkness was announced eight years ago only to be confirmed as cancelled earlier this year. Blizzard first hinted at Project Titan back in 2007 when they started hiring for a next-gen MMO, only to come out and say that the game has been scrapped seven years later.

Gamers don’t like being strung along, especially when it later becomes obvious that the developer’s outward enthusiasm was a veil covering their real sentiment, that the game wasn’t fun, wasn’t being competently developed or wasn’t coming close to development roadmaps, didn’t have a snowball’s chance of being funded to completion, or would be the first thing to thrown under the bus should profits dip even a little on the developer’s live services. At the very least, and this is more than we can say about certain other games, developers like Blizzard, CCP, and Jagex never asked their community to donate to fund these lost causes, which they likely could have done and recuperated quite a bit.

Take-Two CEO: If You Don’t Like It, Don’t Buy It

Take-Two CEO and Chairman Karl Slatoff has something to say to the people who want Grand Theft Auto V removed from store shelves: If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. Speaking at the BMO Capital Markets 2014 Technology & Digital Media Conference, Slatoff responded to the news that Target and Kmart have pulled the shooter from stores in Australia, stating that while the decision has not impacted consumer habits, the company is “deeply disappointed.”

“We have 34 million people who bought Grand Theft Auto, and if these folks had their way, none of those people would be able to buy Grand Theft Auto. And that really just flies in the face of everything that free society is based on. It’s the freedom of expression, and to try to squelch that is a dangerous and slippery slope to go down.”

Target and Kmart of Australia pulled the game after an online petition of over 40,000 signatures called for its removal over heavily criticised claims that the game incentivizes players to commit sexual violence against women. Target has come under fire by critics for perceived hypocrisy, as the company has stated that it will continue selling media including Game of Thrones and Fifty Shades of Grey, both of which contain explicit sexual violence.

(Source: Gamesindustry.biz)

Take-Two CEO: If You Don't Like It, Don't Buy It

“We have 34 million people who bought Grand Theft Auto, and if these folks had their way, none of those people would be able to buy Grand Theft Auto. And that really just flies in the face of everything that free society is based on. It’s the freedom of expression, and to try to squelch that is a dangerous and slippery slope to go down.”

(Source: Gamesindustry.biz)

Eve Online Unfurls Rhea Expansion

CCP is set on ending 2014 with the release of the latest update Rhea being declared both the last and the largest update of 2014. Rhea adds dozens of new features, new ships, and more to the space MMO, with a reminder that the next big update is just five or six weeks away.

Rhea introduces 100 new wormhole systems, the massive new system called Thera, as well as new exploration sites to be discovered. Several under the hood enhancements have been made to make Eve Online look and handle better, from the modernized UI and WASD keyboard controls, a new physical based rendering system, and upgrades to the Eve star map.

On the potentially more controversial side, Rhea also brings with it the removal of skill point loss and the clone upgrade system upon death, in the name of forcing veterans to risk more while punishing new players less severely. Two new ships and several redesigned spacecraft offer a new way to blast your way through space, or just die and lose all of your minerals.

(Source: CCP Press Release)

ArcheAge PLEX Available Again… Again

Trion Worlds has announced the ArcheAge APEX are officially back up and available for purchase.The item, providing a method for players to extend their subscription without paying real money, has been the subject of numerous exploits, resulting in it being pulled from the cash shop for small periods of time.

The following announcement was posted on Twitter yesterday.

Adventurers, APEX is now available again for use and purchase. Thanks for your patience! #ArcheAge

(Source: Twitter)

Update: Microsoft To Blame For Warface Shuttering

Following up on the announcement that Warface would be shutting down its Xbox 360 services, Crytek has come forward to finger Microsoft as the culprit. A representative of Crytek told Game Informer in a statement that the decision to shut the servers down was made by Microsoft, acting publisher of Warface on the Xbox.

“With Microsoft acting as publisher for Warface on Xbox 360, we are bound by their decision to phase out the game on their console.”

The Warface server officially shuts down in February. The PC service remains unaffected.

(Source: Game Informer)

The Old Republic Nixes Training Costs

Bioware has announced that next week training costs will be a thing of the past. Community manager Eric Musco posted the announcement on the Bioware forums today, revealing that next week’s update will completely remove the cost of training abilities, allowing players to train their characters completely free of charge. The announcement comes after the latest major update forced players to rebuy many of their abilities to a fairly expensive tune. Players took to the forums to air their grievances on the update, leading to this announcement.

It is a situation where every level you will see your hard earned credits go to a holographic Hutt doctor in order to make yourself a bit stronger. We have been talking about this topic internally for quite some time and when you add player feedback to the mix one thing becomes clear… We should make training costs a thing of the past.

Players who already dumped large amounts of credits on retraining their skills are out of luck, as Musco confirmed later in the thread that Bioware is not offering any compensation to players.

(Source: The Old Republic)

Black Desert Coming West In 2015

It isn’t so often that you hear about a release date being pushed up, but here it is. Black Desert, a rather anticipated MMO, will be hitting digital shelves in North America and Europe beginning in 2015. The western publisher will be Daum, generally a Korean publisher, who cited an inability to find a suitable western publisher as their reason for changing course.

The reason why Daum is bringing the game to Europe and North America prematurely is probably because of the increased hype and positive feedback from the western community. Daum is actually a Korean publisher, but they decided to expand to the west because they couldn’t find a suitable publisher in EU/NA for Black Desert.

Check back in 2015 for more information.

(Source: Black Desert)

Diaries From Marvel Heroes: Arrow Turrets Galore

It’s time again for another Diaries From series, and it just so happens that the week that I planned on discussing Marvel Heroes was the week of another big update. There is no winning in this world.

First, a disclosure. I talk a lot about how great Marvel Heroes is because of how much content you can access for free, so before I blow into my latest experiences, I feel the need to disclose how much I have spent on Marvel Heroes and what exactly I have purchased with that money. The answer is I have no clue. My account history (which goes back to its creation) shows one purchase of gs, $5 worth, back in May, but I have no idea what I spent it on. My best guess is that I spent it on fortune cards, because I know for sure they weren’t used to buy heroes or costumes, and I have nothing to show for it. Money well spent, obviously.

I also have four random hero unlocks that were obtained through in-game events, with two of those resulting in duplicates heroes. So out of my roster of eight, one was unlocked by default, two were unlocked by promotional hero codes, meaning I have unlocked five heroes through obtaining eternity crystals in regular gameplay. 175 crystals per random hero box, with twelve hours of total game time on my account. Not bad.

So let’s talk about Marvel Heroes, a game closer to my heart than it is to my wallet. It isn’t that I don’t like the game enough to pay money into it, but I promised way back when Marvel Heroes launched that I would see if it was feasible to unlock all of the characters without sinking a single penny into buying them. At launch, it was evident that that was not the case, so I stopped playing for a while until Gazillion Entertainment introduced eternity shards and made it a whole lot more possible. My plan is to get to a point where the random hero token unlocks a duplicate three times, after which I will start buying heroes directly at a more expensive price.

Marvel Heroes is one of those games that markets itself toward a very specific group of players, specifically those who favor the loot treadmill. It is a game of getting up to level 60 by smashing endless waves of enemies on a rather linear track, collecting shinies with slowly increasing stats, and ticking boxes on a skill tree to give your character additional powers. The shinies you don’t need can be sold or donated to vendors for gold or experience respectively, with the latter leveling them up to offer better shinies. This is a genre that people either love or hate, there doesn’t seem to be much in between.

What sets Marvel Heroes apart from your Diablo and Torchlight is that the game has nearly forty to unlock, with more added every few months, and yet (in my experience) none of them feel like clones. Captain America handles differently from Hawkeye, who handles differently from Moon Knight, who handles differently from Iron Man. It may not be as drastic as it was back at launch, where some characters were effectively useless in certain situations, and every character can generally handle their own, but everyone has their own groove. I actually laughed when I found that Colossus has a special move that throws Wolverine at an enemy, who then fights with you for a few seconds.

If you haven’t played Marvel Heroes since it looked like this, give it another go.

My current roster:

Black Panther (level 1)
Captain America (level 12)
Cyclops (level 3)
Hawkeye (level 54)
Iron Man (level 9)
Moon Knight (level 20)
Storm (level 4)
Taskmaster (level 10)

This list doesn’t include the heroes that were added up to level 10 for trial purposes: Black Widow, Collossus, Human Torch, Luke Cage, Punisher, and Rocket Racoon.

Trion Worlds Details ArcheAge Downtime Compensation

Trion Worlds has posted a news piece detailing upcoming compensation for ArcheAge players following recent extended periods of downtime and instability with the game’s service. All players who have “ever been a patron” will receive a Patron pack including five days of patron time, 15 Superior Worker’s Compensation potions, 30 loyalty tokens, three Greedy Goblin Gummies (+10% loot drop rate), three Frankenflavor Jawbreakers (+10% exp), and three Marshmallow Sugar Pumpkins (+3% move speed).

We never take your loyalty for granted and any time we don’t meet the high standards we set for ourselves, it’s important to us to make it up to you as generously as possible. We’re currently applying compensation packs to everyone’s account. This does take a while, and it’ll be running through the rest of today.

Non-patrons will receive a package including 10 Superior Worker’s Compensation potions, 15 loyalty tokens, as well as three of the other items listed above. These packages are being distributed via the Glyph account page, with emails being sent out once players can redeem them.

(Source: Trion Worlds)

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