MMO Fallout

MMOrning Shots: $600k Smite

Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from Hi-Rez Studios, who want everyone to know about the upcoming world championship for Smite to be held in Atlanta, Georgia, home of the Atlanta Georgians. The prize pool currently stands at six hundred thousand and is expected to grow in time thanks to community contributions and content sales. The top two teams from North America, Europe, China, as well as the top teams from Brazil and Spanish-speaking South America will be present to face off.

Check out MMOrning Shots between 7am and 11am every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Age Of Empires Online Shuts Down Today

Age of Empires Online takes its last breaths today. The pseudo-MMO adaptation of Microsoft’s popular series never fully caught on thanks to its limited content and rather expensive cost of purchases, as well as the cheaper, more readily available alternative titles in the series. We learned last year in January that content development had ceased, and finally in October that the servers would come down in July due to the closure of Games for Windows Live services.

With full Age of Empires titles on sale for cheap, players found little reason to throw down $20 to unlock a single civilization. Following an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign for an RTS called Wildman, Gas Powered Games laid off a number of staff and sold off to Wargaming.net.

State of Darkfall: Upcoming Updates

Aventurine has released a list of upcoming updates to Darkfall: Unholy Wars, to be released in the month of July and beyond. The first, expected for launch in the first week of July, focuses on fixing and balancing issues that have arisen since the custom roles patch last month. The second patch is the first step in creating a more customizable user interface, allowing players to tailor the UI to their preferences. Also in the works are economy rebalances, seige engines in August, and the first quest lines in September.

Further down the line, Aventurine plans to overhaul the inventory system into one that is grid-based and more easily managed, as well as an alignment system that will severely reduce the size of the safe zones, as well as the ability to enchant equipment. There is plenty more in development, including fluff items for the in-game store, and Aventurine has promised to keep us up to date on future development.

(Source: Aventurine press release)

MMOrning Shots: Skara’d Of The Dark

Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from Skara: The Blade Remains. I had the opportunity to do a bit of sparring on a very early version of Skara, and while the game is still has a very long way to go, it already looks fantastic on the Unreal Engine 4. You can check out Skara’s Kickstarter page at the following link.

Check out MMOrning Shots every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

MMOrning Shots: Skara'd Of The Dark

Check out MMOrning Shots every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Carbine Staff Knocks Down Cheater On Forums

Wildstar staff Cougar took to the forums to publicly respond to a player asking why his account ban hadn’t been dealt with ten days later.

I’m assuming that with your posting here that you don’t mind us talking about your account status in public. I have a spare moment before my next meeting and am doing this on a lark. I understand this opens me up to “oh oh oh my ticket” which I don’t intend to keep up with. I am a fickle beast. You, and your alts, were reported a number of time by players for AFK Botting. We found you afk botting in a PvP Match (which as you know, was a really big issue for us – which is now better thanks to AddOns no longer being able to join matches automatically, among other things). We did our secret stuff … okay afk bot confirmation doesn’t take much clandestine stuff once we are on top of you. We sent you tells over time and you never reacted and continued doing the same thing over and over.

We closed your account. You opened up a ticket in question, asking for us to give you your account back. In that opening salvo of asking us for getting your account back, you admited that you were afk botting while doing homework. You then added 5 replies in two days to the ticket with various stages of pleading/begging. Including internet meme pictures. (http://i2.kym-cdn.co…392/289/116.gif). A few agents have investigated it internally and found your account to be worthy of permanent closure. You are exactly the problem case players have been pleading for us to remove from our game. We agree with them.

Now, why we’ve taken some time to tell you that your ban will not be overturned I’m not sure. So thank you for bringing that to my attention, however you’ll forgive me if we don’t prioritize deserved-to-be-banned-customers over paying ones right now.

(Source: Wildstar)

Why Does ArcheAge Have Sixteen Thousand Spammers?

ArcheAge is currently in alpha stage getting ready for its launch under Trion Worlds. Players are in-game thanks to a $150 package, where they are bug testing, balance testing, and apparently gold farming and spamming in massive quantities. How massive? Trion Worlds banned sixteen thousand accounts for spamming chat and botting gold. In an alpha.

We’re pleased to report that over 16,000 nasty, evil, foul, and most importantly misbehaving accounts have been reactively and proactively removed from Alpha. These accounts were purchased using ill-gotten funds and have been used to farm gold with bots and to spam chat channels, neither of which is allowed in ArcheAge.

Patch 1.2 arrives next week and gives Trion more power to rid the game of evil spammers and farmers.

(Source: ArcheAge)

MMOments: Neverwinter Key Test

Neverwinter is a game that I’ve had quite a bit of fun in lately. Between the game’s constant events, my slow progress of leveling up my character, and distractions of daily life preventing me from playing too much, I finally managed to nearly hit the game’s level cap. As I write this, I’m sitting at around 75% of the way between level 59 and 60, and I figured why not put some money down and buy a bundle of keys just to see what I can get. For the record, I’ve spent $20 bucks on Neverwinter altogether so far. I used it to buy a bag of holding and some profession packs about six months ago.

With that in mind, I have never bought keys for lockboxes in an MMO (not counting Team Fortress 2), and I’m actually pretty intrigued as to what I’ll get. Aside from a whole box of disappointment, I’m not expecting much. The bundle of ten keys cost $11 bucks.

Box #1
- 9 Tarmalune Trade Bars: Currency for the trade bar merchant. Most things cost between 500-1,000 bars.
- 1 Corrupted Strongbox of Enchantments: I opened a lockbox and found another lockbox. This one contained a lesser plague fire enchantment.
Box #2
- 6 Tarmalune Trade Bars: Oh goody.
- Companion Fortification Kit: Another lockbox within a lockbox. This one contained runestones.
Box #3
- Reghed Barbaric Relic: This is something that is used in the Icewind Dale campaign. I haven’t gotten that far in the quest line yet.
- 6 Tarmalune Trade Bars: Oh joy.
Box #4
- Iron Strongbox of Enchantments: It contained enchantments. None of them any good.
- 5 Tarmalune Trade Bars: More of them.
Box #5
- Planar Idol: Exchange this for an astral resonator which can be used to extract astral diamonds.
- 4 Tarmalune Trade Bars
Box #6
- Priceless Thayan Antiquity: Can exchange at a merchant.
- 8 Tharmalune Trade Bars
Box #7
- Priceless Thayan Antiquity
- 4 Tharmalune Trade Bars
Box #8
- Priceless Thayan Antiquity
- 3 Tharmalune Trade Bars
Box #9
- Artifact Provisions Pack: Contains stuff for refining runestones.
- 4 Tharmalune trade bars.
Box #10
- Corrupted Strongbox of Enchantments
- 10 Tharmalune Bars

So there you have it. A whole lot of nothing. I coulda had a V8.

Xsyon Terrain Update

Xsyon has released a massive update to the game’s terrain system. The goal of the update is to provide plenty of room to settle for new players, while facilitating travel for current players and allow them room to expand.

The Xsyon landscape is shaped and molded by players. Over the years many unsightly mounds and ruins of abandoned sites have built up across the land. The terrain reversion update gradually restores this neglected land to its original state. Felled tree stumps and logs that have littered the landscape also decay over time.

You can check out Xsyon for free at the official website.

(Source: Notorious Games Press Release)

Less Massive: GFWL Not Shutting Down

So, it turns out Games For Windows Live isn’t shutting down next week. According to a statement by Microsoft, you will still be able to download titles from the Games for Windows Live client as usual, however customers will not be able to purchase games or receive title updates.

“As previously announced, as part of the retirement of Microsoft Points the Xbox.com PC marketplace was closed. Although customers are unable to purchase new games from the marketplace or receive title updates, they can continue to enjoy previously purchased content by downloading them through the Games for Windows Live client as usual. We remain committed to investing in PC gaming in the years ahead, and look forward to sharing more in the future.”

Presumably features like achievements will continue to function as well, online play may be dependent on the game.

(Source: Eurogamer)

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