MMO Fallout

Auction House Exploit Tears Through Neverwinter

You’d best put seat belts on your ears, because I’m going to take them for the ride of their life. Perfect World Entertainment are in the midst of some very heavy damage control after an exploit popped up in Neverwinter and threw the game’s economy into turmoil. I won’t go into details about the exploit itself, partially because I would probably butcher the explanation, but the exploit involves the auction house and players duplicating mass quantities of astral diamonds and converting them into Zen.

According to MMO Fallout’s men on the field, the gateway has been shut down, and the ability to buy Zen with astral diamonds has been disabled. Some of those services may be turned back on by the time you read this. Perfect World has posted the following update on their forums:

We currently are in the process of taking action against a subset of accounts that were confirmed to have utilized exploits that affected the game balance or economy.

These accounts may be banned, temporarily or permanently, depending on the severity of exploit utilization. Anyone who is affected by this will receive notification via email.

While we have taken all precautions necessary to ensure that no false positives made it into our final list of accounts to take action against, we do acknowledge that some players who were banned may wish to follow up with us. If you had an account banned and wish to escalate the issue to our support team, please create a ticket at support.perfectworld.com or send an email to customerservice@perfectworld.com

Please note that forum discussions about specific accounts being banned is against our forum guidelines, thus any threads on the topic may be closed. Thank you in advance for your understanding.

Thank you for your patience and support while we continue to do everything in our power to ensure that Neverwinter remains a fair and balanced game experience.

-Dezstravus and the Neverwinter Team

(Source: Neverwinter)

Planetside 2 Update Bringing Lattice System

Ask any Planetside player who made the transition to Planetside 2 what their biggest gripe is, and in all likelihood you will hear about the lack of a lattice system. In Planetside, bases and outposts are connected to each other through nodes, where those further into enemy territory cannot be captured until those at the forward lines are. When Planetside 2 launched without this system in place, players criticized the game for having a lack of objectives or direction, with fights breaking out randomly and players taking advantage of the large map to take over undefended bases.

Those gamers will be happy to hear that the upcoming Update 9, coming this week, will bring with it the much-anticipated lattice system. Players will now be funneled down a corridor system of outposts, with smaller outposts having two to three other bases connected to them and larger bases generally having three to five. The idea is to consolidate fighting to certain areas of the map, making for larger battles and giving defenders a better idea of where to go next. With the new corridor system, it will also be possible to cut off supplies to enemy factions with more tactical precision.

The update is being implemented in a test phase, with player feedback used to implement further changes to base connections, map layout, etc. You can read the full list of details at the link below.

(Source: Planetside 2)

MMOrning Shot: Driving In Style

Today’s MMOrning Shot comes from Fallen Earth, showing off the upcoming Vandal Hatchback vehicle. Players will be able to get their hands one one soon™.

MMOrning Shots is a daily line of screenshots from various MMOs. Most are taken in-house or come to us in press releases, but if you would like your screenshot featured, send it over to contact[at]mmofallout[dot]com with the subject “MMorning Shots.”

Darkfall North American Server Hit By DDoS

Indie MMOs, as we know all too well here at MMO Fallout, are dangerously prone to distributed denial of service attacks, often from either disgruntled (and banned) cheaters/griefers or revenge from recently banned gold farmers. Now Darkfall Unholy Wars has a boatload of people from both categories, so the root cause could be any one of the two.

Aventurine has posted a notice on the official blog that there has been a DDoS attack aimed at bringing down the North American server.

In regard to the ping issues on the NA server the past couple of days, this was due to a DDoS attack during NA prime time. We have taken measures in cooperation with our hosting providers to filter this attack, and we’re monitoring the situation. We’ll keep you updated and we apologize for any inconvenience.

The likelihood of the culprit being caught (or even identified at that) is unlikely, given the nature of a denial of service attack.

(Source: Darkfall Epic Blog)

APB Details Upcoming Spawn System Changes

Ever since Reloaded Productions took over All Points Bulletin and relaunched it as APB: Reloaded, the team has been hard at work addressing reverences from the community, whether related to driving, threat systems, lag, and now the spawn system apparently. In a recent blog posting, the APB team discusses the current manner in which players respawn after death, and the troubles associated with the current formula. As the blog lays out, the current system often leaves the player far out of the way, the same spawn point, or right on top of your enemy.

In an upcoming update, players will be able to enjoy Elective Spawning, effectively the same system but instead of automatically spawning at the “best” point generated by the system, players will have a number of spawn points available to choose from. You will also be able to view where other dead teammates have opted to respawn, in order to better coordinate during public matches. Players will also be able to modify vehicles to allow their teamates to spawn inside of them, given certain conditions are met.

You can read all of it at the blog post below:

(Source: APB Reloaded Blog)

Guild Wars Is In Maintenance Mode

I think most of us got the hint that this was coming around the time that NCSoft stopped listing Guild Wars on their quarterly financial releases. With the rousing success of Guild Wars 2 and the ever advancing age of Guild Wars, Arenanet has posted today to reveal that their ongoing updates to Guild Wars have had a secondary purpose: To teach the game to run itself. With Arenanet’s views moving elsewhere, Guild Wars is being updated to run on automation, or maintenance mode as many of you know it. The game will no longer be updated, except to better service the automation.

So what does this mean for players? Foremost, handing out trims at tournaments and the map rotation of the tournaments themselves will be completely automated. Weekend events will be extended to full week events and run on automated rotations as well. Basically everything that used to require the hand of Arenanet to start will be fully automated. The goal is to get Guild Wars to a point where it can operate mostly by itself, allowing the game to run in maintenance mode for “years to come.”

(Source: Guild Wars)

Reports Of Trion Layoffs Grossly Exaggerated

Rumors of Trion’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. IGN found this out the hard way when their reports that Trion had laid off 80% of its work force, escorting staff from the premises as well as denying severance to several senior leaders due to undelivered services, turned out to be a complete farce.

The actual number of laid off employees has not been revealed, although Trion has confirmed during a stream that the Rift team was not affected. The Defiance team, on the other hand, has undergone a round of layoffs of the type expected by a recently launched game. Trion’s in-development games were reportedly not affected either.

(Source: IGN)

ArcheAge Has Cars

Are the cars in ArcheAge steam powered? They look steam powered. It’s easy to forget sometimes that ArcheAge is partially steampunk-inspired, and that the game will have features associated with said genre including cars, steamboats, airships, and more. ArcheAge has already released in Korea and is set for release in other territories including the United States and Europe and other territories by Trion Worlds, developers of Rift and Defiance.

Aventurine Lays Out Roadmap For Darkfall

Darkfall Unholy Wars has launched and is under way for ongoing development. Due to popular demand, and a commitment by Aventurine to stay in touch with their community, the developer has laid out a roadmap for the weeks to come, detailing weekly planned updates in May and June. The updates add new monsters, tweaks to game systems, new content, and more.

These are just some of the things we have planned that we’re reasonably sure will be added to the game according to the schedule. There is also a “Community Issues” component in our content updates and patches that will be addressing player concerns, issues and working on player suggestions on a regular basis.

You can check out the roadmap at the link below.

(Source: Darkfall Forums)

Akaneiro Coming To Steam

We love Akaneiro here at MMO Fallout, and not just because the developer behind it is Spicy Horse Games, also known as that developer in Shanghai where American McGee works and creates his American McGee games. If you don’t know what Akaneiro: Demon Hunters is, it is a free to play hack and slash along the genre of Diablo and Torchlight and similar titles. Akaneiro is an adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood in feudal Japan. The game is currently available on browsers, with the goal of also releasing on tablets and Linux later on.

In an email to subscribers, Spicy Horse revealed that the game will be coming to Steam, making use of the early access program.

Keep your eyes peeled over the next few weeks as Akaneiro makes its way to Steam’s Early Access Program. If you want to get in on the action early and make Akaneiro the best it can be then this will be the time to do it. A newsletter will announce the day we go live.

No word on exactly when the game will hit Steam, however why not play it at the Akaneiro website while you’re there?

(Source: Akaneiro)

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