Regardless of The Old Republic, do you think it’s about time Lucas Arts lets Sony bring back Galaxies?
The Old Republic Will Sell Statted Gear, New Planets
If you haven’t heard, The Old Republic will be free to play as of later this fall. Without paying a subscription, players will have access to all of the story content from level 1 to 50, with limited access to other features and no access to the game’s warzones. Jeff Hickman, Executive Producer at Bioware, acknowledges that the transition must be performed with great care:
“I don’t want to unbalance the game by putting things out on the store that somebody can walk in on day one, buy and be the winner. Having said that, there will be some things that we put out in the store that do enhance power value in some way, but not at the top end.”
While the cash shop items have not been finalized, Hickman believes that The Old Republic will sell some form of gear with stats (although not high-end equipment) and possibly future planets, hinting that the level cap may be raised at some point.
More on The Old Republic as it appears.
Jagex Bans High Profile Gamblers and Botting Clans
Hi,
Today we have banned several high-profile accounts from the dicing scene.
We can happily confirm that the ring leaders found to be involved in selling RuneScape gold have been banned. Their actions have directly funded a sizable portion of all real world trading activity within the game, led to increased macro use, and resulted in huge surges in spam advertising.
Such actions are strictly against our rules, and all accounts have been wiped and permanently nuked.
This should serve a clear warning to anyone else engaged in similar activities; expect more bans of any continuing offenders.
We have been finely tuning our new anti-cheat and anti-hijack tools over the past few months and are now steadily bringing these systems online in select areas. This is part of an on-going rollout that will be completed over the course of next two months. More good news will follow in due course.
Some of you may already have noticed that we have started cleaning up the high scores over the last week and this will assist us in being able to re-introduce relevant gold farmer free F2P high scores again.
Mark Gerhard
CEOHi,
Today we have banned a large number of accounts involved with self-titled “botting clans”. All of these accounts have been identified by our new data analysis tool and are 100% guilty of breaking our rules. These accounts have been permanently banned with no chance of appeal.
As mentioned on the forums yesterday, expect more bans and punishments in the very near future.
The use of bots will not be tolerated and will result in permanent action against any accounts found to have cheated in this way.
Daniel Clough
COO & VP of RuneScape
ProSiebenSat.1 Deal Altered, More Titles Heading To Europe
You may remember back in February when Sony Online Entertainment announced that they would be opening up a multi-year partnership with European ProSiebenSat.1 Games Group. The list of games affected includes DC Universe, Everquest II, Free Realms, Everquest Next, and Planetside 2. Oddly enough, and without explanation, the list did not include Everquest, Vanguard, and the upcoming Wizardry Online, leading to speculation that ProSiebenSat simply wasn’t interested in the titles.
Well, bad news bears (those of you expecting that Sony would continue hosting said titles in Europe). Today Sony announced that the deal with ProSiebenSat.1 has been expanded. The set list is to include the aforementioned Everquest, Vanguard, Wizardry Online, and the recently released Bullet Run.
“ProSiebenSat.1 is the ideal partner for us to reach an even broader audience in Europe. We are confident that the combination of the media power provided by ProSiebenSat.1 and our expertise in developing high-quality online games will appeal to players in a new and captivating way, creating the perfect prerequisite for achieving great success with our games in Europe.”
The community is once again split over this decision.
(Source: Everquest Forums)
Week In Review: Week of August 12th
It’s Friday and that means it is time to look at the news posts we missed.
- World of Warcraft opens all races, regardless of expansion pack.
- The Secret World 50% off at Amazon this weekend.
- Archeage Next Closed Beta Features All New Functions.
- Electronic Arts For Sale, Rumored.
- Vanguard Free To Play Officially Launches
- Shadowrun Makes $30 Grand In Final 10 Hours
- CCP Secures $20 Million For DUST 514
- Aion 4.0 Will Feature Three New Classes
Neverwinter Delayed To Early 2013
Neverwinter is still alive. Announced back in 2010, Neverwinter has been thrown out as the MMO that Champions Online and Star Trek Online never were (polished). With all of the past events at Cryptic Studios, being discontinued by Atari and then sold off to Perfect World Entertainment, having their new executives delay the title until late 2012 so the game could have some polish and content, and then revising the game to be a full fledged MMO, the idea of Neverwinter being delayed a couple of times isn’t all too alien.
So Neverwinter has been delayed once again, the new release date being “early 2013,” when it will launch with a free to play business model.
(Source: Eurogamer)
Final Fantasy XIV Shutting Down In Preparation For Realm Reborn
Consider this your first heads up, FFXIV players: At some point in the future Final Fantasy XIV will shut down, but only temporarily. At Gamescom, Square Enix announced that instead of simply updating FFXIV when the game’s 2.0 relaunch goes live, the servers will need to be shut down for an indeterminate amount of time. Naoki Yoshida, director/producer, stated that the shut down will occur at some day in the near future, and is required in order to transition all of the character files over to the new game.
“Basically what’s going to happen is that the current story is still continuing now, but some day in the near future — and we’ll make sure we tell the players what day that is — something is going to happen in the story, and at that time, the servers are going to shut down,”
Players will have plenty of notice ahead of time as to when the servers will shut down. A Realm Reborn is set for launch on PC and PS3.
(Source: Massively.com)
Roblox Teams Up With LEGO
It’s been a while since we last heard from ROBLOX, but today’s news should come as a pleasant surprise to ex-Lego Universe players. In a press release, ROBLOX has announced a partnership with LEGO to bring the Hero Factory brand to the popular kid’s MMO. Players take the role of Stringer or Volix, two characters from Hero Factory, and compete in teams in a competitive scavenger mode. While searching for the hidden items, players are able to sabotage the other team by destroying the very items they seek.
Winning a game of Hero Factory will nab a few pieces of equipment from their chosen characters. ROBLOX is one of MMO Fallout’s featured family friendly MMOs and can be played free of charge through your browser.
(Source: Press Release)
Blizzard Releases Free Trial For Diablo III
Blizzard announced today that Diablo III is launching a starter edition, the restrictions of which will be familiar to those who participated in the pre-release beta. Announced earlier today, new players will be able to play up through Act 1, to the Skeleton King, absolutely free. There are several restrictions in place to keep the service from being abused by gold farmers: Level is capped at 13, starter accounts will be unable to access either auction house, and match making will only be available with other starter edition users.
Any progress made during the starter edition will be carried over if you do decide to purchase the full game. The starter edition serves to branch out the already available guest pass.
(Source: Battle.net)
Falling Out Returns Again!
Not that this will prevent any hate-mail, but I’ve included a nice chart on NCSoft’s sales for reference. Falling Out releases a new edition every Monday.
MMO Fallout 