Stealing from other players and duplicating money in a video game can lead to harsh consequences. Suspension of your account, loss of time invested in the game, and being removed from your guild are just a few of them. Stealing from other people and counterfeiting money in real life, however, can lead to jail time, a criminal record, loss of current and potential future jobs, and the embarrassment of everyone knowing you counterfeited money and robbed a person at gunpoint for RuneScape gold.
According to the New York Post, Bajwa faces up to fifteen years in prison for second degree robbery (no comment on the counterfeit money) in a RuneScape cash sale gone sour. Even though Jagex explicitly prohibits the sale of in-game cash, Bajwa attempted to purchase a large sum of gold with what turned out to be counterfeit cash. When the seller realized that the money was fake, Bajwa pulled a pellet gun manufactured to look like a real gun, and forced the seller to transfer the gold at gunpoint. Bajwa was later arrested at his home in Massachusetts.
Of course, the regular news media is already blaming this on video game addiction, no surprise there. Although RuneScape is no stranger to armed robberies.
Two months ago, Sony Online Entertainment incited a backlash from the community by removing the ability to purchase subscriptions with Station Cash without notice. In learning from their past PR mistake, Sony has offered players prior notice before their next change. Beginning Monday August 27th, it will no longer be possible to purchase expansion packs on Everquest I & II or DLC packs on DC Universe with Station Cash. For the next day or so (until early morning August 13th), players will be able to purchase expansion packs at 50% off.
Unfortunately, the cause of this change in marketing is due to the substantial cost in content development clashing with Sony’s desire to continue running double and triple Station Cash promotions, as well as free Station Cash for subscribers. The two deals combined into an unsustainable, low level of income.
Back when I was covering the TERA beta, I received a lot of messages from players who wanted to buy the game, but were afraid to because of the lawsuit between En Masse Entertainment. People were afraid that NCSoft had a chance of winning the lawsuit, and would have the game shut down in North America (and possibly Europe) as a result. Well, according to a press release by EME, the lawsuit has been settled and TERA will not be shutting down. As part of the settlement, En Masse maintains its innocence and has stated that the company will maintain its focus on TERA in the coming future.
“En Masse Entertainment confirms it has settled with NCsoft over the TERA-related lawsuit in the US. In doing so, En Masse Entertainment maintains its innocence and looks forward to refocusing the company’s full attention to TERA, its fans, and its future.”
As for the full details of the settlement, you can probably expect to see those somewhere in the realm of never.
In the very old days of RuneScape, back when servers were few and the community was equally tiny, players were banned in a rather public fashion. Not as public as, say, the crucifixions in Roma Victor, but each ban was represented with a system message to warn other potential cheaters. Of course, as the game became more popular, Jagex put a stop on this technique and started simply reporting numbers rather than names.
A bug in RuneScape recently allowed players to gather large amounts of wealth, leading to the ban of many accounts on Jagex’s behalf. Not content with simply banning the accounts, Jagex took to the main page to publicly name some of the offenders.
2QO
2475 Total (Maxed Player)
606 Days Played
2College
2054 Total
170 Days Played
TzTok-Roy
2327 Total
335 Days Played
DeadEternity
2496 Total (2 200m xp stats)
462 Days Played
Zeke
1690 Total
121 Days Played
00O0OlI0lIO0
856 Total
54 Days Played
Tncd
1128 Total
87 Days Played
lbw
976 Total
27 Days Played
TvF
2132 Total
279 Days Played
x4v
693 Total
157 Days Played
WASTEDMONKEY
1978 Total
198 Days Played
Rs Completed
2496 Total (Maxed Player)
302 Days Played
d4rk_mayhem
1791 Total
296 Days
PlayedSerasha
2381 Total
334 Days Played
i am WeeHoo
1889 Total
197 Days Played
FlashZxFOur1
1386 Total
132 Days Played
Shopkeeper
2338 Total
256 Days Played
Jagex COO took the time to remind the community once again to report bugs that are found, and assured players the the economy would not be affected by the bans.
For those of you concerned about the rare objects being removed from the game after the bans and rollbacks – don’t be. We have several clever and fair ways of making sure that the numbers of these rares (like party hats) remain the same.
Grab your authenticators and rev up the conspiracy machine. With all the server breaches that have happened over the past year or so, it seemed inevitable that Blizzard would eventually be the victim of such an attack. A security notice on Battle.net has been posting warning users that a security breach has resulted in delicate information being released.
According to the notice, encrypted passwords, security questions, email addresses, and mobile authenticator information was stolen in the breach. Mike Mohaime points out that the information leaked is not enough to recover an account, however users over the next few days will be forced to change their secret questions and mobile authenticator users will be required to update to a new version of the software.
All in all the breach was bad, but as several sites are pointing out, it could have been much worse.
Star Trek: Infinite Space was announced a couple of years back by Gameforge as a browser-based free to play title. Set in the Deep Space Nine sector of the Star Trek universe, Infinite Space had the consultation powers of Denise and Michael Okuda to make sure that the game stayed true to the series. Unfortunately, times have not been great for the German developer, as last year the company was hit with layoffs that saw 100 staff cut and the cancellation of Mythos and Hellbreed. No longer able to publish the game themselves, Gameforge paused the beta in an attempt to find a co-publisher.
Well it seems that the endeavor has not been met with success, and Games Industry has reported that the project has been cancelled.
“”Unfortunately, our efforts were not successful. So we have decided with a heavy heart to finally abandon the project Star Trek: Infinite Space. The discontinuation is very regrettable. “
NCSoft has released its finances for the second quarter of 2012, and considering that the major MMO news sites suddenly care enough to report on it, I can only assume that there is some drama to be had. Compared to last quarter, revenues are up thanks to solid Lineage sales and royalties, however NCSoft is in the red on operating profit and net income due to what the company refers to as “one-off labor costs.” Here are the bullet points of important details to explain why NCSoft’s profits sunk so low:
Lineage sales were strong Korea, however Aion sales tanked due to “scaled back in-game item sales.”
Labor costs surged 27% this past quarter due to severance-pay.
Royalty expenses increased 35%
Marketing expenses were up 112% over last quarter due to Blade & Soul
D&A increased 28%
NCSoft’s acquisition of Ntreev also ended up being a major cost.
While sales in Korea and Japan held strong, sales in North America continued a slight decline over last quarter. Europe has been hit the hardest, with sales decreasing to virtually nothing (less than 1% of sales for the quarter).
The launch of Guild Wars 2 is expected to make up for any losses incurred this quarter.
I came to kick ass and not release for fourteen years, and I’ve already been released.
Welcome to Tuesday Top Five, where we compile the top five items into the categories where they fit best. It’s like putting together a puzzle with your family, without the risk of someone being chivved. For today’s list, I wanted to go over my top five MMOs that we won’t be playing for a long time. By we, of course, I mean the western audience as one or more of these titles may be releasing soon, or has already released, in Korea, China, or other eastern countries.
5. Transformers Universe
Jagex still has Transformers Universe set for a late 2012 launch, but with minimal details and Jagex’s past history of development, odds are we won’t be seeing a beta this Christmas. So far all Jagex has shown of Transformers Universe is a limited character creator, a few animations, and some sparse details on game mechanics.
If I had to guess, I’d say we won’t be hearing much about Transformers until 2013, when Jagex will either announce a delay or that the game has been cancelled.
4. Lineage Eternal
Adding Lineage Eternal to this list may be a bit unfair. All things considered, NCSoft has a lot on their plates between the free to play transitions of Aion and Lineage II, the development of Wildstar and Lineage Eternal, and localizing Blade & Soul to a western audience. Lineage Eternal has large ambitions ahead of it and the game was just revealed last November.
Lineage Eternal still has a year or two before release.
3. Wizardry Online
Hardcore MMO? Check. Permadeath? Check. Insane difficulty? Triple check. The more I hear about Wizardry, the more I feel like I must be a glutton for punishment, and beatings. To top it off, Wizardry Online will be a free to play game with a cash shop. A fully integrated pvp combat system, permanent death, no mini-map, and high end graphics. How can this go wrong? Don’t answer that.
More important: The Wizardry Online website states that the game will go live in Summer 2012. It is August 7th and beta still isn’t scheduled for another few months. So hopefully Wizardry will surprise me and launch sooner than I am expecting. After all, it has already launched in Japan.
2. World of Darkness
First off: You kill vampires, you don’t make out with them. With CCP working hard on Eve Online and DUST 514, players are reasonably questioning the future of World of Darkness. While it is relatively safe to say World of Darkness will release eventually, the 60-member development team is working as fast as possible to bring the world of Vampire: The Masquerade into the MMO genre. Initially set to only feature vampires, over time World of Darkness will allow players to roll as werewolves and mages. In keeping with the CCP hardcore HTFU design, players are not only allowed to but encouraged to scheme, plot, and screw over their fellow vampires. Be careful when you do, however: Cities will be player-controlled, and with the inclusion of perma-death, your actions could lead to very dire consequences.
Unlike some of the other games on this list, World of Darkness falls to slow development due to higher priorities on other projects. There is no release date for World of Darkness as of this writing.
1. Archeage
If you haven’t heard of Archeage, many sandbox MMO fans will be happy to fill you in on how the game is the next coming of God. As one user put it, Archeage is all about doing whatever you want to progress. You can build your own house, build ships, plant crops, chop down trees and replant them, craft, sell your wares, engage in combat, form your own country, and a whole lot more I can’t even get into. Without a doubt, XLGames has the sandbox community frothing at the mouth waiting for a notice on western release.
Unfortunately, there is no real concrete date on when that will happen. While Archeage aims to launch in Korea late this year, XLGames has yet to come up with a western publisher. While the aim is to get Archeage into western hands by early 2014, there is no guarantee that the game will be localized and ready for launch by that point.
Shadowrun Online has only 7 days left and $250,000 in funding to raise, so Cliffhanger Productions has released a video describing how each class sees the world.
Early next year, Funcom plans on integrating the single server technology from The Secret World into Age of Conan. In the announcement, Funcom revealed that while it may be possible to merge the different rule sets into one server, the game’s antiquated technology prevents North American and European players from interacting with one another. With the long road ahead until the single mega-server technology is fully integrated and ready to roll out, Funcom has begun announcing server mergers to get the community ready.
On August 7th, the US servers Set and Wicana will be merged into one server: Set. The next day, the EU will see its servers Mitra and Asgard merged into one: Mitra. Characters will keep their names on the basis of activity, level (if both active), registration (if same level), and last login (if registered same month). After the server merge has taken place, characters will be given a free transfer that can be used cross-ruleset (but not cross-region) good for one month. You can read more at the server FAQ below.
MMO Fallout 