Earlier this year, Jagex introduced Squeal of Fortune, a daily gambling mini-game where players use tickets to spin for anything from experience boosts, gold, limited availability items, and even high end armor and weapons. Since its release, Squeal of Fortune has been expanded to include exclusive rare items, and Jagex has opened the shop to players to purchase spins with real money. At the time, this raised concerns that Jagex had plans to open a cash shop.
Around now would be where those same people will message their friends and say “I told you so.” Today Jagex released Soloman’s Shop, introducing a fully fledged cash shop into RuneScape. With its initial launch, Jagex will only offer purely cosmetic items for sale. Players are able to buy cosmetic outfits, new “enhanced” animations, emotes, titles, and more. The shop is run on Runecoins, which can be purchased at the price of $4.99 per 200 points, with higher purchases receiving bonus coins similar to Squeal of Fortune with free spins. Items range widely in price, up to 900 for a banner that tells everyone how awesome you are, and 1620 for a complete pack of assassin outfits and emotes.
Members can redeem 200 points for free for the time being, and also receive a 10% discount on items purchased through the store. Free players are not so lucky, however they do have access to the Solomon’s Store.
Note: This is a beta preview. All details are subject to change before the update goes live.
If I had one word to describe the RuneScape combat upgrade, it would be overwhelming. I don’t even know where to start with this preview, so buckle yourself in and let’s get rolling. RuneScape’s combat system has, for the most part, remained unchanged since RuneScape 2 launched in 2004. Updates over the years have attempted to bring in changes, from set effects, special attacks, and most recently absorption and health boosts, but these have been minor and unsubstantial in the overall scheme of things. Over the years, much of the older equipment has become outdated, obsolete, and as a result: Unused. So with the Evolution of Combat update, Jagex is overhauling both player equipment, abilities, and mobs to bring RuneScape’s combat system into 2012.
The combat level system has been reworked to sport a level cap of 200 over the current 138. Likewise, the mobs you find around the world have been given the same treatment, altering their combat level to more accurately portray their power. The combat level change comes with a drawback, however, as creatures that are far lower level than you (30+) will give reduced experience, or no experience at all. Thankfully this experience reduction does not transfer to slayer tasks.
Health is now wildly different than it was under the old system. HP has been exponentially increased to the point where, at later levels, your health can extend well over ten thousand. Your maximum health is now determined by a combination of constitution level, the health boost of the armor you are wearing, and any other temporary boosts offered through in-game activities. To reflect this change, food has also had a drastic makeover to dynamically alter its healing properties based on your constitution level. To keep the system balanced, however, lower level players will find that high level food scales down to offer a more appropriate healing for their level.
If you have any familiarity with MMOs, the new RuneScape system should come as a very familiar game. Abilities are activated by pressing their corresponding buttons or clicking on the ability bar/book, and encompass everything from instant damage, damage over time, area of effect, etc. The defense abilities, for instance, are dedicated to preventing and offsetting damage, while the constitution book is more based in recovering health. Regardless of your choice of combat style (Melee, Ranged, Magic), just about the same options are available for the picking, while defensive abilities are more universal.
New Vs Old
I’m going to use the word overwhelming again to describe coming into this new update as a decently high level player. If you have ever played an MMO beta that allowed you to create a max-level character, you’ll know the feeling. Rather than enjoying the smooth ride that would have been leveling up, I instead found myself spending well over an hour comparing stats, weapon requirements, effects, etc. Perhaps it would have been better to start anew, but I had neither the time nor patience to endure RuneScape’s long grind to level.
Right now, the Evolution of Combat has a lot of work ahead of it. Currently combat is far too heavily reliant on the use of the ability bar, a change which the community has not reacted positively to. In response, Jagex has promised that future updates to the beta will put less focus on button mashing the ability bar. Additionally, a new feature which lowers the experience gained for creatures much lower level than the player’s current combat level is being tweaked, and possibly removed in a future update.
Bonus XP weekends may be on their way out in RuneScape. While well intended in nature, the events tend to play hell with the economy, with the prices of goods spiking from the time of announcement until the event, with prices of finished goods crashing afterward as players flood the market with millions of crafted items. Not that this means the end of bonus experience events. Jagex occasionally releases special items which boost xp in activities, which will likely fully replace the weekend events.
With an economy heavily focused around the manufacturing and selling of player-crafted goods, RuneScape sits on a different pedestal where a weekend event like the one Jagex has run for the past few years could be more detrimental than helpful. Only time will tell as to how Jagex will replace the current bonus weekend system.
Planetside 2 is still some ways off, but that doesn’t mean players can’t take part in the beta test. If you’ve been following Sony Online Entertainment for the past few months, you’ll know that Planetside players and those who purchased PC Gamer or went to the booth at E3 will have priority access to the Planetside 2 beta. Matt Higby appeared on the Planetside Universe forums to announce that external testing will kick off sometime this week, and that players will be let in as they are needed.
However, Higby also reminded the community that this is indeed a beta test, not a free game demo.
Beta testing is a critically important part of our development cycle on this project, we may be asking you to only play on tanks for a play session, or only play aircraft. We are doing true beta testing, not just a game demo and we implore those of you who are invited to understand and respect that. Things will break, the server will be unavailable sometimes, we will cancel scheduled tests when we find something that breaks before the test starts. All of this will help us make a better final game.
With more and more MMO developers using their betas as little more than publicity stunts, it is a breath of fresh air to see someone using them for their intended purpose: testing. Planetside 2 launches in the future.
It is that time of the year again! Blizzard was once again out and about and ready to give. Blizzard auctioned off two thousand original World of Warcraft server blades, with the proceeds to go to St. Jude Children’s Hospital. Well the final tallies are in, and Blizzard has raised $330,000.
“Each winner in this auction will own a small monument to those collective experiences. The best part is that this auction benefits a great charity doing tremendous work in helping children from the U.S. and around the world.”
Blizzard holds regular charities in World of Warcraft with benefits toward the Red Cross, Children’s Hospital, Make-a-Wish Foundation, and more.
It’s sale time, so get out your wallet and replace the next month’s meals with Ramen because this year is looking fantastic. Right now there aren’t many deals in the MMO realm to speak of, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get in the fun! Check out the current sales below. Remember, as always, prices are in USD and may vary by region. MMO Fallout does not guarantee that items are not region locked, so please read carefully before making your purchase.
Phantasy Star Online 2 was released recently in Japan, and comes to the west in early 2013, and the hackers have already started taking control. This week players managed to hack into the MMO and played a prank by moving NPCs around and out of reach of gamers. Sega claims that they are investigating the hack and that no data was leaked in the process.
Phantasy Star Online has always had problems with security holes, from the original which could be hacked with Gameshark, to rampant item duping and other hacks. Unlike real MMOs, Phantasy Star Online runs many operations client-side, offering a major opportunity for players to make alterations with the way their client connects with the server. The NPC glitch above has reportedly been in the game since the beta first launched.
Bioware is committed to keeping server populations strong. Coinciding with their May announcement of massively increasing server capacity, Bioware has been very active in herding their population on to a select number of destination servers. In fact, Bioware wants you to transfer so much that they are handing out perks just for moving over your eligible characters. On the Old Republic Blog, Bioware has detailed plans to increase server transfers.
Later this summer, we’re taking steps to further strengthen destination server population. Ultimately, we are working to transition all players to designated destination servers in the Free Character Transfer Service.
Later on, servers will be merged anyway.
Later this summer, any remaining characters on selected origin servers will be automatically moved to designated destination servers. We will provide additional details regarding the automatic character transfer process at that time.
Just how many servers are being merged is yet to be seen, however Bioware has listed more than 100 North American and 80 European servers as “origin” servers, available for players to transfer off of with only twelve servers per region qualifying for the free transfer rewards program.
Richard Garriot is a topic of which I tend to butt heads with the community here at MMO Fallout, generally due to the poor handling of Tabula Rasa and Garriot’s departure from Ultima Online. More recently, Garriot set his sights on social networking with the announcement of Portalarium, which Garriot himself described in 2010 as:
“The Portalarium mission is exactly what I want to be doing next in games. This really takes me back to my roots in the game business – small development teams, low barriers to entry, affordable budgets for quality projects, and unlimited new interactive frontiers to explore together with our customers.”
Currently in the works for release this summer is Ultimate Collector on Facebook, tasking players with running a garage sale and decorating their home with the proceeds. Garriot’s company Portalarium has received a $7 million investment from a number of firms, including M8 Capital, FF Angel, BHV Venture Capital, among others. The money from Ultimate Collector will be used to speed up development of Ultimate RPG, the spiritual successor to the Ultima series that may or may not actually be set in the Ultima world.
“We are grateful for the confidence m8 Capital and Founders Fund have placed in our team and we believe gamers will ultimately reap the benefits from this partnership when they get a chance to play Ultimate Collector and see the unique mobile and social games that we are creating at Portalarium.”
-Richard Garriot
Ultimate Collector is set for release later this summer, with Ultimate RPG on the horizon.
Vanguard goes free to play this summer, and recently Sony Online Entertainment released the prerequisite membership matrix, detailing what players would receive for free or be required to pay for. Several of the restrictions have players up in arms, and in response Sony is giving consideration to altering several of the conditions on free accounts. Vanguard’s customer relations has set up a thread in the Vanguard forums with the hopes of hammering out a new F2P Matrix.
