RuneScape: Members Trial Much More Likely


If you had asked me one year ago if RuneScape should have a members trial, I might have said no. Not that such a program wouldn’t be beneficial, but that the rampant amount of cheaters that plagued the game at the time would use the opportunity for free membership, no matter how short, to bot more valuable members items and upend the economy even more. Now that the bots are no longer an issue, there isn’t much of a reason not to allow free players to experience membership.

Not to say that RuneScape’s free version is low quality, but the skills accessible to free players are (for the most part) a far cry from the variety offered in membership. Of the twenty five skills, free players can access sixteen. Seven of those skills are combat related (Attack, strength, defense, constitution, magic, ranged, and prayer). Of the remaining nine, three (woodcutting, fishing, mining) are basic harvesting skills, five (runecrafting, crafting, firemaking, smithing, cooking) are processing skills that revolve around taking raw materials to a place and using them on a thing to create finished stuff, with Dungeoneering bringing up the rear as a combination of all of the above in a secluded area.

Members, on the other hand, is quite a different game to its free to play brother. Weapons and equipment sets with special effects add a whole new level of strategy to combat, as do potions, poisons, curses, new magic books. Skills like summoning can dramatically alter a person’s experience from combat to simple resource gathering. Farming requires time management and mobility while slayer introduces the player to combat that requires more strategy than fight, fight, eat food, kill.

In 2010, Jagex did attempt a membership trial for a week in July, but the program was bogged down by a few unfriendly details. Players were required to submit credit card details, which was charged for $5.95 and set the player up with an automatically recurring subscription. Only if the player unsubscribed during those seven days would the deposit be refunded.

To Jagex’s defense, and as I’ve already said, an unrestricted membership trial at the time would have upended the RuneScape economy table, riddling the members worlds with even more bots than were already present. With the bots absent, there isn’t much reason for Jagex to not offer a taste of membership to free players.

Other than that I have no opinion.

Who Should Publish Dark Millennium Online?


Although Dark Millennium Online was not cancelled, as per the false report circulated late last year, at the time we were given some rather uncertain news that the game was on uneven ground and that there was nothing set in stone. When THQ published its earnings report for the third quarter of 2011, they mentioned that Dark Millennium Online would be taking a more cautious approach.

Gamasutra reports that in an investor conference call, Brian Farrell (CEO) has revealed that THQ is seeking a partner for distribution, and that THQ cannot afford to publish the game by itself.  Of course, a developer hiring a third party publish an MMO is hardly surprising, even more so for a company like THQ that has seen better financial times.

(Source: Gamasutra)

TERA Previews Coming Soon


Moving with MMO Fallout’s commitment for expanding our medium, I’ve committed to producing more video features. While I will not have access to the TERA sneak peek this weekend, reportedly neither the sneak peek or beta tests will be covered by a non disclosure agreement, meaning MMO Fallout will be publishing several TERA previews, both in video and text over the course of the closed beta period.

Stay tuned for more information.

MMO FALLOUT Has A New Home!


Dearest MMO Fallout fans,

It is with great pleasure that I bring you the last post that will ever appear on mmofallout.wordpress.com. As of today, MMO Fallout has moved to the exact same address. Yes, all you have to do is continue heading to mmofallout.com to get your daily fix. The difference? We are no longer hosted on wordpress.com, and have a far more open future than we had before. This news post is primarily for our email subscribers, you will have to desubscribe from mmofallout.wordpress.com and resubscribe on the new website. Sorry!

I’m looking forward to a great year on the new host, and hopefully you will all come along with me.

Falling Out #11: Global Servers


This happens at least once on every global game I play, at least one person demanding that everyone speak English.

Hellgate Global: Status Update and Ticket Prices


Back in July, I talked about how players can get access to Hellgate Global’s Act 3 ticket and Tokyo expansion without paying a dime by paying for the tickets on the in-game auction house. At the time, the tickets only cost a few hundred thousand palladium. In September, I updated the post with another update: The prices for act 3 tickets amounted to around 450,000 palladium, with the Tokyo ticket around half of that.

I checked in on the ticket prices, and not only have prices skyrocketed, the amount of available tickets has gone down to just a few choices. I checked the auction house at 7:30pm on February 1st and found only one Act 3 ticket on sale and a handful of Tokyo expansion tickets on sale. At these prices, it might be easier to just throw down the seven dollars in real cash to buy the tickets from the cash shop.

The Old Republic: 1.7 Million Subscribers


Many years ago, I could provide you with hard subscriber facts because companies were actually able to reveal them. Today, thanks to investors and “trade secrets,” we generally have to settle for vague statements of growth, decline, or breaking even. Actually, these days World of Warcraft is one of the few developers left that come straight out and give base number of subscribers, while NCSoft goes into a detailed breakdown on sales figures per title rather than subscriber numbers.

Since plenty of people have called for the imminent death of The Old Republic, Electronic Arts has eased our pain and suffering of needing to know everything by revealing that The Old Republic has sold over two million copies with 1.7 million subscribers (1 million concurrent), or a retention rate of between 80 and 85 percent. Despite the level of vitriol on certain websites, Origin accounted for 40% of those sales.

You can find an interview below at Darth Hater.

(Via: Darth Hater)

Bigpoint: 250 Million Registered Accounts


Bigpoint Games notoriously has a big mouth when it comes to pointing out their accomplishments, and despite the objections of some of the gaming community over the publisher’s very blatant and self-noted pay-for-advantage model, the company continues to post major profits and major user numbers. Today, the publisher announced that their portfolio of over 60 games has brought in more than 250 million registered accounts. That’s enough accounts for around 3% of the world’s population to have an account.

As I’ve said before, Bigpoint has been consistently up front about selling power in their games, and very successfully at that. The developer raked in revenues of $200 million in 2010, and that number continues to grow as they add more titles to their lineup.

(Source: Bigpoint press release)

Perpetuum: When One Person Can Ruin Everyone's Fun


I’ve talked about disgruntled customers in the past, and once or twice about how occasionally those people happen to have access to say intimate knowledge of SQL database exploits or how to launch denial of service attacks, not that the latter requires much technical prowess. To make matters worse, while large businesses require denial of service attacks on an equally large scale, for smaller developers it often doesn’t take much to knock the website/game offline or to at least put a dent in the service’s stability.

Here at MMO Fallout, we love Perpetuum Online and most indie MMOs for that matter. So when an alleged disgruntled ex-player allegedly starts a denial of service attack against the game servers, we take notice. Dev Gargaj posted the following on Perpetuum’s forums:

Now, I’ll say this first that I’m not a network expert so my conclusions might be wrong but here’s how I saw the situation: Every now and then the login-server would get a huge (sometimes up to 80MB/s, though I suppose this includes TCP/IP overhead) burst of external traffic for about 15 minutes or so, and then it would go back to normal. I did some testing with a variety of network tools, and found out that the traffic is mostly aimed at port 139 (NetBIOS) which we have firewalled out, but still it would cause such a network congestion that it’d cause some connections to time out. This traffic came from thousands of endpoints all over the world, including countries where we have no (awareness of) players from (Peru, Egypt, etc.).

In short, from what I can deduce with my fairly modest knowledge about networks, we just got DDOS’d. Because our cluster works with a login server (which is a single point of failure), we were sitting ducks. Our firewall, on inspection (and contrary what I may have been saying earlier) was configured just fine, but the network itself became a bottleneck for the incoming traffic, something we couldn’t do anything about.

The announcement was posted on the 19th of January, but reportedly the attacks have been ongoing since then. Again, it’s worth noting that there isn’t any hard evidence that this is the work of a disgruntled player, but that the theory is merely speculation considering how targeted the attacks are (attacking specifically the login server rather than the cluster as a whole). Players are reporting instances of not being able to log in, and several Perpetuum traffic tracking services have been disabled without explanation (that I have found).

Still, one of the benefits of a game like Perpetuum is the community’s ability to stand together and draw swords against a common threat, against the attacker rather than the victim. Take for instance from another thread on the Perpetuum forums, Lupus Aurelius.

Also, if indeed this is due to a disgruntled player/explayer, we also need to send a clear message that no matter what they do, we will not waiver in support of Perpetuum and the DEVs, and that NO EXTERNAL ACTION BY ANYONE WILL CAUSE US TO EITHER CEASE PLAYING OR CAUSE US NOT TO RESUB! 

NO ONE, WHATEVER THEIR GRIEVANCE, HAS THE RIGHT TO DENY US OUR RIGHT TO CONTINUE TO ENJOY PERPETUUM!

They may take our bandwidth, but they’ll never take our freedom! As Lupus points out in the thread, any information regarding who might be behind these attacks should be reported directly to the development team at Perpetuum Online.

Perpetuum: When One Person Can Ruin Everyone’s Fun


I’ve talked about disgruntled customers in the past, and once or twice about how occasionally those people happen to have access to say intimate knowledge of SQL database exploits or how to launch denial of service attacks, not that the latter requires much technical prowess. To make matters worse, while large businesses require denial of service attacks on an equally large scale, for smaller developers it often doesn’t take much to knock the website/game offline or to at least put a dent in the service’s stability.

Here at MMO Fallout, we love Perpetuum Online and most indie MMOs for that matter. So when an alleged disgruntled ex-player allegedly starts a denial of service attack against the game servers, we take notice. Dev Gargaj posted the following on Perpetuum’s forums:

Now, I’ll say this first that I’m not a network expert so my conclusions might be wrong but here’s how I saw the situation: Every now and then the login-server would get a huge (sometimes up to 80MB/s, though I suppose this includes TCP/IP overhead) burst of external traffic for about 15 minutes or so, and then it would go back to normal. I did some testing with a variety of network tools, and found out that the traffic is mostly aimed at port 139 (NetBIOS) which we have firewalled out, but still it would cause such a network congestion that it’d cause some connections to time out. This traffic came from thousands of endpoints all over the world, including countries where we have no (awareness of) players from (Peru, Egypt, etc.).

In short, from what I can deduce with my fairly modest knowledge about networks, we just got DDOS’d. Because our cluster works with a login server (which is a single point of failure), we were sitting ducks. Our firewall, on inspection (and contrary what I may have been saying earlier) was configured just fine, but the network itself became a bottleneck for the incoming traffic, something we couldn’t do anything about.

The announcement was posted on the 19th of January, but reportedly the attacks have been ongoing since then. Again, it’s worth noting that there isn’t any hard evidence that this is the work of a disgruntled player, but that the theory is merely speculation considering how targeted the attacks are (attacking specifically the login server rather than the cluster as a whole). Players are reporting instances of not being able to log in, and several Perpetuum traffic tracking services have been disabled without explanation (that I have found).

Still, one of the benefits of a game like Perpetuum is the community’s ability to stand together and draw swords against a common threat, against the attacker rather than the victim. Take for instance from another thread on the Perpetuum forums, Lupus Aurelius.

Also, if indeed this is due to a disgruntled player/explayer, we also need to send a clear message that no matter what they do, we will not waiver in support of Perpetuum and the DEVs, and that NO EXTERNAL ACTION BY ANYONE WILL CAUSE US TO EITHER CEASE PLAYING OR CAUSE US NOT TO RESUB! 

NO ONE, WHATEVER THEIR GRIEVANCE, HAS THE RIGHT TO DENY US OUR RIGHT TO CONTINUE TO ENJOY PERPETUUM!

They may take our bandwidth, but they’ll never take our freedom! As Lupus points out in the thread, any information regarding who might be behind these attacks should be reported directly to the development team at Perpetuum Online.