Why Aren't You Playing: Star Wars: The Old Republic


Too many colons in the title! During the time Bioware wasn’t busy absorbing every sub-developer of Electronic Arts, the company was busy working away at their first and arguably one of the most risky entrances into the MMO genre. The Old Republic is the labor of love of a company that has never put out an MMO, let alone having not developed a multi-player game since 2002. But with the announcement of The Old Republic, at least we knew that Bioware would be consistent, and that we could expect heavy voice acting, a whole load of plot and subplots, and an incredible soundtrack.

I’ve found that The Old Republic is best played as Bioware once referred to it: Knights of the Old Republic 3, but online in a persistent world. The Old Republic is heavily instanced, and while that is for good reasoning, it’s a bit obnoxious when you walk into each city and see a number of buildings that cannot be entered because they are locked by class or by level. However, as it stands, all personal story-related buildings are instanced to ensure that the player is able to immerse themselves, and that means no entry if you have no business there. Still, the game does its best to present a compelling and immersive world, with your companion making comments in various areas of the map.

The first thing you’ll notice is the game’s voice acting, more so its very impressive quantity. Everyone has voice acting, and every quest you take, big or small, has a full dialog tree to accompany it. As with the KOTOR series, you are given the choice from time to time to go down the light or darkside path, which can mean continuing diplomacy or simply halting the conversation and murdering some NPCs. Where Bioware continues their trend of deep plot twists is in the sense that while your choices are split between dark and light side, your goals often are not. For example, the light side path may tell you to report your quest giver to the Republic for smuggling goods, but that means having a good friend arrested. On the Imperial side, while your Sith Trooper may want to just kill everyone in his path, often times the Empire would rather you left a few alive to bring back for interrogation. The points go into your light side/dark side pool, and unlock equipment as you gain ranks.

As far as game play goes, expect nothing particularly groundbreaking. Your story carries you through clearly defined hubs, from planet to planet as you level up. If you’ve played an MMO before, you know the procedure of entering a new hub, gathering all of the quests that send you conveniently in the same general areas, and turn them in until there are no more quests and your main story arc leads you somewhere else. The pain of this grind is lessened a lot by the inclusion of a story that will actually interest you. No more reading a long piece of text (and by that I of course mean slamming the “accept” button), and if you really don’t care about the story, the cutscenes can be sped through by holding down the spacebar.

In combat, The Old Republic follows the prime directive of hotkeys, with the notable exception of no auto-attack function, and this is where The Old Republic is falling short. While combat is functional and hardly a deal breaker, it is sluggish and slow to react. Again, not to a game breaking extent and one that Bioware should be able to patch, but enough that it is easily noticed and in high-intensity situations where you are attacking groups of five, six, or seven mobs, can be quite aggravating. Couple the inherent system and throw in if you are experiencing latency problems, and you have a recipe for button mashing. The fact that you always have a companion available allows for every class to be competent without issue. For instance, my smuggler is a damage dealer and healer while my companion is a tank. While he takes the punishment, I deal out damage and occasionally heal him.

Crafting is a hands-off component of the game, which some will enjoy and others will not. Players will wind up with three skills from an enormous list from three categories: Crafting, Mission, and Gathering. Gathering skills are what you find in other MMOs, nodes in the world that offer raw materials. Crafting is self-explanatory. Mission skills are where you send your companions on mini-quests to find resources. Each skill has respective suggested skills in other categories, so it’s best to choose three skills that fit together. All of the skills however, are leveled on a set it and forget it system, where you set up your crafting queue and then go about your business as your companion on board does his work. You can issue commands from anywhere, and the items are delivered directly into your inventory. Talk about convenient! In my case, the crafting is so hands off that I often find myself forgetting that it exists until the area I’ve entered has resource nodes that have outleveled my skill.

Why You Aren’t Playing Star Wars: The Old Republic

1.) Origin: You don’t need it, even if you order through Origin.com. As some of you know from my head start experiment, I ordered off of Origin.com, even with my intense loathing of EA’s Origin service. I never had to touch Origin once, as when I purchased the digital edition it sent me a link to download the client. Not once during the beta, head start, or live game did I ever have to touch Origin, and I placed this first on the list because I know how people feel about that platform.

2.) Space, where no one can hear you complain about how boring space is. I didn’t expect much out of The Old Republic’s starfighting for the same reason I never expected much out of Bioware’s previous game’s starfighting. Fighting in space is on rails, and was special for me for the first or second time I played through a mission. Sure, it looks pretty, but at the end of the day it’s just a mini-game. A fun mini-game for some, and even if you have absolutely no interest in space combat, you can easily pass these missions up.

3.) Again, Star Wars: The Old Republic breaks ground in storytelling, not combat. For players seeking a sandbox title, this is not the game you are looking for. If you don’t mind the traditional MMO approach of quest hubs, social areas, occasionally grouping up for heroic missions, flashpoints, and an endgame that revolves around player vs player combat and grinding for gear, you will find a lot to enjoy in The Old Republic. Even if you don’t enjoy the endgame grind, you can always start a new character and go through their individual story, skipping the repeated side-missions.

Bioware handled the launch of The Old Republic stunningly, between the staggered head start invitations and the servers specifically capped to even out the populations. There are some crippling bugs still in the game, including a few planets having problems with memory leaks. I can say for what it is worth that Bioware has been taking a very aggressive stance with releasing patches, at a rate of once every other day or so with varying degrees of extensive work, and regular maintenance on the servers themselves. There have been instances of one or two servers coming down for unscheduled maintenance, but these are usually fixed within an hour or two.

I know I say in every Why Aren’t You Playing that the title is worth looking into, but this is one of the few times I will extend that to paying the full $60 box price and a subscription. Take it from someone as cheap as I am, this is worth the cost. If you don’t like MMOs, do as I said earlier: Play it as if it is Knights of the Old Republic 3, ignore the social functions and heroic/flashpoint quests, and play for the story arcs. If Bioware plays their cards right, future expansions of The Old Republic could fulfill their desire of TOR being KOTOR 3,4,5,6,7, and beyond.

At the time of this writing, it is 4:00pm on Sunday, January 1st 2011. Of the servers online, there are 37 North American and 27 European servers listed as full, 31 NA and 23 EU servers listed as very heavy, 13 NA and 15 EU servers listed as heavy, 30 NA and 26 EU servers listed as Standard, and 13 NA servers listed as light.

Why Aren’t You Playing: Star Wars: The Old Republic


Too many colons in the title! During the time Bioware wasn’t busy absorbing every sub-developer of Electronic Arts, the company was busy working away at their first and arguably one of the most risky entrances into the MMO genre. The Old Republic is the labor of love of a company that has never put out an MMO, let alone having not developed a multi-player game since 2002. But with the announcement of The Old Republic, at least we knew that Bioware would be consistent, and that we could expect heavy voice acting, a whole load of plot and subplots, and an incredible soundtrack.

I’ve found that The Old Republic is best played as Bioware once referred to it: Knights of the Old Republic 3, but online in a persistent world. The Old Republic is heavily instanced, and while that is for good reasoning, it’s a bit obnoxious when you walk into each city and see a number of buildings that cannot be entered because they are locked by class or by level. However, as it stands, all personal story-related buildings are instanced to ensure that the player is able to immerse themselves, and that means no entry if you have no business there. Still, the game does its best to present a compelling and immersive world, with your companion making comments in various areas of the map.

The first thing you’ll notice is the game’s voice acting, more so its very impressive quantity. Everyone has voice acting, and every quest you take, big or small, has a full dialog tree to accompany it. As with the KOTOR series, you are given the choice from time to time to go down the light or darkside path, which can mean continuing diplomacy or simply halting the conversation and murdering some NPCs. Where Bioware continues their trend of deep plot twists is in the sense that while your choices are split between dark and light side, your goals often are not. For example, the light side path may tell you to report your quest giver to the Republic for smuggling goods, but that means having a good friend arrested. On the Imperial side, while your Sith Trooper may want to just kill everyone in his path, often times the Empire would rather you left a few alive to bring back for interrogation. The points go into your light side/dark side pool, and unlock equipment as you gain ranks.

As far as game play goes, expect nothing particularly groundbreaking. Your story carries you through clearly defined hubs, from planet to planet as you level up. If you’ve played an MMO before, you know the procedure of entering a new hub, gathering all of the quests that send you conveniently in the same general areas, and turn them in until there are no more quests and your main story arc leads you somewhere else. The pain of this grind is lessened a lot by the inclusion of a story that will actually interest you. No more reading a long piece of text (and by that I of course mean slamming the “accept” button), and if you really don’t care about the story, the cutscenes can be sped through by holding down the spacebar.

In combat, The Old Republic follows the prime directive of hotkeys, with the notable exception of no auto-attack function, and this is where The Old Republic is falling short. While combat is functional and hardly a deal breaker, it is sluggish and slow to react. Again, not to a game breaking extent and one that Bioware should be able to patch, but enough that it is easily noticed and in high-intensity situations where you are attacking groups of five, six, or seven mobs, can be quite aggravating. Couple the inherent system and throw in if you are experiencing latency problems, and you have a recipe for button mashing. The fact that you always have a companion available allows for every class to be competent without issue. For instance, my smuggler is a damage dealer and healer while my companion is a tank. While he takes the punishment, I deal out damage and occasionally heal him.

Crafting is a hands-off component of the game, which some will enjoy and others will not. Players will wind up with three skills from an enormous list from three categories: Crafting, Mission, and Gathering. Gathering skills are what you find in other MMOs, nodes in the world that offer raw materials. Crafting is self-explanatory. Mission skills are where you send your companions on mini-quests to find resources. Each skill has respective suggested skills in other categories, so it’s best to choose three skills that fit together. All of the skills however, are leveled on a set it and forget it system, where you set up your crafting queue and then go about your business as your companion on board does his work. You can issue commands from anywhere, and the items are delivered directly into your inventory. Talk about convenient! In my case, the crafting is so hands off that I often find myself forgetting that it exists until the area I’ve entered has resource nodes that have outleveled my skill.

Why You Aren’t Playing Star Wars: The Old Republic

1.) Origin: You don’t need it, even if you order through Origin.com. As some of you know from my head start experiment, I ordered off of Origin.com, even with my intense loathing of EA’s Origin service. I never had to touch Origin once, as when I purchased the digital edition it sent me a link to download the client. Not once during the beta, head start, or live game did I ever have to touch Origin, and I placed this first on the list because I know how people feel about that platform.

2.) Space, where no one can hear you complain about how boring space is. I didn’t expect much out of The Old Republic’s starfighting for the same reason I never expected much out of Bioware’s previous game’s starfighting. Fighting in space is on rails, and was special for me for the first or second time I played through a mission. Sure, it looks pretty, but at the end of the day it’s just a mini-game. A fun mini-game for some, and even if you have absolutely no interest in space combat, you can easily pass these missions up.

3.) Again, Star Wars: The Old Republic breaks ground in storytelling, not combat. For players seeking a sandbox title, this is not the game you are looking for. If you don’t mind the traditional MMO approach of quest hubs, social areas, occasionally grouping up for heroic missions, flashpoints, and an endgame that revolves around player vs player combat and grinding for gear, you will find a lot to enjoy in The Old Republic. Even if you don’t enjoy the endgame grind, you can always start a new character and go through their individual story, skipping the repeated side-missions.

Bioware handled the launch of The Old Republic stunningly, between the staggered head start invitations and the servers specifically capped to even out the populations. There are some crippling bugs still in the game, including a few planets having problems with memory leaks. I can say for what it is worth that Bioware has been taking a very aggressive stance with releasing patches, at a rate of once every other day or so with varying degrees of extensive work, and regular maintenance on the servers themselves. There have been instances of one or two servers coming down for unscheduled maintenance, but these are usually fixed within an hour or two.

I know I say in every Why Aren’t You Playing that the title is worth looking into, but this is one of the few times I will extend that to paying the full $60 box price and a subscription. Take it from someone as cheap as I am, this is worth the cost. If you don’t like MMOs, do as I said earlier: Play it as if it is Knights of the Old Republic 3, ignore the social functions and heroic/flashpoint quests, and play for the story arcs. If Bioware plays their cards right, future expansions of The Old Republic could fulfill their desire of TOR being KOTOR 3,4,5,6,7, and beyond.

At the time of this writing, it is 4:00pm on Sunday, January 1st 2011. Of the servers online, there are 37 North American and 27 European servers listed as full, 31 NA and 23 EU servers listed as very heavy, 13 NA and 15 EU servers listed as heavy, 30 NA and 26 EU servers listed as Standard, and 13 NA servers listed as light.

Mabinogi Celebrates New Year: Offline Indefinitely


Given the recent malicious activity that has been taking place in-game, it is with much disappointment that we announce that we will take the Mabinogi game service offline temporarily while we work to remedy these issues.

This isn’t the first time Nexon has shut down Mabinogi to combat real world trading and bots, they did it back in October for somewhere around a week. Not that hearing one of Nexon’s games having problems with real money trading and rampant botting is surprising, to say the least, but hearing that the publisher is making some tough decisions to eradicate the trouble makers is worth an ear.

Mabinogi went down yesterday before 7pm pacific with no estimated time to return. We will update with a new post when more information is available.

Please do know that we do not make this decision lightly.  In light of all the tickets and forum posts (which we do read) of this malicious activity, we feel that we have no choice but to take the game down in order to prevent any further malicious action.

(Source: Mabinogi Website)

Games To Watch Out For: NCSoft Edition


If there was ever a game to give Diablo 3 a run for its money, it is Lineage Eternal. Fully revealed late this year, Lineage Eternal brings players back to the days of Lineage with even more chaos and destruction. We were treated to a fourteen minute video of pure gameplay, with cutscenes, massive battles, and showcasing the game’s physics and destruction engine. With the success of Lineage and Lineage II, especially in the Korean markets, Lineage Eternal looks to bring back the days of dealing destruction on a massive scale.

We eagerly await more Lineage Eternal information in the coming year.

Do I need to elaborate? Guild Wars promises to give something everyone can enjoy, from the hardcore player vs player to the MMO fan who simply wants an open world to explore. Arenanet promises to build a dynamic world without subscriptions or heavy grind, world PvP, and the ripple effect. In the case of dynamic events, considerably similar to the public quests of Warhammer Online but on a much larger scale, the actions of players will determine in what direction each phase of the dynamic events move.

Guild Wars has a very strong following of gamers, like it or not, and will prove to be among the biggest releases of 2012.

 

Games To Watch Out For In 2012


2011 was more a year of free to play conversions than new games releasing, but 2012 is looking to be quite an interesting year. Jagex is set to release their second MMO, TERA may finally come to the west, and Star Trek Online heads free to play in January.

Planetside 2 is the first big budget MMO to take the reigns of Planetside since, well, Planetside. While Hi-Rez studios works on the well anticipated Tribes Universe, Sony Online Entertainment this year will (hopefully) roll out the renovated, upgraded, and more efficient massive action shooter. Sony is promising even bigger battles, and has been showing off concept art and trailers left and right. In addition to satisfying Planetside fans, Planetside 2 also has something to offer us more traditional MMO gamers, the Forge Light engine. Sony is using the Forge Light engine to build Everquest Next, so Everquest fans will have a little piece of what they can expect when that MMO hits store shelves at some point in the distant future.

I thought I would be celebrating this with Stellar Dawn, but ever since Geoff Iddison announced back in 2009 that MechScape would be ready that year, I’ve been sitting patiently with my flags and goofy hat with the soda cans and straws hanging out for Jagex to finally come out and have two MMOs running at the same time. If anything else, I’m just interested if they can pull off supporting two MMOs at the same time. After all, their second major project, FunOrb, was more or less abandoned after two years when Jagex got tired with their new toy.

So Transformers is really getting my attention, especially since Jagex also has Stellar Dawn in development (which was supposed to release in 2011), making for three MMOs they will have running concurrently. As for Stellar Dawn, like I’ve said before, maybe they just lost interest after the high-cost cancellation of MechScape.

Star Vault Summons League of Extraordinary Investors For Meeting


The Board proposes that the AGM resolve in order to enable the Board to provide the company with working capital to authorize the Board, during the period until the next AGM, to decide on the issue of a maximum a number of shares and / or convertible bonds and / or warrants entitling to convert to each new subscription, or involves the issuance of a maximum a number of shares to an amount not to exceed 2 million…

Looking to buy stock in Star Vault? They are looking to sell. Announced in an investor’s email, Star Vault will be holding a meeting on January 13th to discuss and vote on the sale of up to 2 million more stocks in order to acquire more “working capital.” The board notes the obvious downside of issuing these stocks, namely that it will dilute the value for existing stockholders.

The measure requires two thirds of the board to vote yes before the new stocks can be sold.

(Source: Translated Release)

Eve Online: 350,000 Subscribers


Convincing an MMO developer to release their subscriber numbers is difficult, if not downright impossible. After all, since World of Warcraft came in and scooped up twelve million people, somehow players have decided to use the most popular MMO in existence as a benchmark for success. Still, Eve Online is one of the big players remaining on the pure subscription section, boasting three hundred thousand players a few years ago. Earlier this year, CCP pointed out after the hubbub over their in-game cash shop that Eve Online was still growing year over year.

In an email to past subscribers, CCP is offering a reactivation for the new years. In the email, they mention “Join CCP Games and the 350,000 subscribers of the Eve Community…” So much for the “Eve Online is dying” crowd.

Oh Joy, The Sony Hackers Are Back!


Apparently someone is nostalgic for seven months ago when Sony’s services on Playstation 3 and PC were offline for weeks on end after a hacker broke into the database and walked out with a cartload of personal data. Thankfully, in their usual fashion, the Denial of Service group Anonymous has released a video in advance, warning Sony of an impending assault on their servers over the company’s support of SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) which is being heavily criticized for claims that it infringes on first amendment rights and will cause even more stability and less security on the internet.

Does Sony support SOPA? This is the fun part, they don’t. All three console manufacturers (Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft) pulled their support of SOPA after heavy public backlash, although Sony is technically part of the Entertainment Software Association, who do still support SOPA. I suppose being right “in a manner of speaking” is still better than rushing out of the starting line with your shoes tied.

With luck, Sony still has the phone numbers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from the last time. Looking forward to the arrest articles.

Eleven Things I Hated About 2011: 2011 Edition


Going into this article, I assumed I’d have trouble lowering my list to eleven items. Truth be told, I actually had more trouble filling this list than I did culling an even larger list. It must be my power of 20/20 hindsight to look at events of the past and think “well that actually didn’t affect me as much as I thought it did.” I also didn’t want the list to be too focused on this website, too specific towards any games but not too broad. In the end, something happened, and this is what popped out.
  1. Rebuilding My Backups: I have no backups of any images from MMO Fallout prior to March of 2011 (I’m spitballing a date), because my hard drive crashed. Since then, I’ve taken the intelligent route of storing my images on a flash drive, of which I have backed up on another flash drive. At some point this year, I will have to transfer my folder for MMO Fallout to a larger flash drive because it currently takes up 600 megabytes of my one gigabyte disk. That is just images, and isn’t even my backup of the actual database itself.
  2. Spam Writers Became More Intelligent: The spam writers are becoming rather intelligent, and for a few months back in September actually started reading my articles and writing appropriate responses. Take for example, I wrote an article in October about the Playstation Vita being viable for MMOs. Now, I always read through the comments Akismet marks as spam but doesn’t immediately delete, and I found one that said simply “Playing an MMO on the Vita, especially with 3G turned on, would kill the device’s battery life.” I actually un-flagged the comment and was in the process of approving it when I noticed in the website box was a URL for an offshore pharmacy website. So touche, spammers.
  3. Targeted By Jaded Gamers: I don’t mean physically. This year I noticed a new trend. Whenever I appeared on Massively.com, or MMORPG.com, or Tobold’s Blog or any other website far more popular than I am, there was a notable increase in attempts to steal any account associated with my email address. Email, gaming accounts, Steam, NCSoft, even an attempt to break into my student loan account. What is it about gaming that spurs people into thinking to themselves “this guy has an opinion I don’t agree with. I should…steal his RuneScape gold and armor!” Just a point of interest to anyone who tries this again in the future: Requesting a password reset email sends the email to my email address, not yours.
  4. Darkfall 2010: Or Darkfall 2.0, or Darkfall 2011, or Darkfall 2012, whatever you want to call it. Players of Darkfall have been reasonably annoyed this past year by the lack of information from Aventurine as to whether or not a wipe in some form will occur when the game goes live. Now, Aventurine has not commented on whether or not a wipe will take place because they claim that they don’t know themselves if they will need to wipe in some fashion. Darkfall 2.0 is still a long ways away, and granted some of the community is taking Aventurine’s lack of response as a confirmation and unsubscribing now to avoid having about a year of grinding be pulled out from underneath them.
  5. Project V13 Has No Hope: Project V13 falls on my list of games that pain me to talk about. On one hand, if Interplay wins I have high doubts that we will ever see the title released. On the other hand, if Bethesda wins it means that they will be developing the MMO and the varying quantity of bugs in Bethesda’s single player games leaves me with nothing but quantified concern.
  6. Babying Cheaters: I couldn’t help but notice a number of MMOs babying their cheaters this year, not that it occurred in any larger quantity than years past. Developers like Jagex who stopped permanently banning botted accounts, instead simply rolling back stats and items gained. Sony, who had warned cheaters that they were on their last warning, before following up with a few temporary suspensions.
  7. I Wanted More Indie: Bigpoint Games, despite my repeated shots to the kidneys, was kind enough to add me on to their press release mailing list (thank you, Lucianne). I love independent MMOs, and I’ve supported almost all of them by buying copies even if I didn’t have much intention on actually playing the game, but I can never get their developers to talk to me. I guess when your company is smaller than my extended family, everyone is too busy to talk to the bloggers. Still, I manage to keep on good terms with the developers I do know.
  8. I Have No Intention on Culling The List: I know I promised this earlier this year. MMO Fallout is getting huge, and at some point in 2012. We have 52 currently running games listed and 27 games still in development listed, and many of them are not receiving the love they deserve. That being said, I have no plans on combating this by de-listing games, rather in 2012 one of my resolutions is to pay more attention to them.
  9. Another Year, No MMO Calender: Back in 2010, I posted an article that the 2011 MMO Calender was cancelled. It hasn’t come back this year either.
  10. Altering New Player Promotions: I’m a bit of a completionist, which is slang for I want one of everything. So every now and then I have to add things to my list titled “not to be considered for 100% completion.” When I played World of Warcraft, this meant items given exclusively at BlizzCon, and more recently retailer-specific promotional items. More recently, however, I’ve noticed a small trend to offer new items to new accounts, that cannot be obtained by current accounts. Do I need to pull out the Ally Bank ice cream commercial?
  11. Massive Action Game Needs A Category: Seriously, who is running this dump?

Eleven Things I Hated About 2011: 2011 Edition


Going into this article, I assumed I’d have trouble lowering my list to eleven items. Truth be told, I actually had more trouble filling this list than I did culling an even larger list. It must be my power of 20/20 hindsight to look at events of the past and think “well that actually didn’t affect me as much as I thought it did.” I also didn’t want the list to be too focused on this website, too specific towards any games but not too broad. In the end, something happened, and this is what popped out.
  1. Rebuilding My Backups: I have no backups of any images from MMO Fallout prior to March of 2011 (I’m spitballing a date), because my hard drive crashed. Since then, I’ve taken the intelligent route of storing my images on a flash drive, of which I have backed up on another flash drive. At some point this year, I will have to transfer my folder for MMO Fallout to a larger flash drive because it currently takes up 600 megabytes of my one gigabyte disk. That is just images, and isn’t even my backup of the actual database itself.
  2. Spam Writers Became More Intelligent: The spam writers are becoming rather intelligent, and for a few months back in September actually started reading my articles and writing appropriate responses. Take for example, I wrote an article in October about the Playstation Vita being viable for MMOs. Now, I always read through the comments Akismet marks as spam but doesn’t immediately delete, and I found one that said simply “Playing an MMO on the Vita, especially with 3G turned on, would kill the device’s battery life.” I actually un-flagged the comment and was in the process of approving it when I noticed in the website box was a URL for an offshore pharmacy website. So touche, spammers.
  3. Targeted By Jaded Gamers: I don’t mean physically. This year I noticed a new trend. Whenever I appeared on Massively.com, or MMORPG.com, or Tobold’s Blog or any other website far more popular than I am, there was a notable increase in attempts to steal any account associated with my email address. Email, gaming accounts, Steam, NCSoft, even an attempt to break into my student loan account. What is it about gaming that spurs people into thinking to themselves “this guy has an opinion I don’t agree with. I should…steal his RuneScape gold and armor!” Just a point of interest to anyone who tries this again in the future: Requesting a password reset email sends the email to my email address, not yours.
  4. Darkfall 2010: Or Darkfall 2.0, or Darkfall 2011, or Darkfall 2012, whatever you want to call it. Players of Darkfall have been reasonably annoyed this past year by the lack of information from Aventurine as to whether or not a wipe in some form will occur when the game goes live. Now, Aventurine has not commented on whether or not a wipe will take place because they claim that they don’t know themselves if they will need to wipe in some fashion. Darkfall 2.0 is still a long ways away, and granted some of the community is taking Aventurine’s lack of response as a confirmation and unsubscribing now to avoid having about a year of grinding be pulled out from underneath them.
  5. Project V13 Has No Hope: Project V13 falls on my list of games that pain me to talk about. On one hand, if Interplay wins I have high doubts that we will ever see the title released. On the other hand, if Bethesda wins it means that they will be developing the MMO and the varying quantity of bugs in Bethesda’s single player games leaves me with nothing but quantified concern.
  6. Babying Cheaters: I couldn’t help but notice a number of MMOs babying their cheaters this year, not that it occurred in any larger quantity than years past. Developers like Jagex who stopped permanently banning botted accounts, instead simply rolling back stats and items gained. Sony, who had warned cheaters that they were on their last warning, before following up with a few temporary suspensions.
  7. I Wanted More Indie: Bigpoint Games, despite my repeated shots to the kidneys, was kind enough to add me on to their press release mailing list (thank you, Lucianne). I love independent MMOs, and I’ve supported almost all of them by buying copies even if I didn’t have much intention on actually playing the game, but I can never get their developers to talk to me. I guess when your company is smaller than my extended family, everyone is too busy to talk to the bloggers. Still, I manage to keep on good terms with the developers I do know.
  8. I Have No Intention on Culling The List: I know I promised this earlier this year. MMO Fallout is getting huge, and at some point in 2012. We have 52 currently running games listed and 27 games still in development listed, and many of them are not receiving the love they deserve. That being said, I have no plans on combating this by de-listing games, rather in 2012 one of my resolutions is to pay more attention to them.
  9. Another Year, No MMO Calender: Back in 2010, I posted an article that the 2011 MMO Calender was cancelled. It hasn’t come back this year either.
  10. Altering New Player Promotions: I’m a bit of a completionist, which is slang for I want one of everything. So every now and then I have to add things to my list titled “not to be considered for 100% completion.” When I played World of Warcraft, this meant items given exclusively at BlizzCon, and more recently retailer-specific promotional items. More recently, however, I’ve noticed a small trend to offer new items to new accounts, that cannot be obtained by current accounts. Do I need to pull out the Ally Bank ice cream commercial?
  11. Massive Action Game Needs A Category: Seriously, who is running this dump?