MMO Fallout

I told you I’d eventually hit the Sunday deadline for Week in Review. I’ve found through MMO Fallout the deadlines I set for myself often conflict with what I’ve heard referred to as a “lack of respect for authority and tendency toward inappropriate analogies.” Personally I equate the situation more to the first few seasons of House, where the producers made numerous attempts, and failed, to provide a running antagonist for the show. The issue at hand was that the viewer knew House would never be fired, taken to jail, die, or otherwise be removed from the show. After all, the show is named House.

For a while I considered handing the reigns to MMO Fallout to another person, as a clerical manner first and foremost with no real notable effect on the website itself (aside from increased productivity). You can hopefully understand my reasoning for not doing so. So instead, I’ve dedicated more time to working and producing articles and pieces, again working on video features at some point.

1. Jagex Rebuilding Trust In The Community

Originally I wanted this spot to talk about Jagex’s upcoming convention show: Runefest 2011. In Jagex’s advertising for the event, they mention a chat about bot busting, including offering a platform for people to inject their ideas for fighting gold farmers and cheaters, as well as laying out some of their plans for the future of the game. What really caught my eye was a tweet from Gregg Baker, which I retweeted today.

Lots of strategy meetings this morning. Today is the first day we rebuild trust in the community!

I am personally interested in seeing where this goes, as Jagex’s relationship with their community has always been up and down. With issues from rampant cheating and gold farming, to Jagex’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for Stellar Dawn and corruption and incompetence in the player moderator group. No one hopes more than me that this isn’t just another PR move with no motion behind it, as Jagex has been known to pull in the past.

2. Why Were People Unsure About The Old Republic’s Subscription Fee?

Now that Bioware has officially confirmed the price of The Old Republic’s subscription, the threads have died out. That being said, did anyone honestly believe that Bioware would charge anything other than the traditional cost ($15 USD) depending on your region? I can’t even begin to count how many threads I encountered on various boards proclaiming “I won’t buy this game until Bioware confirms a monthly cost.”

For EA to charge more than $15 would be suicide for the MMO. For them to charge less than $15 would be a delightful change from the norm. Given the enormous nature (and cost of development) for The Old Republic, it was safe to assume from the start that the game would carry a traditional monthly fee.

3. Hellgate Meets Tokyo

And now my promotions for Hellgate Global are out of date. T3fun has released the Tokyo expansion for Hellgate Global, so you can no longer play the entire game with a simple five dollars. The entire announcement can be found here, along with the reveal of the base defense mode, cow room, new events, and more.

The Tokyo ticket costs 2,000 tcoins, or $2 USD, but you’ll still have to add a minimum of $5 to your account, or $10 if you want to buy the Act 3 ticket and Tokyo ticket together. If you buy both, you will have four thousand tcoins remaining, which if you aren’t a fan of the cash shop items can be held until a following expansion is released.

Otherwise, you should be able to buy the Tokyo ticket in the cash shop. It is currently selling between 360,000 and 1 million palladium. I was able to secure mine for approximately 375,000.

4. Healers Healing Healers, My Only Weakness!

As a solo player, my worst fears come true whenever I see my arch-enemy: The double healer mob group. Continuing talks on Hellgate Global, I came across a moderately sized group of Riders, centaur-like creatures that have strong melee, strong defense, and strong ranged attacks. The group of five or six were accompanied by two Dragoons, the mob that heal other Riders. As I would attack one dragoon, the other would heal it. If I attacked the Riders, the dragoons would heal it.

This can be chalked up to bad balancing on T3fun’s part. The fight would have been over much sooner if it weren’t for the fact that there was no cooldown on the Dragoon’s heal ability. As long as I was shooting, the Dragoon was able to endlessly heal the damage I dished out at a faster speed than I could dish it. I did eventually kill the one Dragoon making the rest of the fight much easier, but only because it bugged out and stopped moving completely.

5. John Smedley: “We Always Wanted To Make DC Universe Free.”

I’m going to do what few have done before and say that John Smedley is a good businessman. He may not be friends to hardcore gamers, but he is a good businessman. He has a good eye where the market is trending and has done a great job with DC Universe and the other recent Sony MMOs. I’ll even go further and say that the cancellation of The Agency might have been a good thing, as I’ve said before Sony never appeared too enthused about the project to begin with.

But moving forward, I wanted to take a look at Smedley’s comment about free to play being their original vision for DC Universe, and it makes me wonder if DC Comics had something to do with the game being subscription at the start. To me, he is conveying that Sony wanted to make DC Universe a free to play title from the start, but some outside force stepped in and said “no, you must have a box price and subscription.”

Such is the game of politics and MMOs.