Warhammer Online Is Boring Crap, At Least Mythic Thinks So…


Mythic Entertainment is taking a unique approach to advertising Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes, their upcoming MOBA game, and I’m not just referring to presenting the title with all the apathy of a high school student’s PowerPoint presentation on the agricultural impact of Wyoming on its neighboring states pre-dating the 1900’s. Back when Wrath of Heroes was announced, a good number of people noticed that the game is essentially Warhammer Online’s scenarios, minus the grinding and leveling, with the original three faction battles that die-hard Dark Age of Camelot fans have been begging for since the game’s unveiling.

Turns out they were right. At the PAX panel, the WoH development team directly stated that Wrath of Heroes is for people who liked Warhammer Online’s scenarios, but did not want to invest the time or money into the MMO. Or as the panel put it, they cut out all the “boring crap” so that players wouldn’t have to grind for “748,000 hours” to gain small incremental advancements in skills and power. If your average WAR fanboy isn’t steaming at the ears from this news, the team goes on to explain that much of the armor in Wrath of Heroes was either used or scrapped in Warhammer Online.

Mythic is going to need to clean the tire treads off of Warhammer Online, because Paul Barnett and the rest of the panel did their best to trash the MMO and throw it under the bus, a sentiment that the WAR community is not at all happy about.

Bigpoint Games Says Better Call The Cleaning Lady…


Philip Reisberger, Chief Games Officer at Bigpoint Games, is a complicated man. I want to hug him, because he turned Battlestar Galactica into an MMO. But Reisberger’s company is consistently cruising for a patriotic wedgie, talking down the status of companies whose chump change amounts to more than Bigpoint Game’s quarterly revenue. Last November, Heiko Hubertz (Bigpoint CEO) stated that The Old Republic will never be profitable.

Not to be one-upped by Hubertz, Reisberger stated in an interview that the big developers just don’t understand monetizing games, and that developers should be pursuing systems where players can pay extra to gain an advantage instead of offering vanity items.

“It’s a delicate balance, though, and that’s why I love my game designers. All of them have understood how to do this. If you have a sophisticated approach to free-to-play games, in the end you can monetise everything.”

Even more interesting is Reisberger’s insistence that it is possible to offer an in-game advantage for cash without altering the balance of the game, which exactly untrue. By selling items that players can attain through normal grinding/leveling, developers have found a way to technically give players an advantage (time) by removing the factor of grind, without unbalancing the game as those items can be attained through standard gameplay anyway.

We’ll see how players respond to Reisberger’s statement as time goes on.

What Star Trek Online Will Offer For Free


Star Trek Online heads free to play later this year, leaving players wondering what will be available with no cost attached, and what players will be expected to cough up some Cryptic points to enjoy. Well, thanks to some much needed love from Cryptic Studios, I can tell you exactly what will be made available:

  • All sectors and missions are available for free. This includes fleet actions, events and dailies, featured episodes, special task forces, and Klingon play.
  • All classes are available for free.
  • Races have the same availability to free players as with members.
  • All ships are available (barring premium ships, which members have to buy as well)
As for limits:
  • Limited to 2 character slots (out of 3)
  • Limited credit storage (unknown amount)
  • Limitations on fleet (guild) creation.
  • Maximum 48 inventory and 48 bank space (out of 72 and 96 respectively)
  • Cannot create foundry projects (can play other player’s creations)
  • Cannot obtain veteran rewards.
  • Will wait behind subscribers in the case of server queues.
  • Limited access to mail and chat (this limitation is waived after 20 hours of gameplay or if the account has ever been a subscriber/made a c-store purchase)
  • Limited forum access (waived for past subscribers)
  • Limited customer service access.
  • Advertisements in vivox voice chat.
You can read the entire list here.

Falling Victim To Your Own Greedy Nature


While the MMO Fallout inbox is never saturated with emails, so to speak, I get a fair amount of tips especially regarding outbreaks of account theft. For the most part, these thefts are not real. A person will have his account stolen at the general time his friend did, so his conclusion is that a lot of accounts must be getting stolen (or the company is selling accounts to gold farmers, please stop emailing me with those conspiracy theories). A quick check of our archives will show that I do indeed report on legitimate server breaches.

One particular email I received prompted this article: To sum it up, a “regular reader” made the claim that I am being paid off by “illegitimate gold farmers and bot developers” to not post warnings when a bot program is actually a trojan horse or a gold farming company starts stealing credit cards. To start off, my apologies to this disenfranchised man. Secondly: I don’t believe in warning potential cheaters that their service of choice may be even less legitimate than thought.

Let’s break that down, shall we? To use the term “illegitimate gold farmer” implies that there are legitimate gold farmers, which would only apply if the developer sold the gold/items or authorized players to do so. No, I’m not going to make the baseless claim that all gold farmers are identity thieves, but to call the business legitimate is about as disingenuous as you can get. Rather, I see the system as knowing the risks. You buy gold knowing full well the potential consequences if this person turns out to be an actual criminal. To give an outside comparison, this is akin to the people who buy laptops off of truck beds in parking lots and then find out the box is full of rocks.

So I don’t write warnings about criminal cheat websites for a few reasons, but I do write articles like this one warning the unwary (however few of you might exist) that gold farming outfits are indeed shady business that has become a haven for identity theft. This way, when the time comes that your Runescape account is cleaned out and Jagex bans you for buying powerleveling services, you might not write to me and ask me to warn other people about an illegitimate service turning out to be a scam.

Jagex Subjects Fan Site Operator To Lynch Mob


Every time I think Jagex can’t be more out of touch with community relations, they pull another move and surprise me. As you can read above, Jagex revoked the “gold” status of a fansite after one of its operators was “discovered” to be registered on the sex-offenders list in Tennessee. So instead of discussing the matter privately with the fan site operators, Mod SteveW (pictured above) decided the best choice was to head over to the Runescape official forums and publicly oust the person in question to tens of thousands of people who had never even heard of the fan site, let alone visited and knew this person. The result was that RuneVillage was forced to shut down its registration due to the virtual lynch mob that had formed on Jagex’s behest.

I’ll be the first in the blogosphere to call out Jagex (or at least the Community Management Team) as bullies. The way that this information was disseminated, with warnings and safety tips making up half of the statement, throws the whole situation completely out of context, making it appear as though the website was being used as a front for some sick predator looking for another victim, which according to outside documents has absolutely nothing to do with the actual charges.

For the record, I’m not against Jagex removing the fan site in question, they can do whatever they like. That being said, if Jagex had gone about this in a professional manner, most of you visiting this website tonight would still not know what Rune Village was, let alone the criminal background of one of its operators. Instead Jagex used the “we need to protect the children” route to portray a fan site as some kind of breeding ground for predators, accomplishing nothing more than harassing the members of the community and actually putting more people at risk due to the inherent risk of vigilante justice.

But for the guy at Rune Village, nothing says loving like being publicly shamed on a multi-million dollar company’s forums for a mistake you made two decades ago.

Analysing Fallen Earth Free To Play: October 12th


So GamersFirst have finally announced the launch date for Fallen Earth Free To Play: October 12th. That’s all you need to know, good night!

But seriously, since the announcement is nowhere in the realm of new, aside from the date, let’s take a look at the breakdown in subscription tiers, shall we?

Most prominently, free players will have access to all content. All missions, all skills, all world areas. Free players can create and join clans, have access to PvP, bloodsports, access to the help-chat channel. So unlike many other games, there are no content barriers. Free players even have unlimited access to the mail system, auction house, and trading, which I dare you to find in most other tiered programs.

Where free players will find restrictions is in the game’s crafting system. Foremost, players can only craft 8 hours worth of goods per day, and crafting takes a 20% hit in speed. In addition, your harvesting speed is 20% lower than subscribers, and your leveling/AP/Faction/Death toll gain rates are all clocked at 75%. There is also a limit on your bank size.

Look for me on October 12th, I’ll be the guy looting your sack while you sleep.

Gods & Heroes Trial Extended: 7 Days


Seven days isn’t just enough time for a small Japanese girl to come out of your television and murder you. I’m going to go on a limb and guess that, although appealing to some, the three day Gods and Heroes trial just wasn’t long enough of a sample period for many prospective buyers. As a result, Heatwave Interactive has announced that the trial has been extended to seven days, without the hassle of phone calls or raspy voices predicting your imminent demise.

“We’d like to invite everyone curious about Gods & Heroes to spend a week sampling the brutality and glory of ancient Rome. By extending the trial period from three to seven days, new players will have a chance to really dig into the heart of the game and we know they’ll like what they find.”

If you want to learn a bit more on Gods & Heroes, check out the MMO Fallout “Why Aren’t You Playing,” article.

Star Trek Online Heading Free To Play


Tell me you didn’t see that one coming? The blokes over at Seeking Alpha have posted an earning’s call with Perfect World Entertainment’s CEO, who has revealed that Star Trek Online will be heading free to play by the end of the year.

And also Star Trek Online, after the acquisition, in fact Cryptic is working on the free-to-play model for Star Trek Online. This is going to be launched by the end of this year as well. So I think free-to-play model we have a bigger potential in US market and also in China market. Thank you.

Kelvin Lau also dropped the release expectation for the Torchlight MMO:

Torchlight from Runic, as mentioned, I think the MMORPG version is going to be – is scheduled to be launched in late 2012 or early 2013, okay?

Yet another MMO going free to play, although it wasn’t like we didn’t see this coming long before Cryptic was ever acquired by Perfect World Entertainment.

Star Wars Galaxies: So This Is How The World Ends


Did you know that if you pay for a month of Star Wars Galaxies now, you never have to pay again? If your account is active and in good standing on September 15th, you will no longer have to pay for Star Wars Galaxies until the game shuts down on December 15th.

Starting in September, Sony Online Entertainment is laying the plans to take the game out in style. Similar to Tabula Rasa’s events or The Matrix Online, the factions in Star Wars Galaxies have decided that enough is enough: It is time for a decisive victory. Players will be able to acquire Galactic Civil War points at a faster pace, with more activities available to them. At a point prior to the December 15th shutdown, a victor will be decided and the game will update to match. For the victor bear the spoils. For the loser? SOE says at least you’ll be going down with a bang.

We’ll have more coverage on the Star Wars Galaxies shut down as it appears.

What Happened This Week: TOR Finally Killing WoW Edition


Did you know that the price of video games has actually come down over the years despite cost in production going up? If you’re like me, you will very clearly remember paying fifty dollars retail for new games all the way back even before the days of the Nintendo 64. Fifty dollars was the choice retail price for new games for years before the current generation (Playstation 3 and Xbox360) raised the prices to $60. But has the price really raised? Of course I have an answer for that.

Factoring inflation since 1995, $50 USD then would cost $73.52 now, meaning that while the numerical sum of the money has gone up, the value of the money being spent has gone down around 32% for new PC games.

1. There Because Someone Is Willing To Pay For It…

EA Games is my new hero, especially after their presentation earlier this year pointing out that those that complained the most about Battlefield Heroes carrying permanent weapons in the cash shop happened to spend, on average, ten times more than those that didn’t post on the forums at all, because it proves the odd discrepancy between the amount of people complaining about cash shops, and the success of the business model.

The market is decided based on what people want to pay for, and it appears those with the biggest voices also seem to have the most wide open wallets. Earlier this year, CCP said that they would be looking at what players did, rather than what they said, and the fact that the $70 monocle is still $70 says that enough people are willing to buy one, regardless of if you can see it or not.

2. TERA To Utilize PLEX-Like System

En Masse is taking the fight to the bots and gold farmers, much like CCP did with the Pilot License Extension. In TERA, players will be able to purchase items called Chronoscrolls, that are in-game representations of one month of subscription. Those scrolls can be traded with other players for currency, items, or whatever you please.

When accounts are used to “farm” gold, those accounts are doing harm to the game. This type of activity adds more gold to the game than normal play would produce, which leads to unwanted inflation. Gold farmers can also make it hard for regular players to find the creatures they need to complete quests or build reputation—an organized gold farming operation can clear areas as fast as the monsters respawn. And gold farmers aren’t really playing the game. They’re not interacting with other players and building a community. They’re not forming parties and guilds. They’re adding nothing at all to the shared experience of the game

Rather than try to pretend that they can stamp out gold farming, TERA has admitted its limitations and gone with the better plan: An alternative to potential identity thieves.

3. How Does Huttball Not Fit Into Star Wars?

I read a forum post by a player who was genuinely “personally offended” that Bioware would include what he referred to as “space football.” Taking a closer look at the preview video, Huttball can be easily summed up as such: In order to gain favor with Giradda the Hutt, players must indulge not only his thirst for violence but satiate his income by participating in the spectator sport that is Huttball. Players on two teams fight over a neutral ball, with the goal of getting it into enemy territory. As the announcer points out, not only is murder/name-calling/cheating/gratuitous violence legal, it is a recommended tactic. Huttball is a far more ruthless game than the critics are portraying it. The field itself is a death trap, with fire pits and acid traps and more littering the field.

And to the lore purists, the game does fit in. The two teams (Frog-Dogs and Rockworms) were formed following the very shaky Treaty of Coruscant between the Republic and Sith Empire that The Old Republic stands on.

4. When Does Microtransaction Become Macrotransaction?

Paypal defines microtransaction as anything under $12 USD, so for the sake of future MMO Fallout articles, that is the definition we will use. Anything above that is considered either an expansion pack or a Macrotransaction, if the developer refuses to label it an expansion. For instance, the $4 act 3 ticket for Hellgate Global? Microtransaction. The $70 monocle for Eve Online? Ridiculous. The $20 premium civilization for Age of Empires Online? Macrotransaction. Having to pay to remove the debuffs on Allods Online (outdated reference)? Microtransaction.

There’s no real difference between the two, but I consider it akin to a person who asks for a sip of your drink and then chugs the whole can down. Yes, food references.

5. Who Else Is Cutting Back On Their MMOs Because of School?

Tomorrow starts my two year set for a Bachelor’s degree in Communication. Will I be gaming less? Probably. I will make sure to keep this website updated as much as possible with the important news, and I do still plan on going forward with more features: videos, additions to the Why Aren’t You Playing” series, and more. Stay tuned.