MMO Fallout

GamersFirst In Scotland, Cryptic Deja Vu.

Who wants All Points Bulletin: Reloaded? Scotland wants APB: Reloaded. So much so, that Scottish Development International offered a cash incentive for K2 Networks to open up an office in Scotland, as well as a two hundred thousand in “regional selective assistance” from the Scottish Enterprise development agency, in order to set up shop. Well, K2 has bitten the line, and opened up a new office with the intent to hire 22 people, with future expansion.

This is where the story gets weird. Gamasutra notes that the General Manager of the new office is Michael Bonafice, previous IT Director at Realtime Worlds. In addition, the location itself isn’t too far from the old Realtime Worlds offices. The CEO of Reloaded Productions, the subsidiary of K2 Networks, and the team that are working on the APB: Reloaded relaunch, said:

“After visiting Scotland, meeting some extraordinary game development professionals and also seeing the Scottish Government’s enthusiastic support for creative and technical ventures, we decided to invest in a Scottish team focused on the core game engineering and key creative design tasks.”

APB: Reloaded is already showing major interest, especially in the ongoing beta test. If K2 are wary about the relaunch’s potential, they aren’t showing it. Then again, Realtime Worlds opened a new office right before their launch, too.

Hallelujah! Square Enix Restoring Services March 25th

Amidst the disaster in Japan, what with the body count rising and the ongoing threat of even greater problems stemming from the nuclear power plants, it’s easy for us westerners (and more likely easterners) to forget that Square Enix fully suspended services for Final Fantasy XI and XIV last week Sunday. In a new lodestone, the team settled in to offer us an update on the situation.

As the original shut down was to conserve energy, the team at Square has been working on conserving their own energy usage, in order to bring the servers back online. This includes, as the lodestone states, shutting off air conditioning and reducing the lighting (they could also reduce lighting costs by switching to compact fluorescent, but I won’t go into that as I can already smell the angry mob forming outside my house). So when are the servers coming back on?

With these energy saving measures in place, we will be able to bring our servers back online and restore service to FINAL FANTASY XIV, FINAL FANTASY XI, and PlayOnline on Mar. 25, 2011 4:00 (PDT).

It is important to note that Square’s promise of not billing players through April (especially on Final Fantasy XIV, wink wink) is still in effect, as the company reminds its Japanese players that the services may have to be shut off again if the energy situation worsens.

Rift: Aion Clone? Major Security Hole Patched.

The coin-lock system in Rift is, as I mentioned, a substandard method of stopping account theft because it doesn’t impact what Trion has referred to as the cause of 80% of all hacked accounts: Keyloggers. With what Trion has referred to as a nonstop attack on the account databases and servers, it was only a matter of time before one of the parasites made it through, as shown just this past week when a player managed to log into another player’s account with their details.

If this were, say, Runes of Magic, the person who found the vulnerability might put thousands of accounts as hostage until the company fulfills a list of demands that could only come from a frothing-mouthed disenfranchised fanboy, but rather than setting himself up for a bunkmate, Mr. ManWitDaPlan alerted Trion to the exploit, and the team has managed to fix it.

The vulnerability existed deep in the server code, dealing with the error checking of the login validations. If this is Greek to you, just feel safe that it’s been fixed.

An important lesson to be taken from this is a reminder that bugs will always occur, and sometimes they have a much larger implication than others. In this case, I have to hand it to Trion for their fast response and willingness to work with the guy who discovered the exploit. As Trion put it:

We do block them as they are detected, but the fact that they are using distributed botnets (compromised computers from across the globe) means that this will remain something that we will continue keeping an eye on, forever.

So score one for Rift, and for Trion’s ability to recover from a setback.

Alganon: Making Our Players Look Good.

I’ve always maintained that Alganon, graphically, is not a WoW-clone. Yes, the initial interface may have been nearly copy and paste, but the way the creatures and inhabitants were presented was in a style all of its own. One major issue I have always had with the graphics however, is not that the player models look bad, but rather that the combat animations were about two inches above abysmal. Somewhere between a jittery spastic, and a four year old who has had too much caffeine. The animations didn’t match the damage output, and most of the moves did not offer much more than a quick jerk, if the character decided to display any movement at all.

The 2.5.100.2444 patch for Alganon launched yesterday, bringing with it better models for player characters, with higher quality textures and more polygons (and more internets, presumably), and I have to admit: Either my eyesight has gone bad or the animations look at lot smoother. Animations now play out their full motion, rather than a jerky swing, and swinging my mallet actually looks like swinging my mallet.

Now that the graphical upgrade is out of the way, hopefully Quest Online will continue working on other glaring issues with Alganon, such as the heavy lag on servers despite low population. The team has done a great job of putting in content in the form of new quests, PvP mechanics, and more, and hopefully this slow upward trend from the “launch” over a year ago will continue.

More on Alganon as it appears. The photos included were from my own Alganon character, as I’m sure many of you are aware of my status as biting the hand that feeds me (and occasionally pissing off its President).

Hello Kitty Online: Save The Children

I love Hello Kitty Online. Not in the sense that I love the game itself, but the knowledge that any time some major disaster occurs, the team at Sanrio Digital will be there with an in-game event to generate donations. To top it off, the team has always managed to present the charity drives in a way that costs the player nothing, yet still manages to donate a notable amount.

In the wake of the earthquake in Japan, the Hello Kitty Online team has put together the HKO Japan Earthquake Aid event, which follows a pattern similar to the previous charity drives. Players are tasked with obtaining a certain set of items, and bringing them to a specific NPC, which will accumulate donations that will be sent to the Save the Children foundation.

The list of items are as follows:

50 Cherry Tree Wood
100 White Bread
50 Green Tea Leaf
50 Veggie Tempura

The items must be given to a GM outside Sanrio Harbor during set times, and the event will only last until March 21st.

Nexon: $1.2 Million and All Proceeds

I’ve said it already, and I will continue saying it: The outpour of support from MMO developers and the community toward Japan has been absolutely overwhelming. Already we have seen support from Square Enix, Sony Online Entertainment, CCP, Hi-Rez, and NCsoft, and the list just keeps on growing.

Nexon today announced a two-tiered plan to send aid to Japan, via select relief agencies including the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders. On the first tier, the company has donated $1.2 million USD in initial corporate contributions. But that’s not all. Players can have a direct effect on the second tier of contributions via the game’s cash shop:

In addition to Nexon’s donation, from March 14 through March 20, Nexon America will be donating 100 percent of the proceeds from the sale of many of our in-game items to the Red Cross for the Japan Earthquake and Pacific Tsunami disaster relief efforts.

The following games are included in the charity movement:

NCSoft: No, This Is How You Charity

Money is a powerful tool that can buy many things. In the wake of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, we’ve seen an outpour of support from MMO developers and their players. Square Enix has shut down Japanese Final Fantasy servers, while Sony Online Entertainment has announced the suspension of billing for Japanese players. Global Agenda has pledged 100% of sales for the next ten days to the Red Cross, while CCP is offering players the option to convert their PLEX into cash to donate.

NCsoft is next on the list, with a substantial donation to the relief effort, particularly the restoration projects. In a recent announcement on the Aion forums, NCsoft announced:

NCsoft sends its most heart-felt condolences to the victims and people of Japan. As such, NCsoft will donate 500 million Yen (approx 4.5 million Euros/3.9 million GBP/6.3 million USD) to restoration of damages in the region. Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Japan.

More on the charity drive as it appears.

Global Agenda: 100% Sales Donated To Japan

Pitting companies in competition with each other over who can donate the most money to charity is a cruel, rude, and disgusting way to advocate for more donations by offering publicity as a reward. But hey, where there’s smoke there is fire, right? With news of CCP reigniting the PLEX for Good campaign to aid the Red Cross in their mission to help the Japanese, Hi-Rez has joined in to offer their own contribution:

Anyone who purchases Global Agenda between now and the 28th will be able to get their hands on the game for $10, but also knowing that 100% of the proceeds will go to the Red Cross. Yes, a 66% discount and a charitable contribution to show for it. If I didn’t already own Global Agenda, I’m sure I would have bought it during this sale.

Again, the sale lasts until the 28th. The $10 sale lasts until Sunday. More on Global Agenda as it appears.

Rift: How About An Authenticator?

Rift launched last month to the fervor of a substantial number of people, opening up more than thirty servers in the days after launch to deal with population. With the mechanics involved, Rift has pulled in players from World of Warcraft and similar MMOs, by presenting a similar game with a new mechanic attached: Dynamic rifts. Of course, the attraction of the large crowd could lead to the two inevitabilities: A whole lot of compromised accounts and a whole lot of real money traders to steal those accounts.

In response to growing complaints of account security, Trion has responded by implementing the Coin Lock program. Coin Lock is similar to the computer identity systems your banks may have begun using recently, where a computer is identified as the “home computer” and any attempt to log in from another computer requires additional information in order to proceed. Without that information, the characters will go into coin lock, during which the following activities will be disabled:

Accessing the Auction House.
Sending Mail (can still receive and view mail or remove items).
Selling to vendors.
Deleting Characters
Salvage, Runebreak, or destroy items.
Trade.
You can continue to play and gain coin and items, but cannot get rid of them.

Coin Lock is a nice idea, but ineffective. Take Trion’s own statement:

“80% of the hacked accounts we’ve seen are from keyloggers.”

The method to unlock a character from coin lock is via a code sent through email, so if your account is compromised via key logger, and thus your email address compromised with it, this system won’t help. At all. Yet by Trion’s own admission, their new security system is going to help, at most, 20% of compromised accounts.

Trion should be utilizing other features in addition to the white list. Why not a black list? If I know that I will only play Rift from my location, why not be able to blacklist all other areas, no exceptions? How about an authenticator that operates through a smart phone app, ala World of Warcraft? A four digit pin that must be entered with the mouse instead of the keyboard, ala Aika Online and Runescape? There are plenty of options that Trion has, and they don’t even need to manufacture security dongles.

The feature of this white list is about as effective as having two locks on your door for extra security, but allowing the same key to work with both. Then again, this is just frustrating because, by Trion’s own admission, this will not help 80% of compromised accounts. It is a start, so we’ll see how this turns out.

City of Heroes: One World, One World List

City of Heroes is the original-man’s super hero MMO. Since the game’s release in 2004, City of Heroes has seen the addition of two expansion packs and nineteen “issues,” with numerous content updates in between. But that’s enough pushing the game up with information we all know, on to the juicy meat center of this article:

In a recent move, NCsoft announced that they are combining the North American and European services, to create one conglomerate of players under one service. The announcement can be found here, and details what effects this will have on players. NCsoft states that this move will allow better interaction with players on both continents, as well as improving gameplay for many (as both services will use the same live and beta builds), as well as decreasing the need for players who have both European and North American accounts.

This will offer all players 15 servers to choose from, eleven located in North America and four in Europe.

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It: