Xsyon Prelude Is Coming Today


Word to your delays...

Those of you who follow indie-MMOs may remember that Xsyon was supposed to launch back in 2010, around March in fact, but the title was delayed by around a year because of the need for more content. Since then, the game has received a lot more publicity, a substantially (albeit understandably still small) increased following, and a whole host of new features, tweaks, and content.

While the full game is set to go live on March 1st, players who preordered will have access beginning today when the servers go back up at around 6pm Eastern. The Prelude event, as it is called, is the beginning of players starting new civilization, following an apocalypse that wipes out most life on earth. Players are tasked with forming tribes (and homesteads for solo players) to rebuild, using their skills in everything from basket weaving to tool crafting in order to make life even a little easier. Tribal territory is where players will converge, and offer quests and solace from the harsh world.

Xsyon is an open world sandbox game with a heavy focus on crafting and evolution. Although the game has free for all PvP, that mechanic is less featured than in titles like Mortal Online and Darkfall, with heavier disincentives for gankers and griefers. As the game progresses, the poisonous “green mist” that surrounds the starting lands will open up, allowing access to new areas and new technologies. So players starting out with guns now may find down the game’s development road that guns are available.

More on Xsyon as it appears. You can read up more at http://xsyon.com/

Final Fantasy XIV: Physical Levels Being Removed?


Final Fantasy XIV bots.

Final Fantasy XIV is an odd bucket. For starters, I love the game, but I often find myself wishing Square would stop phoning me up at 3am, drunk, weeping and apologizing for issues I already know it is fixing. Since Final Fantasy XIV launched, cradled, and promptly slaughtered a flock of geese in its turbine engines, Square has been on the job to fix and tune the game to the liking of its community. The community, despite what one might have expected, has been quite helpful, if anything for the joy of having a free MMO to play that isn’t a Korean grinder (but a Japanese grinder!)

Taking a peek at the lodestone on Final Fantasy’s website reveals a massive list of updates that are currently in the works, from small tweaks to major adjustments. Recently new objectives have been added to the list, from new loot in battle, to balancing the synthesis system. Here are just a few new additions:

  • Instanced PvE content.
  • Auto-MP regeneration.
  • An auto-attack system.
  • Making certain NPCs more visible.

There are a lot of other features in the planning and production stages that are simply aesthetic, including the addition of more graphical “rewards” for ranking up. One question on the poll that caught my attention was whether or not players would prefer to remove the physical level altogether, with a focus being placed on each individual rank. An implication of this, as noted in the poll, is that players would craft and receive gear that relied on skill rank to wear. Another feature receiving a heavy-handed look in the poll was the attribute system, meaning a major overhaul could be in the future for that system as well.

You can check out the rest of the lodestone here. More on Final Fantasy XIV as it appears.

Champions Online: 1,000% More Money


Atari, and by extension Cryptic

By now this type of news shouldn’t be too surprising, and I doubt anyone expected to see a headline: “Cryptic announces major loss in revenue after move to free to play.” As Turbine, Sony, and more have proven before us, the seeming majority who bash everything with a free option and a cash shop ultimately turn up as a very vocal, very tiny minority. There are, of course, those who will claim that Champions Online will have died without making the switch, and they are probably correct in that assessment.

However, if Cryptic Studios is going anywhere now, they’re going to the bank. According to Cryptic, the number of unique logins, concurrent players, and revenue have spiked over 1,000% since the game went free last month. To celebrate, Cryptic is placing a one-hour xp boost in the Cryptic Store for free, limited one per account. If you’re jonesing for some quick cash, the item is apparently tradeable, so save it and see if someone will buy it for a good amount of in-game money.

Having Champions Online free to play will be an interesting move in the months/year to come, as this means more competition for City of Heroes and DC Universe. Will the competition have to adapt to survive? Will Iron Man have to face his one true fear in order to defeat his nemesis? Find out all this and more! On the next issue of Amazing Issues of Amazing Amazements!

Since it had to be asked: Does Bill Roper regret leaving Cryptic now? Someone just missed a fat bonus check.

Everquest: Second Progression Server Tomorrow


Flippy Longstockings

A few days ago, I wrote about how Sony was reactivating inactive Everquest accounts until the 21st of the month in lieu of the time locked progression server, the aptly named Fippy Darkpaw, renowned for his ability to run headlong into guards far higher than his own level, assuredly the first Leroy Jenkins before Leroy was Leroy. As it also stands, I also happen to be a moron, as not only did I manage to misspell “Fippy Darkpaw” in the past two articles, I did it about twenty times, especially given the 490×392 screenshot that sat at the head of the article each time. I am, at this present time, writing this article from inside of The Chokey, where I have to admit my iPad is receiving terrible wifi reception.

Those of you who have experienced Sony’s progression servers in the past will no doubt be sarcastically aghast to learn that the server has attracted so much attention that it has been at maximum capacity since launch. Due to the overwhelming demand for the new server, Fippy Darkpaw (got it!), Sony announced today that a second server is being created, to launch tomorrow (the 16th), if sooner. The server will be named Vulak’Aerr, after the Draconic Lord.

Players wishing to get on Fippy Darkpaw are better off waiting for Vulak’Aerr. The server is at maximum capacity at all hours.

Update: The Vulak’Aerr server is live.

Perpetuum Online: Insurance Fraud Ahoy!


Prepare for unforeseen consequences...

Exploits in a sandbox MMO almost always follow the same progression of events. Exploit is discovered, run into the ground, and is eventually fixed with the developers either removing the ill-gotten gains or banning the more explicit offenders. The forums are then awash with a combination of two types of players; those who used the exploit and those who either wanted to use the exploit and didn’t have the cajones to risk their account getting banned, or didn’t hear about the exploit until it was too late. Those who did get caught and either had their gains removed or were outright banned, never seem to take blame for their actions, and the issue of “it was clearly intended,” sprouts up.

Perpetuum Online is not unlike Eve Online on the ground, with mechs, and inevitably the same issues that spring up in Eve will show up in Perpetuum. In this case, the same insurance fraud scheme that hit Eve has just been patched in Perpetuum, and players are taking to the (virtual) streets to pretty much remove any doubt that they are unapologetic cheaters.

In Perpetuum, players can insure their mechs, for a return if the mech is destroyed. The reimbursement is based off of market prices over two weeks, making the system more difficult to game. However, lesser traded mechs can be manipulated to higher prices, to a point where a player can make a profit by building a robot and blowing it up as it exits the manufacturing facility. The exploit has been patched up and the devs responded by removing all of the ill-gotten money from the economy.

Of course, it probably isn’t in their best interest to give the go ahead on exploiting this system, and then expecting less of an uproar when they change pace and retroactively apply the new rule. As for the players, don’t expect much sympathy when what you were doing, albeit within the rules at the time, was as ethically dubious as insurance fraud.

Aventurine Has Regained Investments On Darkfall


Money money money!

For many companies, regaining the insane investment that MMOs require can often take a game plan of around five years, which is why MMO Fallout specifically designed its patented (not really) longevity test around the five year period. For Aventurine, however, this has taken approximately two years. In an interview with Greek TV (fair warning: It’s in Greek), Tasos Flambouras noted that the company has already seen a return on all of its investments, meaning the profits should be higher in the year to come without all that debt to pay off.

“More and more young Greek scientists conquer their ideas to the international market. Typical is the case of the initiators of the electronic game «Dark Fall», which was created in Greece before 2 years and rampant around the world with more than 100,000 users in over 150 countries and big profits for their creators.”

You’ll have to excuse the poor translation. 100,000 users? And people think Darkfall is a failed MMO.

Frogster: Misleading, Possibly Fraudulent Facebook Ads


The Blokes At ROM

I was going about my daily Facebook activities (posting creepy Woody pictures), and lo and behold, I came across the following ad:

You’ll notice that this ad links to “secure.jagex.com,” and I quite honestly expected that this was either A.) a scam ad that managed to get through, or B.) Jagex was advertising on Facebook, which I don’t believe that they do (with my activities, I’ve seen almost every MMO developer that advertises on Facebook). So naturally I clicked on the ad, and was taken here


Really? Runes of Magic? Take one more look at the URL in the Facebook ad. “secure.jagex.com.” The screenshot in the ad appears to be from Runes of Magic, but someone who has never played either game wouldn’t know that. The ad does do a good job of tip-toeing around, but outright claims to be Jagex by inserting a false link to Jagex.com. This isn’t parody like Global Agenda’s ads or Rift’s “We’re not in Azeroth anymore.” This ad is explicitly misleading people into believing they are viewing an ad for a Jagex product, when really they are being directed to Runes of Magic.

Facebook is already aware of the fraudulent ad, and information has been forwarded to Jagex’s legal department. If this is a third party ad agency, Frogster needs to drop them before they wind up on the receiving end of a false advertising (and likely fraud) lawsuit. If this is Frogster’s doing, someone in the advertising office should be getting his pink slip, yesterday.

More on this story as it progresses.

Bioware: Fansites? No Advertisements Anywhere!


Class 3 Bankruptcy

Back in the age of gaming magazines, getting an exclusive was really a privilege, as the other newspapers would have to wait until the next month’s (gaming magazines primarily printing monthly) print in order to keep up. In the age of the internet, however, exclusives simply mean an hour or two ahead of the competition. Developers have always had a pretty tight system of rules for offering information, and that system has (for the most part) been fair. Don’t unfairly trash the game, give ample screen time, and that is about it.

Operating a fan site (a decent fan site) is expensive work. Between managing databases and active users, the costs of bandwidth and storage space can get pretty high, and virtually any fan site not backed by some conglomerate (and many that are) offer some form of advertising to help pay down costs.

With regards to the upcoming The Old Republic, Bioware is having none of that. If you run a fan site and want any hope of Bioware talking to you, or promoting you through Twitter/Facebook, you may not accept any income whatsoever, either from advertising or from donations. None, nada, zilch. If your fan site pays its writers, you’re going to have to foot that bill yourself. If your fan site operates off of revenue from Google Ads or some other advertising, guess you’re not getting that promo or exclusive information.

Websites, especially the popular ones (which I would know nothing about), can reach bandwidth costs into the hundreds of dollars per month, and many go even higher. To demand that your fans not supplement their websites with some form of payment means that only a select few, those operated by wealthy groups of players, will have any hope at getting that sweet sweet Bioware nectar.

Of course, you could always list yourself as press and bypass that restriction. According to the website that broke the story, Toroz, Bioware is looking into the situation, and this policy may see some alterations in the coming months. That being said, when you’re about to launch your first MMO, you can’t do much worse than giving your potential customer base (given many of your fan sites wouldn’t have the funds to stay afloat without advertising revenue and donations) the middle finger and chastising them for being poor.

I’ll be following this story in case Bioware comments, and given MMO Fallout doesn’t offer advertising, perhaps I’ll have better odds at getting a statement.

Aika Online: Both Versions Opening Globally


Two Services, One Globe...

Aika Online launched under Gala-Net back in early 2010, and quickly became a subject of controversy in April when it was revealed that the company had begun an IP block on all players outside of North America (due to Hanbitsoft carrying the rights to publish in Europe), after Gala-Net had already opened the cash shop, allowing non-North American players to start throwing their money in. Gala-Net came to something of a half-compromise. Players wouldn’t be refunded, but anyone who had created an account prior to the IP blocks would be allowed to continue playing. European players were miffed, especially since the European release was delayed over the North American release by several months.

Well the segregation is over! Although the services won’t be merging (for now), both Aika Online and Aika Global (the latter being Hanbitsoft’s operation) have announced that they are opening doors to previously blocked players. On February 17th, Gala-Net opens to European players and Hanbitsoft opens to American players. It is important to note that the two games are still operated by completely different companies. Your characters, potato chips, TCoins, and accounts will not transfer between services (unless something changes in the next week).

Unless this is the start to a service merger in between the two companies, but that’s just my speculation.

Frogster: This Is How You Charity


The Blokes At ROM

Here at MMO Fallout, I never turn down a good charity story, and today is no different. Frogster has a yearly run on Runes of Magic for Save The Children (Germany edition), a children’s rights organization that engages in all sorts of projects, with the goal of improving healthcare and education for all kiddies no matter where they be.

Between December and January, players of select Frogster games could purchase exclusive items where, after VAT and third party costs, the proceeds went to Save The Children in Bhutan. In total, $112,500 USD was collected.

“In Bhutan, there are suddenly children surfing the Internet and zapping through 400 television channels. Their parents, on the other hand, are people who haven’t learnt to read or write. They have never in their lives been bombarded with advertising. In other words, what we have here is a clash of two ages of civilisation.”

You can read more here: http://game-newswire.com/index.php/the-news/338-frogster-donates-82000-euros-to-children-in-bhutan.html