MMO Fallout

Mechscape Cancelled, Stellar Dawn Coming 2010

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It always pains me to see an MMO fail before it is even launched. As is the case with Mechscape, Jagex’s upcoming Science Fiction MMO, a spiritual successor to Runescape, as CEO Mark Gerhard confirmed to Eurogamer today that the title is indeed canned.

In an interview with Mechscapeworld.com, Mark Gerhard had this to say:

“Sadly the game was not as complete as we wanted and we spent the first few months trying to “fix” the game where we could. About a month or so ago we took the decision to stop trying to “fix it” as we still wouldn’t have the game we wanted and the game certainly did not meet all the objectives and specifications established in the original game design document and therefore it would be better to go back to the founding principles and build the game we always wanted –Andrew [Gower] is now overseeing the project and working very closely with the team to build Stellar Dawn, not all was lost as we naturally have developed the game engine substantially over the last few years and the new designs benefits massively from this as well as a ton of experience within the team as to what works and what doesn’t. So whilst the content and a lot of the game play will change from what was previously built almost everything else will go straight back into Stellar Dawn.” – Mark Gerhard

With the death of one comes the rise of another. Innovations brought about by the production of Mechscape have gone towards the production of Stellar Dawn, a different yet somehow similar MMO to the little guy who never had a chance.

Hopefully Jagex has learned the same truth that Richard Garriot learned with Tabula Rasa: Just because you are an established name, does not guarantee all of your products will succeed.

On that note, it is good to see Jagex catching up to the rest of the mmo world in terms of features. The company just launched a name changing service, and is currently beta testing a feature to see a log of your character’s activity, including amount of time played (see WoW Armory)

Hunting Transgenders, the Chinese Way…

zombie-austin-powers — That's no baby, baby. -banned-

Imagine this, gentlemen: You’re walking through the streets, and at the corner you come across a beautiful woman, clad in nothing but a frilly bra and underwear. As she looks at you seductively, using the hottest /dance emote available, she says “4g 4 l4p d4nc3.” All of a sudden, you notice something about her is wrong. The chin, the hairy arms, the Adam’s Apple. IT’S A MAN, BABY!

If you’re a player who enjoys the occasional pixelated groping, or you work as a GM on Age of Conan, you’ll be glad to hear that, at least on King of the World that you won’t have to worry about that woman actually being a man behind the screen. Taking the phrase “pics or it didn’t happen” literally, and requires players to submit webcam pictures of themselves, otherwise male players playing as female avatars will be banned.

Continue reading “Hunting Transgenders, the Chinese Way…”

I Don't Do Reviews, For Good Reason

The Fallen Earth LLC Boardroom — Where we go to discuss Fallen Earth.

If you’re a visitor to mmorpg.com, you’ve probably found yourself stepping into the middle of a controversy. Apparently yesterday’s review of Fallen Earth caused such an uproar that mmorpg.com’s staff saw fit to remove it from the website. I decided to get my super sleuth kit, and by super sleuth kit I mean grabbing part 1 off of Google Cache before it was deleted.

Continue reading “I Don't Do Reviews, For Good Reason”

I Don’t Do Reviews, For Good Reason

Continue reading “I Don’t Do Reviews, For Good Reason”

With Scammers At Bay, The Players Will Play

This article has nothing to do with T-Mobile's Sidekick

All two of you who visited my message boards will see that I am not a big fan of being explicit with rules. In fact, there are three rules on the Orb Boards; Don’t incite a flame war, keep your account secure, and don’t be a spambot. Apart from those basic rules, I don’t think the rest needs to be explained. What it comes down to is: Anything you wouldn’t do in real life, don’t do here. Unless you make a living out of stealing people’s identities, in which case…still don’t do that here.

I often like to see Game Masters getting intuitive when it comes to removing problems that may not warrant a complete rule, or that may be such a special case that putting a rule would be far too generalizing. Say, for example, the issues Aion had when it launched last month. Players were clogging the servers by going away from keyboard so they could sleep, go to school, etc, without being logged off. Rather than pull out the ban-stick and taking things far over the edge, NCsoft quickly released a patch making such an exploit impossible.

The idea is that you don’t have to issue permabans to get a point across.

More on Aion, World of Warcraft, and more after the break.

Continue reading “With Scammers At Bay, The Players Will Play”

Ignorance Not An Excuse

October 15th has come and gone, and with it came the closure of twelve Star Wars Galaxies servers, as I reported this past September. Now, I originally assumed that once the servers shut down, all characters left on them would be lost for good. The reason for the server closures was that the already running free transfer service had been such a success that multiple servers were now dead as players flooded their characters to other, more populated, servers.

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Dungeons and Dragons Online: Going Free Pays Off

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If Dungeons and Dragons Online taught us anything, it is that just because a title goes free to play, that is no true indication that the company is hitting some hard times. However much like peanut butter and jelly, when the two come together, you can usually anticipate that someone is making a sandwich. Luckily, this is not the case.

Earlier this year, Turbine announced that Dungeons and Dragons Online would be heading towards a free to play model, with several various forms of subscription payment, in addition to a micro transaction store. Today Turbine announced that the now free to play title has seen a massive upswing in numbers, both in subscriptions and in new players. New subscribers has risen 40%, that is to say players who are paying for the title.

Turbine attributes this to people who previously were not willing to give the title a try, but once they got in for free were willing to shell out a few bucks a month.

Dungeons and Dragons can be downloaded at http://www.ddo.com and played for free for an unlimited time.

Fallen Earth LLC: Any Sleep?

Fallen Earth went into live mode on September 22nd, where the title had something of a rocky start. The first few weeks have brought on numerous bugs, server load issues, and recurring problems with the tutorial. Fallen Earth LLC hopes to put the past behind it with an upcoming patch that will address all of these problems.

To start at the top of the list, the new tutorial will allow an optional extension of 30 to 45 minutes, that will give players a more indepth look at the crafting, scavenging, combat, mount, and harvesting systems. Town events will also be given an update, and the patch is followed by eight pages of bug fixes. In addition, October will bring a Halloween event to Fallen Earth.

Forget whether or not Fallen Earth can handle the updates; One can only wonder as to the abuse that the coffee machine over at Fallen Earth LLC is taking.

Toying With Danger: Learning From Microsoft

This article has nothing to do with mobile MMOs

Now, one truth that has always been self evident; a company doesn’t have to deal with MMOs to give the industry something to learn from. Such is the case with Microsoft, Danger Inc (Yes, that is the company name), T-Mobile, and a certain mobile phone called the Sidekick. For those of you living under a rock, the Sidekick was introduced in 2003 with a great feature: Everything you did on the device was immediately backed up on their internal servers. Add a contact? Backed up. Delete a contact? Backed up. Send an alcohol inspired text message? Sadly, backed up. When you turn off the phone, everything on your phone is deleted so it can be properly synced when you next boot up.

The sidekick is something akin to the mobile phone of MMOs, where equally everything you do is backed up on internal servers rather than your own computer. Because crucial information is stored on the company’s servers rather than a person’s computer, or phone, it becomes imperative for that company to have backups available in case something were to go awry. Jagex, for example, does a backup of its systems on Runescape every fifteen minutes, just in case there’s a major server crash and a rollback is needed. Even then, a critical crash earlier last month resulted in several days of data loss on the friends list server.

So here we are in October: T-Mobile’s service went down around the start of the month, much to the dismay of its users. After several days of no service, Sidekick users reported information missing. As it turned out, there were some critical errors on Microsoft’s end where the servers were stored. The personal information synced by the Sidekicks was lost, with no usable backups available. Effectively, all personal data on every T-mobile device is gone. The only way, currently, to keep your data from being lost is to keep your phone on at all times until the service is fully restored.

There are currently two lawsuits running over this issue. Sidekick users can expect a compensation of a $100 gift certificate and a free month of service.

Stargate Back: Outlook Still Bad

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When the website for Stargate Worlds went down Friday for maintenance, we assumed it would take the regular day or so for the DNS change to be complete and the website to come back up. After the 12th, when the website still hadn’t come back up, viewers looked towards the SGW twitter and Facebook pages for any update on the situation. What they found, however, was a lack of any updates or information regarding the delay. SGW’s social networking tools had gone quiet.

Stargate World’s website is back up and running, but prospects are not high. Although Cheyenne received funding earlier this year, enough to pay due paychecks and cover some other costs, the company is still starving for cash. In a post regarding the downtime;

While there continues to be a lot of desire, enthusiasm and excitement about the project from our employees, investors and fans, we will not be able to provide any updates on the development of Stargate Worlds until sufficient funding is available.

I can’t say I’m surprised at all when more bad news comes out of Stargate Worlds.

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