Pending litigation that I received for the sake of this joke, I am unable to quote a certain Arkmay Acobsjay, and his comment about servers being added after launch being somewhat related to the success of the product itself. Just last week, we saw the addition of one server on the PC and one on the PS3, adding in new player vs player servers. I did note that the addition of two servers shouldn’t be seen as a runaway success, as Aion did the exact same thing post launch, and you may recall the monstrous merger that the game went through a few months ago.
This week, on the other hand, even more servers are being added to mitigate load. The PS3 is receiving three new servers, and the PC is receiving one new server.
PS3:
Relentless (PvE) US
Justice For All (PvE) EU
Absolute Power (PvP) EU
PC:
Last Laugh (PvE) US
Reaction to DC Universe has been pretty positive, even on the MMORPG.com forums. Will this be one of the few MMOs whose population doesn’t crash one month after launch? I’m not holding my breath, but let’s hope for the best.
Sony Online Entertainment remains the juggernaut in the MMO industry, with more than ten titles currently on the market, with more on the way this coming year. Already released is DC Universe Online, based on the popular comic books characters and worlds. Aside from DCU, SOE has three titles that are on their way, two of which should be released by the end of the year.
First in line is expected to come in March, the sequel to Planetside codenamed Planetside Next. The next incarnation is anticipated to take the large scale battles of Planetside, and make them even bigger. As John Smedley stated in an interview with Eurogamer:
“And we haven’t announced a release date for it but you can expect it… We’re looking at late first-quarter, early second-quarter [2011].”
Next up, The Agency, expected to launch late this year. The Agency may be smaller in scale than Planetside (expected to be mostly instanced with social lobbies), but Smedley has big hopes for the game post-release, and is allowing the team to take as long as they need to make sure the game is up to snuff.
“One thing that we’ve learned over our company’s history is that it takes time to make great games. And we’re not trying to make cookie-cutter MMOs. There’s some stuff coming out in the next two or three months, MMO-wise, and a lot of it is generic copycats of other games. That’s not what we want to do. We want to make new experiences for people. So The Agency is a new kind of MMO so we want to make sure it’s as good as it can be.”
Third in line is Everquest Next. Although not slated to release for a good while, Everquest Next is expected to take the world of Norrath and turn it on its head. The number of classes and races is confirmed to be reduced, less than Everquest II and likely more around the numbers in Everquest. With a new art style, new lands to travel, and no doubt tons of lore to become accustomed to, Everquest Next may also be heading onto the Playstation 3 to saddle up with Sony’s increasing number of MMOs slated for release on the console.
Sony Online Entertainment remains the juggernaut in the MMO industry, with more than ten titles currently on the market, with more on the way this coming year. Already released is DC Universe Online, based on the popular comic books characters and worlds. Aside from DCU, SOE has three titles that are on their way, two of which should be released by the end of the year.
First in line is expected to come in March, the sequel to Planetside codenamed Planetside Next. The next incarnation is anticipated to take the large scale battles of Planetside, and make them even bigger. As John Smedley stated in an interview with Eurogamer:
“And we haven’t announced a release date for it but you can expect it… We’re looking at late first-quarter, early second-quarter [2011].”
Next up, The Agency, expected to launch late this year. The Agency may be smaller in scale than Planetside (expected to be mostly instanced with social lobbies), but Smedley has big hopes for the game post-release, and is allowing the team to take as long as they need to make sure the game is up to snuff.
“One thing that we’ve learned over our company’s history is that it takes time to make great games. And we’re not trying to make cookie-cutter MMOs. There’s some stuff coming out in the next two or three months, MMO-wise, and a lot of it is generic copycats of other games. That’s not what we want to do. We want to make new experiences for people. So The Agency is a new kind of MMO so we want to make sure it’s as good as it can be.”
Third in line is Everquest Next. Although not slated to release for a good while, Everquest Next is expected to take the world of Norrath and turn it on its head. The number of classes and races is confirmed to be reduced, less than Everquest II and likely more around the numbers in Everquest. With a new art style, new lands to travel, and no doubt tons of lore to become accustomed to, Everquest Next may also be heading onto the Playstation 3 to saddle up with Sony’s increasing number of MMOs slated for release on the console.
To some of us, plunking down a few hundred dollars every three or four years to upgrade our systems comes as naturally as filling our gas tanks, buying two dollar menu cheeseburgers instead of a $3 double cheeseburger because it saves money, and shielding our eyes when we go out in the sunlight. Then again, if you don’t have the money to upgrade, or you don’t have the means to upgrade, nothing is more painful than your favorite MMO announcing that you are being left behind due to the natural progression of updates. Your Pentium 3 processor may still play Half Life 2 just fine, but if your favorite MMO wants to continue progression, the lower tiers are going to be left behind.
For Eve Online, this equates to a little over 1,000 customers. Due to Eve Online’s upgrade to the SSE2 instruction set, incompatible processors are no longer being supported. This list includes Pentium 3 and older, and AMD Athlon XP and older. Athlon 64 CPUs are reportedly not affected. It is worth noting that these CPUs are from 2003 and beyond, making them older than Eve Online itself.
You can read more about it in the short dev blog here. More on Eve Online as it appears.
“Thank you to all those of you who took part in the historic RuneScape Referendum, which ended on Friday. We received an incredible 1.2 million votes, with a united 91% of you voting for the restoration of free trade and the Wilderness. We have heard your call and will be restoring these much loved features to RuneScape on Tuesday 1st February.”
Eventually someone will listen to me that the “vote” was nothing more than a publicity stunt, albeit a successful one, and that the return of free trade was guaranteed months ago when Jagex started coding it and working on the update. Far be it from me to say that the Jagex crew isn’t fast, but to think that they will be able to move features out of the wilderness, recode and script entire quests, redesign the entire area, code in free trade in regards to newer item functions, redesign the wilderness to work with items that are unusable in PvP scenarios, and more in two weeks is a little ridiculous.
But the official announcement is now dated. Mark your calendars for February 1st (note: allow for last minute delays) because that is when the Wilderness and free trade are returning after a good three year absence.
Of course, now is the greatest time to continue speculation. What will happen with overload potions, which dramatically raise combat stats and are unusable in dangerous player vs player combat? What about corrupt dragon and ancient warrior armor/weapons which are only capable of obtaining through current player vs player combat? Brawling gloves? Ancient artifacts? What about item lending? Where will the quests from the wilderness be placed? The activities from the wilderness? I think you get my point about this being in development far longer than December’s poll.
And more importantly: What is Jagex doing to keep the game from being swamped with bots and gold farmers like it was pre-trade? They seem to be very sure of themselves that their secret weapon can combat this.
If you understood the term "leet," you'd know I bypassed the firewall!
As a partial webmaster myself (that is, I run a website, not a professional at web services), nothing makes the belly chuckle like an anonymous person who is likely not old enough to drive, writing a comment threatening to hack (hax) the website and ruin my life. Often, such a problem can be fixed by simply adding the IP address to the auto-delete filter, and hoping that the young person isn’t posting from a school where other people might like to comment in the future.
On the other hand, one has to be cautiously apprehensive about website security. For every hundred script kiddies you knock away with your hardware firewalls, dedicated servers, and DDoS protection, there is at least one person out there who can, and will, break into your system if you piss him off enough, and although MMO Fallout is not a business, I can say nothing scares the pants off of business than the thought of having the IT guy come into their office and say “Someone got in, sensitive information has been leaked onto the internet.” So nothing puts a damp in your pants like seeing this message:
“Right now we have more than 3 Million and 5 hundred thousand accounts. 5 hundred thousand of them are already hacked and verified. Your other Games like Bounty Bay Online and Tera are affected too. So you better dont mess with us. Take this serious. Change your mind. Become a valued member of the community and stop abusing them.”
Frogster’s account security system was compromised, and although the number cannot be officially confirmed, the hacker behind the attack has released over two thousand account names and passwords. In a post on the official forums, Frogster Silberfuchs revealed that the two thousand accounts who were revealed have been deactivated, and are able to be reactivated by their owners.
We promptly assembled a task force and are of course making every effort to get to the bottom of this incident. We are utilising every means at our disposal to minimise the damage and to prevent such threats in the future. We have already implemented additional security measures today. As soon as all the necessary steps have been taken with regard to operational and criminal processes, we will inform you of further developments on this matter.
It is yet to be seen whether or not more accounts are going to be revealed, and by the time this story ends there could be a lot of deactivated accounts. The sad part is that, although this whole ordeal started because of something as simple as gripes with a gaming company, this will likely end with the hacker being prosecuted and (depending on his age) going to jail.
This is just a reminder: Breaking the law is not a proper response to your gripes with a company. Do you really want to risk going to jail over your anger that Frogster deletes too many critical forum posts?
As you can see from the top notice, on the 5th of this month, Nexon began a cash shop sale on their game Maplestory in Europe. The details are sketchy, and seem to change slightly depending on who you ask, but it appears that a 90-day double experience card found its way into the same area as the 24-hour double experience cards. Of course, in a world where we are brought up to understand that if a deal feels too good to be true, it probably is, the pricing was a mistake. Nexon fixed the price, and all was alright in the world, right?
Of course not, that would be too easy. After a week, Nexon fixed the cash shop item, and replaced the already purchased cards with 24-hour cards, which sent the forums into an uproar. The opinion appears to be split over whether or not players should be compensated or if they should have been aware that the sale was an “obvious bug” (their words, not mine) in the first place. According to a few members on the forums, this is not the first time Nexon has had such a cash-shop fluke, but apparently this is the first time they had responded by removing the items post-purchase from a user’s account.
Granted, we could yell until our faces are blue about the legality of this change in product, given the many loopholes and issues that would be raised from commerce laws between European countries, to exemptions in place because the product was purchased with Nexon Cash instead of real currency. I see a lot of people using examples of tangible purchases, but the two have separate laws that govern each form of commerce.
Of course, for those of you who did purchase the bugged card, there is still the option of reversing the charges on your credit card, if you are unconcerned with your Nexon account being banned.
The question now, as always, rests in the hands of the Nexon European community. I think it’s safe to say that, despite what the trolls say, players won’t be reeling in fear that their items are going to suddenly start being replaced en masse. You can buy that pack of regularly priced potions without worrying about them being turned into weak potions. I would, however, take great caution when buying something during any sales on the cash shop, as this is not the first time such an error has occurred. Nexon does not appear to be taking as much leniency with those who purchased the bugged item, maliciously or not.
I believe Nexon should have at least refunded the cash shop points back to players, and perhaps next time not take a week to implement a fix that should only take a few minutes.
A once-employed man who may or may not be named (Mark Jakobs) once said
“Look at us six months out. Look at us six weeks out. If we’re not adding servers, we’re not doing well.”
DC Universe Online may have only been out for a couple of days, but the team over at Sony Online Entertainment is already adding servers to mitigate the load. Two new North American servers are coming to the fledgling MMO, one for the PC and one for the PS3 versions, named “Cry For Blood” and “Blood Will Run” respectively. If you haven’t picked up from the names, these are player vs player servers.
Granted, it is a bit early to start shouting uplift in population, as most MMOs either deal with server strain or introduce a few temporary servers directly after launch (see Aion’s added servers that were made obsolete by the massive merger the following year). Still, if Sony can keep what they have, and continue to improve the service, then DC Universe may climb to the top!
Back in April I happily announced that the Interplay Vs Bethesda lawsuit was over, after an investor reported to Joystiq that Bethesda had dropped their suit. Of course, as we discovered in our long and incredibly painful interrogation of investor Frymuchan, Bethesda confirmed that they were not dropping the suit, and planned to continue full steam ahead.
Last month, Bethesda made a claim so ridiculously absurd that I did not report on it out of strong suspicious that the report was fake. As we know so far, Interplay has the rights to create a Fallout MMO, which is what spawned the whole lawsuit in the first place (Bethesda wants those rights back). In their latest claim, Bethesda made the statement that they only gave the rights to the name Fallout for the MMO, and that Interplay had no rights to use anything else from the franchise in said MMO. So…Interplay agreed to making a Fallout MMO that has nothing whatsoever to do with Fallout aside from the name? Bethesda may have had a stronger case just having their lawyer shout out “if the glove don’t fit, you must acquit,” during trial.
Interplay, of course, fired back yesterday calling the claim “absurd” and “without merit,” surely far more conscious words than many of us would use to describe such statements (I’ll start with juvenile, desperate, pathetic, and you can fill in the rest). For a company that is worried about the Fallout MMO never making it to light, Bethesda sure is spending a lot of time and effort to cripple Interplay through legal fees and wasted time.
Then again, when the genre is continuing to take more serious turns, we can always use two clowns in the corner honking their horns and throwing pies in each other’s faces. For comedic purposes. It’s a good thing Interplay talked about the Fallout MMO being light hearted and humorous, because the game itself is already a running joke, not unlike Duke Nukem Forever. Not the happy funny either, but the depressing funny, like laughing at the crazy homeless guy with the tinfoil hat and the “The end is nigh” cardboard poster.
Back in April I happily announced that the Interplay Vs Bethesda lawsuit was over, after an investor reported to Joystiq that Bethesda had dropped their suit. Of course, as we discovered in our long and incredibly painful interrogation of investor Frymuchan, Bethesda confirmed that they were not dropping the suit, and planned to continue full steam ahead.
Last month, Bethesda made a claim so ridiculously absurd that I did not report on it out of strong suspicious that the report was fake. As we know so far, Interplay has the rights to create a Fallout MMO, which is what spawned the whole lawsuit in the first place (Bethesda wants those rights back). In their latest claim, Bethesda made the statement that they only gave the rights to the name Fallout for the MMO, and that Interplay had no rights to use anything else from the franchise in said MMO. So…Interplay agreed to making a Fallout MMO that has nothing whatsoever to do with Fallout aside from the name? Bethesda may have had a stronger case just having their lawyer shout out “if the glove don’t fit, you must acquit,” during trial.
Interplay, of course, fired back yesterday calling the claim “absurd” and “without merit,” surely far more conscious words than many of us would use to describe such statements (I’ll start with juvenile, desperate, pathetic, and you can fill in the rest). For a company that is worried about the Fallout MMO never making it to light, Bethesda sure is spending a lot of time and effort to cripple Interplay through legal fees and wasted time.
Then again, when the genre is continuing to take more serious turns, we can always use two clowns in the corner honking their horns and throwing pies in each other’s faces. For comedic purposes. It’s a good thing Interplay talked about the Fallout MMO being light hearted and humorous, because the game itself is already a running joke, not unlike Duke Nukem Forever. Not the happy funny either, but the depressing funny, like laughing at the crazy homeless guy with the tinfoil hat and the “The end is nigh” cardboard poster.
MMO Fallout 