If you’re lucky enough, you’ll be attending a theater airing a director’s cut edition trailer for Eve Online. For those of you not lucky enough, the trailer is above. The Eve Online trailer airs before Tron.
MMO Calendar Update
I wrote an article today talking about how disappointed I was that there was no MMO Calendar this year. I’d sent an email to the website, but had not received a response until tonight.
So there will be an mmo calendar next year. Looking forward to it.
Consolation Gifts Are Relative To The Problem.
If I accidentally trip or bump into you, generally a simple “I’m sorry” and a hand up with suffice. Then again, if I smash your mailbox with my car because I’m texting while driving, an apology won’t suffice as well. You’ll probably expect me to pay for the mailbox, and won’t be paying for the damage your mailbox caused to my car.
Such is the case with MMOs and various forms of reimbursement that come up over the course of any title’s life. Very extended maintenance, false bans, etc, can put a company in the position where they have to say “alright, now how do we calm tensions between us and the customer?” If you are Jagex, you’ll likely refuse to roll back or compensate, and simply give the middle finger to anyone who lost items or was banned unfairly due to a bug or oversight. If you are NCsoft, XP bonus items are your forte. Turbine? Break out those Turbine points.
I think we can place loss of items at the lowest end of the reimbursement spectrum, extended maintenance somewhere around the middle, and false positive bans somewhere around the top. At the lowest end, reimbursement and perhaps some free xp boosters will suffice, depending on the severity of the loss and the time it took to reimburse. As for extended maintenance, this scales with time. A few extra hours may require a couple xp boosters, but 12+ hours of downtime should generally lead to game time being extended by the respective amount of time (So one day, generally).
In the cases of false bans, however, as a developer you should be putting on your lips of +2 ass kissing, because their durability will be put to the test. By banning someone falsely, as has happened on countless occasions over virtually any game, you’ve accomplished the virtual equivalent of approaching someone, sucker punching them in the jaw, and accusing them of cheating on your wife, before saying “sorry, you looked like another guy.” At this point, you’re looking at shelling out one or more free months of game time, and hoping that the person doesn’t up and quit.
So there you have it. For those companies that do offer reimbursement, they generally do a pretty good job of scaling the compensation to match the severity of the problem. Again, unless you are Jagex and would rather your players quit than reimburse them for issues brought about by faults in your programming.
To Fix Your Patcher: Use A Torrent Program (Final Fantasy XIV)
Quick question: What do you hate most about Final Fantasy XIV? Odds are, the slow patcher is one of your top answers, and one you haven’t been able to find a fix to. If you are like me, you’ve been finding your patches through external hosts, through Mediafire or FFXIVCore until Square Enix started telling their fansites not to host patches. Despite Square’s patcher, peer to peer networking is truly a more efficient way to distribute patches, assuming the company steps in to host peers when not enough players have the patch (such as right after launch).
So I did find a quick fix. As it turns out, the problem lies with Square Enix’s patcher (go figure) not allocating a proper amount of seeders and leechers. Start the patch download in the client, and then cancel it. Go to C:/users/[user]/My Documents/My Games/Final Fantasy XIV/Downloads/FFXIV and the torrent will be sitting in one of the two folders “2d2a390f” or “48eca647.” Open the torrent file with a separate torrent client, and you should have no problem connecting and downloading. Whereas on the Square patcher, I had one running connection at 0.0b/s, using this on uTorrent was able to completely download the latest patch in about five minutes.
Move the patch from wherever it was downloaded to, to its correct folder (hunt around in the two folders until you find the file that the Square patcher created, and replace it with the one you downloaded). This was done on Windows 7, so your file location may have a slight difference. You can find the folder it is in by doing a windows search and typing in the name of the patch, in the case of the latest being “d2010.12.13.0000.”
More on Final Fantasy XIV as it appears. I would offer to host the patches myself, but Square Enix would shoot me.
Disappointment: No 2011 MMO Calendar
I love my 2010 MMO Calendar, so much so that I’m keeping it after 2010 is over this year. For those of you who haven’t participated in the past, the MMO Calendar is a yearly tradition that’s been happening for a few years now, and is essentially a calendar (yes) with a different MMO on each month, sold by an independent company with the proceeds going to St. Jude Children’s Research Center. The calendar put out last year also has signatures from the developers at Jagex, Sony Online Entertainment, and Frogster.
Sadly, it doesn’t seem like there’s going to be an MMO Calendar this year, as it is well past last year’s deadline to order, and there is no information on the main website that there will be a new calendar this year. I’ve tried contacting the “email us if you want information on the 2011 calendar,” but that email address is from 2009, and may not be in use anymore.
More on the MMO Calendar, and subsequent charities, as it appears. I guess for now I’ll have to just use my Nintendo Club desk calendar, right? January is Super Mario Galaxy 2 themed.
Legit And Illegitimate Blizzard Emails Circulating
About a week ago, I put out a warning telling people to be careful about emails claiming to be from Blizzard over their passwords being reset. Apart from the usual worry of the Christmas season putting a spike in the number of spam emails sent, I had an unexplainable feeling that something big was going to happen this month, I just couldn’t put my finger on what.
This weekend, Gawker was hacked, releasing the usernames and passwords of anyone who commented on Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Gawker, Jezebel,
io9, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Deadspin, and Fleshbot, according to the email sent out. If you commented on these websites in the past, you’ve likely already received an email. If you have received an email, you can check this Slate page to see if your account has been released: http://www.slate.com/id/2277768/
Phishers and spammers have been using this information to send out emails claiming to be from Blizzard and other companies. Of course, this doesn’t help the situation that Blizzard has apparently been sending their own legitimate emails, telling users to reset their passwords if they are a commenter on any of the aforementioned websites.
For those of you ready to soil yourselves, the passwords leaked are encrypted, but that should not keep you from changing your passwords.
Final Fantasy XI Team Faces Major Restructuring Too
When the news broke earlier today that the Final Fantasy XIV team is undergoing some noticeable restructuring, it would’ve been nice of Square Enix to also mention that Final Fantasy XI was undergoing a similar change. In a lodestone post on the Final Fantasy XI website, Square has announced that Mr. Mizuki Ito, whom many of you will recognize as the mind behind the Abyssea add-ons, is taking over as director for Final Fantasy XI. Assisting him is Mr. Yoji Fujito, whom you may remember from the Chocobo raising system.
What I said about Final Fantasy XIV still stands, granted, and is quite unchanged in reflection of this information that the restructuring is taking place on a wider scale in the company. More on both titles as they appear.
Planetside Next: Coming To You March 2011
“We have a very big launch coming in the month of March,” Smedley said. “It’s a big first person shooter franchise that we’re really happy with.”
Oh John Smedley, you are so coy. We’ve known about Planetside Next for a while now, since last year when Sony released the Call To Arms asking players what they would like to see in a new MMOFPS. In a recent interview with The Escapist, Sony’s own John Smedley dropped a bombshell; Not only is Planetside Next in the works, but the title has a release window for March 2011.
“We haven’t technically announced it. This is the farthest I’ve gone [discussing it with the press] and the PR people are going to shoot me.”
We’ll have more on Planetside Next as it appears, as well as the location of John Smedley’s dumped corpse.
Final Fantasy XIV: A Nice Publicity Stunt, Regardless…
If Oprah was running Final Fantasy XIV, I imagine the situation would have started with her gathering the development team into one room and shouting “Look under your chairs! You’re getting fired, and you’re getting fired! You’re all getting fired!” Okay, so Tanaka was the only person to actually get fired in the development restructuring, and it is possible that many of them don’t know who Oprah is, but you get the point. In the latest lodestone, Square Enix has announced a major restructuring to the FFXIV development team, bringing in the best and brightest Square has to offer to help bring this game to greatness.
But what does this mean for you, the consumer? Foremost, the free trial currently on its third month will be extended indefinitely until Square is satisfied with the experience they are giving. Square has made it quite clear that as long as they are not satisfied with the game, they will not take the risk losing what players have stuck through, by charging them a monthly fee to play an unfinished title.
On a lesser side, those of you who are waiting for Final Fantasy on the PS3 are going to have to change your plans, dramatically. The PS3 version of FFXIV has also been suspended indefinitely until the development team is satisfied with the direction of the game. At this point, I don’t think I need to tell you what happens when MMOs are delayed indefinitely on the console, but I’ve included a couple of links just in case.
So are we at Final Fantasy’s Final Fantasy? If Square can’t keep their subscribers during this transitionary period, even with the allure of no monthly fees, you bet your sweet Miqo’te ass it is. Of course, such a failure would not knock Square Enix out for the count, rather FFXIV would simply go the way of Asheron’s Call 2, the sequel making way for the original.
Final Fantasy XIV’s release is somewhat awkward for those of us who are MMO journalists, because we have to go to our editors (which in this case is me talking to myself) and say “I’ve seen bad launches, but this is exceptionally poor, but I don’t want to make it worse,” to which the editor (still me, stay focused) comes back and says “well then say it has potential.” Unfortunately the communities have evolved to the point where they pick up on these verbal gaffs, and “potential” has become synonymous with “this game is terrible and the writer just doesn’t want to admit it.”
Truth be told, every game has potential. Team Fortress 2 is a great game, and after three years of release still has the potential to become more. Final Fantasy XIV has potential, but will they pull it off like Square did with Final Fantasy XI (which was in a horrible state at launch in Japan), or will they go the way of FURY and shutter at around ten months? That is up to the new FFXIV team to decide.
The Agency: I'm Just As Confused…Late 2011 Release?
Given that it is December 7th, you’re probably wondering why the trumpets of fanfare haven’t been going off at the headquarters of Sony Online Entertainment. Unless many of us were in a hallucinogenic daze earlier this year, I do believe that The Agency, Sony’s instanced espionage MMO, was slated for release this month. Granted, we haven’t heard anything about the game since E3, so fill in the gaps as you will: It’s not coming out this month.
So what happened? Simple answer: Sony looked at The Agency and said “we’re not happy with it.” In an interview with Kotaku, John Smedley of Sony Online Entertainment said:
“There was a moment in time in our company where we looked at our own stuff with a clear eye and saw we have to do better,”
You can read the whole article here, but The Agency will not be making it to a retailer near you before the second half of 2011, possibly putting the title in direct competition with The Old Republic, DC Universe, and others.
MMO Fallout 