Dynamic events and MMOs go together like the layers of a sweet sweet cherpumple cake, and despite what some may claim you really don’t need to be a sandbox title in order to accomplish such a feat, and do it well. In the past, we’ve seen attempts at developer-run dynamic events, where the player’s success decides what happens next, but most of the time the idea of a dynamic world usually runs down to which guild/clan/corporation owns what territory. Eve Online, Darkfall, Mortal Online, etc, pretty much the same idea.
Over at Aventurine, the devs have been working on expanding and fleshing the lore of Darkfall, the latest being about a nomadic race called the Vargashi. The new lore is going to be used, according to a blog post, to spur on new dynamic quests. The blog doesn’t go into much detail, but does offer one example of a Vargashi NPC going into a town to request help in dealing with the Mahrim, or tasking players with aiding the nomadic race, even going against the person’s own race in some cases.
Overall it sounds like these dynamic quests won’t be necessarily world-changing, but rather on a more randomly timed, do-it-as-it-comes scale. Whether or not a player completing/failing the quest will have any impact on the world is yet to be seen.
In a blog post today, Aventurine discussed that the quests are being rewritten, with faction quests being more helpful towards newbies. Plans are also in place to optimize NPC cities to be more accessible, redistributing monster spawn, NPC locations, and dungeons, and far more than I can post here. You can read all about it on the link above, it is a long and very interesting read if you’re a current/ex/prospective player of Darkfall.
Back in October, Square Enix announced that early adopters of Final Fantasy XIV would receive an additional month of time to try out the game, play through it, and hopefully weather out the storm of issues with the game. This month, Square Enix announced a tentative update coming on the 25th of November, just a few days after most of the free extensions will expire. In response, Square has issued a news article detailing yet another extension to the free time:
Today, we have decided to extend the free trial period an additional 30 days. Please refer to the following for more details.
Players who purchase FFXIV before November 19th can also partake in this free month (giving them 60 days of free game time), while those who adopted early are enjoying their third free month. In addition, Square put out a comprehensive list of updates they have planned for the coming months, which you can find here: http://lodestone.finalfantasyxiv.com/pl/topics/detail?id=cb4dc09784bc24b4fde2e45de9f018ec5fb504d2
And since the discussion on other forums is already erupting on this subject, yes this is to appease early adopters and get them to stick around until Square can do some much needed maintenance on the game. In case you hadn’t noticed with All Points Bulletin, when a company doesn’t fix glaring issues fast enough, the game dies: fast. Hopefully Square can get the necessary issues fixed before the early adopters disappear.
Any account created before the 19th will be able to take part in the free 30 days. More on Final Fantasy XIV as it appears.
Back in 2009, Jagex implemented a jobs system on Runescape mainly for new players where they could take tasks doing menial work with low level skills in return for gold, as well as an occasional experience lamp. This gave players a reason to work on their crafting and combat skills for a reward other than what is commonly known as vendor trash. Of course, this feature was removed due to low player participation, but the point still stands: It was a useful system.
Turbine is bringing 250 new quests into Lord of the Rings Online in the form of a task system. Using a similar idea to Runescape, players will take up bulletin board messages in towns offering repeatable quests, tasking players with gathering vendor trash from nearby mobs in return for an experience reward to augment the grinding process, as well as an occasional reputation reward. These will also go towards new deeds offering unique cloaks.
The tasks are limited, however, starting at five per day and going up to 10 by completing deeds or purchasing the increase through the store. This system is mainly for free players who wish to augment their leveling but don’t want to pay for zone packs. Players may also only take a task up to four levels over the task (A level 8 task can only be completed up to level 12, for example).
Alganon has no subscription, and technically doesn’t even have a client price. You can download the game and play it for free, although doing so will incur some penalties on your account. For instance, you won’t be able to create a guild, access chat channels past say/tell/group/guild, get the last 20 levels, and you will have a decreased quest log capacity, not to mention additional character slots. Now you can buy all of these separately, which can get expensive (Over eight thousand Tribute, or about $40) or you can buy the super pack, which costs 3,627 tribute (You’ll need to invest $20 worth of tribute to buy it).
Quest Online regularly has sales on the Super Pack, and it is currently discounted to 3627 tribute, about twenty dollars USD. If you don’t care about most of the perks with the pack, you can always ditch guild creation and buy the communications and level cap for $10. In fact, you might want to ditch the communications perk, as Derek Smart posted on the forums:
I already asked for chat channel restrictions to be removed. In fact, I asked for that months ago once I heard about it; but the team gave a compelling reason for having it that way. Just last week, I overruled that and asked for it to be changed. Once the spam starts flying (now that they can do it with impunity just by downloading a free copy of the game), I hope nobody complains about it. There is a reason (stated many times) why it was done this way.
Type MMO Fallout in the reference box, and enjoy a 0% discount. Just don’t use me as collateral, because then your transaction is guaranteed to be declined.
Note: I don’t think there’s a reference box, but if there is MMO Fallout is not affiliated with Alganon or Quest Online, nor is this a solicited advertisement. But if there is a reference box, type MMO Fallout in for poops and giggles.
Anarchy Online is one of the oldest MMOs on the market, and for the fact that it never appeared much (read: at all) here on MMO Fallout, the game has brought a number of innovations to the MMO genre, foremost instancing, dynamic questing, and in-game advertising. Funcom also touched upon what we now think of as endless trials, when they made the original game completely free (plus in-game ads) that brought in major money for Funcom.
Last week, Funcom announced that the “new” cash shop would be coming to Anarchy Online. This week, in a forum post, they commented further on the upcoming update. In addition to hundreds of social items, Funcom is looking at adding some non-vanity items in the form of xp stims (boost experience gain for a limited time), time-limited access to expansion content, level packs (boost to level 50, 99, 150, 199 instantly) only available to players who have a level 220 character, and more.
We’ll see how this goes for Anarchy Online. According to the forum post, Funcom plans on rolling out a Funcom Points currency across their games, meaning a similar cash shop may appear in Age of Conan and upcoming The Secret World.
When Champions Online went into preorder, Cryptic offered a lifetime subscription for two hundred dollars, giving players the perks of subscribing (foremost being able to play) as well as a few other bonuses, free swag, etc. The lifetime subscription went away when the game launched, after a few pre-launch issues, and after the usual early adopters finished saying “I paid a lifetime subscription for this?” the subject mostly went away.
Well, with the timely launch of Champions Online free to play this spring, and no doubt the recent return of the McRib, Cryptic Studios would like to announce that the Champions Online lifetime membership is back…for 33% higher cost than you will remember. Now three hundred dollars, the Champions Online lifetime subscription will grant unmitigated access to the subscriber perks, plus access to the hottest place in Millennium City: The VIP lounge (Warning: Escort service not included). At three hundred, the cost of membership roughly equates to twenty months of VIP time, so if you plan on subscribing longer than that, you’re probably better off just paying the money up front and not having to pay more later on.
Well someone will find love in the lifetime subscription, and if you don’t…well, that’s your perogative? People seem to be taking this news too seriously on other websites, and by people I mean the usual Cryptic trolls who follow every news article on Champions Online so they can call Cryptic “Craptic” and giggle like little girls that they’ve won the argument. It’s fine to show your unbridled, and some would say slightly stalker-ish, rage towards Cryptic if you’d purchased the game and were disappointed, but eventually you have to move on from posting in every news article about how Bill Roper/Jack Emmert is the devil and how you will never buy from them again.
Being an MMO Journalist affords one the opportunity to make fun of a company, yell at them for a stupid mistake, and then praise them all in one day, or even in one article. Given that I’ve managed to fake myself as a trusted journalist this far, I think I can afford to take some of those perks with me.
MMO Fallout is all about the PR, so naturally my editorials revolve around public relations, and how developers and publishers react when the times are good, and when the times are bad. I’ve talked about everything from subscription convenience in Final Fantasy XIV, to the turing test for MMOs, to identity crisis, permanent death, to more famously charge-backs. I’ve discussed the public relations nightmare that was the Allods Online cash shop, the Aion server mergers, Turbine’s fraudulent surveys, the Square-Enix HR rep who said Final Fantasy XI was shutting down this year, Atlantica Online’s near-fraudulent charity scheme, and far more.
Forums are a place where we go to communicate with the developers on a mass scale. When something bad happens in-game, like say a bunch of players get banned under suspicious circumstances, or a massive void appeared where a city used to be, killing everyone who was standing in it prior to a patch. It also happens to be a place where developers can keep users up to date on breaking news, like why players should steer clear of ___ because it is killing people randomly.
What irks me the most, however, is that in the grand majority of these cases the developers manage to inflame the situation by, doing what? Deleting threads and posts made on the subject. What this tells your players is that while you have someone with enough time to scan the forums and delete their posts complaining about this issue, you apparently don’t give enough of a rat’s ass to have that same person just give a response and negate the need for the threads.
Of course I am most recently referring to Turbine, and an accidental mass banning on Dungeons and Dragons Online that left thousands of players locked out of their accounts for more than just a while, which Turbine later announced as a glitch in the automated system that handles bans for exploits. Massively had an article on it, since the mass bans happened to crash in on their public event on DDO. Of course, when the rants started hitting the forums players were met with threads being locked, deleted, and forum infractions handed out.
Part of working in retail has taught me that when you screw up, you can’t blame the customer for getting pissed, a point many of these developers seem to have missed. You can’t falsely accuse someone of cheating, ban them with no real explanation or method of appeal, and then expect them to not head to the fastest method of handing feedback in a white hot rage. This compounds when most of them just want information, something that you do not supply until it is at your own convenience.
As much as I’m sure my viewers think it pains me to knock Turbine; this isn’t good PR, especially toward those paying your bills. The bans themselves don’t even factor in as, as I have said, mistakes happen. Instead of letting people vent while you leave them in the dark, you decide to add insult to injury and give up infractions because people had a crazy notion to get angry over unjustified bans. The comments of the developer being too busy fixing the problem to comment on it are also utter garbage. This always crops up when an incident like this takes place, and every time those throwing around this talking point fail to respond to a simple comment: It takes less than a minute to write up “we’re aware of the situation, working on it,” on a forum. Hell, I did it in fifteen seconds, and doing so did not hinder my completion of this article.
So I will reiterate what I have said time and time again: Response means everything, and right now Turbine are about a step behind Star Vault’s “sorry, no patch to fix this gaping void in the map because the developers are off for the weekend,” in terms of taking a bad situation and turning the flames up to 11.
Quest Online has been talking for a few months now about bringing player vs player combat to Alganon, and has recently laid out their plans for the next few months on how exactly this will work. Starting foremost, Alganon will see the addition of open world PvP, allowing flagged players from opposite factions to fight one another anywhere. Additionally, consensual PvP has been added in the form of dueling, non lethal. The next phase will introduce towers and keeps, ala Warhammer Online, into the world for the two factions to fight over. Finally, Alganon is looking to bring in instanced battlegrounds, ala a whole lot of MMOs.
Suffice to say, Player Vs Player, especially that on the keep/tower/instance level, requires players which Alganon, also suffice to say, does not have. As much as I love Alganon and praise it here on MMO Fallout, I fully acknowledge that given how difficult it is to get a conversation going on Alganon, getting a duel or a war going will be next to impossible. I hear Quest Online is going to have some sort of marketing campaign (Not that there’s much better marketing than an article on the MMO Fallouts, right?), but right now the game is for all intent and purpose…single player.
Also, is Alganon trying to be more like Warhammer Online? In the November newsletter, not only have they announced a keep system (capturing towers and keeps, to rush in and kill the keep leader). I brushed this off until I saw the plans to introduce a renown points system that gives access to more powerful PvP weapons and armor. Renown? Keeps? You cunning devils, Quest Online, you had them thinking the whole time that Alganon was pulling from WoW, when in fact it was pulling from WAR!
Of course Alganon does have one up on WAR, for starters it’s free to play, no subscription required.
More on Alganon as it appears. Until then, make sure you’ve paid your tithes to Tzeentch…
Rev up the Wikipedia, because All Points Bulletin has a buyer…well, it always had a buyer, but now we know who that buyer is: K2 Networks. To save some of you the work, K2 Networks is the gaming company behind the Western localizations of Knight Online, WarRock, 9Dragons, among others. Given that K2 operates solely on Asian f2p grinders, the likelihood that All Points Bulletin will follow the free to play cash shop model are very high.
An official statement is coming next week. You can read the full story on Eurogamer, and I guess it’s time to stick All Points Bulletin in the Upcoming category. Bet you never thought you’d see that. But today the Realtime Worlds APB saga comes to an end.
MMO Fallout 