Square Enix is committed to protecting your user information. We have just been alerted to a potential breach of Square Enix’s secure systems from an external source. This may have resulted in the disclosure of a limited number of PlayOnline IDs, passwords and user account data. Please be assured that your credit card data has not been compromised. We are taking this matter very seriously and are conducting a full investigation.
As a precaution we are notifying you of this potential breach and we are resetting your PlayOnline password.
Please contact our Support Center by web chat and obtain a new password that differs from your prior password. Please keep this new password safe and always be on the alert for any “phishing” emails that ask you to disclose personal or financial information.
Support Center http://support.na.square-enix.com/jump/chat2/
Hours of Operation: Mon-Fri 9:00AM to 6:00PM
*This week only, the Support Center will handle calls for this issue on Saturday June 5, and Sunday June 6.
*Please note that due to a large number of calls, it may take a long time until your call is handled. We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause.
Again, we apologize for this inconvenience and we thank you for your continued support.
I’m not going to say I doubt Square Enix’s word when they say that credit card information has not been compromised, but if you do subscribe to Final Fantasy XI, or have in the past, you should keep a very close eye on your credit card for the next few months, and possibly remove it from your account information if you are unsubscribed. Current subscribers should consider switching over to a pay-by-card method. Better to be safe than sorry.
I say this because no game company’s lawyers would ever allow them to admit that credit card information might have been stolen if there is no existing evidence of it. To do so would incite panic and lawsuits that the company neither needs or can afford, especially in a time where information is so sparse and various IT teams are scrambling to plug holes.
To say Square Enix will be ruined by this, as a few trolls are, is overkill. To say that there won’t be backlash and a heavy amount of distrust between company and fanbase is disingenuous. Luckily Final Fantasy XI has a long history of keeping account information safe, so perhaps this will be shrugged off as a one time incident that didn’t result in any real harm.
Square Enix has been sending the above email to affected players, and reports indicate that a few players have had their passwords reset by Square. More on the account breach as it appears.
I don’t feel I have much to apologize for on MMO Fallout as I stand by my statements and comments, and very rarely do I make a factual error. On the other hand, it is equally rare that a procession of articles succeed in embarrassing me as much as the Derek Smart/David Allen series of events that began last year when Alganon officially launched. I’m going to reiterate what I said in March when I wrote up “We’re ****ing Done Professionally,”
“I can only apologize to anyone who disliked reading this as much as I disliked writing it.”
Since Derek Smart has taken over leadership, Alganon has gained significant exposure in the gaming marketplace. By parroting Derek Smart’s initial reaction to David Allen’s lawsuit, I’m not sure what exposure Mr. Smart may be referring to. Out of all of the news I have seen on Alganon, the grand majority has to do with the lawsuits and, in a solely news aspect, Alganon has been barely featured at all.
Suffice to say, the train has departed the station, and there is no going back for my coverage of all things (well…not all things) Alganon, essentially until the game shuts down. I won’t allow myself to just stop writing about a game just because I happen to dislike the rhetoric being thrown around every time I get something to work with relevant to MMO Fallout.
It feels like only yesterday that Derek Smart was on the scene, reminding not only us but David Allen that Quest Online would be bringing legislation against him. Quest Online announced that they are filing a countersuit to David Allen’s defamation lawsuit. In the claim, QOL alleges pretty much what Derek Smart has been saying in the past: That Allen locked QOL out of critical Alganon systems when he was fired, that another employee gave him access to the company’s funds, among other allegations.
More on all things Alganon that has nothing to do with Alganon as it appears.
Get your defibrillator and heart medication out, and take a seat. In a move that will no doubt send shock-waves through the industry, Turbine has announced that Lord of the Rings Online is going free-to-play, following the system of Dungeons and Dragons Online. Starting this fall, players in Europe and North America will have access to the game for free, no subscription.
“Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment is bringing quality games based on The Lord of the Rings to multiple platforms, and the franchise’s expansive adventure story lends itself perfectly for LOTRO free-to-play, giving a wide range of players the opportunity to experience the game, We are focused on expanding our game franchises onto new digital platforms to maximize quality experiences for gamers worldwide and LOTRO’s new model is a great leading example of this.”
-Jeff Junge, Warner Bros
From my understanding, the original Lord of the Rings game will be available for free, with expansions sold much like Dungeons and Dragons Online’s adventure packs, alongside convenience items, quest packs, and more. Or, buy VIP access and get hold of everything plus a nominal allowance of Turbine points, for a flat monthly fee! According to the announcement, up to level 50 is free.
When The Mummy came out in 1999, it turned out to be a huge hit in the box office (although it gave me perpetual nightmares about scarabs crawling under my skin). Following on that success, The Scorpion King hit theaters in 2001 with similar success, with yet another sequel in 2008 hitting number 1 on the box office for opening day (beating out The Dark Knight on opening day). I purchased Tomb of the Dragon Emperor back during a Black Friday sale and decided to watch it today, having not opened it since purchase.
So imagine my surprise when I see that Bigpoint is making an MMO surrounding The Mummy. The Mummy Online is a free-to-play browser MMO in the works for release this Winter, and Bigpoint sees plenty of opportunity in this:
“We’re excited to have the opportunity to work with The Mummy film franchise,” said Jesse Schell, CEO of Schell Games. “The action-packed story of Egyptian mythology and 1930’s fortune hunters provides a great backdrop for our team to build an awesome online game experience.”
Built on the Unity engine, The Mummy Online will be a 3D MMO, likely similar to Free Realms or Fusion Fall. Now I know what you’re thinking; “Omali! The Mummy series hasn’t been relevant since 2002. This will bomb!” You might be correct, after all, were the title not free-to-play. One of the issues that crashed The Matrix Online was that the game was delayed so long that the fervor of the original movie had died to the painful failures of the sequels and, by then, very few wanted a Matrix MMO. With The Mummy Online being free to play and browser based, several initial barriers are removed.
That is to say, there is nothing preventing this from being a cheap pull to an IP that was popular a few years ago, but we’ll see about that when it launches.
More snooping around Hollywood’s garbage cans for MMO IPs as they appear. I hope Brendan Fraser is an NPC.
NCsoft has big goals behind the 1.9 update to Aion. In fact, as this video shows, they are willing to bet that leveling has become so much faster, that players won’t have any reason to buy powerleveling services, leaving Louie from Louie’s Power Leveling For Losers…oddly out of business. But hey, even Louie is finding Aion so much fun, he’s going legit! So go help Louie with his raiding, and if you don’t, he’ll break your legs.
Aventurine is notably one of the few MMOs to ever attempt to justify a lack of trial program, citing that the game was “not ready for it.” Back in February, Aventurine decided no time was better than the present, and with Darkfall reaching nearly one year in age, opened up a trial for the cost of $1/€1. Due to the reaction to the one dollar/euro trial, Aventurine has decided that it is time for a free fourteen day trial, twice the length of the original trial, for none of the cost!
So what’s been going on in Darkfall lately? Well, if you haven’t been paying attention to the bi-monthly Darkfall articles, the game has become quite a bit fairer. Couple that with a few mass bans, and the upcoming Darkfall 2010 patch, and you have plenty of improvement to a one year old MMO. With new player protection, health balancing. Depending on who you ask, Darkfall has gone down in population recently, so with any luck this new trial program will bring fresh meat…new players into the game for the veterans to kill…care for and introduce into the game.
Accounts from Asia are being throttled with priority to American and European players on American and European servers respectively.
Diablo-style God-of-War reminiscent upcoming MMO Mytheon is among the ongoing list (read: all of them) of MMOs with troubled developments. Citing poor efficiency and unreasonable demands for time and funds, publisher True games launched a lawsuit against the developer, Petrolyph. I commented (not here) at the time that the reasons cited in the lawsuit make it sound like True Games’ lawyers are the same people who troll MMO forums about how they cancelled their preorder because they didn’t anticipate that an MMO from an indie developer is likely to be delayed for months on end, but rather the game itself is an artful scam, by a fraudulent company. Petroglyph stated, in their defense, that True Games was expecting essentially a AAA title.
I’ve never been good at subtle titles, so you’re already aware of how this story ends. Unlike the other lawsuits I cover, this suit does have a happy ending: Although neither side is admitting fault or wrongdoing, they have settled their differences and Mytheon is back on track for a June 13th launch.
Congratulations and, once again, best of luck to Mytheon in becoming…well, a launched game.
It felt like years ago that I originally wrote about an upcoming Star Wars: Clone Wars MMO, namely because it was way back in September 2009. Earlier this year in Feburary, I posted the above image that quite a number of people received on their Station Pass adverts, and was blasted on a few forums linking to the article that I was forwarding rumors, falsifying photos, etc.
Well, today Sony officially confirmed Clone Wars Adventures for this fall, a casual (yep) Clone Wars (yep) MMO similar in style to Free Realms (of course), chock full of mini-games (mmhmm), pets (yes), and more. The trailer is below:
This of course brings me back to questions I asked last September. By the end of next year, barring an unpleasant event occurring in the next twelve months, there be three Star Wars MMOs on the market. Can each coexist? Does Sony really need two Star Wars MMOs? I don’t know, but I do know that you’ll be able to catch me in my house on Tatooine this fall. Oh and make sure you take your shoes off when you come in, this is supposed to be a kid-friendly MMO.
Back in pre-MMO Fallout 2008, I pondered whether or not Square Enix hired sadists to create the biggest bosses for Final Fantasy XI, and if I remember correctly my verdict was yes. Of course, the barrel of that day’s gun was pointed at Beyond The Limitation, a Final Fantasy guild that gave a detailed description of their fight against the boss Pandemonium Warden, before they finally gave up and trudged out some 20+ transformations and 18 hours later. Oddly enough, the group left the fight so that their, presumably 20+ hour, victory would not have been picked up by the press and used against gamers. Rather, their defeat was picked up by the press and used against Square Enix, especially the following quote:
“People were passing out and getting physically ill. We decided to end it before we risked turning into a horrible new story about how video games ruin people’s lives.”
So Square Enix later altered the boss battle, and several others, to be shorter, but the story still stands almost two years later as one of the remaining reasons why MMOs have some of their less desirable reputations, mind numbing tediousness.
But speaking of mind numbing segues, Runescape launched a pretty substantial update to the mini-game Castle Wars, a capture-the-flag style game where players representing one of two deities fight to take the other team’s flag. Each Castle Wars game lasts 20 minutes, and on more populated worlds regularly runs down to who can zerg rush with the most area of effect spells.
The armor Castle Wars provided was something of a status symbol, as despite not being particularly powerful, the armor took a lot of dedication to the game to obtain. For winning a game of Castle Wars, you gain two tickets. A tie results in one ticket, and a loss results in no tickets. At twenty minutes per round, even the most basic set requires almost five hours of game time, assuming you win every match.
The rewards become increasingly ridiculous as you move up to the tier 4 armor, as shown in the chart below:
Quite a leap.
Rank 4 armor, Profound, requires a minimum of 1,975 games (this is assuming you win every game), which will take 658 hours to complete. This amounts to over 27 days of pure Castle Wars, 24 hours a day, assuming you win every game you ever play. To put it bluntly:
For each win, the statistic remains the same.
For each tie, add 20 minutes.
For each loss, add 40 minutes.
Every time your win:loss ratio goes down 10%, you waste over 70 hours of pure game time. So a player with a 75% rating will lose over seven and a half days of pure game time. That is an extra 182 hours of time spent making no progress. To top it off, my figures don’t include the wait time in between rounds. Factor that in, and you end up with almost 150% of the previous estimation.
The Castle Wars professional cape, which costs 2 tickets, is only available after playing five thousand games of Castle Wars. Accomplishing this would take almost 87 days, factoring in waiting time, playing 24 hours a day. I don’t dictate to players how they should spend there time, but there is a fair line between grind and ridiculous that both the Profound armor and the Professional cape crosses. Players who obtain this cape will surely be greeted as they wear it in the streets, but I have a feeling it won’t be with the “respect” they might anticipate.
Back in my day, our games didn’t have save features. Sure, there were a select few that had the ability to save, but otherwise if you wanted to finish the game, you were going to sit down and play through, or leave your console on and risk overheating. Once save functions became more prevalent and useful (no more 20+ string codes to input), a new generation of gaming was born: The no-save play through. These were players who refused to give up on a time honored tradition of playing through a game without ever saving, ever. If you died, it was game over for good. As time progressed, some games bought into this tradition, and created incentives for players to not save as often, if at all. The Resident Evil series is well known for, in the end-game score, factoring in how many times the player saved, as well as supplying a fairly limited number of ink ribbons (required to save at a typewriter).
As far as MMOs go, death is rarely much more than a nuisance. In fact, if you saw my NIDA Online videos, you’ll see my strategy of saving on health potions by resurrecting on the spot (resurrecting at that location cost so little in gold and experience that it was barely a scratch). At earlier levels, death hits you hard, but as you level up or join a populated guild, death just becomes a minor setback. In many games, you spend a few gold to fix your armor, and you’re back in the action. In MMOs such as Darkfall, you get your guild’s crafter to make you a new set of bone armor, and you’re back in the action. Or you just pull the extra pair of armor and regents out of your bank and head back to do some ganking.
Few MMOs have attempted permadeath, and the community’s cold reception to those that did is an excellent reason why many newer generation titles don’t even bother. Although Everquest had a permadeath server back in 2003, it didn’t last long (it was a promotional server). Star Wars Galaxies originally had permanent death for Jedi, which was scrapped considering the awesome amount of time that was invested into creating a Jedi. Titles like Eve Online and Face of Mankind are two successful titles that have managed a form of permanent death, but at a price: Experiencing permanent death in these titles is extraordinarily hard, as clones are abundant and easy to come by. In these titles, it is easier to delete your character than to die permanently.
As far as current MMOs go, virtually none of our current titles would support permanent death. With how much grind goes into games like World of Warcraft, Allods Online, Warhammer, etc, only the most hardcore of players would be willing to accept a permanent death system, even if it means forgoing any extra incentives (extra rewards or otherwise). Grinding hundreds of mobs for hours on end, just to have your efforts gone to waste because some guy and his clan decided to troll through town and murder everyone. Even more, players on PvP servers would regularly find themselves targets of griefers, high level players who would roll through and kill everyone. I mentioned in an old article about unrestricted PvP, and how there is no reason a level 80 should encounter a level 15 of the opposite faction, let alone fight them (and kill them with a flick of the wrist), and adding in permanent death would merely make the issue worse.
So it is safe to say that the “traditional” incarnation of permanent death is gone: losing your character because your died. That being said, although the feature is not coming back in any commercial MMO, we can see traits of it in other MMOs. Sandbox MMOs are more regularly adopting stat-loss, where your player loses a percentage of their stats across the board when they die. Stat loss is generally used for players marked as player killers, as a method of balancing risk vs reward, and has been well received in sandbox titles including Ultima Online, Mortal Online, and Darkfall.
In Dungeons and Dragons Online, players created a permanent death guild, where upon creating your character you join the guild, and then must leave if you ever die. Players claim it forces a lot more depth and strategy to the game, and although some players opt to delete their characters upon death, others simply treat them as an alternative character, an inviting opportunity to less hardcore players who still want to somewhat experience permanent death.
I’ve talked about this before, but there will likely never be truly meaningful death in an MMO, due to the natural fact that you will die during your game time. Although Eve Online and Face of Mankind include a form of permanent death, the system boils down to an alternate currency that must be paid upon death. Rather than simply paying your cash currency to remove death sickness (Aion) or to repair your items, you pay an alternate currency, purchased with regular currency, that you use to buy more lives. With the way both games have implemented it, it’s almost like taking Super Mario Brothers, but greatly reducing the 100 coin requirement for a 1-up. Aside from losing your items, death becomes still just a small hindrance.
Traditional permanent death will never be more than the kind of niche that Chronicles of Spellborn players look at and say “that is one tiny community.” With traditional permanent death, you set the risk v reward scale so far to one side that no one will want to risk anything, heaven forbid a lag spike come their way at a bad time, the server has a brain fart, or some magical bug causes them to die instantly (I’m looking at you, Runescape). MMOs may have free reign to do what they wish with the death system, but for all intent, the system will be small variations on a handful of features.
Instead of working on new ways for punishing players for dying, why not work on new ways to reward them for living? Lord of the Rings Online went as far as including achievements for getting to certain levels and never dying, with Champions Online including a star-like system where players gain stars (up to five) based on how many enemies they kill, that buffs the player. A little positive reinforcement can go a long way in pushing a player through a particularly long grind session, and in the developer’s benefit, give them the enthusiasm to keep that subscription going to next month, or buying that cash shop item they were on the fence about.
I know that the hardcore community is going to hate me for my belief that there is no median to the debate on death, and that the focus should instead be put on incentives for living, but I’m not the “carebear” some would think. I play a wide spectrum of MMOs, from Runescape to Dungeons and Dragons Online to Mortal Online and Xsyon. There is very little like strafing in a bank so that you aren’t pickpocketed.
I am certain I will revisit the topic if permanent death in the future. Until then, I remain unconvinced that a system will ever work.
MMO Fallout 