Once again Rooster Teeth has teamed up with NCsoft to inform those of you who may be considering buying accounts/powerleveling, and entertain those of us smart enough not to. Today’s lesson? Don’t buy your characters, otherwise you’ll end up as dumb as Caboose. Oh and you’ll be naked and alone.
This is Dhuum, he doesn’t like cheaters, hackers, botters, and exploiters. If you cheat, hack, bot, or exploit bugs, Dhuum will find you, and Dhuum will murder you in cold blood. As the God of death, when Dhuum takes your soul, there is no coming back, you are banished from the world of Guild Wars forever.
ArenaNet has announced that they have banned over 3,700 accounts, not to mention disbanding over a dozen guilds, with more on the way. Not only are players being banned, but they are being smitten in-game by the God of Death. See the video.
This isn’t the first NCsoft title to have flashy public executions of botters. Aion is well known to have GM’s personally firebomb chat spammers out of existence.
More on Guild Wars as it appears.
Readers of MMO Fallout know that, despite my strange methods of secrecy, I generally leave out various points for one reason or another. So in response to reader Dex’s question, also sent in by a few others:
“Why do you refer to there being two Final Fantasy MMOs at the end of 2010? Technically there are three: Final Fantasy XI/XIV, and Fantasy Earth Zero.”
Why that is an excellent question. Fantasy Earth Zero is a title you may have just heard of recently as that Korean F2P MMO with Square Enix’s name on it that I’ve seen ads for on MMORPG.com. When Fantasy Earth Zero launched in Japan-only in 2008, it tanked. In fact, to say that the game tanked would be a disservice to the short months that the game was active before Square Enix shut it down.
Like any good resurrection story, this of course continues with Gamepot picking up the publishing rights and relaunching under a free to play, cash shop model. Accumulating over nine million players, Gamepot shuffled the title over to the West, where it launched just over a week ago. Fantasy Earth Zero is an action-based title, with large Kingdom Vs Kingdom (50v50) battles being the main draw of the game.
So I’ll be keeping an eye on you, Fantasy Earth Zero. Being free definitely gives you an edge over your fellow Final Fantasy MMOs, but I’ve also seen your level of grind, and boy is there a lot of it.
Readers of MMO Fallout know that, despite my strange methods of secrecy, I generally leave out various points for one reason or another. So in response to reader Dex’s question, also sent in by a few others:
“Why do you refer to there being two Final Fantasy MMOs at the end of 2010? Technically there are three: Final Fantasy XI/XIV, and Fantasy Earth Zero.”
Why that is an excellent question. Fantasy Earth Zero is a title you may have just heard of recently as that Korean F2P MMO with Square Enix’s name on it that I’ve seen ads for on MMORPG.com. When Fantasy Earth Zero launched in Japan-only in 2008, it tanked. In fact, to say that the game tanked would be a disservice to the short months that the game was active before Square Enix shut it down.
Like any good resurrection story, this of course continues with Gamepot picking up the publishing rights and relaunching under a free to play, cash shop model. Accumulating over nine million players, Gamepot shuffled the title over to the West, where it launched just over a week ago. Fantasy Earth Zero is an action-based title, with large Kingdom Vs Kingdom (50v50) battles being the main draw of the game.
So I’ll be keeping an eye on you, Fantasy Earth Zero. Being free definitely gives you an edge over your fellow Final Fantasy MMOs, but I’ve also seen your level of grind, and boy is there a lot of it.
So it’s been a bad month or so for MMO servers. We know that Vanguard is on the verge of server mergers, and that Aion is to shut down several servers, and that Everquest 2 may be getting some servers shut down on the horizon. New word comes from Sony that beginning June 20th, Sony will begin consolidating servers. The result are that Everquest will end up with ten servers, the result of twenty being merged on a two to one basis (two servers merged into one, ten times over). There are four servers that are unaffected.
Characters will receive one free transfer for their characters that will only be valid for seven days after the transfer. Characters will be automatically transferred to the merged-server. If you play Everquest, you will want to read up on the information in the above link, as there are a lot of important notices you will need to take heed to, including what characters/items/banks/etc will be kept and what could be lost.
It is not all bad news, however. Sony announced that they will be opening up a new server, which players will have the opportunity to name.
I’ve said that server mergers are not always a bad thing, and for a game as old as Everquest I am certain the population will enjoy the increased number of players in various areas (or not, we all hate overcrowding). If the new server is a regular rules server, then we might see some vested new interest in the title by new players, as the lower level areas will be populated for quite some time by players rolling alts.
More on Everquest as it appears.
We all have those MMOs that we’ve quit for various reasons: Lack of depth, that one annoying feature, lag, abundance of bugs. I, to set an example, recently started playing Fallen Earth again, which I had quit shortly before picking up Aion in late October. What I found was a much improved game, not to mention a whole abundance of features that were not in the title when I stopped playing. I’m looking forward to starting the construction skill, but most notably is the lack of lag. I’m actually disappointed that I dropped Fallen Earth so soon, although my reasoning was because of the intense rubber-banding.
On the other hand, I also started playing the Allods Online beta again, and was immediately reminded of why I quit. Allods is a fun game, but some of the quests I had in my journal made me want to set my computer on fire. Not to mention the fact that I quit Allods mainly for the same reason I quit World of Warcraft; because the game just got boring. The cinematic effects die off quickly after the tutorial, and the prospects of systems similar to, if not even more strict, than the Fear of Death mechanic or armor cursing make me hesitant to put any investment into the title.
So have you given your old MMO a chance? And what was the result?
I’ve been playing Xsyon pretty much since the beta went live, and by playing of course I mean doing as much as I can to get the servers to crash and functions to break. Don’t worry, that’s what the developers want. So far, not much is implemented in Xsyon, as Notorious Games does their best to work on server stability and other bug fixes. Following the modular approach many people saw in Mortal Online, Xsyon hopes to implement each feature on a feature-by-feature basis.
Now for some bad news: Xsyon has been pushed back from the original prelude launch (this month) to August 15th.
The trolls are out in force, of course, scrambling to already call Xsyon a failure, despite many of them likely just hearing about it for the first time. Those of us with, as Derek Smart would put it, “two working braincells” would know that delays, and often large delays, at indie MMO studios are expected when a small team is working on something that arguably a large team should be.
More on Xsyon as it appears.
Now I know what you other MMO’ers are thinking right now: World of Warcraft got a mount that generated like a billion dollars for them. Why is it that WoW can pay $25 for a mount, and I can’t?
Well those of you who do not play Everquest 2, you’re out of luck (at least for now). Those who do play Everquest 2, however, can purchase Etheral, Sinister, and Ulteran Prowlers. What does each mount do, you ask? Aside from +65% run speed, each one comes in two version: Fierce and Arcane, each differs as follows:
Sony promises that these mounts will be available at least one month, so our paranoid mount-grabbers should act quickly, assuming this turns out to be a hint that the mounts will not be around forever.
I call dibs on the $250 Allods Online mount.
Aion launched in late September 2009, and by November I had reported that NCSoft’s report that the game had sold nearly one million copies in North America and Europe. Not only that, but very shortly after release NCsoft released a couple more servers to alleviate load. They did this, of course, with very public opposition to the idea. With any MMO, adding servers within the first month is generally a poor decision, as the iconic mass exodus that follows any MMO’s launch in the first few months is bound to alleviate those overpopulation woes.
So it is not too surprising when Aion announces that they are merging servers:
“I don’t relish the idea of mergers, however, once it is complete you should notice improvements in each of the new server economies, an abundance of players to group and run instances with, a number of great Legions to join or people to form new ones with, and a more tightly knit community.When all is said and done, Aion will be a better game because of the server merge. We’re in the planning stages, and will have more information on the timing and execution in the coming weeks.”
Chris Hager is right! Seriously, he is. Server mergers are not always a bad thing, and can do a world of good to the game’s economies and servers, and often even incite people into resubscribing who may have left due to low population on their server, but an unwillingness to transfer and create a new character.
In the recent NCsoft Q1 report, Aion is down in the West, with the conference call noting:
“As for the Aion performance in the Western market, I should have mentioned that the number of active users has declined since the launch of the retail package in September and October last year. But I’m also very confident that at this point EU/US is able to maintain the current level of active users and since we’re expecting the 1.9 update soon, and also 2.0 in the third quarter.”
More on Aion and the server mergers as it appears.
NIDA Online shut down late last night, after approximately eight months in service, so last night I decided to take a plunge into the game and see just why the title fell short of its one year anniversary.
What I found was a game that wasn’t all that terrible, but nothing special. In terms of cookie-cutter MMOs, this cookie was that plate of Christmas cookies you get from relatives and neighbors that eerily look identical. They are home cooked, but have the strong sensation that the person simply unwrapped store bought items, arranged them on a plate, and called them their own.
I created an Artificier, a tech-based character, who did all of his fighting through guns, not unlike my character in Aika Online. My starter pistol was replaced at level ten with a shotgun, and buying ammo was quick and easy (click on a button on the HUD, no need to be in town or at a vendor). At level fifteen, however, I purchased myself a machine gun that tore through enemies like a hail of knives through air.
By the time I logged off for the night (the game shut down at approximately 3am my time), I hit level 20 and felt like I had accomplished absolutely nothing. I had finished a total of five quests, each one having me kill dozens, if not hundreds, of the same two or three mobs for the sake of finding three or five of whatever item they dropped. Sayries, for example, dropped shells that I needed for a level five quest. I leveled from eight to fifteen before I retrieved all five shells, which I turned in to find my next quest? Get three Sayrie shells. These are non-repeatable quests.
I wanted to get the essence of what new players see when coming into the game, and what I found was an uninviting world filled with monsters who, should you partake in the game’s quest system, you will be slaughtering by the hundred until they no longer give you a viable source of exp, only to finish one quest and then be sent right back for the next. It isn’t a test of patience, or tolerance of grind like in most other Asian MMOs, but instead you get to a point while questing where you simply ask yourself “where is the challenge?”
Moving around is a chore, with the WASD system broken, and the point/click system shoddily put together (I had regular moments where clicking yielded no movement). The combat system is a combat system, there isn’t much more to say about it. Nothing special, but nothing horrible about it either.
I’m sure I will be berated for not giving the title more of a chance, but the focus of my play time over the course of the day yesterday was to experience the game as a new player would, and judging by the dearth of posts on the forums pre-shutdown, and the lack of people in-game, I get the feeling I was one of the few remaining who cared to even take a peek.
NIDA Online is a reminder that for all we rag on mainstream Korean MMOs, there is in fact a level of quality that borderlines on comatose, and I for one feel bad that Gamekiss put so much of their own support and funding into a title that the developers obviously couldn’t care less about.
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