MMO Fallout

With Scammers At Bay, The Players Will Play

This article has nothing to do with T-Mobile's Sidekick

All two of you who visited my message boards will see that I am not a big fan of being explicit with rules. In fact, there are three rules on the Orb Boards; Don’t incite a flame war, keep your account secure, and don’t be a spambot. Apart from those basic rules, I don’t think the rest needs to be explained. What it comes down to is: Anything you wouldn’t do in real life, don’t do here. Unless you make a living out of stealing people’s identities, in which case…still don’t do that here.

I often like to see Game Masters getting intuitive when it comes to removing problems that may not warrant a complete rule, or that may be such a special case that putting a rule would be far too generalizing. Say, for example, the issues Aion had when it launched last month. Players were clogging the servers by going away from keyboard so they could sleep, go to school, etc, without being logged off. Rather than pull out the ban-stick and taking things far over the edge, NCsoft quickly released a patch making such an exploit impossible.

The idea is that you don’t have to issue permabans to get a point across.

More on Aion, World of Warcraft, and more after the break.

Continue reading “With Scammers At Bay, The Players Will Play”

Ignorance Not An Excuse

October 15th has come and gone, and with it came the closure of twelve Star Wars Galaxies servers, as I reported this past September. Now, I originally assumed that once the servers shut down, all characters left on them would be lost for good. The reason for the server closures was that the already running free transfer service had been such a success that multiple servers were now dead as players flooded their characters to other, more populated, servers.

Continue reading “Ignorance Not An Excuse”

Dungeons and Dragons Online: Going Free Pays Off

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If Dungeons and Dragons Online taught us anything, it is that just because a title goes free to play, that is no true indication that the company is hitting some hard times. However much like peanut butter and jelly, when the two come together, you can usually anticipate that someone is making a sandwich. Luckily, this is not the case.

Earlier this year, Turbine announced that Dungeons and Dragons Online would be heading towards a free to play model, with several various forms of subscription payment, in addition to a micro transaction store. Today Turbine announced that the now free to play title has seen a massive upswing in numbers, both in subscriptions and in new players. New subscribers has risen 40%, that is to say players who are paying for the title.

Turbine attributes this to people who previously were not willing to give the title a try, but once they got in for free were willing to shell out a few bucks a month.

Dungeons and Dragons can be downloaded at http://www.ddo.com and played for free for an unlimited time.

Fallen Earth LLC: Any Sleep?

Fallen Earth went into live mode on September 22nd, where the title had something of a rocky start. The first few weeks have brought on numerous bugs, server load issues, and recurring problems with the tutorial. Fallen Earth LLC hopes to put the past behind it with an upcoming patch that will address all of these problems.

To start at the top of the list, the new tutorial will allow an optional extension of 30 to 45 minutes, that will give players a more indepth look at the crafting, scavenging, combat, mount, and harvesting systems. Town events will also be given an update, and the patch is followed by eight pages of bug fixes. In addition, October will bring a Halloween event to Fallen Earth.

Forget whether or not Fallen Earth can handle the updates; One can only wonder as to the abuse that the coffee machine over at Fallen Earth LLC is taking.

Toying With Danger: Learning From Microsoft

This article has nothing to do with mobile MMOs

Now, one truth that has always been self evident; a company doesn’t have to deal with MMOs to give the industry something to learn from. Such is the case with Microsoft, Danger Inc (Yes, that is the company name), T-Mobile, and a certain mobile phone called the Sidekick. For those of you living under a rock, the Sidekick was introduced in 2003 with a great feature: Everything you did on the device was immediately backed up on their internal servers. Add a contact? Backed up. Delete a contact? Backed up. Send an alcohol inspired text message? Sadly, backed up. When you turn off the phone, everything on your phone is deleted so it can be properly synced when you next boot up.

The sidekick is something akin to the mobile phone of MMOs, where equally everything you do is backed up on internal servers rather than your own computer. Because crucial information is stored on the company’s servers rather than a person’s computer, or phone, it becomes imperative for that company to have backups available in case something were to go awry. Jagex, for example, does a backup of its systems on Runescape every fifteen minutes, just in case there’s a major server crash and a rollback is needed. Even then, a critical crash earlier last month resulted in several days of data loss on the friends list server.

So here we are in October: T-Mobile’s service went down around the start of the month, much to the dismay of its users. After several days of no service, Sidekick users reported information missing. As it turned out, there were some critical errors on Microsoft’s end where the servers were stored. The personal information synced by the Sidekicks was lost, with no usable backups available. Effectively, all personal data on every T-mobile device is gone. The only way, currently, to keep your data from being lost is to keep your phone on at all times until the service is fully restored.

There are currently two lawsuits running over this issue. Sidekick users can expect a compensation of a $100 gift certificate and a free month of service.

Stargate Back: Outlook Still Bad

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When the website for Stargate Worlds went down Friday for maintenance, we assumed it would take the regular day or so for the DNS change to be complete and the website to come back up. After the 12th, when the website still hadn’t come back up, viewers looked towards the SGW twitter and Facebook pages for any update on the situation. What they found, however, was a lack of any updates or information regarding the delay. SGW’s social networking tools had gone quiet.

Stargate World’s website is back up and running, but prospects are not high. Although Cheyenne received funding earlier this year, enough to pay due paychecks and cover some other costs, the company is still starving for cash. In a post regarding the downtime;

While there continues to be a lot of desire, enthusiasm and excitement about the project from our employees, investors and fans, we will not be able to provide any updates on the development of Stargate Worlds until sufficient funding is available.

I can’t say I’m surprised at all when more bad news comes out of Stargate Worlds.

False Positives Happen: The Response Is What Counts

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Good morning/day folks,

A couple of threads on this topic appeared during the night and rather than replying to each one of them I thought I’d create a new one.

We have, as you know, recently banned a large number of users for violating our User Agreement. If you found yourself unable to log in after the night, that would be the reason.

If you are 100% sure you have not been involved with any activity that would violate our User Agreement (this would also include anything related to RMT), then we suggest contacting our Customer Support team at Support | NCsoft who will be able to look into your case.

We understand that the timing is very inconvenient and will make sure that inquiries on this matter are made top priority. Our GMs will be working through the weekend to sort this out as quickly as possible.

– Ayase

Mass bans in any game remind us as to why police officers don’t take down an armed suspect in a crowded mall by firing an automatic rifle into the crowd and hoping to hit him. You’ll hit your mark eventually, but you are the one that will be explaining to little Tina why daddy won’t be waking up.

When the subject turns to real money trading (RMT), the situation turns from cop-in-mall to a McCarthy style commie hunt, the commies being the gold farmers and buyers (Note: Not a jab at China). Hunting down goldfarmers is akin to searching for a criminal by attempting to listen to their thoughts (Note: You are not Matt Parkman, nor do you work for the FAA). Banning for gold is an even hairier issue. Take for example the following issue: Xkcd sends TwinkpOwn892735 twenty thousand gold. R3dsp0t sends X Dalton X twenty thousand gold. Both of these transactions actually happened in an unnamed MMO, and one of the two were gold farmers. I’ll come back to that later.

Continue reading “False Positives Happen: The Response Is What Counts”

Play Runescape Now, My Lord

SUMMONING

Jagex, makers of the browser based MMO Runescape, recently struck a marketing deal with Zapak to bring Runescape’s marketing and distribution to India. For those not familiar with Zapak, the website is a portal of web based games. The Indian version of Miniclip if you will.

But one bit of advertising caught my eye: On Zapak’s front page, the following image can be seen advertising Runescape:

I’m hoping this is Zapak’s artwork because, if it is, we can play it up to ignorance. Evony, formerly Civony, was widely panned for its continuing advertising campaign, featuring nothing but women with large breasts, a marketing campaign that spiraled down into just breasts. In fact Evony was voted the most despised game on the internet for just that same reason.

Then again, it could be worse. Jagex could be owned by a goldfarming-I said nothing. Maybe I’m just a little tender to anything that reminds me of Evony, considering I would estimate 60% of the spam comments I get are advertisements for this scam game.

Some Evony banners, and breasts, after the break.

Continue reading “Play Runescape Now, My Lord”

Archlord Is Back!

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Ok, you caught me. I have to admit, however, that for a title that was as widely panned as Archlord (As I mentioned in my previous news bit, Archlord was panned for being “dull and repetitive” among other issues) Archlord is quite resilient. Last September we learned that the free to play title was to be shut down after Codemasters lost the rights to run the title in North America and Europe. Ever since the title launched, it was wrought with controversy, as I mentioned coming across quite a large number of claims of corruption within Codemasters, and convenient bans for people who purchased large amounts of in-game currency (The game runs on a micro-transaction format, shop currency is specifically what I am referring to).

Archlord shut down on the first of this month, for two days when the newest host, Webzen, officially launched the new North American and European servers. Webzen is offering a transfer service to players coming over from Codemasters, that is expected to complete on the 14th. In order to sweeten the deal, Webzen updated the game offering transfer players some microtransaction currency, and the new Archlord now features a female-only swashbuckling class.

A change of pace should be just what the doctor ordered for Archlord, but it may be too little too late. I foresee the next news story you see here on MMO Fallout related to Archlord will be its shutdown notice.

Keep Fighting the Good Fight

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With Champions Online and DC Universe taking up most of the superhero limelight, we tend to forget that City of Heroes is still in the room. City of Heroes is getting along in its life, and despite having just celebrated its fifth birthday this year, the train keeps rolling. City of Heroes remains one of NCSoft’s more popular titles.

The developers over at Paragon have been working tirelessly this year to keep City of Heroes up to date and relevant. Aside from improvements to the customization of your superhero, Paragon announced Going Rogue, an upcoming expansion pack for the title. Set in a Utopian alternate universe to Praetoria, Going Rogue will introduce a new system that dives into the shades of gray in between the Hero and Villain. This expansion will allow heroes to become villains, villains to heroes, allowing each side to experience the opposing side’s cities without having to reroll a character.

More on Going Rogue as it appears. If you attend this year’s Hero Con, you can receive beta keys to the expansion.

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