With November coming to a close, the holiday deals are already beginning. For Steam, Eve Online and Final Fantasy XI: Ultimate Collection are now on sale, for the next 24 hours. As usual, all values are in USD. This sale lasts until Noon EST on November 26th.
Stargate Resistance isn’t the only game to lower their stores. As of today in Eve Online, NPCs will no longer sell orders for the Learning Group, now known as Learning Skills. Why? All learning skills are being deleted, that’s why. Coming on December 14th, all learning skills will be removed from the game, with varying forms of reimbursement. Skillpoints invested in learning skills will be returned, while skill books will be exchanged with the vendor’s price. All new and existing characters will receive an additional 12 base points in each attribute. In addition, the 100% bonus up to 1.6m SP will be removed. Injected learning books will not be reimbursed.
You can read all about it in the latest developer blog, and stay tuned to the blog to find out the second half of December’s Santa patch.
Make a wish, kids, because Blizzard just donated one million dollars to make your wish come true. Last year, Blizzard ran a two month long charity drive with a simple premise: Purchase a Pandaren Monk pet for $10 USD, and 50% of that purchase will go towards the Make-a-Wish foundation. Despite the usual complaints on the forums, over two hundred thousand of Blizzard’s subscribers pulled their wallets out and made a purchase during that time period.
Although 50% isn’t nearly as much of a percentage as I’d like to see companies (especially Blizzard) give from a non-tangible item that costs barely a couple hours to code into the game, given that the Pandaren wasn’t made for the charity, I think I can give it a pass. The sheer girth of the donation, combined with Blizzard being up front about how much they were donating, makes it an alright move in my books.
Meanwhile the PLEX for Haiti event ended last week on Eve Online, with more than forty thousand dollars being donated. In Eve Online, if players donated PLEX, it was converted directly into cash and sent to charity.
By this time in, oh I’ll go for a long shot, 2011 we should be seeing the outcome of the battle of the titans: Four major contenders looking to bring their best and brightest to the field and answer one question: Who will dominate the MMOFPS market? Granted, two of the contenders are not actually fully declared.
According to insider reports, Blizzard’s unnamed upcoming MMO will be split into two parts, a social aspect and a first person shooter. Virtually nothing is known about the MMO so far. Likewise, Infinity Ward is rumored to be working on a Call of Duty MMO, with Modern Warfare 3 being moved to another company. Of course, there is Sony Online Entertainment, with the recent announcement of Planetside 2, and the most confirmed of the group: DUST 514.
Some time ago I wrote an article discussing how games that have full, unrestricted PvP are doomed to fail. The games create a griefer’s paradise, where Player Vs Player combat is no longer about finding the most powerful person to take down, but rather how many people you can gank out of their starting area before you are removed for a few hours. Developers create the games with the knowledge that the title will be niche, but fail to realize just how many players will not make it past their first free month of gameplay.
CCP’s contempt for Real Money Traders may seem slightly overblown in this title, but in his latest dev blog, GM Grimmi wants us completely sure that the Eve Online developer feels exactly that sentiment when the subject comes to RMT and players who buy and sell illegal isk (ingame currency). Eve Online has taken a two tier strategy to fighting Real Money Traders in the past, one of those being the ability to sell membership for isk, and the other being the support staff that are on hand to remove farmers as they pop up.
Eve Online has been trying to find the perfect formula for fighting gold farmers for years, and we’ve seen many mass bans on their part. Operation Unholy Rage, which went live on June 22nd, resulted in the banning of over six thousand paying accounts. Gm Grimmi is nice enough to provide us with a few charts, one of which I’ll refer to here.
Makes you wonder what the ratio of players to bots is.
Thanks to Operation Unholy Rage, the servers are back to their spacious…space, and resources are no longer being tied by up botters and macros. GM Grimmi also noted the instant impact on items, namely memory augmentation implants, noting that the immediate effect was a sharp increase in price and a pitfall in quantity supplied.
With all of these changes, however, the market has reportedly been overall unaffected by the string of mass bans. Players of games such as Runescape are well in tune with the effect massive amounts of real world trading and botting once had on the economy, and it’s fresh to see that the macroing didn’t manage to break the kneecaps of the economy on its way out.
If you’re an Eve Online player; Keep fighting the good fight. A large market of real world trading is conducted through hacked accounts, so keeping your password secure and difficult to guess is an absolute must. I normally don’t do your regular MMO news, but issues such as Real World Trading have a big effect on a game’s population. People who see the developers as not stopping real world trading will leave an MMO in droves. What CCP has shown for over four years straight is their dedication to keeping their game clean and enjoyable without hurting the legit players, and that is something to be truly commended.
MMO Fallout 