Winter is coming, but this year’s Blizzcon has brought with it a much anticipated and long demanded announcement from Blizzard: Years of players asking for classic World of Warcraft servers has finally heeded an answer and that answer is yes. According to an article by PC Gamer, the Classic World of Warcraft server will be an endeavor taken on by an entirely different team at Blizzard,
There is no set launch date for World of Warcraft Classic.
Old School RuneScape’s Community Manager took to the game’s subreddit today to address a controversy that sparked up over a number of accounts getting banned overnight for alleged harassment of a popular streamer. According to player allegations, people were banned for the simple act of standing near the streamer while playing emotes.
The story Jagex is telling is very different from the one being passed around between members of the community. According to Jagex, the players were banned for a string of racist and abusive messages, and that only one person was permanently banned which was for dressing up as a KKK member.
Recently, several players were banned for repeatedly harassing a number of people within the community. We want to make one thing clear in this post: the actions of these players were completely unacceptable and we will not tolerate racism or harassment in Old School RuneScape.
The post goes on to state that Jagex took action on players who “spent their time spreading racism hatred, and abuse throughout the game.” Later on in the same Reddit thread, Kemp explains that the reason players were banned for “bug abuse” was because of the length that the ban carries.
Jagex has refused to publish the transcript evidence of players banned for abuse, due to not wanting to publicize the activity and out of fear that it would create a precedent obligating the company to release the transcripts every time someone demands it.
MMO Fallout will update if we get any more details.
(Source: Reddit)
Free servers are the MMO equivalent of regular game piracy, they’re likely never going to fully go away and developers have different approaches on how to deal with them. The gaming community is split on how private servers should be regarded, and there are plenty of legitimate and illegitimate reasons for their existence.
If Nostalrius has proven anything, it is that vanilla World of Warcraft continues to be the holy grail of a large number of MMO gamers. It proves that there is at least heavy interest in the concept. Whether or not those players, plus the unknown quantity of gamers who want vanilla WoW but won’t play on pirate servers, will translate into a profitable venture is unknown, but that’s just it: The number is unknown.
To not misquote Blizzard, they never really talk about profitability when it comes to classic servers. Rather, the answer is generally about artistic vision and supporting the live game going forward. I have little doubt that an official classic server with the Blizzard seal of “this won’t get shut down pending a lawsuit” would be profitable, and I’m sure that their bean counters have come to the same conclusion. So the only choices are artistic vision and technical feasibility.
On the technical side, it’s hard to argue that such a venture would be impossible. It’s been done, numerous times by people working out of their house, in fact it’s been done better. Nostalrius was capable of supporting a massive number of players in a server.
I suspect, and don’t hold me to this, that a classic World of Warcraft server is and for years has been on Blizzard’s potential project list. When Jagex launched RuneScape 3 along with the Evolution of Combat update and players began leaving the game, I suspected that if the population dropped enough that they would launch a classic version of RuneScape 2. Lo and behold, I was right. I feel that World of Vanillacraft doesn’t stray too far from that theory.
Because creative vision doesn’t mean jack when your subscriber numbers are falling and your customers are badgering you to please let them give you money. Right now, Blizzard is in a place where the ebb and flow of expansions and microtransactions are keeping that ace firmly placed up Blizzard’s sleeve. Should those sales dip, I have a feeling Blizzard will come across a functioning version from 2005-2006, and all of a sudden those claims of artistic vision will have been just a prank, bro.
And just as with Old School RuneScape, I suspect that WoW Vanilla would do amazingly well within its first months, enough to fund the hiring of dedicated developers and get the content train rolling in a way that didn’t diminish from the old school style of play. You’d gradually see small tweaks and bug fixes turn into regular content updates, kind of like Old School RuneScape, and who knows? In a few more months its population could rival that of the main game.
But, like I said, we’ll never know until Blizzard tries. Jagex has Old School RuneScape, Daybreak Game Company gave its blessing to Project 99, hasn’t sued the Star Wars Galaxies emulator, Lineage II has its classic servers, etc.
I’m not saying Blizzard is obligated to provide a classic server, but never say never.
In celebration of RuneScape’s 15th birthday, Jagex has once again made the oldest iteration of the game available to the public. Starting today and running through mid-March, players can log in and secure themselves indefinite access to the classic servers with all of their old school glory. Your account from RuneScape won’t transfer over, so if you haven’t played before you’ll be starting over.
The availability of RuneScape Classic is limited to current RuneScape members. If you are a member and wish to take advantage of the open window, head over to the official page and log in with your current RuneScape account from 11 January at 12:00 UTC until 11 March at 12:00 UTC. Once you’ve made a character, you will have access to RuneScape Classic whenever you want to play it.
RuneScape Classic remains online for the remaining community that continue playing as well as players who would like to see how the game looked pre-2004. Due to the ease of cheating, the game is mostly closed off to the public with small windows of time where new players can obtain access. The last time that the servers were open to new players was 2011, at which time Jagex claimed that the game would not be opened to the public again. Whether the current event is a one-off exception is unknown.
(Source: RuneScape)
You can only hope that other developers are paying attention to Jagex. This year marked the announcement and launch of RuneScape’s Old School server, a separate service that originally launched as a snapshot of the MMO way back from August 2007, but has since evolved into its own game entirely. Updates are based entirely off of polls, with each addition being voted on separately and requiring 75% approval in order to be implemented. Rather than vote on ideas from the standard RuneScape ruleset, Old School has gone in a completely different direction with the implementation of features such as pvp worlds, where players are able to fight it out all over the world instead of being relegated to the wilderness.
We can only hope that more developers will see the value of classic servers.
Would you pay $15 a month for access to classic RuneScape? No not that far back, we’re talking 2007’ish, before the original trade restrictions were put into place. Well do I have news for you. In a blog post on the RuneScape official website today, Jagex has outlined plans to release a snapshot version of RuneScape dated back to August 2007. Before, well, a whole lot. Just imagine, a RuneScape where Jagex never restricted trade (or nuked bots), where Dungeoneering doesn’t exist, no God Wars or top tier equipment, no grand exchange (auction house), etc. No evolution of combat and no microtransactions.
Want to go back to the nostalgic days? All you have to do is vote.
So, just like the poll for the return of the Wildy & Free Trade, which saw a jaw dropping 1.4 million votes , we will be running a similar poll and letting you – our valued members – decide the fate of ‘Old School RuneScape’, given that you directly fund the game’s ongoing development and supporting services. This decision – along with the level of service, investment and potentially any additional fee for the service – is truly up to you to determine.
The blog post highlights several stages of development depending on how many votes the poll gets, from the bare minimum (50 thousand) where the service comes back as a $15 a month subscription (yikes) and only receives critical maintenance.
These servers, at any of the above levels, would be the exact version from back in 2007 and would maintain the ‘old school’ vibe and rules. The old graphics, hiscores, log-in, are all part of the same archived build and would be retained. We wouldn’t ever add any micropayment updates.
The poll will be live on February 15th and run for two weeks. Your options are yes, or don’t vote.
(Source: RuneScape Website)
Would you pay $15 a month for access to classic RuneScape? No not that far back, we’re talking 2007’ish, before the original trade restrictions were put into place. Well do I have news for you. In a blog post on the RuneScape official website today, Jagex has outlined plans to release a snapshot version of RuneScape dated back to August 2007. Before, well, a whole lot. Just imagine, a RuneScape where Jagex never restricted trade (or nuked bots), where Dungeoneering doesn’t exist, no God Wars or top tier equipment, no grand exchange (auction house), etc. No evolution of combat and no microtransactions.
Want to go back to the nostalgic days? All you have to do is vote.
So, just like the poll for the return of the Wildy & Free Trade, which saw a jaw dropping 1.4 million votes , we will be running a similar poll and letting you – our valued members – decide the fate of ‘Old School RuneScape’, given that you directly fund the game’s ongoing development and supporting services. This decision – along with the level of service, investment and potentially any additional fee for the service – is truly up to you to determine.
The blog post highlights several stages of development depending on how many votes the poll gets, from the bare minimum (50 thousand) where the service comes back as a $15 a month subscription (yikes) and only receives critical maintenance.
These servers, at any of the above levels, would be the exact version from back in 2007 and would maintain the ‘old school’ vibe and rules. The old graphics, hiscores, log-in, are all part of the same archived build and would be retained. We wouldn’t ever add any micropayment updates.
The poll will be live on February 15th and run for two weeks. Your options are yes, or don’t vote.
(Source: RuneScape Website)
- Cherry Blossoms.
Final Fantasy XIV features nineteen classes, and for the most part the names are rather straightforward. We know what to expect out of a fisher, botanist, miner, armorer, blacksmith, goldsmith, culinarian, etc. However, from the perspective of someone who has never played Final Fantasy XIV, can you tell me what a Thaumaturge does? A Thaumaturge is a magic class that specializes in damage, incapacitation, and using your own HP to heal your party members. For a regular Final Fantasy player, the Thaumaturge are probably closer to black mages.
There are plans in place to change the job names back to their more classic versions (archer becomes ranger, etc), and the update is welcome, albeit a low priority task. Learning the jobs in Final Fantasy XIV is basically a measure of applying new terms to old concepts, and aside from a few extra minutes of confusion, is not that big of a deal.
As for me? Well I’ll keep spending a lot of my time in Final Fantasy XIV making screenshots to use as header images, like the one you see above.
MMO Fallout 