Community – MMO Fallout

Daybreak Ignores Everquest Ragefire Vote

When it comes to Everquest and time-locked servers, polls ensure that the servers only progress as fast at the community wants them to. For Ragefire/Lockjaw, the latest set of progression servers, players voted by a very large percentage in order to keep the servers as they are for another six months, with the second most popular option being ASAP on Ragefire and 3 months on Lockjaw.

In an announcement posted on the official forums, however, Daybreak developer Aristo announced that the company will react to player votes by ignoring them, bending the rules and combining answers from two categories (ASAP and 3 months) and calling it the majority opinion. Instead of going with the top voted option (six months), Daybreak will instead open up voting for the Kunark expansion after three months.

Players stuck on Ragefire might have the option to transfer to Lockjaw, perhaps. It’s a possibility that Daybreak is investigating with no details or confirmation that it would be possible, also noting that the transfer wouldn’t be possible until after the servers fell out of sync.

Once Ragefire is settled into Kunark we’ll have to explore whether they want to return to the 6-month schedule or adjust it to a faster track. Likewise, although Lockjaw will hopefully be full of people who want to stick around in an era for a long time, we’ll check to make sure that remains the case as time goes by.

Daybreak Game Company seems to be suffering from a case of foot in mouth disease, as earlier today community manager Holly Longdale ruffled some feathers by stating that “casual players shouldn’t be allowed to fight Nagafen,” a rather out of touch comment considering that much of the content and competition is currently being nullified by large groups of players multi-boxing and botting.

“What we don’t want to do is instance raids, which is what casuals want us to do because they want to fight Nagafen. Casuals shouldn’t be allowed to fight Nagafen… that diminishes the achievement of others. That’s part of the challenge: You have to be better than the other guy; you have to be more strategic that the other guy.”

As for multi-boxing, Longdale assures us that they are “looking into it.”

(Source: Everquest)

Arenanet Responds To Expansion Criticism

In response to recent criticism over the handling of Heart of Thorns, Arenanet has posted a comprehensive compensation and refund policy. For veteran players, Arenanet is offering a free character slot to anyone who owns the base game and pre-orders the Heart of Thorns expansion and registers it prior to launch.

The announcement that Heart of Thorns would come packaged with the base Guild Wars 2 game drew heavy fire from gamers who purchased the game following Arenanet’s warning that the expansion would not be a standalone as was the case with Guild Wars 1.

Anyone who purchased Guild Wars 2 from the official website between January 23rd and June 16th will be eligible for a full refund should they purchase Heart of Thorns also from the official website before July 31st. If you purchased the core game during that same time and no longer want to play it, Arenanet will offer a full refund.

For Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, we didn’t want the core game’s price to be a factor in a new player’s decision to begin playing Guild Wars 2. In the future, if we release further Guild Wars 2 expansions, we plan to offer all of the prior expansions, the core game, and the latest expansion for one single purchase price.

Copies purchased from third party vendors during the above period will be upgraded with the extra character slot if the expansion is pre-ordered and registered to the account prior to launch.

(Source: Arenanet)

[Community] Let’s Call A Merger A Merger

Originally I intended this week’s Community column to be speculation about how Trion Worlds would handle ArcheAge’s upcoming server merge, given that the plans are still in the conceptual stage and any real action that will be taken is still months down the line. To fuel speculation, I looked at how server mergers were handled in Korea and Russia under XLGames and Mail.ru respectively, and hoped to get a comment from each party.

While Mail.ru and XLGames didn’t respond to my request, I was told by Trion Worlds that an FAQ was in the works. It isn’t out as of this publishing (approximately 2pm EST on Monday, June 1st), so I’m going ahead with my original plan.

It’s safe to say that the term “server merger” has such a negative connotation attached to it because, in the eyes of the ever-rational internet mob, developers might as well post an announcement that they’ve failed at business. Couple that with a media in love with negative headlines, and you’ve got a recipe for PR disaster. Because of this, Trion Worlds isn’t the first to treat the phrase like they’ve been accused of having lice, and have joined the growing list of developers shuffling players away from low population servers (before closing them usually) without actually using the term “merger.” Even Blizzard opted to develop its engine to support cross-realm play rather than merge its list of low population servers.

There tends to be an even more negative response to this tactic, since if there’s one thing people hate more than being lied to, it’s when companies talk to them like they are lawyers in a courtroom dodging a guilty plea by questioning the definition of the term “murder.” To go back to the previous analogy, they are the kid in school trying to explain that while their head has been buzzed and their hair smells of medical shampoo, there is no way you can prove that they were responsible for the lice sighting that the school warned about over the morning announcements.

This isn’t the first time Trion Worlds merged without ever using the term. In Rift, Trion would convert low population servers to “trial servers” in order to force players off of them without actually calling it a merger. Designating a server as “trial” would result in character creation being disabled (for subscribers) and would limit players to the two main cities, forcing players to transfer off once they had finished the content available in the free trial.

We won’t know what Trion plans on doing with ArcheAge until they release more information, but we did grab this soundbite from their latest Twitch stream:

“It’s basically taking lower population servers and then creating an entirely new server and allowing players to migrate from that server to the new evolved servers.”

If their approach to merging servers in ArcheAge is anything close to what they did in Rift, it is likely that players will be not so gently coerced into transferring over to these “evolved servers,” through various limitations on these legacy servers. This way, once the population has sufficiently dwindled, the servers can be logically shut down due to lack of activity, with any characters remaining forced to transfer off.

So the notion that the servers were never merged is technically correct, and as I have said before technically correct is my favorite kind of correct.

[Community] Are Boxers Harshing Your Ragefire Buzz?

(Community is a weekly column discussing ongoing events in various MMOs. Agree or disagree, we’d like to hear what you think in the comments below.)

Everquest’s Ragefire progression server has been up for less than a week, actually it’s been up for about four days, but if you’ve been trying to make headway in the game it might feel more like a week. Unfortunately, parts of the community are at each other’s throats over the issue of people not being able to play, and who is responsible for clogging Ragefire and camping its mobs. Daybreak has been working to alleviate problems without trampling on either side’s shoes, and the fighting is getting worse.

The culprit of choice for Ragefire are the boxers, players who run two or more copies of Everquest simultaneously, either controlling accounts separately or using programs like isboxer to direct multiple characters at once. A distinction between boxing and botting is important, since botting is unattended and boxing is one player actually operating multiple accounts. Boxing has become very common over the years in Everquest, as computers have expanded and become capable of running multiple instances of the game very easily. For Ragefire, where getting a spot on the server has been rather difficult, members of the community are understandably angry over long queues that are at least partially the fault of single players taking upwards of six or more slots.

With Ragefire requiring a subscription, it’s also easy to see why Daybreak doesn’t want to tread on the shoes of someone paying $15 per month, per account.

On Daybreak’s end, the company has implemented an afk timer that apparently goes up and down based on how much demand there is to get into the server. I haven’t been able to test this out myself, but reports from other players indicate that the timer can swing as high as over an hour to as low as under ten minutes. In addition, Daybreak cobbled together a server queue that allows players to get their place in during peak hours and alt-tab out of the client or go into chat without worrying about the system automatically logging them out.

How do you feel about boxers in Everquest?

[Community] Do You Take Part In Month-Long Events?

RuneScape is eleven days into its May roadtrip, and the hardcore among you are no doubt already finished and reaping the benefits. As has become a tradition, the month of May means the RuneScape Road Trip. Players are given a booklet with a set of 20 tasks that can be completed once per day, with the option to gather chits from employee events to skip an extra task once per day. Since today is the eleventh, it is possible that people are already done with the event.

Long term events have always been a point of contention among MMO players, between those on the casual side that may be unable to log in more than a couple days a week, and the content locusts who will quickly gobble up a month’s worth of content in a couple of days, including their four alt accounts. Jagex generally makes attempts on longer-term content by including methods to accommodate both groups.

How do you feel about long-term events in gaming? Let us know in the comments below.

[Community] The Despicable DDoS

If I had a nickel for every time some individual or group launched a denial of service attack against a website or service that they didn’t like, I would put those nickels in a sock and use it to beat them unconscious. I’m old enough to remember a time when DDoS attacks were much more rare and feared not only because of how much they could cost in terms of damages or fees, but because they generally had some kind of motive behind them, be it retaliation or to even hold a service ransom. These days the denial of service attack has become so simple and accessible that people in RuneScape are using it on each other to gain an edge in player killing! Players in Garry’s Mod DOS each other’s servers and call it “competition.” The Garry’s Mod official forums itself is a regular target of denial of service attacks in response to bans targeting specific cheat programs.

The rate at which denial of service attacks are becoming increasingly common is disgusting, even more so when you look at how many of them are likely breaking things for the sake of breaking things. Big name developers like Jagex are being hit in retaliation by the gold farming criminals they ban, and the past two years alone saw attacks on Eve Online, Wurm, Darkfall, Dino Storm, Dofus, Perpetuum Online, TUG, Cubeworld, and countless more. Even Extra Life was not immune to the power of a few keyboard-wielding psychopaths.

As companies like Amazon and Google jump into the fray to bring more affordable protection to websites via cloud protection and mitigation, we can only hope that they will spell the death of the denial of service attack. Until then, when the method of delivery is about as complicated as logging into the Facebook account that you’re about to DOS, you can expect to see such attacks continue to propagate.

[Community] Is Ragnarok Online 2 Pay To Win?

Does Ragnarok Online 2 have a pay to win system? I’ve asked around about this and the best answer I’ve been able to come up with is “in a sense, yes, but nothing drastic.” I ask this because Ragnarok features a VIP system, similar to that found in games like Age of Wushu, where players can pay in for some perks. Unlike those games, however, Ragnarok cuts straight to the point by offering straight stat perks: +5 to stats, +10% health, +10% sp, and +20% movement speed.

I ask because the opinion seems pretty split between people who are calling it pay to win, although virtually none of them are speaking from any actual experience playing the game, and people who are playing and stating that the bonuses are insignificant to the point where they don’t do much more than keep your character alive another millisecond before they die. So the conclusion I’m seeing on discussion boards is that the system is pay to win, in theory, but in practice isn’t going to break the barrier between lose and win.

Are there any Ragnarok Online 2 players who can clear this up for us?

[Community] Must We Threaten To Sue Over Everything?

As you all know, The Secret World went Buy-to-Play, dropping the required subscription in return for giving subscribers more perks and allowing the unwashed masses to play (and presumably spend some cash in the cash shop) by simply picking up the box copy. Like any other town with a bridge to live under, there is a subsection of players who are apparently licensed, practicing, ambulance chasing lawyers, and naturally someone brought up the idea of suing Funcom over the transition. The claim is that the terms of the subscription/lifetime account have been changed without prior knowledge, and that somehow Funcom has diminished the value of the deal without offering a refund.

If you take a look at The Secret World pre-transition, you’ll find two tiers:

Subscriber:

Access to The Secret World for that month.
Cash shop points based on multi-month packages.

Grand Master (lifetime):

Access to The Secret World forever.
1 additional character slot.
Set of XP potions.
Set of Talismans.
10% discount to cash shop.
Snakeskin Jacket.

Following the transition to buy to play, the following benefits were added to accounts:

Subscriber:

Mayan time accelerator (reusable bonus xp item)
$10 worth of bonus points (cash shop)
Item-of-the-month gift
10% discount to everything in the store.

Grand Master:

20% discount to cash shop.
Everything subscribers receive above.

Additionally, Funcom instituted a “price guarantee” to subscribers and grand masters ensuring that they will be able to receive any DLC for free by marking down the price to match the monthly bonus point stipend. For example, if a piece of DLC is released that costs $20, the price will be marked down to $10 for subscribers and grand masters. In the shortest sense: There isn’t anything in the new plan that subscribers or grand masters no longer have access to in the new plan. In fact, the benefits (even over the new buy to play tier) have only increased.

I suppose it all comes down to whether or not you see the addition of another tier (buy to play) as removing a benefit from subscribers/grand masters. Perhaps it would have been better from a PR perspective for Funcom to allow players to request refunds for multi-month packages that still had time left rather than to force the players into adopting the new system. Like it or not, there are still a good deal of players who remain loyal to subscription-only games and would not touch a buy-to-play/free-to-play game with a ten foot pole, let alone spend money on it.

Heading forward, however, the MMO community should always know that when a company states that they have no intention of going free to play, they actually mean “at this time.” With the market of MMOs very heavily favoring optional subscriptions rather than mandatory subscriptions, such a transition isn’t as much a possibility as it is an inevitability with the only question being how far post-launch does the game move over? There are obvious exceptions to the rule, strong titles like Eve Online and World of Warcraft who see a better environment in subscriptions, or games like Warhammer Online that simply don’t have the funds to make the transition.

Regardless, you won’t find any legal expert who will agree that Funcom has done anything worthy of legal action, even if some customers aren’t entirely happy with the transition.

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