Cryptic – Page 2 – MMO Fallout

Neverwinter Previews Upcoming Event

Cryptic Studios has detailed the next big event to hit Neverwinter. Currently embroiled in an ongoing war against the Dragon Cult, this week’s event sees Neverwinter under siege yet again by the forces of evil. The event ties into the latest campaign, Tyranny of Dragons.

With this Siege of Neverwinter event will come the chance to obtain Dragon Hoard Coins, Dragon Hoard Coffers, as well as other items used in the Tyranny of Dragons campaign. All of these items will aid you in your quest to defeat the Cult of the Dragon once and for all and help prevent them from unleashing Tiamat!

The event runs from January 15th through 22nd.

(Source: Neverwinter)

MMOrning Shots: No Man Has Gone

For today’s MMOrning Shot, I figured that I would continue the trend by showcasing some of the earliest screenshots that we have of certain games. In this case, you’re looking at Star Trek Online sometime around early 2009. If you look closely, you can see that the captain is wearing pajama pants.

Cryptic Opens Studio To Polish Champions Online

Better late than never, I suppose. Champions Online is a game that, despite its potential, has seen some neglect over the years. The game has been subject to a number of updates over the years that are either never fully realized or have spent their lives in a perpetual prototype or broken state. It appears that even Cryptic Studios is aware of this, because the developer recently announced the opening of Cryptic North in Seattle, Washington with the function of taking the ailing MMO and bringing it up to snuff.

In an interview with Gamasutra, Jack Emmert discusses the idea behind opening up an entirely new studio. Cryptic North is made up primarily of the old Flying Lab Software team responsible for Pirates of the Burning Sea. The team wants to give Champions Online the polishing that it deserves, and depending on their success may branch out into new projects.

Make better games. Make cost effective games. Treat our players better. Take care of our talent. Focus on working business models. A tried and true way to mitigate risk is diversification. And we also have a crazy diverse portfolio of games at [Perfect World Entertainment].

On another positive note, Cryptic is once again looking at porting their games over to consoles, with the upcoming PS4 and Xbox One. You may remember that Cryptic had plans to port Champions Online over to the Xbox360, but the project was cancelled last minute due to Microsoft’s lack of cooperation. With at least Sony having an open platform for MMOs, the likelihood of seeing a Cryptic MMO on the next generation consoles seems all the brighter.

(Source: Gamasutra)

Neverwinter Unveils Caturday, Gift Pack For Players

As many of you are aware, Neverwinter suffered a fair bit of downtime this weekend thanks to the mass abuse of a bug allowing players to duplicate Astral Diamonds using the auction house. While originally stating that non-cheating characters would not be affected overall, Perfect World had decided to perform a rollback to early Saturday morning, taking action against accounts that had abused the bug and going into the game’s history to track down those who were abusing it prior to Saturday’s outbreak. As compensation for Saturday’s extended downtime, as well as for the inconvenience in the rollback, Perfect World has given all characters created prior to May 21st a Caturday pack.

All characters that have been created before 6:00 A.M. Tuesday, May 21, 2013, will receive the Caturday Survivor’s Pack, which will appear in your in-game mail as an attachment to the message, “You Survived!” The items within the Caturday Survivor’s Pack are bound to each character that receives it.

The pack includes a cosmetic cape, a dwarven mask, teleport scrolls, experience boosters, and a stone of health. The cutoff date was initially May 19th, however Perfect World has moved it to the 21st at 6am PST.

(Source: Neverwinter)

Auction House Exploit Tears Through Neverwinter

You’d best put seat belts on your ears, because I’m going to take them for the ride of their life. Perfect World Entertainment are in the midst of some very heavy damage control after an exploit popped up in Neverwinter and threw the game’s economy into turmoil. I won’t go into details about the exploit itself, partially because I would probably butcher the explanation, but the exploit involves the auction house and players duplicating mass quantities of astral diamonds and converting them into Zen.

According to MMO Fallout’s men on the field, the gateway has been shut down, and the ability to buy Zen with astral diamonds has been disabled. Some of those services may be turned back on by the time you read this. Perfect World has posted the following update on their forums:

We currently are in the process of taking action against a subset of accounts that were confirmed to have utilized exploits that affected the game balance or economy.

These accounts may be banned, temporarily or permanently, depending on the severity of exploit utilization. Anyone who is affected by this will receive notification via email.

While we have taken all precautions necessary to ensure that no false positives made it into our final list of accounts to take action against, we do acknowledge that some players who were banned may wish to follow up with us. If you had an account banned and wish to escalate the issue to our support team, please create a ticket at support.perfectworld.com or send an email to customerservice@perfectworld.com

Please note that forum discussions about specific accounts being banned is against our forum guidelines, thus any threads on the topic may be closed. Thank you in advance for your understanding.

Thank you for your patience and support while we continue to do everything in our power to ensure that Neverwinter remains a fair and balanced game experience.

-Dezstravus and the Neverwinter Team

(Source: Neverwinter)

Neverwinter’s Double Diamond Dash Dismantles D’Servers

As a critic, I can’t get enough of the action combat and battling against iconic creatures from Dungeons & Dragons. As a fan, I’m creating many quests and campaigns with the foundry. As a reader, you probably figured out a long time ago that I’m reading from the news page. Cryptic Studios recently announced that with the rampant success of the Neverwinter beta/soft launch/massage parlor, that gamers of all sorts would be able to enjoy a weekend of double diamonds starting Friday and running through what I assume will be 11:59 pm PST.

Naturally, the servers are crashing, and by that I mean more so than they have over previous weekends. Perfect World has had to take the game down multiple times for emergency maintenance. Perfect World has been working to get the servers to a stable position, despite the overwhelming traffic, and ultimately the three servers currently available will be merged into one.

Neverwinter's Double Diamond Dash Dismantles D'Servers

Perfect World Is Banning Neverwinter Foundry Exploits: Creators And Players

Consider this a classic example of why we can’t have nice things. Neverwinter is just another of Cryptic’s games to feature a foundry, where players can create missions for other players to enjoy for their wonderful stories, deep and thoughtful mission design, and…ah who am I kidding? Neverwinter is an MMO and therefore the community will exploit everything until it is taken away from them. Players quickly found a way to exploit the foundry system, creating missions that are nothing more than a bunch of high value mobs in a pit, unable to fight back while the player farms them for gold, items, and experience.

Unfortunately for players, Perfect World Entertainment is apparently cracking down on large amounts of experience and items gained through the foundry. The patch released earlier today modified gains through the foundry, and Neverwinter has taken action not just against accounts that created the foundry missions, but against players who repeatedly used those foundry missions to level quickly. Some foundry creators are reporting their accounts banned, while others are claiming that their access to creating foundry missions has been revoked. Players who repeatedly used quick-leveling foundry missions are similarly reporting bans.

So far there hasn’t been any official announcement of the bans, apart from player reports.

MMOrning Shots: Devils In Neverwinter

Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us via press release from Neverwinter, which many of you are aware has entered its head start access stage. The screenshot is part of Perfect World promoting the Devils in Neverwinter.

MMOrning Shots is a (somewhat) daily line of screenshots from various MMOs. Most are taken in-house or come to us in press releases, but if you would like your screenshot featured, send it over to contact[at]mmofallout[dot]com with the subject “MMorning Shots.”

Neverwinter’s Founder Pack Valued $25 Million Yearly

It all makes sense.

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