If you are, or have been, a VIP player on Dungeons and Dragons Online, you already know how the system works: In addition to the normal perks of being a VIP player, you are given 500 Turbine points a month as something of an allowance. These extra points can go towards anything that the VIP program itself does not give, be it mercenaries or other perks.
From now until August 10th, VIP’ers will receive double the monthly alloted, one thousand points, to spend on their liking, and I found a number of people were confused as to how this will work out.
I receive my points on:
Before June 11th: You will receive your double points in July and in August. Your points for June will have already been deposited.
After June 11th: You will receive double your points this month, double your points next month, and August will be back to normal.
So those of you with current subscriptions will receive two months worth of double points, no matter what part of the month your subscription renews.
If you are not a VIP member of Dungeons and Dragons Online, you have until July 11th to enjoy two months of VIP, otherwise those who subscribe after July 11th will only receive one month.
Hopefully when Lord of the Rings Online goes free to play this year, we may see a similar promotion. This promotion does not include regular players buying their points.
Back when Cryptic announced they did indeed have a third MMO planned, the lines in many of our (bloggers) heads drew together very quickly: Cryptic is owned by Atari, who is being sued by Turbine under allegations that they were trying to sabotage Dungeons and Dragons Online, so they could turn around and market their own secret Neverwinter Nights MMO (Neverwinter Nights is based on third edition D&D). When asked what franchise he would most like to work on, his answer being “Godzilla and Dungeons and Dragons.” I speculated in the article that this would reignite rumors of a Cryptic D&D MMO.
And reignite it did. In a recent interview with Bill Roper, MMORPG.com asked “Do you have anything to say to the D&D Forgotten Realms MMO rumors?”
“I can’t speak to the specifics of what we’re doing, but it’s true that we have another game in the works. We won’t be making an announcement until late summer, and we’re still a ways off from launch. I can say that this is a game and a franchise we’re very excited about. I think people are going to pleased and a bit surprised with what we’re doing in terms of the game, how we make it, and even how we sell and support it. The game is being developed around new design principles merged with Cryptic’s community-first approach to ongoing development.”
MMO Fallout will be here late this summer with all the news as to Cryptics new MMO.
Television advertisement is a barrier that few MMOs break if their names are not World of Warcraft, so it’s good to see Turbine’s Dungeons and Dragons on the semi-big screen.
As some players point out to me in the numerous emails I receive each week, I apparently look like an idiot/hypocrite/uninformed child when I praise a company one day, and then crush them like a bug the next (literally) for doing something insanely inane. What these emails forget is that here at MMO Fallout, we shy away from sticking labels on a company, as long as that company is not Mythic entertainment and that label is not Mark Jacobs. But I digress: I feel that events should be taken as they come, and that there really isn’t some kind of point system you can keep to tell how good an MMO is in your graces. Oh well, Turbine gave us some free stuff so that gives them…five points? And the pay wall…You see my point.
Yesterday Turbine introduced the Dungeons and Dragons Online pay wall, where players could opt to complete offers to gain Turbine Points, not unlike MyPoints. The community, for lack of better words, exploded in response to this news. What originated as a shady new way to gain Turbine Points by taking an IQ test by some company in Malaysia quickly turned into controversy:
Players discovered that the user’s username and email address were being transmitted, unencrypted, just by looking at the wall, to the survey providers.
Forum users confirmed that one of the offerers, SuperRewards (or one of its affiliates) was harvesting emails for use in World of Warcraft phishing emails. A number of users, some of whom who have never played World of Warcraft, received similar looking phishing emails shortly after viewing the offer wall.
Offers that require users to download software that secretly harvests information, cookies, and potentially passwords, credit cards, and social security numbers.
Cell phone scams that require you to send a text to complete the offer.
Offers that require you to partake in long surveys that then disqualify you.
Turbine has since completely removed the offer wall, temporarily, to address these issues, but the fact remains: For a few hours yesterday, Turbine was literally walking their players directly into a developer-backed trap. Players who were offered an alternate method to paying for Turbine Points were herded into a trap where they could have had their accounts compromised, or possibly even becoming victims of identity theft, depending on what some of the advertisers were sticking on player’s computers.
Players are, understandably, livid about this and Turbine has released a list of rules that offerers must adhere to. Hopefully this will calm down an inflamed situation.
Offer Wall Rules
Any offer to be published on the Offer Wall must meet the following criteria:
1No unapproved required downloads – ever. This includes toolbars, helper applications, plug-ins, and ActiveX Controls. Player security is our top priority.
All offers must be certified spyware-clean and confirmed in internal testing against a cleanroom environment.
Surveys must be legit. No lengthy prequalification surveys followed by a disqualification and no points. If the pre-qualification is more than 20 questions for our test cases, we won’t host the survey.
Surveys must not ask for game account information or information which could be used to discover a player’s credentials.
No deceptive offers – i.e. take this IQ test and get the results via SMS (free IQ test, SMS costs $).
Partners must display a privacy policy in a public location that can be checked.
Offers must pay out as expected. All offers must deliver the points promised in a clear and straightforward fashion.
More on Dungeons and Dragons as it appears, and no there is no news on the lawsuit.
I don’t talk about Dungeons and Dragons nearly enough, but the game is the poster child for the typical crazy success story. Game launches, game goes partially free to play with a subscription and cash shop, game explodes in popularity. Not to say Dungeons and Dragons was hurting, just that not nearly enough people were giving the game the attention it warranted.
Needless to say, the move was a huge success. Turbine announced earlier this year that the initiative had brought in over one million new players, and more than doubled the number of subscribers, while the cash shop saw a huge boost in purchases. Since then, Turbine has done everything they can to accommodate free players, including the removal of leveling sigils, allowing anyone to make it to level 20, and introduced “casual” difficulty, for solo players. Two enormous updates (Update 3 and 4) have launched, with more updates along the way.
So what’s coming in DDO’s future? Guild airships! Players will be able to build bankers, auctioneers, vendors, and other bits in their guild housing, which will serve as transportation and quick teleportation to many dungeons and raids. The guild itself will have a leveling system by which players can access better airships. Even more stunning, the airships will be viewable in in-game airspace! Half-Orcs will become a playable race at some point this year as well, alongside a bevy of new adventure packs and other items hitting the Turbine store.
More on Turbine and Dungeons and Dragons Online as it appears. To those who have asked, no I do not have any new information on the lawsuit between Turbine and Atari.
The Atari of old was a great company that brought gaming to the home platform, with Pong and later consoles. Between the Pong box, the Atari 2600, Atari defined the industry, and was responsible for the classic games before the games we now consider classic, not to mention a console that spawned thousands of shovelware titles.
When the discussion comes to the new Atari, there is a different story. I believe I referred to Atari on a website that is not MMO Fallout, as an empty shell of a company that not only couldn’t keep itself on the NASDAQ stock listing, had a failed European branch, and has undergone more cosmetic surgery to change face than any other company in the business. Despite being relegated to the position of publisher for any notable title over the past decade, Atari has been downsized to the elderly man who keeps talking about his youth, and he buys up the younger crowd so he can live through them, even though his limbs are falling off from years of mistreatment.
I usually don’t talk about publishers, but since Cryptic Studios is obligated to use Atari as their publisher (being a subsidiary and all), I’ll make an exception. If you are considering buying a title that was published by Atari, it is in your best interest not to buy them directly from Atari’s store, especially if you may need to use any factor of their customer service.
Granted...
As a rule of thumb, I always do research to confirm a story before I write up about it. In this case, several players informed me that Atari has “purposely” broken their customer service in order to stop any cancellations of Star Trek Online before the game is released. Naturally, I went directly to Atari’s customer support page to investigate. What I found was that, when not busy formulating plots against Turbine (allegedly), Atari is busy not fixing their customer support contact page.
When attempting to contact customer support, one must first include a purchase number or email address, and choose from the drop boxes which category they are looking for. I filled out the first drop box with no issue, but then the problem hit me: The second drop box does not load, making it impossible to fill out the form. Having tried this with every major browser, on several computers through multiple networks, I can now say it is impossible to contact Atari’s customer support for their online store. Not only is it impossible to get refunds, but it is impossible to cancel orders, get support of any kind, or even contact the company to let them know that their support is broken.
If Atari is unaware of this problem, they must be feeling very proud of themselves that they must be making such great products that not a single person is emailing in with a problem. If they are aware of the issue, and if what the players are telling me is true about how long it has been broken, then this is just a drop in the bucket of Atari’s long history over the past decade of increasingly poor customer support.
I can’t say how Atari’s support is for download games, but if at all possible consider buying from another digital download service. Just remember that if something goes wrong, your only avenue will be dealing with your bank in the form of a charge back, because Atari (for all intent and purpose) is sitting in the corner with its fingers in its ears shouting “la la la la, I can’t hear you!”
The Atari of old was a great company that brought gaming to the home platform, with Pong and later consoles. Between the Pong box, the Atari 2600, Atari defined the industry, and was responsible for the classic games before the games we now consider classic, not to mention a console that spawned thousands of shovelware titles.
When the discussion comes to the new Atari, there is a different story. I believe I referred to Atari on a website that is not MMO Fallout, as an empty shell of a company that not only couldn’t keep itself on the NASDAQ stock listing, had a failed European branch, and has undergone more cosmetic surgery to change face than any other company in the business. Despite being relegated to the position of publisher for any notable title over the past decade, Atari has been downsized to the elderly man who keeps talking about his youth, and he buys up the younger crowd so he can live through them, even though his limbs are falling off from years of mistreatment.
I usually don’t talk about publishers, but since Cryptic Studios is obligated to use Atari as their publisher (being a subsidiary and all), I’ll make an exception. If you are considering buying a title that was published by Atari, it is in your best interest not to buy them directly from Atari’s store, especially if you may need to use any factor of their customer service.
Granted...
As a rule of thumb, I always do research to confirm a story before I write up about it. In this case, several players informed me that Atari has “purposely” broken their customer service in order to stop any cancellations of Star Trek Online before the game is released. Naturally, I went directly to Atari’s customer support page to investigate. What I found was that, when not busy formulating plots against Turbine (allegedly), Atari is busy not fixing their customer support contact page.
When attempting to contact customer support, one must first include a purchase number or email address, and choose from the drop boxes which category they are looking for. I filled out the first drop box with no issue, but then the problem hit me: The second drop box does not load, making it impossible to fill out the form. Having tried this with every major browser, on several computers through multiple networks, I can now say it is impossible to contact Atari’s customer support for their online store. Not only is it impossible to get refunds, but it is impossible to cancel orders, get support of any kind, or even contact the company to let them know that their support is broken.
If Atari is unaware of this problem, they must be feeling very proud of themselves that they must be making such great products that not a single person is emailing in with a problem. If they are aware of the issue, and if what the players are telling me is true about how long it has been broken, then this is just a drop in the bucket of Atari’s long history over the past decade of increasingly poor customer support.
I can’t say how Atari’s support is for download games, but if at all possible consider buying from another digital download service. Just remember that if something goes wrong, your only avenue will be dealing with your bank in the form of a charge back, because Atari (for all intent and purpose) is sitting in the corner with its fingers in its ears shouting “la la la la, I can’t hear you!”
I’ve been trying to find a video version of this for a little while now, and for some odd reason it never occurred to me to search Youtube. So without further ado, one of the best MMO banner ads of 2009, from Dungeons and Dragons Online: Broccoli Vs The Beholder.
“The corollary to that is if you’ve seen a game consolidate servers, you know it’s in deep, deep trouble — that’s not a healthy sign for an MMO, It will be the same for ‘Warhammer.’ Look at us six months out. Look at us six weeks out. If we’re not adding servers, we’re not doing well.”
-Mark Jacobs, Mythic VP
Thank you, Mark. What Mark Jacobs, Vice President over at Mythic Entertainment is trying to say is that success in an MMO can usually be seen by looking at whether or not the company is adding servers. Earlier in September, as we all know by now, Turbine turbine’d Dungeons and Dragons Online into a free to play game, with pay to play subscriptions as well as a microtransaction system. After the game relaunched, Turbine noted a 40% increase in subscriptions.
Well, Mark Jacobs can eat his heart out. Turbine will be opening a new server to deal with the incoming flood of players.
MMO Fallout 