If you’re lucky enough, you’ll be attending a theater airing a director’s cut edition trailer for Eve Online. For those of you not lucky enough, the trailer is above. The Eve Online trailer airs before Tron.
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.
If you woke up with a strange urge to gorge yourself on meat stuffed with other meats, it must be November…or just another Monday morning. With November coming, and the holiday season right around the corner, we take a look back on what October brought us: Halloween events, particularly in the hat trading simulator formerly known as…I believe it was called Team Forts. Yes, while we were busy killing all the demons (only to find out we were the demons), it was business as usual in the land of MMOs and the developers who create them.
Naturally the Better Business Bureau makes number one on our list. Now, most of the companies remained unchanged with their scores since July, except for Cryptic Studios who apparently took my advice and started replying to complaints. Their score now sits at an A- from its original C. The “Checking In With The BBB” will be back in January.
DC Universe Online was delayed. Sorry, Joker! Those who preorder before November 15th get guaranteed access to the beta, however. Those who didn’t preorder get jack squat. Although there is no set date, DC Universe Online is set to go live sometime in early 2011.
Square Enix announced an embargo…I mean a voluntary request that reviewers hold off for thirty days, a threat I would like to see enforced through practically every gaming website/magazine in existence losing their free swag, because the grand majority completely ignored this request. You can still send us swag, Square, we love you for your need to smother your customers, not in spite of it.
And speaking of Final Fantasy XIV, the game bombed on Amazon.jp. Final Fantasy XIV on Amazon’s Japanese website still carries a 1.5 star rating, with 137 one-star ratings to five one-star ratings. Square Enix would later reward early adopters with a free extra month of the game. My apologies to the owners of Gizzard Blendtertainment for any confusion that the article caused.
Lord of the Rings Online in Europe…what a saga. Through October, MMO Fallout brought you weekly updates on the situation regarding LOTRO’s release in Europe under Codemasters, as well as our own speculations (that turned out to be correct) on whether or not the issues were really technical. Codemasters announced that Lord of the Rings Online Europe will make the free to play transition on November 2nd.
Speaking of cash shops, Eve Online is getting one. Don’t worry, kids, it’s only vanity items. In the same interview, CCP’s own Tori Olafsson denied any claims that the developer was working on an Eve Online 2, or reboot of Eve, noting that such options had “no purpose.”
Oh don’t tell me you didn’t see this coming! With the launch of the new Everquest II Extended, Sony announced that Everquest II servers would be merging, shutting down a total of six servers.
All Points Bulletin joins the ranks of Earth Eternal in games that are dead, but not really dead because someone might be buying them, but they aren’t playable. Neither game is online, and though we know there is a buyer for Earth Eternal, and likely one for All Points Bulletin, we still don’t know who it is yet.
And finally, likely the biggest double-take of October, the announcement that Champions Online would be going free to play. Yes, Cryptic wants to take their thumb out of the pie and shove their entire fist into it as Champions Online goes partially Turbine this coming Q1 2011. More on the Champions Online transition…soon.
If you woke up with a strange urge to gorge yourself on meat stuffed with other meats, it must be November…or just another Monday morning. With November coming, and the holiday season right around the corner, we take a look back on what October brought us: Halloween events, particularly in the hat trading simulator formerly known as…I believe it was called Team Forts. Yes, while we were busy killing all the demons (only to find out we were the demons), it was business as usual in the land of MMOs and the developers who create them.
Naturally the Better Business Bureau makes number one on our list. Now, most of the companies remained unchanged with their scores since July, except for Cryptic Studios who apparently took my advice and started replying to complaints. Their score now sits at an A- from its original C. The “Checking In With The BBB” will be back in January.
DC Universe Online was delayed. Sorry, Joker! Those who preorder before November 15th get guaranteed access to the beta, however. Those who didn’t preorder get jack squat. Although there is no set date, DC Universe Online is set to go live sometime in early 2011.
Square Enix announced an embargo…I mean a voluntary request that reviewers hold off for thirty days, a threat I would like to see enforced through practically every gaming website/magazine in existence losing their free swag, because the grand majority completely ignored this request. You can still send us swag, Square, we love you for your need to smother your customers, not in spite of it.
And speaking of Final Fantasy XIV, the game bombed on Amazon.jp. Final Fantasy XIV on Amazon’s Japanese website still carries a 1.5 star rating, with 137 one-star ratings to five one-star ratings. Square Enix would later reward early adopters with a free extra month of the game. My apologies to the owners of Gizzard Blendtertainment for any confusion that the article caused.
Lord of the Rings Online in Europe…what a saga. Through October, MMO Fallout brought you weekly updates on the situation regarding LOTRO’s release in Europe under Codemasters, as well as our own speculations (that turned out to be correct) on whether or not the issues were really technical. Codemasters announced that Lord of the Rings Online Europe will make the free to play transition on November 2nd.
Speaking of cash shops, Eve Online is getting one. Don’t worry, kids, it’s only vanity items. In the same interview, CCP’s own Tori Olafsson denied any claims that the developer was working on an Eve Online 2, or reboot of Eve, noting that such options had “no purpose.”
Oh don’t tell me you didn’t see this coming! With the launch of the new Everquest II Extended, Sony announced that Everquest II servers would be merging, shutting down a total of six servers.
All Points Bulletin joins the ranks of Earth Eternal in games that are dead, but not really dead because someone might be buying them, but they aren’t playable. Neither game is online, and though we know there is a buyer for Earth Eternal, and likely one for All Points Bulletin, we still don’t know who it is yet.
And finally, likely the biggest double-take of October, the announcement that Champions Online would be going free to play. Yes, Cryptic wants to take their thumb out of the pie and shove their entire fist into it as Champions Online goes partially Turbine this coming Q1 2011. More on the Champions Online transition…soon.
When it comes to cash shops in MMOs, player opinion is split. There are players who don’t mind cash shops as long as the items are obtainable in-game (or at least the equivalent), while others will only tolerate vanity items being sold. There are players who are opposed to a cash shop in any form, players who will only tolerate a cash shop in games without a subscription, and of course those that are complacent with cash shops as a whole. The players who do not like cash shops in any form might not be sticking with Eve Online.
In an interview with Eurogamer, CCP’s Tori Frans Olafsson was asked if a cash shop was in the books. Tori responded that:
“Yeah, we are looking at introducing virtual goods within the game, but we feel those things should be vanity items rather than those that give you a clear benefit over other players in-game.”
Vanity items? I hope I can get chrome thrusters for my shipping freighter, although heading into 0.0 sector space is likely to get me shot on sight, regardless of what I’m carrying on me. Of course, this might lead to a surge of death squads, as some other MMOs have seen, where players actively hunt down and grief players who visibly purchased cash shop items.
On the topic of a sequel, Tori had the following to say:
I don’t see any purpose in rebooting EVE or doing EVE 2. We have a magnificent community, we have a devoted player-base, we have a vibrant economy, we have the ability to update graphics and game systems and software and hardware – and have been doing so progressively since launch.
The longer CCP supports Eve Online, the better. You can read the rest of the interview in the above link.
More on Eve Online as it appears. Eve Online currently plays host to over 330,000 subscribers, alongside a slew of trial accounts.
When PLEX, the cash-to-subscription-time item, was introduced to Eve Online, it was created special from the rest. You couldn’t undock with PLEX in your ship, meaning the item was bound to the station and its marketplace. CCP was so worried about the volatility of PLEX being introduced into the game that these restrictions were put into place, if temporary, to allow the item an introductory period of sorts until the kinks could be worked out and the game could become used to it. Luckily, with the upcoming changes to PLEX, many of these restrictions will be removed.
So what does this mean? You will be able to undock with PLEX, as well as placing PLEX in courier contracts. The restriction on redeeming (and reverse-redeeming) items only at NPC stations is being removed, as well as allowing players to convert ETC into PLEX when not necessarily at an NPC station.
This does, however, mean that you can lose PLEX if your ship is destroyed. A player who destroys you may find your PLEX as part of your loot, or it may be destroyed in your ship’s explosion. As with Eve’s other items, refunds are out of the question. CCP’s reasoning behind these updates is that they do not want items to have a special status, and would prefer to have item prices be determined by the players, rather than some system set up.
The updates go live next week (13th). More on Eve Online as it appears.
Silly Eve-izen, that’s not even from the right game. Losing items in a game where you drop everything upon death, is nothing short of not news. Players are killed, hacked, and generally die for one reason or another, on a daily basis and, whether or not we want to accept blame (Lag, account theft, etc), more often than not we are met with a simple “sorry, your stuff’s gone for good,” should we try to retrieve it.
There are three levels of item loss, as I will demonstrate:
If you want to annoy your players, allow them to be killed due to unforeseeable, yet annoying issues. Lag is chief in this category, not to mention players with easy access to exploits in the system, hacks, and other such software.
If you want to piss off your players, kill them via in-game bugs and don’t return their items. In Runescape, it isn’t uncommon for at least one update every four or five months to have some instant-murder effect, or allowing player killing in a spot it shouldn’t be. When Mobilising Armies was released, one player lost an enormous sum of money simply by talking to an NPC, and was not reimbursed despite confirmation by a Jagex employee.
And finally, if you want to get players to quit, take the items right out of their possession, by process of one of your intended features going haywire.
If you were logged into Eve Online today, or even if you weren’t, you may have logged in to find that one or more of your items were missing. Due to an unintended issue, the Eve Online ItemID recycling system ended up deleting a mass amount of items. How many? Up to fourteen thousand, to be exact. But how exactly did this bug happen?
In Eve Online, every item has its own procedurally generated ID (The ID is created when the item is created). In order to prevent items six years from launch being labeled #34054083489534890583890459348, Eve Online recycles ItemID’s back into the pool once the associated item is destroyed, or stacked with another stack of the same item. The retrieval system failed, causing items to not receive an ID when created under various circumstances, and thus disappear.
Although CCP is not returning lost items (they have no way to, the data trail is literally gone), they will be reimbursing players. Players affected are asked to file a petition with the list of items they lost due to the bug. As for how well players will be reimbursed, MMO Fallout will be listening in.
More on [MMO name retrieval failed. Deleting portion.] as it appears.
Naturally the Better Business Bureau makes number one on our list. Now, most of the companies remained unchanged with their scores since July, except for Cryptic Studios who apparently took my advice and started replying to complaints. Their score now sits at an A- from its original C. The “Checking In With The BBB” will be back in January.
Lord of the Rings Online in Europe…what a saga. Through October, MMO Fallout brought you weekly updates on the situation regarding LOTRO’s release in Europe under Codemasters, as well as our own speculations (that turned out to be correct) on whether or not the issues were really technical. Codemasters announced that Lord of the Rings Online Europe will make the free to play transition on November 2nd.
Oh don’t tell me you didn’t see this coming! With the launch of the new Everquest II Extended, Sony announced that Everquest II servers would be merging, shutting down a total of six servers.
MMO Fallout 