Don’t you hate it when all you’re trying to do is navigate a crowded system, and all of a sudden you fire on an unsuspecting player? And then your keyboard and mouse inexplicably lock up, and you continue firing until the combination of NPC protection and players gun you down, destroy your pod, and come over to your house to crap in your cereal. Luckily, CCP is here with the new system safety system. With the upcoming update, players will be able to set themselves to one of three modes: enable, partial, and disabled safety.
On enabled safety, you won’t be able to do anything that is against the law. Think of it as Paladin mode. On partial safety, you will be able to perform actions that raise you into “suspect” status, but not criminal. Disabled safety is free reign to do whatever you want. The option is only for player convenience, although there will surely be some heated discussion over the update.
As we learned from Stephen Calendar many months ago, the MMO industry is one of test and react. So it stands that over the years, not every change or new feature to a game will be openly accepted by the community, or for that matter updates that are intended to improve gameplay may not always do so. In the case of Eve Online, the updates revolve around factional warfare changes implemented in the recent Inferno expansion. The goal of Inferno was to shake up the way that all players, new and experienced, fight.
Unfortunately, as CCP points out in their dev blog, this didn’t go as planned. Instead of focusing on content, players have been distracted by farming and cashing out alternative points, and a number of factors have come together and caused an inflation in the market. In order to alleviate player concerns, CCP is ready to implement a patch tomorrow that will take the focus off of farming LP and more on to the actual fights themselves.
You can find more in-depth patch notes at the link below.
As we learned from Stephen Calendar many months ago, the MMO industry is one of test and react. So it stands that over the years, not every change or new feature to a game will be openly accepted by the community, or for that matter updates that are intended to improve gameplay may not always do so. In the case of Eve Online, the updates revolve around factional warfare changes implemented in the recent Inferno expansion. The goal of Inferno was to shake up the way that all players, new and experienced, fight.
Unfortunately, as CCP points out in their dev blog, this didn’t go as planned. Instead of focusing on content, players have been distracted by farming and cashing out alternative points, and a number of factors have come together and caused an inflation in the market. In order to alleviate player concerns, CCP is ready to implement a patch tomorrow that will take the focus off of farming LP and more on to the actual fights themselves.
You can find more in-depth patch notes at the link below.
Good news everyone! As the DUST 514 beta continues trucking along its path towards release, CCP has added regular updates to bring the Playstation 3 shooter closer together with its older PC sci-fi MMO brother. With the release of Codex, the latest major update to the MMOFPS, players in both games will now find their experiences much tighter. Codex allows players to appoint directors in both games to keep watch on corporate activity. Corporate contracts allow Eve Online players to hire DUST 514 players to take over territory held by rival corporations. While not released with this update, CCP teases orbital strikes, allowing players in Eve to fire down on the planets below and affect the operations of their DUST counterparts.
The update also brings in a host of new content, from female avatars to new weapons and equipment, new maps and environments, and more. DUST is still in beta testing, and players can get in by registering and hoping for a key or buying the $20 mercenary pack. and obtaining the key that way.
Hulkageddon is one of my favorite MMO-related holidays, but a friend of mine recently asked: Omali, don’t you wish Hulkageddon would last forever? And I said no, friend who asks conveniently timed questions. Because then I wouldn’t be able to fully enjoy Hulkageddon. If you don’t know, Hulkageddon is a celebration in Eve Online where players are encouraged, and paid, to kill miners in massive quantities. Normally, Hulkageddon only lasts for a limited time each year, but in a post by Mittani on the Eve Online forums, Goonswarm intends on continuing to pay users for dead miners.
For every ten miners you kill, Goonswarm will pay you ten million ISK and one hundred million per ten exhumer. So far Hulkageddon has claimed more than eleven thousand ships and over two trillion in damages and twenty seven billion in rewards paid out.
Now Hulkageddon is a perfect example of emergent gameplay and capitalism at work in Eve Online. Now, Goonswarm pays people millions to destroy hulks, meaning more people are buying hulks to replace those that were destroyed. Can you imagine who is manufacturing the hulks that are being destroyed? Do you see how this comes around full circle?
As an avid fan of the sandbox genre, I would love to see Mortal Online evolve from the money-losing machine that it is today to a powerful name in the industry. Who knows, maybe in a few years Star Vault will be powerful enough to make my death look like an accident. Sandboxer.org has posted a chat in which Star Vault CEO Henrik Nystrom talks about his vision for Mortal Online, not just the developer hitting more sales but the game eventually doing well enough to compete and even succeed Eve Online.
Now, Eve Online has an estimated 450,000 subscribers (plus PLEX traders), so the goal may seem a bit off in the distance. Mortal Online’s Awakening expansion will bring with it drugs. What kind of drugs, you ask? The illegal kind, more illegal than a Pepsi machine in a grade school hallway.
We await Mortal Online’s next expansion with anticipation.
Announcing your intention to blow up the economy, in any other online game, would probably be met with raised brows and perhaps a few suspensions depending on the developer. When the mantra of the developer is just as hardcore as that of its players, say CCP for example, the reaction might be closer to a kid with fireworks: they’re just interested in how big the explosion will be.
In fact, CCP thinks it will be “absolutely brilliant.” You may remember the CSM member who resigned from his position and was suspended from Eve last month for suggesting a coordinated attempt to harass an emotionally unstable person into suicide. Well, he is back, and tomorrow will lead “Burn Jita,” in an attempt to cripple the Eve economy.
Reportedly fourteen thousand Thrasher ships are prepared for an all out assault on Jita, Eve Online’s trade hub. Luckily, CCP had warning that the event would take place, and the developer has made sure to swap servers around so Jita can handle the imminent influx of players.
“We’ve said, okay, stick Jita on the big, scary server, and put all the surrounding systems on these other servers.”
And CCP isn’t just all for this, they find the idea of intervening appalling.
“The worst thing we could do is to stop it happening. It would be appalling for the game. It would be against everything we stand for.”
Get your popcorn and stock up on clones, we are in for a bumpy ride.
Minecraft is a game that has stolen the hearts, the lives, and a whole lot of time here at the nonexistent MMO Fallout office. I’d love a reason to talk about Minecraft, but sadly the game is not an MMO. Notch’s next game, however, will give me plenty of time to talk about Minecraft. Announced just recently, the game is titled 0X10c (figure out the pronunciation yourself), which we will simply refer to as Notch’s MMO from here on out.
The game is set as a sci-fi title and is very early in development, and appears to be an Eve Online style game with a very heavy focus on engineering, mining, trading, and looting. Players have a spaceship that carries a certain fixed wattage that is consumed by additions added to the ship (very Eve-like). At its heart, each ship will operate as its own fully functioning 16-bit CPU.
You can check out the website below. Notch’s MMO will carry a singleplayer and multiplayer mode, and will likely carry a subscription fee for the multiplayer universe.
I have a feeling that we’re going to be seeing a lot more of Gaikai around here for the foreseeable future. Two weeks ago I talked about Turbine’s plan to bring a limited trial for Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online to Gaikai, an online streaming service where players would be able to play a very limited version without having to download a massive client. Following that news, CCP Chief Marketing Officer David Reid has talked to Eurogamer to discuss bringing Eve Online to Gaikai or Onlive in some form.
“We think it’s a really important way to not just play the core Eve Online gameplay – that you do play today principally on the PC and on the Mac – but also to add new sorts of experiences – when you think about Planetary Interaction in Eve Online right?”
It is important to note that whatever happens is still a very long way off, and we may not see anything come of this until 2013. MMO Fallout will be paying close attention for more details.
I love sandbox MMOs and nothing gives me a better feeling than having a good discussion around what the genre needs to evolve. In the past, I’ve used this website to discuss my discontent with the fact that sandbox MMOs could be so much more but often devolve into random death matches with extensive crafting systems implanted. A lot of this stems from the freedom and punishment system, what the developers allow players to do and what players can expect to be “punished” for doing. For the sake of this conversation, I am not referring to bug abuse or exploits, but intentional systems that are purposefully planted to create gameplay.
Here at MMO Fallout, I adhere to the basic process that the community reflects the game, it isn’t a coincidence. So if you have a game where resources can be drained permanently (Wurm Online), you will have players dedicated to draining those resources if only to ensure that no one else can have them. If your game centers around player vs player combat, than you will form a community of gankers and player killers. And, of course, if you create a world that is completely safe you will end up with high-end characters who may have never figured out basic features.
By implementing features in a game and then telling players that they are expected to not engage in such activity, the activity itself simply becomes more appealing to a wider base. Ren and Stimpy fans will know this as the big red button effect.
That being said, sandbox MMOs are all about having a certain level of freedom above and beyond other games, and that level of freedom opens the door for people to act like jerks. Let’s go back to the resource drain conversation: Say you wanted it to be possible for players to deforest an area in order to construct buildings in the new fields. How do you stop a clan of people from griefing and deforesting large portions of the map for little more than “giggles?” The answer I get from developers is “we let the community police itself.”
I can’t say this enough: The community doesn’t police itself. No one is going to stop Tom over there from deforesting the neighborhood, and odds are no one will come to the defense when Tom heads over to the newbie zone in full top-level gear and starts a genocide of new players. I’ve played far too many free for all sandbox MMOs to know that this community policing never happens. In Eve Online, players have a measure of built-in defense in the form of high security space with NPC guards. For MMOs like Mortal Online, you are either in 10.0 (highest security) or 0.0 (lowest), there is no middle ground.
There are many ways to deal with our lumberjack Tom. A system of fatigue can make it prohibitive for a small group to deforest an area. Allowing players to take ownership of land and situate NPC guards to keep out specific players known to grief, having only certain trees able to be uprooted, or making the replanting of trees just as easy as the destruction. This goes back to the original problem, however, of requiring a developer willing to implement systems more complicated than solving all of your problems by stabbing them.
Some MMOs solve this with automated prison systems: Become a notorious criminal and you will eventually be caught and thrown in jail, where you will be forced to do menial repetitive tasks in order to be released. Just recently I talked about the plan in Dominus to allow players to put bounties on gankers, going as far as allowing the player to keep reissuing the bounty as long as he can afford to pay for it, and selectively choosing who is allowed to take on the bounty.
Preventing lumberjack Tom from deforesting an area with his cohort of griefers is a much more difficult task than punishing someone for killing too many newbies, and I’ll admit that my ideas presented above may not be reasonable when experimented in an actual sandbox MMO. But if a developer wants to put in a system by which players can theoretically drive a species to extinction, or deforest a zone, or deplete an area’s resources, they need to have some sort of system in place to compensate for when such an event occurs, because it will happen without a doubt and when players feel that they are unable to do anything about griefing, the number of players griefing will increase and the grieved will simply quit.
And I don’t want to imply that our Tom character is always a jerk, or a bad person. MMOs by nature attract players who strive to do the impossible, often for no reason other than to say that they were able to do it. Everquest created a dragon that could not be killed, players worked tirelessly to try and kill it. World of Warcraft placed its bosses in open world environments, players managed to rope them into major cities.
There is a middle ground between freedom and regulation that sandbox MMOs need in order to survive, which is why more structured titles like Eve Online have gathered more than 350,000 subscribers and on the opposite end we have games like Mortal Online and its inability to profit, and Earthrise bankrupting its developer.
I would love to see Eve Online’s structure translated to a fantasy-themed MMO.
MMO Fallout 