I’ve always said that developers/publishers should not punish the entire community for the actions of a small group. Now, I hadn’t taken a full look at the TERA guild emblems I posted (which were essentially dumped from a folder on my hard drive) until I started writing this article, but lo and behold I found a penis in the pile. Unsurprising in the highest order. In Europe, however, TERA publisher Frogster has taken upon itself to disable the feature entirely for everyone for the time being.
We had to remove the possibility to use custom guild emblems, as there were cases of inappropriate pictures.
The emblems aren’t gone forever, just until Frogster is able to filter them.
We haven’t just removed the guild emblems without contacting Bluehole Studios. We’re working together with them on this problem, and try our best to find a way to censure/filter inappropriate images.
Community Representative Sealath also explained that the publisher also has an issue with the logos being saved to the local hard drive.
I don’t know about you, but I hate queue lines, except in those rare moments when I find myself queuing in line for the gas station to open in the morning to buy a slushie. But enough of my small town stories. The point of my story is: I hate queue lines in video games, and if I’m going to be expected to sit around in my chair and leisurely consume carbonated beverages and watch television while I wait for a queue line to diminish, well by golly I better be compensated for it.
TERA has the right idea. I noticed while logging into the closed beta test tonight that the server was under around an 800+ person queue line, with a notice that if my time in line extended over ten minutes, I would be compensated with bonus XP. Ten minutes later, the notice changed to what you see above, and I was granted 13 minutes of bonus XP upon logging in.
“The sneak peek event planned for this weekend unfortunately has had to be cancelled. As we currently cannot foresee when we will be able to guarantee a smooth running of the event, there is no new date as of yet. We’re working closely with the TERA developers at Bluehole to fix the remaining issues.
The cancellation was not due to load problems caused by the large number of potential players. Player numbers would have given us a look into possible issues within the scope of a stress test. Due to unforeseen reasons, problems arose already during the entry into the game world.
As soon as we have new information regarding a rescheduled event planning and once all technical issues have been resolved we will inform you on our website, in the forum and via the usual social media channels.
We apologize for the cancellation of the event and assure you that we are doing our utmost to provide all players access to TERA as soon as possible. We thank all TERA fans for their patience and understanding and hope to have positive news for you very soon.
Back when Bluehole announced that TERA would have no region restrictions whatsoever, I was admittedly skeptical. An MMO without regional restrictions generally spawns from one of a few circumstances: The same company is publishing it in all regions ala City of Heroes, or there is only one worldwide server ala Eve Online and Mortal Online. In the case of TERA, back in 2010 Bluehole announced that while the clients are region specific, there was nothing stopping someone in Europe from purchasing a North American client and playing on those servers.
Not the case. If Bluehole truly wanted cross-oceanic play, this idea was met with a dead “negative” by the game’s publishers. Bluehole did make this statement to Massively:
We had to change our stance on IP restrictions due to licensing and security issues. While we can’t go into the reasons in detail, we would like to say that although these restrictions are not a panacea for preventing hacking, they are highly effective, and produce more positive results than might be expected.
So licencing reasons. Restricting IP addresses will not accomplish much in preventing gold farmers in Russia or China from accessing North American and European services or stolen accounts, considering ease of use in a proxy. Unfortunately, these IP restrictions also mean that certain regions aren’t able to play the game until a publisher picks up the title in that region. In many cases, the game just never releases in those regions.
Still, this is another example of what happens when you let the developers make announcements about decisions that should be handled by corporate. If TERA had announced from the start that there would be region restrictions (or had they not waited a year and change to go back on that statement) than this wouldn’t even be an issue (save for the regions that can’t play at all).
TERA launches in May for North America and Europe and is being published by En Masse Entertainment (North America) and Frogster Interactive (Europe). Read up on Bluehole Studios’ lawsuit with NCSoft here.
Back when Bluehole announced that TERA would have no region restrictions whatsoever, I was admittedly skeptical. An MMO without regional restrictions generally spawns from one of a few circumstances: The same company is publishing it in all regions ala City of Heroes, or there is only one worldwide server ala Eve Online and Mortal Online. In the case of TERA, back in 2010 Bluehole announced that while the clients are region specific, there was nothing stopping someone in Europe from purchasing a North American client and playing on those servers.
Not the case. If Bluehole truly wanted cross-oceanic play, this idea was met with a dead “negative” by the game’s publishers. Bluehole did make this statement to Massively:
We had to change our stance on IP restrictions due to licensing and security issues. While we can’t go into the reasons in detail, we would like to say that although these restrictions are not a panacea for preventing hacking, they are highly effective, and produce more positive results than might be expected.
So licencing reasons. Restricting IP addresses will not accomplish much in preventing gold farmers in Russia or China from accessing North American and European services or stolen accounts, considering ease of use in a proxy. Unfortunately, these IP restrictions also mean that certain regions aren’t able to play the game until a publisher picks up the title in that region. In many cases, the game just never releases in those regions.
Still, this is another example of what happens when you let the developers make announcements about decisions that should be handled by corporate. If TERA had announced from the start that there would be region restrictions (or had they not waited a year and change to go back on that statement) than this wouldn’t even be an issue (save for the regions that can’t play at all).
TERA launches in May for North America and Europe and is being published by En Masse Entertainment (North America) and Frogster Interactive (Europe). Read up on Bluehole Studios’ lawsuit with NCSoft here.
Back in the day, you may remember that Dungeon Runners was set to receive a transfer to the web browser shortly before death. Due to the nature of MMOs being the opera singers (read: fat) of the gaming genre, free to play titles have a harder time gaining new customers when that means convincing someone who is jumping from title to title to sit down for another multi-gigabyte game they may hate after five minutes. Now, games like Runescape and Battlestar Galactica and FusionFall work with small downloads, through the browser. Turbine, Sony, and Blizzard attempted to fix this as well by offering streaming downloads, where you only download a portion of the game, and the rest downloads as it is needed.
Last year in October, Frogster released a 3.5gig client for Runes of Magic, carrying the same functionality at a smaller size than its 7gig counterpart, as well as carrying higher optimization and better performance. Apparently this wasn’t far enough, as Frogster has announced through press email that Facebook and browser based versions of Runes of Magic are coming, fully functional. Expected to be arrive in Q2 2011, Runes of Magic browser edition will open up a legion of untapped customers.
I can only hope that Frogster will invite me to swim in their money jacuzzi after this update goes live.
I was going about my daily Facebook activities (posting creepy Woody pictures), and lo and behold, I came across the following ad:
You’ll notice that this ad links to “secure.jagex.com,” and I quite honestly expected that this was either A.) a scam ad that managed to get through, or B.) Jagex was advertising on Facebook, which I don’t believe that they do (with my activities, I’ve seen almost every MMO developer that advertises on Facebook). So naturally I clicked on the ad, and was taken here
Really? Runes of Magic? Take one more look at the URL in the Facebook ad. “secure.jagex.com.” The screenshot in the ad appears to be from Runes of Magic, but someone who has never played either game wouldn’t know that. The ad does do a good job of tip-toeing around, but outright claims to be Jagex by inserting a false link to Jagex.com. This isn’t parody like Global Agenda’s ads or Rift’s “We’re not in Azeroth anymore.” This ad is explicitly misleading people into believing they are viewing an ad for a Jagex product, when really they are being directed to Runes of Magic.
Facebook is already aware of the fraudulent ad, and information has been forwarded to Jagex’s legal department. If this is a third party ad agency, Frogster needs to drop them before they wind up on the receiving end of a false advertising (and likely fraud) lawsuit. If this is Frogster’s doing, someone in the advertising office should be getting his pink slip, yesterday.
Here at MMO Fallout, I never turn down a good charity story, and today is no different. Frogster has a yearly run on Runes of Magic for Save The Children (Germany edition), a children’s rights organization that engages in all sorts of projects, with the goal of improving healthcare and education for all kiddies no matter where they be.
Between December and January, players of select Frogster games could purchase exclusive items where, after VAT and third party costs, the proceeds went to Save The Children in Bhutan. In total, $112,500 USD was collected.
“In Bhutan, there are suddenly children surfing the Internet and zapping through 400 television channels. Their parents, on the other hand, are people who haven’t learnt to read or write. They have never in their lives been bombarded with advertising. In other words, what we have here is a clash of two ages of civilisation.”
If you understood the term "leet," you'd know I bypassed the firewall!
As a partial webmaster myself (that is, I run a website, not a professional at web services), nothing makes the belly chuckle like an anonymous person who is likely not old enough to drive, writing a comment threatening to hack (hax) the website and ruin my life. Often, such a problem can be fixed by simply adding the IP address to the auto-delete filter, and hoping that the young person isn’t posting from a school where other people might like to comment in the future.
On the other hand, one has to be cautiously apprehensive about website security. For every hundred script kiddies you knock away with your hardware firewalls, dedicated servers, and DDoS protection, there is at least one person out there who can, and will, break into your system if you piss him off enough, and although MMO Fallout is not a business, I can say nothing scares the pants off of business than the thought of having the IT guy come into their office and say “Someone got in, sensitive information has been leaked onto the internet.” So nothing puts a damp in your pants like seeing this message:
“Right now we have more than 3 Million and 5 hundred thousand accounts. 5 hundred thousand of them are already hacked and verified. Your other Games like Bounty Bay Online and Tera are affected too. So you better dont mess with us. Take this serious. Change your mind. Become a valued member of the community and stop abusing them.”
Frogster’s account security system was compromised, and although the number cannot be officially confirmed, the hacker behind the attack has released over two thousand account names and passwords. In a post on the official forums, Frogster Silberfuchs revealed that the two thousand accounts who were revealed have been deactivated, and are able to be reactivated by their owners.
We promptly assembled a task force and are of course making every effort to get to the bottom of this incident. We are utilising every means at our disposal to minimise the damage and to prevent such threats in the future. We have already implemented additional security measures today. As soon as all the necessary steps have been taken with regard to operational and criminal processes, we will inform you of further developments on this matter.
It is yet to be seen whether or not more accounts are going to be revealed, and by the time this story ends there could be a lot of deactivated accounts. The sad part is that, although this whole ordeal started because of something as simple as gripes with a gaming company, this will likely end with the hacker being prosecuted and (depending on his age) going to jail.
This is just a reminder: Breaking the law is not a proper response to your gripes with a company. Do you really want to risk going to jail over your anger that Frogster deletes too many critical forum posts?
Sometime around Dungeon Runner’s shutdown, the blokes at NCsoft talked about how somewhere around one third of players who signed up for Dungeon Runners free accounts never got past the client download. Considering Dungeon Runners lists one gigabyte as a requirement on the box, I can only imagine how much the issue transcends to other free to play games , like the late Chronicles of Spellborn (eleven gigabytes).
Runes of Magic, coming in at a whopping seven gigabytes, wants to lower the barrier to entry, while cutting some fat in the process. In an announcement on the main website, Frogster announced the release of Runes of Magic Slim, a much smaller client that carries essentially the same data. This half-sized, 3.5gig client was made possible through the magic of compression, and retains all of the functionality of the original Runes of Magic client, plus increased optimization and performance.
![[Europe] TERA Custom Guild Emblems Temporarily Removed](https://mmofallout.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/mmofo.jpg?w=1200)
MMO Fallout 