Tag: Gameforge

TERA Sees Huge Number Spikes Thanks To Steam


As surprising as it may sound, releasing on Steam can do wonders for a game’s community, as European publisher Gameforge and developer Bluehole Studios found out following the successful rollout of TERA on the digital distribution service. Since its launch, TERA has remained in the top 30 list of free to play games. According to Steam Charts, TERA enjoys on average more than three thousand concurrent players on Steam alone.

Olaf Bernhard, CMO of Gameforge, says: “Our strategy of bringing not only new releases to Steam but also re-releasing our most successful games, proves very successful: With every game we manage to bring new fans in and reactive former players.”

Support for TERA is still going with a new class set to release in April, the Valkyrie, which players will be able to reserve their names for shortly.

(Source: TERA press release)

Perfect World Talks: RaiderZ


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RaiderZ is an action-combat game from the minds of MAIET Entertainment, the folks behind GunZ: The Duel and GunZ 2. Released in 2012 as a free to play MMO, RaiderZ features active combat which places an emphasis on dodging and blocking incoming attacks, as well as an emphasis on crafting and big boss fights. Sadly, RaiderZ has hit some hard times with the announcements that Gameforge and Neowiz would be shutting down their servers in Europe and South Korea respectively. What does this mean for RaiderZ? I had to know.

So naturally, I saddled up and went directly to the source with my pen, paper, and a box of Necco Wafers in case I needed a bribe. With Perfect World Entertainment as the only western host remaining, I wanted to know where RaiderZ stood in terms of support from its remaining publishers, and developer MAIET Entertainment. PWE was kind enough to hook me up with Senior Product Manager Mark Hill, who had no problem answering my questions.

Omali: RaiderZ has shut down in Europe and Korea, with both announcing their closure around the same time. How did Perfect World manage to come out unscathed?

Hill: We are highly committed to RaiderZ and to the fans of the game, so we haven’t even considered closing our servers at this point. We feel that we can build upon the current success of RaiderZ and continue to improve the game for current and future players.

O: What do you say to players who might be concerned over the fact that half of RaiderZ’s territories just shut down?

H: It is very unfortunate if they were involved in the closure of servers that they were playing on. As a gamer, I know how it feels when a game you’re passionate about is no longer available, and it’s not a good feeling. That goes double for MMOs, and for the players that dedicate hundred and even thousands of hours to the game, community, and the publisher.

While I wish there was a way that those affected players would be able to resume their progress on our servers, it’s unfortunately logistically and contractually impossible. However, we do encourage anyone that is able to start up a character on our servers. I think they’ll find a solid and dedicated community to experience the game with, and it may even give them a chance to level up a new character in ways that they didn’t experience before.

O: With Gameforge stepping out of the picture, has any interest been expressed in picking up European publishing?

H: We’re definitely always looking for new market opportunities, and seeing the feedback from European players that were affected makes it clear that they still want to play. There are license and contract restrictions still in place even after they closed their servers, but we have discussed the possibility of Perfect World Entertainment bringing RaiderZ back to Europe. Of course I can’t promise anything, but it is something we are interested in.

O: Is RaiderZ region locked to North America or are players from Europe capable of creating accounts and logging in?

H: European players are able to create accounts on the Perfect World servers. They can register by visiting raiderz.perfectworld.com.

O: Have you considered putting RaiderZ on Steam to bring in a wider audience?

H: Oh man, you’re reading my mind! Yes, we have considered it. But before we do, we want to make sure the game is in top shape in terms of bug fixes, player retention, and overall game experience, which is what we’re working on now. Keep an eye out on Steam, though!

O: Is MAIET still committed to developing content for RaiderZ?

H: Absolutely! As a matter of fact, we have big expansion coming soon that is current being QA tested. You can read all about it in the forums here. We talk to the developers at MAIET every day, and we are both committed to making the game a success.

O: If MAIET does cease development, is there any chance of Perfect World adopting a license similar to Neowiz in Japan, allowing for more in-house control of content?

H: That’s a great question, but it’s not something that we’ve considered at this point. We’ve heard great things out of Japan, and are always open to new opportunities in order to ensure the continued success of the game, and making a positive experience for the players.

I want to thank Perfect World Entertainment and Mark Hill for taking some time to answer our questions. You can check out RaiderZ for free at Perfect World’s website.

Gameforge Shutting Down RaiderZ Europe


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As the MMO market continues its march towards heavy saturation, it is our duty at MMO Fallout to inform you whenever another title sees its services come to an end. Gameforge has announced that they will be shutting down all support for the action MMO RaiderZ in its hosted territories. As Gameforge is merely the European publisher for the MMO, the game will remain operational in North America and South Korea where the game is published by Perfect World Entertainment and Neowiz Games respectively.

The FAQ published by Gameforge notes that RaiderZ did not meet financial expectations:

The success of RaiderZ did not meet our expectations and as we saw no other potential alternatives to the discontinuation of the services, unfortunately we were left with no other alternative than to take this step.

Servers will remain online until August 30th after which players who still want a fix will have to move over to Perfect World or Neowiz.

(Source: Shutdown FAQ)

Runes Of Magic Posts Year 4 Infographic


Runes of Magic launched March 19th, 2009 and has enjoyed great success with eight million accounts creating twelve million characters. In celebration of Runes of Magic’s birthday, Gameforge and Runewalker have released an infographic.

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TERA Doubles Its Players In Europe


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Commonly when an MMO heads free to play, the number of active players goes up instead of down. In fact, it is so common that there is more news to be had in a game not seeing a boost in population than there is in one doubling or tripling their community. In Europe, TERA’s number of registered players has doubled, bringing in five hundred thousand new players according to Gameforge. This leaves TERA with over one million registered users under Gameforge.

That seems a little light, doesn’t it? Only one million? You would be correct in that assessment. The announcement of one million accounts comes from Gameforge, which (I will eat my hat if this isn’t the case) does not include the North American service under En Masse Entertainment, nor does it factor in the NHN Corporation hosting in Japan and Korea. Assuming other regions saw similar responses to their free to play shift, that could amount to several million new accounts overall for TERA.

NCSoft Latest Anti-RMT Shot: Bans All Chinese IPs


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Gold farming in Aion is a pretty major problem. Similar to NCSoft’s other big name title, Lineage II, Aion players have become accustomed over the years to logging in and going through the ritual of reporting and blocking the new set of bots spamming the multiple chat groups and sending them whispers of cheap gold, fast delivery, and poor English (as opposed to MMO Fallout’s gold farming service which carries high prices, no delivery, and a staff of folks who understand English very well, especially the more vulgar parts of it). NCSoft has put forward various efforts to improving the process, like automatically clearing ignore lists of banned accounts, all the way back to launch when NCSoft sent GM’s in-game to blow up gold spammers.

And now, NCSoft declared all-out war on gold farming by firing the first shot: Banning IPs. NCSoft will be blocking Chinese IPs from creating accounts on Aion, due to high RMT traffic coming from the country. As for proxies, they will be blocked too if they become a problem:

Please note that proxies have become an integral tool for illicit behavior in MMOs, and as a result we do target them when we undertake anti-RMT efforts. However, legitimate latency reduction services are recognized, and a proxy will not be banned unless it is confirmed to be part of unsanctioned behavior.

And what happens if the gold farmers leave China? NCSoft is willing to follow them. The post makes note that should the gold farming become a problem from another country, NCSoft may begin knocking out access from other countries on a case-by-case basis. This only applies to newly created accounts, it does not stop current accounts from using their game.

(Source: NCSoft Aion)

[Community] First Impressions Are Everything


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Jbuck1984 over on Reddit wants RaiderZ developer MAIET Entertainment to know that it took him ten minutes to decide that the MMO wasn’t worth investing the time into. Simple: Upon entering the game, Jbuck1984 was immediately greeted by a spam bot that could not be blocked due to poor UI and an impossible to read name.

Would have loved to give it a shot, but there was a random gold spammer with the name llllllllll. In game I couldn’t differentiate the L’s from the I’s and I couldn’t click in the chat window to block him. The only next logical step for someone like me who gets annoyed very quickly was to uninstall the game. Thanks Raiderz for making the interface so horrible. If you couldn’t develop a functional chat window I can only imagine what the rest of the game is like.

Some of you will likely see uninstalling the game as a bit of an overreaction, but that doesn’t make Jbuck1984’s point any less true. Walking into an MMO and being presented with an environment like the one described is a bit like entering a nice restaurant and having solicitors start berating you from the entrance to your table to try and sell you stuff. The food might be of five star quality, and odds are a good few people with higher levels of patience will stick around long enough to eat it. There are, however, others who will just get up and go to a restaurant that doesn’t tolerate solicitors.

The post over at Reddit was deleted before this article was published, so you’ll have to excuse there not being a link to the original post. If you have a thought you would like to submit to Community Concerns about RaiderZ or any other MMO, throw us a comment below.

Star Trek: Infinite Space Cancelled, No Publisher Found


Star Trek: Infinite Space was announced a couple of years back by Gameforge as a browser-based free to play title. Set in the Deep Space Nine sector of the Star Trek universe, Infinite Space had the consultation powers of Denise and Michael Okuda to make sure that the game stayed true to the series. Unfortunately, times have not been great for the German developer, as last year the company was hit with layoffs that saw 100 staff cut and the cancellation of Mythos and Hellbreed. No longer able to publish the game themselves, Gameforge paused the beta in an attempt to find a co-publisher.

Well it seems that the endeavor has not been met with success, and Games Industry has reported that the project has been cancelled.

“”Unfortunately, our efforts were not successful. So we have decided with a heavy heart to finally abandon the project Star Trek: Infinite Space. The discontinuation is very regrettable. “

(Source: Gamesindustry.biz)

NCSoft Outsourcing European Hosting?


You know, I hadn’t really noticed until tonight how small NCSoft’s library has become in the west. With the shuttering of Lineage, Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, Exteel, and Dungeon Runners, us westerners are left with Aion, City of Heroes, Guild Wars, and Lineage 2. Four titles? Granted, we have Blade & Soul (hopefully) coming out at the end of this year, and Wildstar and Lineage Eternal coming at some point in the future.

I can’t help but notice, however, that NCSoft’s personal appearance in Europe has taken a lesser role recently. Lineage II’s European service was recently handed over to Innova for the free to play transition, and when Aion goes free to play early this year, Gameforge is taking over service of that title. So far this is only on NCSoft’s titles in Europe that have transitioned to free to play, with the exception of City of Heroes in which case the two services (US/EU) were merged into one under NCSoft. This leaves Guild Wars.

If I’m lucky, NCSoft will answer my emails about future title publishing.