Today’s MMOrning Shot comes from Guild Wars 2, where players are currently doing their best to fight back in the battle for Lion’s Arch. Players are tasked with rescuing citizens and animals and fighting back Scarlet’s minions. I would have stayed longer, but the miasma made the area too lethal to remain in any longer.
Check out MMOrning Shots every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. To submit your own screenshot, send an email to contact@mmofallout.com.
Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from Guild Wars 2 and ArenaNet, to show off the Origins of Madness update that will already be live by the time this article goes up. The first update of 2014, Origins of Madness will task players with taking on Scarlet Briar, arch-villain of the game.
MMOrning Shots shows off interesting games and locales, and can be seen here at MMO Fallout every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. To submit your own MMOrning Shot, send an email to contact@mmofallout.com.
Dataminers on Reddit unearthed the above information regarding a VIP membership for Guild Wars 2. Although no price is detailed, membership includes a bundle of extras, including bank and inventory space, convenient banking/trading, and more. There are at least 20 tiers, going by the VIP badges found in the Mists beta client. Mark Kerstein, Head of Global Community, commented on the forums to point out that the VIP member is an internal experiment and is not intended for western gamers.
This is a testing branch. We conduct internal experiments for various territories on our testing branches. This particular experiment is not being tested for the West.
Whether or not VIP will make it into Guild Wars 2 in any territory will have to be seen.
(Source: Reddit)
There is an old phrase that says “I can’t define obscenity, but I know it when I see it,” a paraphrase of a quote originally stated by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. The gaming media, as with any other media, loves to use sensationalist headlines, and nothing makes bank in this industry quite like a rolling ban for some exploit. The question is how do you define a “mass ban?” Hundreds? Thousands? I can’t define a mass ban, but I know one when I see it.
Some of you may remember an exploit that popped up in last year’s winter event for Guild Wars 2 resulting in what some referred to as a mass ban. The announcement drew a lot of flak, partially from people not fully understanding just how many were banned at the end of the day. Turns out, according to Arenanet, that the total ban figure came out to less than two hundred. Bans were reserved only for the worst offenders who used the exploit hundreds if not thousands of times and knew exactly what they were doing. I still believe that calling it a mass ban was a poor choice of words, misleading, and probably paints ArenaNet in a poor light.
If you want to see a real mass ban, watch Jagex run a sweep of bots.
I have a deep hatred for mass-group bosses in MMOs. There isn’t anything appealing to me about a creature that requires at least thirty people beating on it for fifteen minutes straight, if not longer, and can flick its wrist and kill most of the support or DPS classes in one or two unavoidable hits. You don’t know what is going on because the clutter of people has caused an information overload in terms of flashing lights and swords swinging about, and the sheer number of people present cause the game to lag and FPS to drop, and soon you’re in a slideshow.
So mass-group bosses just aren’t my thing.
This week’s Community Concerns is all about Guild Wars 2, primarily questions about emails you may have received from ArenaNet regarding attempts to access your account. Guild Wars 2 utilizes a security method of email authentication whenever you attempt to log in from a new computer. Aside from being an excellent incentive to keep your passwords unique to each account, this method also acts as an early warning system that someone somewhere, has your password, and that you should change it immediately.
The top question I receive on this topic is how to know if these emails are legitimately from ArenaNet. The answer is that you should always assume that these emails are legitimate, change your password and possibly even run your anti-virus program just to be safe if you receive one. Never click on the authorization link unless you are explicitly expecting the email (you logged in and the game blocked you) because if the email is not legitimate, you will end up at a fake website and expose your computer. If the email is legitimate, all you accomplish is to authorize a thief to log in and ransack your account. You have nothing to gain and everything to lose by clicking the authorization, again unless you are explicitly expecting contact.
The second most asked question is how to know if the email is real when you do actually have to authorize your computer. If you receive two emails at the same time and both are asking for authorization, close the client and wait a few minutes, then log in again and the system will email you again. There is roughly a .00001% chance of a fake authorization just happening to be sent to you as you log in for real, and if you are blocked and receive only one email with your location details, you can safely assume that it is legitimate.
This is what the email looks like. Make sure to doublecheck the city, region, and country, before authorizing.
A log-in attempt from the following location is currently awaiting your authorization.
Address: [IP Address]
City: Hamburg
Region: NY
Country: USThis location is approximated based on information provided by your Internet Service Provider. If in doubt, deny the request and try again.
If you are certain this log-in attempt was not made by you, then someone else knows your log-in credentials and you should change your password immediately via Account Management.
For security purposes, we alert you each time your account is accessed from an unrecognized location. To authenticate this log-in attempt, please click the link below:
https://account.guildwars2.com/login/allow?token=[string of numbers & letters]&request=[string of numbers and letters]
Need help or have questions about your Guild Wars account? Visit our support site: http://en.support.guildwars2.com/
Thanks!
–The ArenaNet Team
Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from Arenanet, and offers a glimpse at the upcoming Twilight Assault update set for October 1st. Twilight Assault, which I originally assumed would involve raiding a Barnes and Noble and burning some Stephanie Meyer books, actually involves players assisting in the raid of a secret facility. A secret facility for what, exactly? For the printing of Stephanie Meyer books.
Let me put my hard hat on real quick. Alright. Raptr is a desktop app similar to Xfire that we’ve featured here on MMO Fallout because it not only tracks your game time and achievements across your consoles, it also regularly gives free stuff at the cost of absolutely nothing. Thanks to a strong promotional effort between Raptr and Trion, Rift came out on top as the most played game of June, with a whopping 13% of the pie. World of Warcraft came in at #5 with three MMOs dropping out from last month’s list: Defiance, Neverwinter, and The Old Republic.
As far as PC games go, Guild Wars 2 ranked #7 with The Old Republic at #10, Neverwinter at #12, Star Trek Online at #14, Marvel Heroes at #17, and Microvolts at #18. Defiance showed up as #13 most played games on the Xbox 360.
You can check out the top lists at the link below.
(Source: Raptr)
Let me put my hard hat on real quick. Alright. Raptr is a desktop app similar to Xfire that we’ve featured here on MMO Fallout because it not only tracks your game time and achievements across your consoles, it also regularly gives free stuff at the cost of absolutely nothing. Thanks to a strong promotional effort between Raptr and Trion, Rift came out on top as the most played game of June, with a whopping 13% of the pie. World of Warcraft came in at #5 with three MMOs dropping out from last month’s list: Defiance, Neverwinter, and The Old Republic.
As far as PC games go, Guild Wars 2 ranked #7 with The Old Republic at #10, Neverwinter at #12, Star Trek Online at #14, Marvel Heroes at #17, and Microvolts at #18. Defiance showed up as #13 most played games on the Xbox 360.
You can check out the top lists at the link below.
(Source: Raptr)
Guild Wars 2 was originally envisioned to follow in the footsteps of Guild Wars: A buy to play game supported through microtransactions and through the sale of expansion packs. With production steadily increasing on the sequel’s ongoing living story, ArenaNet quickly changed its focus to providing world-changing content on a regular basis for its players. Nowadays, the Living Story has four teams rotating and keeping content churning out at a regular pace. As a result of the focus on the living story, the odds of an expansion are becoming slimmer according to Mark Zadorojny, Lead Content Designer at ArenaNet, talking to Eurogamer.
“It’s something that’s on the table but it’s not something we’re focused on, because what we want to do is – our idea here is that with Living World, we can do what expansions would have done but do it on a more regular basis.”
You can read the entirety of Eurogamer’s article down below, where ArenaNet assures us that the box sales and gem sales are more than enough to sustain Guild Wars 2.
(Source: Eurogamer)
![[Community] Guild Wars 2 Authorized Logins](https://mmofallout.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/guild-wars-2_83015.jpg?w=800)
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