Lineage II – MMO Fallout

Battle Royale Comes To Lineage II: Revolution

Battle Royale is coming to Lineage II: Revolution, because of course it is.

Netmarble this week announced that the popular mobile MMO will receive a 25-player battle royale mode. Utilizing one of four battle royale specific characters, players will engage in combat and avoid penalty zones that apply debuffs. Players can also acquire exclusive skills from NPCs and various buff zones on the map, all in the effort to become the sole survivor.

Lineage II: Revolution players will also have access to the following events and items:

Sailor Costumes – Costumes that transform players into sailors are now available through the in-game Shop. Players will receive a Hat and Outfit, both of which increase Combat Power (CP) once owned.
Water Gun Weapon Costume – Cool off during the summer with the Water Gun Weapon Costume, now available in the in Shop. This also increases CP when owned.
In-Game Events – Netmarble is celebrating today’s new Battle Royale update with special events, such as:
- Bingo events, where players earn points to complete an in-game bingo board by completing missions, for special rewards;
- Attendance events, where Heroes receive prizes by logging in every day for up to fourteen consecutive days;
- The Megakurin Web Events, where players collect stamina to evolve their Kukurin mount to receive various rewards for each evolving step.

Source: Netmarble Press Release

Lineage II Cancels Hero Coin Resets

Lineage II players by now are used to the annual reset, an event that takes place every January and resets your Hero Coins. As it turns out, the reset has been causing a great deal of frustration and confusion in the community, and NCSoft has taken notice.

In an announcement posted to the official website, NCSoft has announced that the annual reset will be going away starting this year, meaning there won’t be a reset in January 2017 or afterward. As a result of the change, there will be alterations made to the hero coin store. Details will be coming in the future as to those changes.

Hero Coins in Lineage II are accumulated by buying and spending NCoin, the cash shop currency.

Our thoughts: I have a feeling that costs are going to rise for items in the Hero Coin store now that NCSoft has a reasonable expectation that the amount on hand is universally increasing.

(Source: NCSoft)

Lineage II: Server Transfers Stopping Over the Holidays

Lineage II players thinking about changing servers might want to make up their minds soon. In a post on the official website, NCSoft has announced that server transfers will be shutting down for two weeks while the staff takes a much deserved holiday break. In addition to the two week break, the post notes that if your transfer on December 14th fails, it will not be processed until January.

Important dates are noted below:

December 14: Last server transfers are processed, and closure of Server Transfer applications.
January 4: Server Transfer applications open again.
January 11: Server transfers are processed, and function as normal once again.

(Source: Lineage II)

Lineage II Releases Player Appreciate Pack

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NCSoft wants to show players how much it appreciates them, and probably apologize for the fact that character registration has been completely disabled while the team goes in and figures out how to deal with the overwhelming number of bots taking over the game. While registration is down until August 24th, players have been invited to redeem a player appreciation pack, containing a myriad of items and boosts.

The appreciation pack can be redeemed in game until September 16th and can be claimed once per account.

(Source: NCSoft)

NCSoft Sales Boom, Wildstar Flounders In Q1

NCSoft has officially released their first quarter financial documents, and there is plenty to be happy about (providing you are not a developer on or player of Wildstar). Sales hit a boom with a 28% increase over the same time last year while profits over the same period jumped 70%. Pre-tax income flew up 67% while net income soared to a grandiose 86% increase.

Much of the increase is thanks to Blade & Soul, driven by the US/EU launch the title is now NCSoft’s second highest grossing product below the original Lineage. US/EU sales jumped 136% over last year thanks primarily to Blade & Soul while the title also grew revenues in China by 15%.

Aion saw a small boost in sales while Guild Wars 2, Lineage II, and Wildstar all saw a loss of revenue. The boost in profit is even more amazing when put alongside an increase in labor costs, box and merchandise production.

And now the bad news: Wildstar’s sales have officially dropped to its lowest point, 1,282 KRW in MN or $1.09 million approximately USD. The game’s income is, at this point in time, virtually negligible for NCSoft as a company, and the switch to free to play has clearly just delayed the inevitable. With the cancellation of Wildstar’s Chinese launch and the allegation by Polygon that NCSoft confirmed the game’s imminent closure at the last round of layoffs, both fans and the developers should start prepping their resumes if they haven’t already.

I want to put this into perspective for the “Wildstar is fine” comments that will show up here and in reference to this article on other websites. NCSoft’s revenues for Q1 came to 204,848 KRW in MN, that is 204.8 billion Won. Wildstar made up 1.282 billion of that, or 0.6258% of the total revenue. The three month period in the report runs from January to March, a period that has 91 days. 91 days translates to 2,184 hours.

Wildstar was worth 13.66 hours of NCSoft’s time over the last three months. It is worth less than half of City of Heroes (2,855) at the time NCSoft shut down Paragon Studios and fired the team with barely any warning. Just a fraction more than Guild Wars (1,277) was when NCSoft halted development. Increasingly less than Tabula Rasa (2,007) when it was delisted and the servers were shut down.

It’s over, folks.

(Source: NCSoft)

Get Your Lineage II Transfers In Before December 16th

NCSoft has posted a notice on the Lineage II website that anyone wishing to transfer their character this month should do so before December 16th, otherwise they will have to wait until next year.

With the upcoming holiday, the last server transfers of 2015 will be processed during the December 16th maintenance. Purchasing and queuing for server transfers will not be available after this date and any server transfers that fail during the next maintenance will be processed next year.

Missing the deadline will mean having to wait until transfers begin again on January 6th.

(Source: Lineage II)

MMO Hall of Fame Inducts Two New Games

The MMO Hall of Fame has announced the inductees for the 2015 ceremony. Out of a grand total of 173 candidates, two titles managed to sneak past the 60% requirement to make it into the hall of fame, and those games are Lineage II and Anarchy Online.

Doug Kale, curator of the hall of fame, noted the growing competition as new games are added each year.

“There was an enormous amount of competition, but after tallying all the numbers only two games reached the required 60% of the votes to enter the Hall of Fame,”

MMO Hall of Fame inductees are chosen based on contributions to the genre as well as their dedicated fans, with a voting committee made up of members of the MMO industry and gaming press.

Some of the highest voted games include Second Life, Maple Story, Toontown, and Pirates of the Burning Sea.

(Source: MMO Hall of Fame)

Week In Review: Sony Offline Entertainment

I’ve discovered a newfound love for Ultima Forever. Once you carve out the ridiculous cash shop mechanics, get rid of gear degradation, and drop gold keys like they’re candy, the game is a lot of fun to play. It’s almost disappointing that Electronic Arts will be shutting down Ultima Forever on August 29th, but it’s hard to say that it wasn’t deserved. Mythic Entertainment will best be known for Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer Online, the latter being much beloved by its fans despite its commercial failings, its other recent ventures (Wrath of Heroes, Ultima Forever, Dungeon Keeper Mobile) will likely fade into obscurity.

Naturally, when it rains it pours. This week also marked the sunsetting of two more Sony Online Entertainment titles. I can’t say I was entirely surprised when SOE revealed that Vanguard couldn’t be fixed due to issues deep within the game’s engine. Vanguard was a collection of great ideas implemented rather shoddily on a foundation made of crepe paper. The idea that the game wasn’t runing a profit is hardly surprising when you factor in that the game spent so long in a dormant state that, in 2011, it was a massive surprise just to see the game getting patched. Vanguard did go free to play, but the response was meek at best.

Wizardry Online, on the other hand, will continue to live on in its native Japan. Depending on how they view the market, Gamepot may either decide to open up a global server or bring on a different publisher to host Wizardry Online in North America and Europe. Given the game’s tepid response under Sony Online Entertainment, however, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Finally, this week also saw the announcement that DUST 514 would be shutting down its Oceanic servers due to players taking advantage of the low population to boost their accounts.

Firefall launched this week, a sentence I never honestly saw myself getting the chance to say. NCSoft continues to add more races and classes to Lineage II with the latest expansion, despite the game’s age and waning profit. And finally pigs have officially grown wings and made me breakfast using their own bacon, because Square Enix has opened up 14-day trials for Final Fantasy XIV.

I plan to wrap up every Week in Review with a piece from MMO Fallout history.

This Week in 2009: On The Brink: Planetside

Planetside, touted as the first true MMOFPS, takes yet another turn towards its ultimate demise, with the announcement that the game’s two servers will finally merge into one, to deal with lacking population. The original five servers have gradually closed and merged, and currently the game houses two servers; One North American and one European.

As far as MMO’s go, server closure is one of the first lines of defense in keeping a game alive. When empty servers spread players thinly, forcing them into a smaller space will give an illusion of player count, and may inspire ex-players to jump back into the renewed action, creating a snowball effect that brings more and more players to the game.

Sadly, if history has taught us anything, it is that this mantra will more than likely fail for Planetside, a game that has been on a downward slope for years now. Planetside’s status as pioneer in MMOFPS action, massive scale battles, and focus on skills above levels, will not help it in its fall from grace.

The merge will go ahead on August 25th. Once Planetside is consolidated on to one server, it is anyone’s guess as to how long it has to live afterwards.

Classic Servers: Another Developer “Gets It.”

Private servers are a very stingy subject in the gaming press. Many developers don’t like to acknowledge them and, honestly, there is at least one of my contacts who will never return my emails after this article just for the act of referencing their existence. MMO Fallout does not condone private servers, nor do we allow them to be advertised in our comments section. I like to think that private servers can be an important tool for developers to gauge their audience’s expectations, however. Private servers that exist simply to cheat, to bypass a subscription, or gain accelerated experience/items will always exist, and those don’t offer much of a lesson outside of that some gamers are unwilling to invest the time or money.

As more developers are realizing, however, there is a great opportunity in classic servers. Jagex has not only maintained the original RuneScape Classic, but launched a version of 2007 RuneScape that remains updated thanks solely to the majority vote of its community. Sony Online Entertainment has, for a long time now, dabbled in classic and progression servers for Everquest. Ragnarok Online launched a classic server back in 2012, and NCSoft recently announced a classic server for Lineage II, at least the Korean version.

There are a million legitimate reasons why a developer wouldn’t want to create their own classic servers. A classic server would need some form of monetization, where a cash shop would risk driving away the target audience and a subscription would put the server in competition with those same private servers that operate for free. The developer could, however, capitalize on this very issue. A dedicated developer could offer stability and quality where many classic servers are at risk of shutting down at moment’s notice, operate on inferior server infrastructure, and are partially hand-built by the operator due to the inaccessible nature of certain MMO mechanics (server side operations).

Other developers refuse to create a classic server on the grounds that doing so would compromise their “artistic vision,” a belief that MMOs change with time and that introducing a classic server would be counter to that vision, or an admission that they made the wrong choice somewhere down the line. Further developers cite an unwillingness to risk splitting the community in half.

Happily, it appears that more developers are recognizing the potential for classic servers or those with alternate rulesets.

Classic Servers: Another Developer "Gets It."

Happily, it appears that more developers are recognizing the potential for classic servers or those with alternate rulesets.

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This Week in 2009: On The Brink: Planetside

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