In early access.
Tag: Loot
Diablo II Loot Argument Leads To Murder
Marvel Heroes Omega: Better Loot, More Costumes, Less Choice
Big changes are coming to Marvel Heroes Omega with how the game treats drops. According to an announcement revealed this week, Gazillion plans on taking the loot box and making it more substantive. For starters, while previously the boxes could only be obtained via the cash shop, they will now be granted at specific character levels (5, 12, 15, 30, and 60). In addition, loot boxes will drop costumes at a higher rate.
Now for the bad news: As part of this update, Gazillion will also be removing all costumes from the cash shop, meaning that the only way to acquire them will be through the loot boxes.
We plan to rotate the costumes available in the loot boxes out every few months, but players looking for particular costumes after this update can use their Marvelous Essence (given in each loot box) to acquire them directly from the Marvelous Essence vendor Moondragon, located in all Hubs. She will carry all costumes in the loot boxes available at that time.
The community isn’t taking the news well. Gazillion has since come out and tried to explain that the model was “unsustainable” on PC.
Everquest Next Avoiding Bad Design Decisions
For some reason I will never understand, members of the free to play sandbox community have taken Everquest Next to be Sony Online Entertainment’s answer to games like Mortal Online and Darkfall: free for all deathmatching with full loot and hardcore gameplay. Apparently I wasn’t the only one wondering why Sony would make such a poor decision to force full loot pvp. On Twitter, someone asked Lead Game Designer Darrin McPherson if pvp would be forced on players, to which McPherson stated that “we avoid bad design decisions.”
Although his words were vague, likelihood points toward Everquest Next at least offering players a choice similar to the options between PvP and PvE servers on almost every other MMO on the market. Whether or not Sony will experiment with a hardcore server is up for grabs. Back in the day, Sony opened up Rallos Zek on the original Everquest, a pvp server with full loot. Sony has a habit of rolling out experimental rule servers with the Everquest brand and seeing how they perform, so a hardcore pvp Everquest Next is an absolute possibility.
Age of Conan: Loot PvP Server Coming!
In the past, Everquest has been one of the few MMOs to dabble in, shall we say, unconventional alternate rule servers. Sure, most games you come across nowadays have some combination of PvE, PvP, and RP, and you can’t get much better than a PvP-RP server, when striking someone with your sword as you scream “you must construct additional pylons!” before your World of Warcraft guild gives you the final boot for “vagrant sarcasm.” But that was years ago when I was still interested in Starcraft. The problem with alternate rule servers is that updates have to be coded once for each ruleset, to balance and work out bugs. As Ultima found out, your bastard sword (their word, not mine) of Gargoyle slaying worked fine when gargoyles were NPCs, but when they become a player race, the weapon is suddenly very overpowered.
The Age of Conan team has desired to implement alternate rule servers, and up until now just haven’t had the utilities. In this month’s monthly development update, Craig Morrison talks about how some players just aren’t satisfied with the level of ass-whooping they can dish out in AoC, and want to take that limit further:
“However, as we have gone on we see that there is clearly a very dedicated, and very loyal, group of players who long for a more brutal and demanding PVP environment. It has become increasingly apparent that the desires of that section of our playerbase simply want something a little bit further away from the experience that the mainstream majority are comfortable with.”
Can you guess what that mechanic is? Trust me, if you just blindly dive into an article, the surprise isn’t ruined from the start. Funcom plans to implement two (one for US, one for EU) PvP servers for Age of Conan, featuring full loot. The following rules will apply:
- One character limit, no transfers.
- No NPC guards.
- PvP re-enabled in Tortage areas that were previously removed.
- Other PvP systems may be changed.
The specifics are not in on the Age of Conan loot system. Morrison was able to confirm that equipped gear will likely be off-limits from looting, and that the loot will likely be a combination of inventory items and generated loot (so Age of Conan is becoming like the 2008-early 2011 PvP in Runescape?). Expect more news before the server launches in early May.
We hope to have the new rule-set ready to roll out in early May, but we will hopefully deploy a version to the PVP test dimension prior to that for some public testing. Keep your eyes on the weekly community updates for more information as to when that will happen.
MMO Fallout 