NCSoft – Page 12 – MMO Fallout

Wildstar Announces Server Mergers

Mega servers are the future, at least in the sense that they allow developers to merge servers without using the term and acting like there is nothing to worry about with the population. Wildstar developer Carbine Studios has revealed that the fledgling MMO will soon see its servers merged similar to DC Universe Online, with one PvE and one PvP server per cluster.

Going the Megaserver route means that we vastly increase server capacity allowing for greater critical mass of our player base, resulting in more people, more groups, more activity and more raids… more of everything that makes WildStar so fun. The Megaservers and their increased player capacity will give fans more options to group up and enjoy WildStar with friends and other players for a long time to come.

To avoid name conflicts, all players will be given a last name.

(Source: Wildstar)

City of Heroes: The Mask Comes Off

At this point in time, the idea that there are talks underway to get City of Heroes back up and running isn’t a secret. The previously unnamed team has been negotiating with NCSoft to acquire City of Heroes with the request that the negotiations themselves be kept secret and with the knowledge that the whole deal could fall apart at any moment, or could never have had a chance of succeeding in the first place. Today, Nathan Downes of Missing Worlds Media (who we spoke to in our most recent interview) posted an update on the negotiations.

You can read the entire post at the link below, but Downes summarizes the proposal as it stands currently.

The proposal as it stands right now (this is not a final form, just the current proposal on the table) is this:

The CoH IP would be spun to its own company, to handle licensing. This company would itself license the existing engine from NCSoft for the creation of a maintenance mode, using a binary copy of the i23 server.
The existing user database and characters are not part of this arrangement at this time, nor is the source code.
An arrangement is to be made to license the trademarks to the various Plan Z projects, CoT, Valiance and H&V, to create a family connection, and to allow each to drop the “Spiritual” portion of successor. This means they can make references to the original game if desired, and to enable the expansion of partnerships. This could be expanded for any of them, should the desire be there.
An arrangement is also to be made for the Atlas Park Revival project. As part of the informal agreement we have with them, they would be given an official stamp of approval, and the CoT game build would be licensed to them, to create a kind of “CoH 1.5” and migrate people off of the classic game engine before it finally becomes unsuitable (we expect this to happen around when Windows 9 is released, due to binary compatibility). This can be done because both APR and CoT run on Unreal Engine 4.
By being its own firm, the licensing company can also pursue other avenues which were unavailable before.

(Source: Titan Forums)

How City of Heroes Could Have Avoided The Press

I’ve known about negotiations between unnamed buyers and NCSoft to purchase City of Heroes, the fact that attempts to buy the game have been ongoing since it shut down in 2012 should be of little surprise to anyone given the game’s fiercely loyal fanbase and revenue margin. I haven’t run any stories on it, and not because it was requested of me to keep the matter quiet (and it was), but because the story doesn’t have a whole lot of meat to it. Truth be told, there are always attempts by developers and indie outfits to purchase defunct MMOs and nine times out of ten nothing comes as a result of the “negotiations.” To write a story about the potential deal would only serve as a hype piece, and to provide a scapegoat for the community if and when the negotiations finally fell through.

And then Massively wrote an article, and what do you know? There are some who not only have already blamed Massively for messing up the deal, but are claiming that it was an intentional act of sabotage.

Justin’s articles are always belittling CoH and the fact that the playerbase continues to try. (Mostly because of his inherent hard-on for SWG.)

I saw that to and am annoyed. My trust in massively.com has gone down because of that. Like, seriously can’t they respect us until we got more details and the deal comes through? Can’t they wait for this deal and the team to finish or fail before posting about it? But the way Justin talks it’s clear he doesn’t give a crap.

On the other hand it has been requested time and again that people keep it low key while the negotiations are going on, so if Justin really does have some sort of animosity towards CoH and the associated community posting an article on Massively right at a time when negotiations are supposed to be at a critical stage could be a very deniable way to try to hinder the deal.

It almost seems like it was done purposefully. If the guy scoured the forum pages in an effort to undermine the effort, then he is truly a spiteful, little, miserable man.

If the team negotiating the deal didn’t want the situation being discussed, they shouldn’t have discussed it. Rather than keeping the situation quiet, however, small updates on the negotiations have trickled out onto the publicly available forums of the game’s most popular fansite, by a moderator of said forums, in a thread stickied to the top of the category called “new efforts,” in the section labeled “task force hail mary,” with a timeline of said statements compiled in the original post, with more than two hundred thousand views and nine thousand replies.

The answer to not wanting publicity is to not talk about the matter publicly. Loose lips sink ships, and a major gaming press website writing a story about this was guaranteed to happen sooner or later with chatter on the Titan forums growing larger every day. If anything, the surprise is that it took this long for a news site to jump on board.

NCSoft Q2 2014 Finances

NCSoft has posted their second quarter finances for 2014 and the results are looking good across the board. Thanks to strong launches including Guild Wars 2 in China and Wildstar in the US and EU, NCSoft saw a 20% increase in sales, a 46% increase in profit, and a 45% increase in net income over the previous quarter. Lineage 1, meanwhile, increased in sales thanks to a solid base.

Wildstar debuted to $27 million in sales during its first posted quarter. Sales in Europe and North America have been consolidated into a single metric, not so surprising when you consider that Europe had dropped to just 3% of NCSoft’s sales with North America at 13%.

MMOrning Shots: High Finance

Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from, well, me. Those of you who follow MMOrning Shots know that I occasionally use this as a platform to make website announcements. Last year I ran a Lineage of Support for NCSoft, and I planned on integrating this into the website on a more permanent basis. One thing led to another, I got busy, and the details were never hashed out.

I’ve long wanted MMO Fallout to have more resources available to viewers, and compiling some of the more business-focused pieces of content is step one in accomplishing that goal. Part of that step is to make sure that said content has more publicity than a simple post on the front page that is obscured after a day or two.

I will have more details likely next week. Check out MMOrning Shots on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Carbine Staff Knocks Down Cheater On Forums

Wildstar staff Cougar took to the forums to publicly respond to a player asking why his account ban hadn’t been dealt with ten days later.

I’m assuming that with your posting here that you don’t mind us talking about your account status in public. I have a spare moment before my next meeting and am doing this on a lark. I understand this opens me up to “oh oh oh my ticket” which I don’t intend to keep up with. I am a fickle beast. You, and your alts, were reported a number of time by players for AFK Botting. We found you afk botting in a PvP Match (which as you know, was a really big issue for us – which is now better thanks to AddOns no longer being able to join matches automatically, among other things). We did our secret stuff … okay afk bot confirmation doesn’t take much clandestine stuff once we are on top of you. We sent you tells over time and you never reacted and continued doing the same thing over and over.

We closed your account. You opened up a ticket in question, asking for us to give you your account back. In that opening salvo of asking us for getting your account back, you admited that you were afk botting while doing homework. You then added 5 replies in two days to the ticket with various stages of pleading/begging. Including internet meme pictures. (http://i2.kym-cdn.co…392/289/116.gif). A few agents have investigated it internally and found your account to be worthy of permanent closure. You are exactly the problem case players have been pleading for us to remove from our game. We agree with them.

Now, why we’ve taken some time to tell you that your ban will not be overturned I’m not sure. So thank you for bringing that to my attention, however you’ll forgive me if we don’t prioritize deserved-to-be-banned-customers over paying ones right now.

(Source: Wildstar)

Go Back And Revisit Old Events In Guild Wars 2

To date, Arenanet has introduced more than two dozen living world updates to Guild Wars 2. The feature is great, for those of you who can keep up with it. For others, missing a week or two due to real world obligations or simply taking a hiatus means missing out on rewards and the world’s ongoing evolution. Thankfully this is set to change for (most) affected players. Beginning with the launch of Season 2 on July 1st, as long as a player is able to log in during the two week period, they are able to “bank” the living world to return to at any time after. If you aren’t able to log in during the period, you are still able to access the content for a small fee of in-game currency.

“The Living World exists to drive the story of Guild Wars 2 forward and create a sense of speculation, wonder, and intrigue around the world of Tyria and its characters. We want to create the feeling that anything in Tyria can change and get players looking forward to what might happen next. A natural system that provides story and context for these changes makes sense when we regularly expand the experiences in our game”.

Season 1 will not be included at the launch of the new journal, as it was not built with the journal in mind, but Arenanet hopes to add it in at some point in the future. Season 2 will move away from the concept of meta-achievements entirely, replaced with story-mode achievements accompanied by open world event achievements with each step.

(Source: Arenanet Press Release)

Wildstar Early Access Hammered By DDOS

With players piling into Wildstar’s servers for early access, what more could a developer possibly ask for? A denial of service attack, apparently. Executive Producer Jeremy Gaffney posted on the game’s Reddit to confirm that the servers were under attack and that it was being handled. Since then the servers have come back to normal.

I’ve heard from a few folks it’s a confirmed DDOS attack (real time updates, may change, fog of war, etc.). Partially handled. Servers taking in some players now, player counts rising. Ninjitsu continue.

Never underestimate the potential of anonymous basement dwellers with botnets.

(Source: Reddit)

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.

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It: