Neverwinter – Page 12

Rift Tops Raptr's Charts For June

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)

Thank You For Not Competing

Perfect World Entertainment made news this week when they said that their plan with Neverwinter is not to compete with World of Warcraft. In an interview with Red Bull UK, Craig Zinkievich said that the goal was to “operate a fun game people like to play and want to come back to.” The developer believes that the box price and subscription model are no longer valid in most places, with the vast majority (86%) of gamers subscribing to only one MMO at a time, and fewer willing to subscribe to two. You can read the entire article here, where they talk about the free to play model and a couple other topics.

I almost feel bad for assuming that World of Warcraft’s consistently falling subscriber numbers would mark the end of developers trying to compete with it, but I suppose that years from now when World of Warcraft is a shadow of its former glory that the new benchmark for success will be the twelve million subscribers that the game peaked at. That said, I can’t help but give points to any developer willing to state that they are not looking to beat/compete with World of Warcraft. Why? Because at least I don’t have to worry about Neverwinter shutting down because it couldn’t meet the developer’s unrealistic expectations. Or Perfect World Entertainment labeling the game a failure, firing all of its developers, and stripping its funding to fix launch issues, subtle reference to Warhammer Online and several coughs.

The only thing that such a business model tells me as a video game writer is how willing the company is to cripple its own product during development and then shoot it in the head when it doesn’t pop out of the womb as an already accomplished millionaire. What better way to instill confidence in the press and your potential community than picking a goal that not a single other developer has managed to achieve, and measuring anything less as abject, irreconcilable failure? One can only sit and wonder why consumers don’t flock to spend sixty bucks and fifteen dollars a month on what is almost guaranteed to be a mediocre attempt at recreating a game they got sick of three years ago, launched with all of the grind and bugs of said product and no understanding of why it became so popular to begin with.

As a writer, I encourage developers to try and compete with World of Warcraft because the ensuing train wreck attracts leaves a lot of onlookers and that means more views for websites like MMO Fallout. As a gamer, however, I keep my money out of anything that so much as mentions competing with World of Warcraft, unless of course it is preceded by ‘we are not.’ So while Neverwinter may not be the perfect game, I have to give extra kudos to Perfect World for seeing World of Warcraft as a product to live with, not having the same reaction my dog has when he sees the vacuum cleaner running.

Also why is Red Bull better at getting MMO interviews than I am?

(Source: Red Bull UK)

Neverwinter Unveils Caturday, Gift Pack For Players

As many of you are aware, Neverwinter suffered a fair bit of downtime this weekend thanks to the mass abuse of a bug allowing players to duplicate Astral Diamonds using the auction house. While originally stating that non-cheating characters would not be affected overall, Perfect World had decided to perform a rollback to early Saturday morning, taking action against accounts that had abused the bug and going into the game’s history to track down those who were abusing it prior to Saturday’s outbreak. As compensation for Saturday’s extended downtime, as well as for the inconvenience in the rollback, Perfect World has given all characters created prior to May 21st a Caturday pack.

All characters that have been created before 6:00 A.M. Tuesday, May 21, 2013, will receive the Caturday Survivor’s Pack, which will appear in your in-game mail as an attachment to the message, “You Survived!” The items within the Caturday Survivor’s Pack are bound to each character that receives it.

The pack includes a cosmetic cape, a dwarven mask, teleport scrolls, experience boosters, and a stone of health. The cutoff date was initially May 19th, however Perfect World has moved it to the 21st at 6am PST.

(Source: Neverwinter)

Perfect World Rolls Back Neverwinter Servers To Fix Exploit

Last time we checked in with Perfect World over the Neverwinter auction house exploit, the company was pretty determined to keep the possibility of a rollback secluded only to those accounts that were affected by this weekend’s brou ha ha. At one point the company must have determined that character-specific rollbacks were not on the cards, as Neverwinter has performed a rollback to early Saturday morning.

We took the Neverwinter OBT down for emergency maintenance, found the bug, corrected it and tested it. In order to fix the damage this exploit caused to the in-game economy, we implemented a necessary rollback of our servers to 5:20 AM PDT the morning of May 19, 2013. This means that characters have been reverted to the state they were in at that time, pre-exploit damage. That includes items, level, experience, etc.

All Zen exchanged after this time (whether spent or traded on the auction house) will be returned to its original owner. There is apparently an issue with returning astral diamonds which PWE is still working on. The Foundry was not affected by the rollback, so players who created levels or made changes after the rollback time will be happy to see that their work was not reversed. Characters created during that period will be lost, unfortunately. It appears that Perfect World is working on a package for players to thank them for being patient during this period.

As far as complaints that the bug existed long before this weekend, going further back into earlier beta tests, Perfect World will be checking logs and removing accounts that were already using the exploit in open beta.

We are performing additional log searches and investigations to ensure that the appropriate actions are taken against any accounts that performed the exploit before the rollback window. Exploits that were performed prior to our rollback window make up a fraction of a percent of total impact, so we will be dealing with those issues selectively as not to cause greater impact on those legitimate testers.

You can read the entire FAQ below.

(Source: Neverwinter FAQ)

Perfect World Responds To Recent Neverwinter Exploit

The Astral Diamond Exchange and Auction House are temporarily offline after a bug allowing players to duplicate astral diamonds was discovered and exploited by players. Perfect World has posted a notice on the forums that they are currently compiling data to see how widespread the effects of the exploit are, and will be using that data to determine the appropriate action to take place in response. Right now it appears Perfect World will be running character-specific rollbacks.

We are still investigating the situation. There is a high likelihood that we will be performing character-specific rollbacks on any accounts that were found to be utilizing the exploit. Additionally, we are investigating the extent of what can additional steps can be taken to remove any illegitimately obtained Astral Diamonds that have entered into the economy. At this stage, the possibility of performing a shard-wide is unlikely.

You can read the rest of the ongoing updates to the situation at the link below.

(Source: Neverwinter)

Auction House Exploit Tears Through Neverwinter

You’d best put seat belts on your ears, because I’m going to take them for the ride of their life. Perfect World Entertainment are in the midst of some very heavy damage control after an exploit popped up in Neverwinter and threw the game’s economy into turmoil. I won’t go into details about the exploit itself, partially because I would probably butcher the explanation, but the exploit involves the auction house and players duplicating mass quantities of astral diamonds and converting them into Zen.

According to MMO Fallout’s men on the field, the gateway has been shut down, and the ability to buy Zen with astral diamonds has been disabled. Some of those services may be turned back on by the time you read this. Perfect World has posted the following update on their forums:

We currently are in the process of taking action against a subset of accounts that were confirmed to have utilized exploits that affected the game balance or economy.

These accounts may be banned, temporarily or permanently, depending on the severity of exploit utilization. Anyone who is affected by this will receive notification via email.

While we have taken all precautions necessary to ensure that no false positives made it into our final list of accounts to take action against, we do acknowledge that some players who were banned may wish to follow up with us. If you had an account banned and wish to escalate the issue to our support team, please create a ticket at support.perfectworld.com or send an email to customerservice@perfectworld.com

Please note that forum discussions about specific accounts being banned is against our forum guidelines, thus any threads on the topic may be closed. Thank you in advance for your understanding.

Thank you for your patience and support while we continue to do everything in our power to ensure that Neverwinter remains a fair and balanced game experience.

-Dezstravus and the Neverwinter Team

(Source: Neverwinter)

[Perfect World] Help, My Region Is Disabled!

Good evening, folks. Omali of MMO Fallout here (who else?) with a short notice for some of you attempting to access the Neverwinter open beta. Some of you have been emailing me asking why you are receiving a “disabled region” notification. As always, I will remind you that I don’t work for any MMO developer and my inbox is not a place to send your technical questions.

Perfect World would like to remind you all that the following countries are banned from accessing any game on the Perfect World Entertainment library. In many cases, the ban is due to regional licensing, and in others it is due to administrative reasons. Unfortunately, this also includes IP addresses that are “close to” any of the following countries.

China
Hong Kong
Macau
South Korea
Taiwan
Vietnam
Russia
Egypt
Japan (Only in Rusty Hearts)

Neverwinter's Double Diamond Dash Dismantles D'Servers

As a critic, I can’t get enough of the action combat and battling against iconic creatures from Dungeons & Dragons. As a fan, I’m creating many quests and campaigns with the foundry. As a reader, you probably figured out a long time ago that I’m reading from the news page. Cryptic Studios recently announced that with the rampant success of the Neverwinter beta/soft launch/massage parlor, that gamers of all sorts would be able to enjoy a weekend of double diamonds starting Friday and running through what I assume will be 11:59 pm PST.

Naturally, the servers are crashing, and by that I mean more so than they have over previous weekends. Perfect World has had to take the game down multiple times for emergency maintenance. Perfect World has been working to get the servers to a stable position, despite the overwhelming traffic, and ultimately the three servers currently available will be merged into one.

Neverwinter’s Double Diamond Dash Dismantles D’Servers

Perfect World Is Banning Neverwinter Foundry Exploits: Creators And Players

Consider this a classic example of why we can’t have nice things. Neverwinter is just another of Cryptic’s games to feature a foundry, where players can create missions for other players to enjoy for their wonderful stories, deep and thoughtful mission design, and…ah who am I kidding? Neverwinter is an MMO and therefore the community will exploit everything until it is taken away from them. Players quickly found a way to exploit the foundry system, creating missions that are nothing more than a bunch of high value mobs in a pit, unable to fight back while the player farms them for gold, items, and experience.

Unfortunately for players, Perfect World Entertainment is apparently cracking down on large amounts of experience and items gained through the foundry. The patch released earlier today modified gains through the foundry, and Neverwinter has taken action not just against accounts that created the foundry missions, but against players who repeatedly used those foundry missions to level quickly. Some foundry creators are reporting their accounts banned, while others are claiming that their access to creating foundry missions has been revoked. Players who repeatedly used quick-leveling foundry missions are similarly reporting bans.

So far there hasn’t been any official announcement of the bans, apart from player reports.

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