Tag: Perpetuum Online

Perpetuum Online To Shut Down Its Servers This Month


Perpetuum Online may be shutting down its official servers, but the game isn’t necessarily going away forever. Avatar Creations last week announced that, after seven years, the official Perpetuum servers will go offline as of January 25. If you happen to have an itch that only Perpetuum can scratch, you’ll still be able to log in to one of the game’s already available standalone servers, operated by members of the community.

We cannot release the live server’s database to the public due to privacy issues, however DEV Crm is committed to keep the live DB alive with his own private server solution. This won’t be the same as the current official server in terms of speed and availability and it’s strictly a “no promises made” gig, but it’s something.

The official news post goes into more details on standalone server operations. There are presently five servers online, however most have single digit player counts.

(Source: Perpetuum)

Perpetuum Online Sees Growth


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With Perpetuum Online now operating as a buy to play title, and the folks at Avatar Creations have posted a status report detailing just how things are getting along. Thanks to an upswing in users, five times the average player count, Perpetuum is receiving the capital investment that it so deserves. For starters, the server cluster is being upgraded and moved to a more suitable location: Amsterdam (your drug jokes here). Gamma islands are still closed down in preparation for a relaunch, along with multiple quality of life changes to the game’s UI and features.

I don’t have the freedom to tell you actual financial data, but it should be enough to say that after months (years?) of worrying about what to put on your plate tomorrow, it’s a liberating feeling to have that off of the list of things to worry about, and being able to just focus on making the game better.

Also in the works is the ability to buy and sell ingame items for Steam wallet funds. There is also a major rewrite of the engine in the works which should allow for higher resolution textures and a brand new interface. Check out the entire announcement below.

(Source: Perpetuum Online)

Perpetuum Dropping Subscription Fee


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Perpetuum Online has announced that it will be dropping its subscription fee on April 2nd. Rather than asking for a subscription, Perpetuum will adopt a buy to play model with an in-game cash shop for cosmetics and services.

The subscription model will be dropped in favor of a single purchase when players join the world of Perpetuum, and augmented with optional in-game purchases of previously unavailable services and cosmetic upgrades. The price of the single and final purchase of the game will be comparable to 3 months of subscription time in the past: 28.99 USD/EUR (VAT included).

Players with at least three months of subscription accumulated will receive a copy of the new game for free, while those with less time accumulated will be deactivated and will be required to purchase the $30 client. There is a lot more information at the official news post below.

(Source: Perpetuum Online)

Perpetuum Online Extends Active Accounts, DDOS Attacks


Back in January I talked about the issue surrounding a certain someone launching a distributed denial of service attack on indie MMO Perpetuum Online. The attacks began in January and caused the server to become unstable for many players. For now, however, the developer believes that the attacks are over. Players are being compensated with three extra days added to their subscription.

Probably most of you are aware of the recent DDOS-attacks against the Perpetuum servers. They seem to have stopped now, but we have and still are taking steps to strengthen our defenses against these kinds of attacks in the future.

To compensate for lost game time, we have decided to extend all active accounts (including trial accounts) by 3 days, effective after today’s patch.

We’d like to say a big thank you to all our players for their continued support through these times, even when they couldn’t even log in and play.

Hopefully this is the end of the story, and the developers can move on to more important issues.

(Source: Perpetuum Forums)

Perpetuum: When One Person Can Ruin Everyone’s Fun


I’ve talked about disgruntled customers in the past, and once or twice about how occasionally those people happen to have access to say intimate knowledge of SQL database exploits or how to launch denial of service attacks, not that the latter requires much technical prowess. To make matters worse, while large businesses require denial of service attacks on an equally large scale, for smaller developers it often doesn’t take much to knock the website/game offline or to at least put a dent in the service’s stability.

Here at MMO Fallout, we love Perpetuum Online and most indie MMOs for that matter. So when an alleged disgruntled ex-player allegedly starts a denial of service attack against the game servers, we take notice. Dev Gargaj posted the following on Perpetuum’s forums:

Now, I’ll say this first that I’m not a network expert so my conclusions might be wrong but here’s how I saw the situation: Every now and then the login-server would get a huge (sometimes up to 80MB/s, though I suppose this includes TCP/IP overhead) burst of external traffic for about 15 minutes or so, and then it would go back to normal. I did some testing with a variety of network tools, and found out that the traffic is mostly aimed at port 139 (NetBIOS) which we have firewalled out, but still it would cause such a network congestion that it’d cause some connections to time out. This traffic came from thousands of endpoints all over the world, including countries where we have no (awareness of) players from (Peru, Egypt, etc.).

In short, from what I can deduce with my fairly modest knowledge about networks, we just got DDOS’d. Because our cluster works with a login server (which is a single point of failure), we were sitting ducks. Our firewall, on inspection (and contrary what I may have been saying earlier) was configured just fine, but the network itself became a bottleneck for the incoming traffic, something we couldn’t do anything about.

The announcement was posted on the 19th of January, but reportedly the attacks have been ongoing since then. Again, it’s worth noting that there isn’t any hard evidence that this is the work of a disgruntled player, but that the theory is merely speculation considering how targeted the attacks are (attacking specifically the login server rather than the cluster as a whole). Players are reporting instances of not being able to log in, and several Perpetuum traffic tracking services have been disabled without explanation (that I have found).

Still, one of the benefits of a game like Perpetuum is the community’s ability to stand together and draw swords against a common threat, against the attacker rather than the victim. Take for instance from another thread on the Perpetuum forums, Lupus Aurelius.

Also, if indeed this is due to a disgruntled player/explayer, we also need to send a clear message that no matter what they do, we will not waiver in support of Perpetuum and the DEVs, and that NO EXTERNAL ACTION BY ANYONE WILL CAUSE US TO EITHER CEASE PLAYING OR CAUSE US NOT TO RESUB! 

NO ONE, WHATEVER THEIR GRIEVANCE, HAS THE RIGHT TO DENY US OUR RIGHT TO CONTINUE TO ENJOY PERPETUUM!

They may take our bandwidth, but they’ll never take our freedom! As Lupus points out in the thread, any information regarding who might be behind these attacks should be reported directly to the development team at Perpetuum Online.

Perpetuum: When One Person Can Ruin Everyone's Fun


I’ve talked about disgruntled customers in the past, and once or twice about how occasionally those people happen to have access to say intimate knowledge of SQL database exploits or how to launch denial of service attacks, not that the latter requires much technical prowess. To make matters worse, while large businesses require denial of service attacks on an equally large scale, for smaller developers it often doesn’t take much to knock the website/game offline or to at least put a dent in the service’s stability.

Here at MMO Fallout, we love Perpetuum Online and most indie MMOs for that matter. So when an alleged disgruntled ex-player allegedly starts a denial of service attack against the game servers, we take notice. Dev Gargaj posted the following on Perpetuum’s forums:

Now, I’ll say this first that I’m not a network expert so my conclusions might be wrong but here’s how I saw the situation: Every now and then the login-server would get a huge (sometimes up to 80MB/s, though I suppose this includes TCP/IP overhead) burst of external traffic for about 15 minutes or so, and then it would go back to normal. I did some testing with a variety of network tools, and found out that the traffic is mostly aimed at port 139 (NetBIOS) which we have firewalled out, but still it would cause such a network congestion that it’d cause some connections to time out. This traffic came from thousands of endpoints all over the world, including countries where we have no (awareness of) players from (Peru, Egypt, etc.).

In short, from what I can deduce with my fairly modest knowledge about networks, we just got DDOS’d. Because our cluster works with a login server (which is a single point of failure), we were sitting ducks. Our firewall, on inspection (and contrary what I may have been saying earlier) was configured just fine, but the network itself became a bottleneck for the incoming traffic, something we couldn’t do anything about.

The announcement was posted on the 19th of January, but reportedly the attacks have been ongoing since then. Again, it’s worth noting that there isn’t any hard evidence that this is the work of a disgruntled player, but that the theory is merely speculation considering how targeted the attacks are (attacking specifically the login server rather than the cluster as a whole). Players are reporting instances of not being able to log in, and several Perpetuum traffic tracking services have been disabled without explanation (that I have found).

Still, one of the benefits of a game like Perpetuum is the community’s ability to stand together and draw swords against a common threat, against the attacker rather than the victim. Take for instance from another thread on the Perpetuum forums, Lupus Aurelius.

Also, if indeed this is due to a disgruntled player/explayer, we also need to send a clear message that no matter what they do, we will not waiver in support of Perpetuum and the DEVs, and that NO EXTERNAL ACTION BY ANYONE WILL CAUSE US TO EITHER CEASE PLAYING OR CAUSE US NOT TO RESUB! 

NO ONE, WHATEVER THEIR GRIEVANCE, HAS THE RIGHT TO DENY US OUR RIGHT TO CONTINUE TO ENJOY PERPETUUM!

They may take our bandwidth, but they’ll never take our freedom! As Lupus points out in the thread, any information regarding who might be behind these attacks should be reported directly to the development team at Perpetuum Online.

What Happened This Week: Macrotransaction Edition


I skipped This Week in Review last week because I only had three days worth of posts for the previous week. This week, I want to continue the Week in Review articles by starting out with a question, and it pertains to Star Wars Galaxies. It’s always a downer to hear that an MMO you play is shutting down. If you currently play the game. do you continue playing until the game shuts down, or do you consider any more invested money a waste? If you were an ex-player, do you rejoin to savor some memories or to see the game off, or do you stay away? If there is free time, do you take advantage of it?

But enough of that, what happened this week?

1. What Does Star Wars Say For Sony’s Other Titles?

This one is obvious: not much. It’s important to remember that Star Wars was canned because Sony and Lucas Arts decided it to be the best decision rather than renew the contract at the end of the year, likely partially because LA doesn’t want two full Star Wars MMOs on the market, even if they wouldn’t really compete (two completely different points in time).

Looking at Sony’s other lineup, it’s safe to say neither Everquest nor Everquest II are going anywhere, the two games just make too much money. Free Realms makes a lump of  cash, as does Pirates of the Burning Sea and Clone Wars Adventures. DC Universe is still trucking along with the server meld bringing the community closer together.

My only title of note is Vanguard. Although Sony has expressed interest in taking Vanguard free to play, doing so would require a good investment of capital, one that the company could deem not worth it ultimately. If I had to choose one game from the list, Vanguard would be high on the list, although likely not #1 as the game has barely any overhead left. Most likely, I would say Planetside, although I believe Sony will time Planetside shutting down with the release of Planetside Next.

2. Rift Shuts Down Servers…Subtly

Trion reminds me of Blake from Glengarry Glen Ross with his ability to tie “good news” and “you’re fired” in the same sentence. If you haven’t been paying attention, Trion recently announced that a few servers would be transferred over to “trial” status, where free trial players would be segregated off to. Of course players have the option, and you will be suggested to do so upon logging in, to transfer off of the server, free of charge.

Who says Trion doesn’t know innovation? This is probably one of the most subtle ways to merge servers I’ve seen in the history of MMO Fallout, nay, the history of the genre. Character creation has been disabled for non-trial users on those servers, and the restrictions for under level 15 characters are being removed in the near future so all of your currently made characters can leave the server. There are a lot of trial-tagged servers, too. Around twenty, from my understanding.

3. Eve Players Are Overloading Perpetuum

Perpetuum Online! That game I talked about that one time with the place and the thing. With all the talk of people leaving Eve (Over four thousand committed to unsubscribing so far, according to the Eve forums), their natural destination should be Perpetuum Online, right? The game is essentially Eve on the ground, and with mechs instead of space ships. If you said yes, you would be correct.

Over in the forums, Perpetuum has been hit with some good, healthy (for the wallet) overpopulation, resulting in queue lines to log in. I don’t normally laugh at MMO drama, but this is pretty funny. It’s like a picture of a concert, where the band is giving the middle finger to the audience who are, in turn, giving it back.

4. Maybe CCP Just Bit Off Too Much

Thinking back, perhaps CCP is in the same situation as Cryptic Studios. Sure, the game they run is raking in the cash, but that profit may be dwarfed by the development costs of their other games. CCP has DUST 514 in development for the PS3, and we all know how expensive PS3 development is, as well as World of Darkness. The cash shop may be a way to supplement their income and get the games out faster, but it’s a prescription that is not fitting well with the community.

But as many Eve players have noted, the price of the cash shop items barely factors in. Where the players are getting angry isn’t in CCP’s initial action, but in the response given to the controversy. You can read the events in the Eve Online category on this blog but for a quicker image, just go back to my concert analogy.

Down to brass tacks, if as many players are leaving as committed (over four thousand and growing) and stay gone, this could put a serious damper in CCP’s development of DUST 514 and World of Darkness.

5. Funny Fifth Thing.