Tag: Premium

Gamigo Immediately Cans Plans For Gifting Premium Items in ArcheAge Unchained


Gamigo has dumpstered an idea so fast, the news was barely able to report the original story.

Today’s ArcheAge stream caused a bit of an uproar when Gamigo announced that they were going to allow gifting premium items from the cash shop on ArcheAge Unchained. Since Unchained is supposed to be the version that didn’t support pay to win, the community had a bit of a problem with this strategy. As a result, a number of viewers took to the ArcheAge Reddit to voice their concern.

And Gamigo has listened, and immediately put out a statement that this is no longer going to be the case. The statement has been pasted below for your viewing pleasure.

Hello everyone,
The ability to gift items from the in-game premium marketplace has been disabled for ArcheAge: Unchained.

We are committed to ensuring that our revised game-play experience meets the expectations of our supportive community and is in no way clouded by our past. We considered allowing the ability to gift from the marketplace due to the items being trade restricted and cosmetic. In hindsight, it’s easy to understand how gifting could circumvent the items being bound. The decision to remove gifting was unanimous internally and so it is passed into order.

We’ve worked closely with you over the past six weeks to refine offerings in the premium item shop based on the following criteria:
-All premium items are cosmetic in nature, or provide a non-essential game-play service (renames, costumes, character appearance customization, or UCC)
-All premium items are bound to the character that purchased them and are not tradable through any in-game system (mail, auction house, storage chests, player-to-player trades)
-The gifting of premium items has been disabled

We stand behind our approach to delivering ArcheAge: Unchained and more importantly, remain devoted to you. Thanks for your continued support.

~The ArcheAge Team

Blade & Soul Is Coming: Founder’s Packs Ready For Purchase


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Blade & Soul’s western release is right around the corner, we know this to be true because NCSoft has officially announced that founder’s packs are available for purchase. Made ready to pickup in the form of $24, $75, and $125 packages, anyone who grabs a founder’s pack will have access to all closed betas later this fall, not to mention three days early access, scaling character titles, and increasing premium points. Higher tier packages give access to premium membership, name reservations, booster packs, NCoins, and more.

The good news is that should you have second thoughts about your pre-order, you can always get a refund anytime before the character name reservation becomes available. You’ll also need to make use of this function if you decide to upgrade to a higher tier, because right now that is impossible and may or may not be implemented at some point in the future.

Premium points increase your membership tier along the lines of a loyalty program, increasing the benefits of membership with each cash shop purchase.

(Source: NCSoft)

MMOrning Shots: Premium Milk


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How much tainted milk is premium worth? I guess that depends on what kind of premium milk we’re talking about here. Either way, I’m not sure how we missed it but last month Gamersfirst implemented an update turning premium subscription into a traded item, ala PLEX from Eve Online and in other MMOs.

MMOrning Shots is a (somewhat) daily line of screenshots from various MMOs. Most are taken in-house or come to us in press releases, but if you would like your screenshot featured, send it over to contact[at]mmofallout[dot]com with the subject “MMorning Shots.”

And Now An Unsolicited Testimonial: Tribes Ascend


Tribes: Ascend is not Tribes Universe, let’s get that out of the way from the start. The game is not the multi-hundred player shooter ala Planetside that Hi-Rez had promised us, that game is currently on hold until development of Tribes: Ascend finishes. Now that we have that out of the way, Tribes Ascend is an upcoming shooter by Hi-Rez, the same guys that made Global Agenda. Billed as free to play from the start, Ascend is offering a rather useful package for those that preorder. The package costs $30, and bequeaths upon you 3,000 Tribes gold ($30 worth), a 30-day booster for experience, tokens, and points ($15 on cash shop) and lifetime VIP status which gives you a permanent boost in said exp/tokens/points, as well as priority access and VIP-only servers.

I love Tribes, and Ascend does an outstanding job of bringing the fast paced action back to its glory days. A third map was added in today, there are currently two game modes (capture the flag and rabbit), with continuous updates as the game progresses through the closed beta phase. I can’t help but be amazed once again at the skill of longtime Tribes players, who are able to use the geometry to move faster than I can keep track of them. They’re like watching someone extremely skilled in Sonic the Hedgehog, the speed at which they can still react fluently is beyond comprehension.

Playing completely free, I have a lot of respect for you. You have access right off the bat to the soldier (with that spinner disc launcher) and a gunner class, but everything else is locked up unless you buy gold coins to unlock the classes, preorder the game to obtain the 3,000 gold to buy the classes, or grind an enormous amount of tokens to unlock the classes for free. Each loadout costs 15,000 tokens to unlock for free, and now that my character is halfway through level 5, with the added VIP bonus, I’ve achieved around 1,200 tokens.

If you’ve been playing Tribes, odds are we’ve come across one another (my username is Omali). I’ve come across familiar faces quite a bit, especially since I tend to play in the off-hours. Otherwise, check out my Twitter page to see how you can nab a beta key.

Premium Services Coming To World of Warcraft


Here’s an interesting story out of Blizzard. According to this post on the Blizzard forums, World of Warcraft will see the introduction of cross-realm dungeon finder, for players who have friends on different realms, but still want to go through dungeons and heroics together. A new system in development will allow players with RealID friendships to dungeon together, regardless of what realm they are on, as long as they’re on the same faction.

Of course for Blizzard this spells l-o-d-s of e-m-o-n-e, and what does that spell? Loadsa money! Probly…

 It’s important to note that as with some of the other convenience- and connectivity-oriented features we offer, certain elements of the cross-realm Real ID party system will be premium-based, though only the player sending the invitations will need to have access to the premium service.

The above is causing quite a bit of discussion on the thread about whether this violates Blizzard’s promise to not charge for services that offer an advantage, as well as questioning the necessity in charging for a service that is hardly a technological feat at this point in World of Warcraft’s lifespan (The game already supports cross-realm dungeons and realid invites).

So much for Bobby Kotick not having his greedy little fingers in Blizzard’s pie. Big thanks to Verterdegete on the MMORPG.com forums for pointing this out. I’m guessing the service will be just as successful as the $25 pet, although I know plenty of people who are hoping this is thrown out with the mandatory real-name forum update.