Timeless Dungeon 2.
Tag: Runes of Magic
Runes of Magic Gets Timeless Dungeon 2
Runes Of Magic Is 15 Years Old Today
That’s the same as three five year olds combined.
Runes Of Magic Posts Year 4 Infographic
Runes of Magic launched March 19th, 2009 and has enjoyed great success with eight million accounts creating twelve million characters. In celebration of Runes of Magic’s birthday, Gameforge and Runewalker have released an infographic.
Rift: Aion Clone? Major Security Hole Patched.
The coin-lock system in Rift is, as I mentioned, a substandard method of stopping account theft because it doesn’t impact what Trion has referred to as the cause of 80% of all hacked accounts: Keyloggers. With what Trion has referred to as a nonstop attack on the account databases and servers, it was only a matter of time before one of the parasites made it through, as shown just this past week when a player managed to log into another player’s account with their details.
If this were, say, Runes of Magic, the person who found the vulnerability might put thousands of accounts as hostage until the company fulfills a list of demands that could only come from a frothing-mouthed disenfranchised fanboy, but rather than setting himself up for a bunkmate, Mr. ManWitDaPlan alerted Trion to the exploit, and the team has managed to fix it.
The vulnerability existed deep in the server code, dealing with the error checking of the login validations. If this is Greek to you, just feel safe that it’s been fixed.
An important lesson to be taken from this is a reminder that bugs will always occur, and sometimes they have a much larger implication than others. In this case, I have to hand it to Trion for their fast response and willingness to work with the guy who discovered the exploit. As Trion put it:
We do block them as they are detected, but the fact that they are using distributed botnets (compromised computers from across the globe) means that this will remain something that we will continue keeping an eye on, forever.
So score one for Rift, and for Trion’s ability to recover from a setback.
Runes of Magic Coming To A Browser Near You!
Back in the day, you may remember that Dungeon Runners was set to receive a transfer to the web browser shortly before death. Due to the nature of MMOs being the opera singers (read: fat) of the gaming genre, free to play titles have a harder time gaining new customers when that means convincing someone who is jumping from title to title to sit down for another multi-gigabyte game they may hate after five minutes. Now, games like Runescape and Battlestar Galactica and FusionFall work with small downloads, through the browser. Turbine, Sony, and Blizzard attempted to fix this as well by offering streaming downloads, where you only download a portion of the game, and the rest downloads as it is needed.
Last year in October, Frogster released a 3.5gig client for Runes of Magic, carrying the same functionality at a smaller size than its 7gig counterpart, as well as carrying higher optimization and better performance. Apparently this wasn’t far enough, as Frogster has announced through press email that Facebook and browser based versions of Runes of Magic are coming, fully functional. Expected to be arrive in Q2 2011, Runes of Magic browser edition will open up a legion of untapped customers.
I can only hope that Frogster will invite me to swim in their money jacuzzi after this update goes live.
Frogster: Misleading, Possibly Fraudulent Facebook Ads
I was going about my daily Facebook activities (posting creepy Woody pictures), and lo and behold, I came across the following ad:
You’ll notice that this ad links to “secure.jagex.com,” and I quite honestly expected that this was either A.) a scam ad that managed to get through, or B.) Jagex was advertising on Facebook, which I don’t believe that they do (with my activities, I’ve seen almost every MMO developer that advertises on Facebook). So naturally I clicked on the ad, and was taken here
Really? Runes of Magic? Take one more look at the URL in the Facebook ad. “secure.jagex.com.” The screenshot in the ad appears to be from Runes of Magic, but someone who has never played either game wouldn’t know that. The ad does do a good job of tip-toeing around, but outright claims to be Jagex by inserting a false link to Jagex.com. This isn’t parody like Global Agenda’s ads or Rift’s “We’re not in Azeroth anymore.” This ad is explicitly misleading people into believing they are viewing an ad for a Jagex product, when really they are being directed to Runes of Magic.
Facebook is already aware of the fraudulent ad, and information has been forwarded to Jagex’s legal department. If this is a third party ad agency, Frogster needs to drop them before they wind up on the receiving end of a false advertising (and likely fraud) lawsuit. If this is Frogster’s doing, someone in the advertising office should be getting his pink slip, yesterday.
More on this story as it progresses.
Frogster: This Is How You Charity
Here at MMO Fallout, I never turn down a good charity story, and today is no different. Frogster has a yearly run on Runes of Magic for Save The Children (Germany edition), a children’s rights organization that engages in all sorts of projects, with the goal of improving healthcare and education for all kiddies no matter where they be.
Between December and January, players of select Frogster games could purchase exclusive items where, after VAT and third party costs, the proceeds went to Save The Children in Bhutan. In total, $112,500 USD was collected.
“In Bhutan, there are suddenly children surfing the Internet and zapping through 400 television channels. Their parents, on the other hand, are people who haven’t learnt to read or write. They have never in their lives been bombarded with advertising. In other words, what we have here is a clash of two ages of civilisation.”
You can read more here: http://game-newswire.com/index.php/the-news/338-frogster-donates-82000-euros-to-children-in-bhutan.html
Frogster Account Security Compromised: 3.5 Million Accounts Hacked
As a partial webmaster myself (that is, I run a website, not a professional at web services), nothing makes the belly chuckle like an anonymous person who is likely not old enough to drive, writing a comment threatening to hack (hax) the website and ruin my life. Often, such a problem can be fixed by simply adding the IP address to the auto-delete filter, and hoping that the young person isn’t posting from a school where other people might like to comment in the future.
On the other hand, one has to be cautiously apprehensive about website security. For every hundred script kiddies you knock away with your hardware firewalls, dedicated servers, and DDoS protection, there is at least one person out there who can, and will, break into your system if you piss him off enough, and although MMO Fallout is not a business, I can say nothing scares the pants off of business than the thought of having the IT guy come into their office and say “Someone got in, sensitive information has been leaked onto the internet.” So nothing puts a damp in your pants like seeing this message:
“Right now we have more than 3 Million and 5 hundred thousand accounts. 5 hundred thousand of them are already hacked and verified. Your other Games like Bounty Bay Online and Tera are affected too. So you better dont mess with us. Take this serious. Change your mind. Become a valued member of the community and stop abusing them.”
Frogster’s account security system was compromised, and although the number cannot be officially confirmed, the hacker behind the attack has released over two thousand account names and passwords. In a post on the official forums, Frogster Silberfuchs revealed that the two thousand accounts who were revealed have been deactivated, and are able to be reactivated by their owners.
We promptly assembled a task force and are of course making every effort to get to the bottom of this incident. We are utilising every means at our disposal to minimise the damage and to prevent such threats in the future. We have already implemented additional security measures today. As soon as all the necessary steps have been taken with regard to operational and criminal processes, we will inform you of further developments on this matter.
It is yet to be seen whether or not more accounts are going to be revealed, and by the time this story ends there could be a lot of deactivated accounts. The sad part is that, although this whole ordeal started because of something as simple as gripes with a gaming company, this will likely end with the hacker being prosecuted and (depending on his age) going to jail.
This is just a reminder: Breaking the law is not a proper response to your gripes with a company. Do you really want to risk going to jail over your anger that Frogster deletes too many critical forum posts?
Runes of Magic Slimming Up: New 3.5G Client
Sometime around Dungeon Runner’s shutdown, the blokes at NCsoft talked about how somewhere around one third of players who signed up for Dungeon Runners free accounts never got past the client download. Considering Dungeon Runners lists one gigabyte as a requirement on the box, I can only imagine how much the issue transcends to other free to play games , like the late Chronicles of Spellborn (eleven gigabytes).
Runes of Magic, coming in at a whopping seven gigabytes, wants to lower the barrier to entry, while cutting some fat in the process. In an announcement on the main website, Frogster announced the release of Runes of Magic Slim, a much smaller client that carries essentially the same data. This half-sized, 3.5gig client was made possible through the magic of compression, and retains all of the functionality of the original Runes of Magic client, plus increased optimization and performance.
More on Runes of Magic as it appears.
MMO Fallout 