Tag: Runescape

Third Circuit Court Mutes RuneScape Lawsuit, Again


You all remember Amro Elansari, patron saint of MMO Fallout and guy who is constantly sticking it to the man. What do you stick to the man? Chewing gum, probably.

Last we heard from Mr. Elansari, he had just come off of a failed lawsuit against Jagex over claims that being muted in RuneScape constituted a violation of his freedom of speech, due process, and human rights. Judge Kearney, patron saint of shutting down nonsense, dismissed the case with prejudice noting that a private company like Jagex could not be charged with violations of the constitution. Most definitely they could not be sued on such grounds in state court. Elansari was informed that he could file in federal court should he decide to.

And he decided to, as Elansari appealed to the third circuit federal court who…shut it down immediately. In his appeal, Elansari brought forward a fourteenth amendment complaint which Judges Schwartz, Restrepo, and Rendell noted would require a state actor working with Jagex. If Jagex had a secret state government employee that they were conspiring with to squash Elansari’s constitutional rights, he might have a lawsuit. Elansari did not present any such claim of a state actor, and as a result the lawsuit is kaput.

Elansari also attempted a Title II claim of unequal treatment which would require discrimination based on protected status (race, gender, religion, etc) but Elansari did not make any claim as to his punishment being a result of discrimination. The most recent court filing dismissing the lawsuit is below.

Source: Justia

2010’s: Remembering Those Games That Went Out For Gas (And Never Came Back)


The 2010’s brought us closer than ever with developers and that means a lot more instances of people shall we say fudging the truth and maybe being a little more optimistic about their company’s future than was realistically possible. We’ve seen plenty of games in the past decade disappear after promising us that there was no way in hell that they would be gone forever. Just up and vanished in a puff of smoke. Like they got raptured.

Let’s talk about some of them.

Now I’m not saying I’m perfect, but I spent far more time than this piece deserves looking up each game on this list (plus a hundred other titles that didn’t qualify) and scouring their websites/social media just to make sure I had my i’s dotted and my t’s crossed on the developer going dark. I was specifically looking for games/developers who never announced cancellation but just went silent one day and never came back. I also disregarded Kickstarter MMOs because the workload was big enough already. That’s a piece for another day.

If I missed some comment from a dev, it’s because it was shoved in the corner somewhere nobody would ever see it. Also this list isn’t meant to cast shade on any developers, so please; All comments about how I’m disrespecting the development process by making this list can go in the box below this piece. As always, defamation threats to randy@gearboxentertainment.com, c/o Randy Pitchford.

#1: City of Steam: Arkadia (Mechanist Games)

City of Steam was a not-so-successful game that rebranded and relaunched as a much-less-successful game steeped to the brim in microtransactions. It’s hard to believe that Arkadia shut down in early 2016 with the promise that the game was “resting: not retiring.” Boy has City of Steam been in a long sleep because after four years there is no indication that the game is ever coming back. It’s like a permanent form of narcolepsy, also known as death.

Just check out this quote from the website.

“City of Steam certainly isn’t retired, but we’ll need time to reflect on these things. A sequel would have to do justice to the world in a way that honors the original, addresses as many critiques and quirks as possible, and improves or innovates at the same time. It would also have to be good enough to make up for the shortcomings of the original – stuff that no one was really happy with. Rushing into such a massive commitment would be foolish, and would risk destroying the goodwill that still exists for the game.”

Fans of the original City of Steam may be happier that the game is gone for good, since judging by reviews on Mechanist Games’ current lineup the company hasn’t just stayed the line with their predatory microtransactions, they’ve gotten much worse. Mechanist Games’ follow up titles to City of Steam have pretty much all shut down by this point: Spirit Guardian, Heroes of Skyrealm, War Clash, with Game of Sultans remaining. The players were not happy with them, and that is a horrible track record for four years.

Who knows, maybe Mechanist can surprise all of us with a decently built City of Steam follow up that respects its players time and money. I’m not holding out hope.

#2: The Missing Ink (Redbedlam)

The Missing Ink was a pretty basic MMO with a somewhat interesting concept: Player avatars were two dimensional cardboard cutouts existing in a three dimensional world. At one point the folks at Redbedlam took the servers down and announced that a new game design would be coming that same year.

“We’ve taken the TMI servers down for now, but we’ll be back later this year with a BRAND NEW game design – watch this space!”

That post was from January 2014. Whoops. You can actually play Redbedlam’s last title Bedlam, and I posted a whole article about this company last year. There is nothing left of Redbedlam let alone their 2014 dreams of relaunching The Missing Ink, except for one employee taking Steam residuals and probably making a phone call to get investment. He should hit up the guys that invested in the Juicero, they’ll fund anything with a pulse.

#3: Alganon/Line of Defense (3000AD)

I know I’m going to get a Tweet/comment from Derek Smart himself over this post, but I’m going to add it to this list anyway. Alganon shut down its servers for migration in 2017 and never brought them back online. For the record, I’m going to go on a limb and say that I’m probably looking forward to Alganon’s return at least more than any of my readers outside of Derek Smart himself. Probably more than a large portion of the gaming public. I expect my study points for those three years of downtime, Smart. Literally unplayable.

If Alganon comes back I will be greatly surprised and impressed and will be the first person to jump on board with coverage, as right now it feels like the box set of Matlock that I bought on sale at Amazon Prime Day. Yes I’m actively working on it, no I haven’t actually started watching the DVDs yet. The same goes for Line of Defense which is undergoing an engine change and hasn’t posted a new developer diary in over a year. I’m sure Line of Defense will come out at some point in the future, perhaps not my lifetime and published by the third Sonny android model loaded with Derek Smart’s consciousness. It’ll be at the same point where people stop funding Star Citizen’s alpha client in 2342.

We get it; 3000AD is a small company and things take time. I’m just not convinced that they are going to happen at all.

#4: Earthrise (Silent Future)

The Earthrise reboot is totally being developed by Silent Future, a German team who ironically have been completely silent about the game other than to deny the idea that the game is going nowhere when I brought it up a year ago. It has not been taken out back and shot, no matter what common sense and the complete lack of progress over the past eight years since Earthrise first shut down might tell you.

Will Silent Future have the funds to build Earthrise, now a nine year old game that was out of date even back when it launched in 2011, into a product viable for the current market? I’m going to guess no, just judging by their recent releases peaking in the realm of one concurrent player on Steam. I’m also not sure which company is gullible enough to fund development of a reboot of a game that was wholly rejected by the public eight years ago, but then again Justin Roiland’s company bought that Radical Heights trademark so you never know.

#5: All Of Jagex’s Not-RuneScape MMOs

I could probably fill a limosine with all of Jagex’s cancelled MMO projects, so for the sake of time let’s just roll them into one number. Jagex has hinted at more MMOs over the years than I can count (and I can count to four), but every few years the company likes to drop a hint via press release or in a RuneScape update that it has some new IP in the works. What new IP? Who can say. It’s a fantasy game, a sci-fi game, a shooter, an RPG with MMO-like elements. It’s built on Java, it’s built on RuneScript, it’s built on Unreal. It’s literally three days away from beta and cancelled.

What isn’t it? Getting published. We’ve been having this conversation for over a decade now about how Jagex needs to stop treating its new games like hobby projects. Can Jagex recreate that RuneScape magic? Or push another product to publication? As literally the only person still running a Funorb-oriented website into 2010, I hope so.

#6: Lineage Eternal/Project TL (NCSoft)

But Conrad, I hear you say, Lineage Eternal is definitely coming out! Nah. Lineage Eternal is going so well that the game is ahead of schedule according to NCSoft, which is naturally why it has been delayed and changed numerous times over the course of the last decade. I’d be more ready and willing to believe NCSoft’s promise that Lineage Eternal would be going into closed beta testing this year were it not for the fact that they have literally made this very statement in quarterly reports for at least seven years. That’s not an exaggeration.

It’s been nine years since Lineage Eternal was first announced with the first round of cancelled beta tests dating back to 2013. Now that Lineage is quickly becoming the Duke Nukem Forever of MMORPGs, maybe it’s best if Gearbox buys out the property and Randolph Pitchford helms its launch. Technically speaking he can’t do any worse.

#7: Black Prophecy Tactics: Nexus Conflict (Gamigo)

Black Prophecy Tactics was to be the prequel to the failed MMO Black Prophecy, a game that fared so poorly in its life that it shut down barely a year after launch. Black Prophecy Tactics meanwhile was deep into its second beta test in September 2012 when everything went dark. To the best of my knowledge and research, the cancellation of Black Prophecy Tactics was never formally announced; it’s certainly obvious considering all of the MMORPG catalog websites that still to this day show the game as “in development.” No press releases, no announcements, nothing. Just a poof and roughly three people wondering what ever happened to this game.

Gamigo: The pinnacle of communication.

#8: UFO Online (Gamigo)

Gamigo-published games have a habit of just up and ghosting us. I couldn’t tell you for sure if UFO Online ever fully launched, but I do know that it was announced in 2010 and then went into beta in 2013. Again, we’re dealing with 2010-2015 era Gamigo who tended to treat their game launches like they were the location of CIA spies; not for distribution to the public.

I’m willing to put my money on the notion that UFO Online never launched, but if it did it ghosted us like last night’s Tinder date.

#9: Dynastica (Dynastica Ltd.)

I want to know who the hell is paying for some of these websites. Dynastica went into its second closed beta phase on April 4, 2011 and subsequently went completely dark. For some reason unknown to man on Earth and God in the sky, the website is still online albeit mostly nonfunctioning. Signups are closed, the server is presumably long gone, but the domain and the website are still live.

I can only presume that it’s being paid for by some preloaded Paypal account and nobody’s actually paying attention to it.

#10: Bounty Hounds Online (Suba Games)

Ah Suba Games, the only publisher who can beat Gamigo for the early-mid 2010’s race to “who can advertise their games the least” awards. The prize is a bunch of shuttered games. Bounty Hounds Online has never been cancelled, at least not in an official capacity or in a way that is still accessible today. Suba Games seemed excited to get Bounty Hounds Online approved through Steam Greenlight and the title seemed to be enjoying some attention during the closed beta phases.

And then everything died. We’ll never know what became of Bounty Hounds Online (other than the obvious that it has been cancelled) but like every other game on this list we didn’t even get the courtesy of a goodbye kiss.

#11: Land of Britain (Potato Killer Studios)

I’ve heard worse studio names than Potato Killer Studios but gosh darnit I can’t think of any of them off the top of my head. Land of Britain is a new Dark Age of Camelot at least in the sense that it was going to deliver three factions, innovative gathering, crafting, PvP combat, PvE, and KvK, perhaps a little TlC, CBS, and AT&T as well. What it won’t deliver is a game, since the domain has been dead since June 2018 and is now for sale. You can get it for nearly $4 grand. Don’t buy it.

Outside of Land of Britain, Potato Killer was also supposed to launch a TCG tie-in called Fangold. That never happened either. Their last post is in December 2016 thanking Microsoft for the BizSpark Plus program. Money well spent.

#12: Eden Falling (Razor Edge Games)

Eden Fell and Eden Died, and as such will not be Eden Finished. Eden Falling is a turn based RPG that promises to bring a tabletop experience to the online gaming realm. What it doesn’t bring is a finished game or a present developer, since Eden Falling hasn’t had a press release or a dev diary since 2017. A trailer was released in late 2018 but otherwise the team has been pretty mum. Mums the word.

The website is still online and so are the forums if you want to discuss off-market Xanax and pirated copies of Madden with the hundreds of bot posts that are the only accounts still active.

#13: Lux (Ignis)

Lux is a hand drawn MMO from Chimera (Ignis) and sure the website has been updated with a 2020 copyright but there’s also a link to the company’s Google+ account and that hasn’t been a thing since April.  April, right? Who even remembers Google Plus? I forgot about it a week after Google stopped hardcoding it into Youtube. Lux had a failed Kickstarter campaign back in 2016 to put the title on PC, Xbox, PS4, and Mac. Accompanying the game’s campaign was one for a graphic novel tie-in that despite raising over the paltry goal with 23 backers was also canned. The Kickstarter tells backers to stay tuned for more information.

We all know where this is going. The website lists “pre-orders soon,” and if you believe that I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. The last sign of life I could find was in 2018 when after nearly two years of inactivity someone posted a link to the Lux website on their Facebook page. Two years to post a link for a website for a game that is absolutely not ripping off Don’t Starve.

The most entertaining part of Lux’s history is that if you look at their Twitter account the last thing that they posted about the game is an expression of excitement that the team is working with Ignis to continue development. In March 2017. Someone decided to use the account five months later in August to ask a couple questions about a rented Conan Exiles server and how to change harvesting rates.

After Nine Years, Jagex Abandons Annual End of Things Event


There are two things guaranteed in January; Everyone will renege on their New Year’s pledges roughly half an hour after the ball drops and after 2011 Jagex will release the End of Things event in RuneScape. Except now they won’t.

Every January since 2011 Jagex has released the End of Things event in the Freminik region. The event has changed over the last nine years, but the crux of the event has stayed the same. Players battle it out with three big wolves; Hati, Sköll, and Fenrir. To the victor goes the spoils, specifically some cosmetic items and a burst of bonus experience in several skills. The event didn’t launch this week, nor are there plans to launch it at all, possibly forever.

In a Q&A stream, Jagex confirmed that the event just isn’t as popular as it was and they wanted to pursue other ideas than simply lazily rolling out unpopular content because it’s been on the same release list year over year. After the shallow release schedule that has been January, maybe players would have enjoyed something familiar with whet their whistle outside of weeks upon weeks of patch notes. The end of The End of Things event comes alongside Jagex ending the Winter Weekend events for similar reasons. Jagex’s big update for January, the Archaeology skill, has been delayed to an unknown date.

Jagex Continues Hiring Spree In 2020, Brings On Big Names


2020 is continuing the trend of gaming industry names being absorbed into the Jagex collective. Will MMO Fallout be absorbed next? Only time will tell.

Jagex’s latest hiring spree has brought on board a number of notable names to notch their…I’m out of words for this alliteration. The role of head of product marketing for RuneScape has been filled by David Bamberger who was part of the product launches for Final Fantasy VII, Twisted Metal, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and more. David is joined by Ouni Kwon as head of marketing for Old School RuneScape coming off of his nine year stint at Wargaming working on World of Tanks.

Creative services director is now Joeyray Hall who had spent more than two decades at Blizzard Entertainment working as 3D artist and taking on senior management roles including cinematics senior project manager. Mike Donatelli is joining on as product director of Old School RuneScape, having worked on the late Mythic Entertainment’s MMO library of Dark Age of Camelot, Warhammer Online, and Wildstar.

Stewart Stanbury has joined as director of business development and brings his experience of working with clients including Adobe, Ubisoft, Rockstar, and more to provide insight, research, marketing, and player retention support. Stewart will be Jagex’s outreach to external studios for investment, retail and licensing opportunities for Jagex’s corporate portfolio. Official Planet Funorb merch? We can only dream.

And last but not least we have Anna Mostyn-Williams as director of publishing partners. After a career of helming brands from Xbox, Quantic Dreams, and Discovery Communications, Anna will be working on Jagex’s outreach and relationship with distribution and marketing partners.

Jagex CEO Phil Mansell weighed in:

“With the significant talent we’re able to continuously attract to Jagex, it’s very clear that big things lie ahead for the studio as we approach our 20th Anniversary of RuneScape. We recognise the importance of investing in exceptional talent, with 100 new hires welcomed to Jagex in 2019 alone, we have witnessed a record-breaking year whilst hitting exciting milestones, and we plan to continue to build our talent pool through 2020 and beyond.”

Source: Press Release

RuneScape Celebrates All-Time High Membership In 2019


Everything’s coming up Glouphrie in RuneScape for 2019.

As RuneScape enters its twentieth year of existence, Jagex is celebrating a successful 2019. RuneScape as a franchise enjoyed the highest membership count of all time with well over a million subscribers while Old School RuneScape achieved its highest daily active players thanks in part to a launch on mobile that has drawn in over 8 million installs, and was also awarded a BAFTA for mobile game of the year and best mobile game at the Develop Star Awards.

In 2019 Jagex hired over 100 new employees as part of a big hiring drive including former EA Development Director Melissa Bachman-Wood joining as VP of Studios, Product Director at Blizzard Entertainment Ryan Ward joining as Executive Producer of RuneScape, and Rob Hendry, previously Head of Studio London at Natural Motion, joining as Executive Producer of Old School RuneScape.

CEO Phil Mansell, aka Mod Pips, stated:

“This level of success only comes with the passion of huge player communities, who engage with our games because of the amazing craft and care from our talented teams. It is thanks to these efforts that we’ve been able to greatly increase our investment in our existing games, new product development and the broader business with more than 100 new hires coming onboard in the last 12 months. This includes senior leaders joining from EA, Blizzard, Activision, Ubisoft, Riot and more, adding more than 250 years of cumulative games industry experience to the Jagex team.”

RuneScape raised over £250 grand in charity with Jagex being voted the Best Places To Work award by Gamesindustry.biz.

More details on RuneScape’s future will be released in the coming months.

Twitch: RuneScape Umbral Packs Now Available


The next set of Twitch Prime items are now available in RuneScape. The pack is free for all Twitch Prime members and includes the umbral cloak, umbral bow, and umbral staff, as well as previous items in the umbral set if you haven’t previously received them. You will need to link your Twitch and RuneScape accounts and the rewards can only be redeemed once.

The umbral pack is available until February 3. Get it here.

Diaries From Gielinor: The Yak Track Made Me Hate RuneScape


I’ve made several comments over the years about how Jagex seems to struggle with conflicting priorities, and nothing really exemplifies that in recent history more than the Yak Track.

For those of you who play RuneScape, the Yak Track ends today (January 5). I liked the idea of the Yak Track in theory; an alternative to the battle pass that was given away for free to those who shelled out additional money for the Premier Pack. It’s pure selfishness, but for people like me who are still grandfathered in at the $5 monthly subscription you kinda have to give us something in the bundle to make that price difference worth it.

The Yak Track was such an exercise in tedium that it made me resent RuneScape. I managed to swallow 25 of the 50 levels and theoretically can’t really “quit” the game because I have 600+ days accumulated in excess membership thanks to various giveaways over the past 15 years. I’ve just spent the last couple of months playing the Twisted League in Old School RuneScape.

Contextually the Yak Track couldn’t come out at a more ridiculous and dare I say stupidly contradictory time in RuneScape history. It represents a mind-numbing tedium that Jagex has gone back and forth on in terms of stamping out in the game.

The Yak Track is a battle pass that presents players with 50 tiers of rewards with each tier having its own option of one of two tasks. Some of the tiers are joke tasks, like collect 28 cabbages or talk to an NPC, something you can do it 5 minutes. The majority of the tasks however are ridiculously tedious. Fletch thousands of bows, make thousands of potions, invest endless hours into slayer, etc. It isn’t fun and it’s a stark reminder of one of Jagex’s worst business practices that the company has admitted it is trying to push away from.

Jagex, like Ubisoft, has a habit of creating a problem and then selling players the solution. Don’t want to slog through 30+ tiers of godawful grind for this time-limited event and cosmetics you’ll never be able to obtain again? Well Jagex will sell you bonds to skip the content that they artificially inflated the tedium for in order to sell you bonds to skip the grind that they artificially inflated to make you pay real cash to skip. Nothing stokes resentment quite like the company that has had numerous apology videos over the past few months about their predatory monetization practices doing exactly what they are apologizing for, while they are apologizing.

It also dampens the fact that two weeks after the Yak Track launched, Jagex overhauled the way daily quests in RuneScape work because they saw players getting indignant about the tedium of taking excessive time away every day for dailies that didn’t really reward them. Yep, Jagex will overhaul a system so you don’t need to talk to an NPC to turn in a daily task while at the same time instituting another system that forces you to mine three thousand coal for 1/50th of a reward tier.

I’d like to believe Jagex’s thousandth apology and promise to do better when it comes to predatory microtransactions, but they could at least wipe the crumbs off of their face before promising that they’ll stop stealing from the cookie jar.

RuneScape Reduces DailyScape Grind


DailyScape is the not-exactly-positive name given to RuneScape by players who are somewhat fed up with the game’s daily grind. Not so much over the game itself, which is a massive grind no matter where you look in it, but over Jagex’s insistence on daily, weekly, and monthly tasks that start to feel more like busy work than something worth accomplishing.

This month Jagex took aim at daily challenges, a feature that is often long and tedious, requires the player to hand over their creations, and go out of their way to complete the task. Imagine being told to make hundreds of bows only to hand them over for a reward kinda worth the value of the goods that went into it. With this week’s update, RuneScape daily challenges will be more manageable and consistently rewarding;

“So, to solve this issue we’ve simply increased player agency. Instead of having several Challenges per skill, most of the time there will now be only one. This single Challenge will require you to interact with the skill in a manner of your choosing. You might be asked to run five laps of an Agility Course, but you’re free to pick which one. Or maybe you’ll need to cut 28 logs – if so, you’ll be able to choose from whichever trees you like.”

The daily challenge rework blog post can be found here.

Old School RuneScape Suffers Major Technical Difficulties Over Weekend


(Update: Old School RuneScape underwent maintenance this morning that appears to have fixed the issue)

If you have tried to play Old School RuneScape this weekend, especially over mobile, odds are your experience has been less than desirable. Absolutely horrible more like.

Long story short, Old School RuneScape has been suffering issues causing the game to be completely unplayable for many people on mobile and the official client and Jagex has yet to figure out what is causing the problem or the million dollar question of how to fix it. The last update to an alert posted on December 7 notes that the issue is still being looked into, but as of midnight on December 9 the problem has yet to be fixed.

The issues are still actively being investigated and resolved. We’ve also edited the article to reflect the issues that some players are experiencing with the desktop client. We’re also aware of issues affecting some Old School RuneScape players when attempting to connect to the official Old School RuneScape game client. These players are experiencing long loading times, with ‘Loading configuration’, ‘Loading application resources’ and ‘Loading application’ all taking a long time. Our SysAdmin and our Game Engine teams are investigating and are working on resolving the issues as a matter of priority.

In addition to the connection problems, players who have been able to log in have reported major server lag with some servers suffering more than others.

Source: RuneScape

Super Rewards Is Dead, RuneScape Survey Takers Grieve


It is with great sorrow that I post the news at 1:30a.m. on Tuesday December 3 that Super Rewards, the place most of you RuneScape players went to for (occasionally) free keys in return for signing your name, email, and phone number to some of the internet’s shadiest scam artists, has disappeared.

If you head over to RuneScape and try to earn some free loot box keys with the Super Rewards service, you’ll be met with the message above. Now if you want your identity stolen in return for some RuneScape keys you’ll need to go with Jagex’s surviving partner, Peanut Labs. Peanuts, an apt description of the size of the payout.