Tag: Star Vault

Mortal Online's Billing Servers Explode: Players Double Billed


If you have a Mortal Online subscription, you will want to check your bank account and email (where your payment confirmations are sent). According to several players on the Mortal Online forums, and confirmed by Star Vault, a recent billing issue has resulted in an unknown number of players being double, and reportedly triple, billed for their subscription fees.

Any double charge will of course be solved, we have recently moved parts of our shop system that I expect causes some of these issues. It should be solved asap.

I’ve contacted Star Vault to confirm whether or not the company is actively seeking out the extra charges, or if players will be required to submit a billing dispute with customer service on a case by case basis. I have not yet heard back, more than likely given today is Sunday. Those of you playing Mortal Online should check to make sure you weren’t charged twice. As for those who have expired accounts, you should be safe. Checking your bank won’t hurt, however.

I will update this when I receive a response from Star Vault.

Mortal Online Doing A Little Better: Costs Cut


Nothing to lose your head over. The last time we took a look at Star Vault’s finances, the company announced that:

With the new cost structure, the Board expects that an additional approximately 1500 players to achieve break-even, a goal that we hope to achieve in the second quarter of 2011.

Well the Q1 financial reports are out, and it appears that although Mortal Online’s subscribers have remained mostly stagnant, the cost of running business has gone down significantly.

 The sale of licenses in the first quarter of 2011 remained largely unchanged compared to the fourth quarter of 2010.

The Board of Star Vault decided, in order to reduce its costs, to cancel the liquidity guarantee. Star Vaults last day of trading with market maker was on 29 April 2011 and the company’s first trading liquidity without being 2 May 2011.

With our current cost structure, the Board expects that an additional approximately 1000 players to achieve break-even, a goal that we hope to achieve during the second quarter of 2011.

If you don’t understand what a liquidity guarantee is, that’s okay, I don’t fully understand it either. What is important is that Star Vault requires less income to break even, meaning Mortal Online’s long term viability just became that much better.

You can read the entire release here.

Eat Yourself In Mortal Online: Gain Weight


Mortal Online launches the Dawn expansion at some unknown point in the near future, and among the new features is a cooking system that allows players to cook pretty much anything they want (although cooking rocks won’t result in a healthy meal), and with the cooking system comes a weight system. Gorge yourself on food, and you will gain weight, and naturally your stats will change with your increased/decreased girth. Another feature being presented is cannibalism, the ability to not only kill a player and loot them, but eat their corpse to regain health.

Luckily, Henrik confirmed a question I’ve been wondering for a good while now: Is it possible to eat yourself? The answer? Yes.

“Cooking gives new interesting surprices everyday…
Today Sebastian and me was playing, I killed sebastian, when he came back he took his own corpse which had a certain weight.. he couldnt resist to taste him self…. and started to eat, he filled is stomach with the carcass which wasnt to good for his health. After that I just had to kill him again, he came back once again and looted his new carcass, now he found something interesting, his new carcass had an increased weight.. thats because he stuffed him self with his previous carcass. so you see we now have weight as well and it works just like it should in real life, pretty cool.. Then I took his head and logged out with it haha. Funny little moments we have at the office, just wanted to share it with you as well.”

If you ate your own carcass that was stuffed with the consumed carcass of yourself that your previous self had eaten, would you become twice as fat, or would the resultant paradox simply shut down the Mortal Online servers and give you a massive nosebleed?

Mortal Online’s Dawn expansion comes out sometime either late this month or early next month, while Star Vault works out last minute issues.

Arnold Plays Mortal Online


Arnold sure has thinned down since leaving the Governor’s office.

Mortal Online: Link Facebook, Get Discount(?)…


As someone who works in brick’n’mortar store customer service, I’m often presented with the question; “is it seriously a sale when a $10.99 item is put in sale for $10.50?” and the answer is, in a certain sense, yes. The sale may not be particularly good, but given the new price is smaller than the last, it is indeed a sale.

About a week ago, I wrote on the upcoming expansion to Mortal Online, titled “Dawn,” and that the Star Vault team was also working to implement a feature to connect your Mortal Online account to your Facebook. As an extra incentive, the team decided that players would be given a discount to their subscription price if they linked accounts.

Well, Star Vault has unveiled the Facebook connect feature and the discount is, to say the least, negligible. Starting at five friends on your friends list (well that disqualifies me immediately), the savings amount to .25 Euro, or thirty six cents USD. The sales progress up to 750 friends, where the discount reaches 1.25 Euro, or $1.80.

As for wall spam, Star Vault promises the messages to be minimal:

In return for providing you with a discount, Mortal Online will sometimes make small posts to your Facebook wall when major events occur for you as a player; however, these are quite rare as we know nobody wants what could be considered spam!

More on Mortal Online as it appears.

Mortal Online: Facebook Discount, Expansion Coming


We have been silent for some time now while working very hard on our first expansion titled Dawn, and we now feel ready to reveal its contents. The expansion will be released in April, and it will not cost anything, all you need is an active subscription.

Mortal Online has gone through some…troubles in its short less-than-a-year on the market. Since its launch last June, the team over at Star Vault have had to deal with ongoing lag and server stability issues, the accidental deletion of an entire city, the realization that their combat system may be unfeasible, a few publicized exaggerations regarding patches, not to mention that the game is still not profiting, and Star Vault is selling stock for five cents a share. Given this, any progress is worth publishing for the fledgling developer, and Star Vault wants nothing more than to make the upcoming expansion go smoothly.

To start, finally a followup on the mount update I wrote about last month. With the new mount system, each horse will carry its own unique stats, as well as the slots to equip with new saddles, armor, headpieces, and horseshoes. By customizing the horse, players will increase their speed, defense, and storage capacity. There are a lot more updates to be seen in the upcoming expansion, which can be read here.

More importantly, however, is the announcement in this month’s newsletter that players will be able to link their Facebook profile with their Mortal Online account, and have updates sent to their wall based on what they do in-game. Why link? Star Vault is offering a discount to your subscription if you do. I do not have any information currently regarding how much the discount is, however I will post more information in the coming month.

In addition, Star Vault is looking to release a system reminiscent of World of Warcraft’s Armory, allowing players to view real-time status updates on the guild territory, wars, and characters. Of course, being a PvP-centric game, displaying your information will be completely optional.

Finally, it appears that Star Vault is making progress on the server stability end of things, recording a 50 hour uptime before the servers were brought down for maintenance. This will surely be a delight to players.

More on Mortal Online as it appears.

Mortal Online: Revolutionizing Mounts In MMOs!


Seeing Henrik Nystrom post on the Mortal Online always reminds me of watching a kid describing his favorite super hero, just because I can’t read Henrik’s description of an impending update and not think “and then Superman flies and, and everyone is like ‘whoa,’ and then he grabs a car with his super strength and he smashes the bad guy like POW, BAM, POW!”

Today’s post comes from the Mortal Online forums, where Henrik has an announcement about an upcoming mount update:

Revolutionize mounts in MMOs you say? Why, that would be even better than an update that was just like Mortal Online 2, or as one deleted post put it:

Technically, MasterCrafter (if that is your real username), you left out the part where Henrik blames Epic Games. Although, if the update is as revolutionary to Mortal Online as Henrik says it is, the mounts may have the power to keep the server running online for more than ten concurrent hours without crashing.

More on Mortal Online, and what is and is not the fault of Epic China, as it appears.

Mortal Online: Still Not Profiting, 2011 A Better Hope?


Spiders everywhere.

The only thing I love more than reading financial reports is reading financial reports auto-translated by Google. With the release of Mortal Online’s 14-day trial, our next bit of discussion pertains to the company’s annual financial report, released a little earlier today. The short: Mortal Online is remaining stable, growing at a small rate. Star Vault has plans to increase advertising in the near future, but requires more money as the previous ad money was spent on development. Although the subscriber rate is growing at a positive pace, Mortal Online has yet to achieve profitability, even with the new cost management.

With the new cost structure, the Board expects that an additional approximately 1500 players to achieve break-even, a goal that we hope to achieve in the second quarter of 2011.

Hopefully the mass sale of stocks, as well as new players being introduced via the 14 day trial, will bring Star Vault some much needed income to sustain the company until they reach the point of profiting.

More on Mortal Online as it appears. You can read the whole financial report here.

Mortal Online: 14 Day Trial


Fight now, and let spill the dogs of war?

Wanted to try out Mortal Online without the need for purchasing the game? Those of you paying attention will be aware that a free trial has been on the list for a while now, but hampered due to Star Vault’s desire to continue patching the game before advertising it to the general public. The wait, however, is over! Announced via email and through the game’s forums, players may now create a trial account here, download the client here, and soon be experiencing the full frontal nudity that is Mortal Online.

Limitations, you say? There is a limit of 600 skill points and a cap of level 60 for all skills. Other than that, you have 14 days to wreak havoc on your fellow players in the nudist colony. You may want to check up on the servers before you go in, however, as Star Vault’s Henrik Nystrom posted a couple days ago:

Dear community,

Our entire host network in Europe have operation issues at the moment. This is affecting our server at the moment. We got reports that servers running a game called World Of Warcraft is effecting these network at the moment via Frankfurt……

This could affect our server connections and they are working to solve it as we speak.

A game called World of Warcraft…Nope, not ringing a bell. Whatever it is, surely it can’t be big enough to cause lasting server problems.

Buy Star Vault Stock! Only 5 Cents A Share!


Let's not lose our heads over this.

Mortal Online has been creeping its way towards success since its launch last year, and not unlike the mass of polyps in my face, removing the problems is going to require a lot of work, time, and perhaps some major surgery. As it stands, however, Star Vault has taken the “no publicity is better than bad publicity” approach, one that I myself have encouraged and several other MMOs featured here are currently using, and Henrik Nystrom is holding off on advertising Mortal Online until the game reaches a marketable state.

Unfortunately, development doesn’t pay the bills, and likely not even Henrik can continue using the family coffers forever. Star Vault, on a Swedish trading website, announced that 9.9 million Class B shares will go up for sale for .36 SEK each, a figure which rounds to about 5 cents USD per share. I don’t think it takes an expert to know that those are extraordinarily low stock prices.

Hopefully this influx of cash will mean faster development toward that era of marketability that Star Vault so greatly desires and likely needs at this point. I mean, it has to get worse before it can get better, right?

More on Mortal Online as it appears.