Credit goes to Scream112 on the Mortal Online forums for the screenshot.
Any game, and really any concept in any medium, follows the same path. At the early stages, the developers dream up all kinds of stuff they want their players to be able to do in their world. Drunken bar brawls? Awesome! Skill based combat with no lag on an MMO? Brilliant! Full PvP with no restrictions? Blockbuster!
Eventually, either before or after release, the developer hits a brick wall and like any decent sinking ship, some of the furniture must be thrown overboard to keep stable. Thinking players would protect one another in cities, negating the need for NPC guards? Didn’t happen. Player owned housing non-instanced? Not possible under your engine. Epic sword of goat-slaying? Wasn’t as overpowered before someone decided to add half-goat half-human as a player race. Holding a Cataclysm style event? The established community would never accept it.
This week, Star Vault is coming to that basic understanding of reality by publicly announcing their plans to not only have their cake, but preserve it until a later time in which they may eat it. In this case, Star Vault’s own Henrik Nystrom has posted a new thread on the official forums detailing plans for the server lag. He stresses that this is not the desync we once knew, that has been eradicated. This lag, on the other hand, has to do with the way movement and attacks are predicted on the server’s end, namely that the server is not updating said figures fast enough (at least that’s what I got out of it).
On one hand, it appears that this update is going to be a last-ditch effort to fix the lag before less desirable updates have to be considered, either through localizing servers or completely changing the combat so that the current hardware can handle the combat.
“If this doesn’t bring us to an “acceptable” level when it comes to real time combat we may be forced at looking into localizing servers, which we really want to avoid at all means, or we simply have to look at “nerfing” the complex way of fighting, which of course is something we want to avoid.”
This is good news, and hopefully this effort by Star Vault to stamp out desync, or whatever term they call it, will go by without having to resort to splitting up an already small community, or changing the charm that Mortal Online holds to many of its players.
Mortal Online is one of those games I can’t wait to try…when it is finished and as lag free as they’re going to get it. Until then, I’m a college student with 12 grand in college loans, another 6 in my car, and another 15 grand on the way over the next two years for even more collegical goodness. I don’t have any disposable income.
Credit goes to Scream112 on the Mortal Online forums for the screenshot.
Any game, and really any concept in any medium, follows the same path. At the early stages, the developers dream up all kinds of stuff they want their players to be able to do in their world. Drunken bar brawls? Awesome! Skill based combat with no lag on an MMO? Brilliant! Full PvP with no restrictions? Blockbuster!
Eventually, either before or after release, the developer hits a brick wall and like any decent sinking ship, some of the furniture must be thrown overboard to keep stable. Thinking players would protect one another in cities, negating the need for NPC guards? Didn’t happen. Player owned housing non-instanced? Not possible under your engine. Epic sword of goat-slaying? Wasn’t as overpowered before someone decided to add half-goat half-human as a player race. Holding a Cataclysm style event? The established community would never accept it.
This week, Star Vault is coming to that basic understanding of reality by publicly announcing their plans to not only have their cake, but preserve it until a later time in which they may eat it. In this case, Star Vault’s own Henrik Nystrom has posted a new thread on the official forums detailing plans for the server lag. He stresses that this is not the desync we once knew, that has been eradicated. This lag, on the other hand, has to do with the way movement and attacks are predicted on the server’s end, namely that the server is not updating said figures fast enough (at least that’s what I got out of it).
On one hand, it appears that this update is going to be a last-ditch effort to fix the lag before less desirable updates have to be considered, either through localizing servers or completely changing the combat so that the current hardware can handle the combat.
“If this doesn’t bring us to an “acceptable” level when it comes to real time combat we may be forced at looking into localizing servers, which we really want to avoid at all means, or we simply have to look at “nerfing” the complex way of fighting, which of course is something we want to avoid.”
This is good news, and hopefully this effort by Star Vault to stamp out desync, or whatever term they call it, will go by without having to resort to splitting up an already small community, or changing the charm that Mortal Online holds to many of its players.
Mortal Online is one of those games I can’t wait to try…when it is finished and as lag free as they’re going to get it. Until then, I’m a college student with 12 grand in college loans, another 6 in my car, and another 15 grand on the way over the next two years for even more collegical goodness. I don’t have any disposable income.
“Help! Anyone, everyone, we need help! The Risar are attacking!”
GM Events are nature’s way of saying “we’re willing to break from the normal monotony of every day gaming.” In most cases, these events are pretty simple in nature, and result in little change to the game’s landscape, if any at all. The event starts, players do things, and eventually the event ends. We all have fun, and might obtain a cool item to take home with us, but the next day is as if nothing ever happened. Other events, like in The Matrix Online and Tabula Rasa, such GM events can result in the death of major NPCs, entire bases being blown up, or even prelude to bigger expansions.
The above GM event took place just a couple days ago in Cave Camp, players being notified by word of mouth, and by an NPC running around the wilderness frantically screaming of the attack. Players were tasked with fighting off the Risar horde (Risar are Mortal Online’s version of Orcs, for those of you who have not played the game).
Eventually the Risar made way for their leader, the Risar Lord, to step in and finish the job. Although a number of players managed to cut the Risar Lord to size, an alliance of players from the Ascension clan (and others) bolted in, in a coordinated attack, and drove the players off to kill the Risar Lord themselves and no doubt feast upon his sweet, sweet loot.
The event wasn’t full GM-driven, it was a scripted event that was activated and allowed to run its course. Of course, Star Vault has promised to expand upon this in the future, with more GM-driven events, surprise events to come. Players will also recall such “epic bosses,” single-time monsters that only appear once, are gone when they are killed, and are controlled by GMs.
And now, for your viewing pleasure, the Risar Lord slaying (IE: People circling a mob and curb stomping it repeatedly).
Rumors suck, no question about it, especially when you’re in a system where verifiability is absolutely naught. IRC logs can be forged, pictures can be photoshopped, and ex-employees always have a bone to pick with their employers. For this reason, I decided a long time ago that I wouldn’t even humor unsubstantiated claims. If I did, you’d be seeing a lot more articles on how this company or that company is going bankrupt, and Warhammer would have shut down at least thirty times since last year.
There’s an odd sense of gratification that people, some of them journalists, get when a company does badly or (god forbid) goes under. Even when The Matrix Online shut down last year, after four years and countless updates and events, people still called the game a massive failure. There are people who not only believe that behemoths like Sony Online Entertainment or NCsoft will go bankrupt because of an update they didn’t like, they regularly reinforce that they hope it happens. From jaded Star Wars Galaxies fans, to people who were dissatisfied with Mortal Online, to World of Warcraft haters, and everyone in between. You name any MMO on the market, and odds are someone is expressing their volatile rage through claims that the game is shutting down, and the company is going bankrupt.
Of course, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and eventually one of these trolls will become a prophet. Warhammer Online is still online two years after launch, although when the game does one day shut down someone will be there to say “See? I told you it’d shut down but no one believed me,” and even more to stand there and talk about how Mythic deserved it for one reason or another. Forget the fact that the doomsayers have been calling death for years, yet always being wrong, the one time they happen to be right and suddenly their insider information is legit.
Over at the Mortal Online troll community (located on the Mortal Online section of the mmorpg.com forums), the tribesmen have been worshiping a supposedly leaked IRC log where a Star Vault employee claims that Mortal Online will shut down next month, likely leapfrogging the latest troll fodder that Star Vault is in the red, money-wise. If the rumor is true, however, it won’t spell the complete death of Mortal Online, as according to the text log the game will be rebuilt ala All Points Bulletin and rereleased, possibly under a new engine.
But this isn’t about whether Mortal Online will be with us in January, because even if Star Vault were to say tomorrow that they were shutting down, it wouldn’t make this report any more credible. Something leaks every other month on Mortal Online shutting down, and to give credit to this one because happened to hit the mark would just offer validation to those who should not be validated.
So those of you currently playing Mortal Online and enjoying it, keep doing what you do. To those of you looking to buy the game, wait a month if it makes you feel better. I don’t pretend to be an expert prophet on which MMOs are going to live or die, but as to the claims that Mortal Online will shut down next month: I’m going to say no.
Rumors suck, no question about it, especially when you’re in a system where verifiability is absolutely naught. IRC logs can be forged, pictures can be photoshopped, and ex-employees always have a bone to pick with their employers. For this reason, I decided a long time ago that I wouldn’t even humor unsubstantiated claims. If I did, you’d be seeing a lot more articles on how this company or that company is going bankrupt, and Warhammer would have shut down at least thirty times since last year.
There’s an odd sense of gratification that people, some of them journalists, get when a company does badly or (god forbid) goes under. Even when The Matrix Online shut down last year, after four years and countless updates and events, people still called the game a massive failure. There are people who not only believe that behemoths like Sony Online Entertainment or NCsoft will go bankrupt because of an update they didn’t like, they regularly reinforce that they hope it happens. From jaded Star Wars Galaxies fans, to people who were dissatisfied with Mortal Online, to World of Warcraft haters, and everyone in between. You name any MMO on the market, and odds are someone is expressing their volatile rage through claims that the game is shutting down, and the company is going bankrupt.
Of course, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and eventually one of these trolls will become a prophet. Warhammer Online is still online two years after launch, although when the game does one day shut down someone will be there to say “See? I told you it’d shut down but no one believed me,” and even more to stand there and talk about how Mythic deserved it for one reason or another. Forget the fact that the doomsayers have been calling death for years, yet always being wrong, the one time they happen to be right and suddenly their insider information is legit.
Over at the Mortal Online troll community (located on the Mortal Online section of the mmorpg.com forums), the tribesmen have been worshiping a supposedly leaked IRC log where a Star Vault employee claims that Mortal Online will shut down next month, likely leapfrogging the latest troll fodder that Star Vault is in the red, money-wise. If the rumor is true, however, it won’t spell the complete death of Mortal Online, as according to the text log the game will be rebuilt ala All Points Bulletin and rereleased, possibly under a new engine.
But this isn’t about whether Mortal Online will be with us in January, because even if Star Vault were to say tomorrow that they were shutting down, it wouldn’t make this report any more credible. Something leaks every other month on Mortal Online shutting down, and to give credit to this one because happened to hit the mark would just offer validation to those who should not be validated.
So those of you currently playing Mortal Online and enjoying it, keep doing what you do. To those of you looking to buy the game, wait a month if it makes you feel better. I don’t pretend to be an expert prophet on which MMOs are going to live or die, but as to the claims that Mortal Online will shut down next month: I’m going to say no.
Mortal Online’s launch feels like forever ago, and player reaction is still mixed. Ask a current player and they’ll likely tell you that the game has improved leaps and bounds but still has a long way to go before it is stable, complete, and balanced. Ask an ex-player and you are likely to walk headlong into a Hitler analogy accompanying a rant about how much Star Vault hates making money and just wants to drive their customers away. Either way you look at it, Mortal Online had a rocky launch, not lethally rocky like All Points Bulletin, but heavier than your normal MMO launch. For months, de-synchronization was the biggest issue plaguing the game, among other smaller but numerous problems. Star Vault launched the Epic Patch, promising to fix many of these faults.
Star Vault wants to apologize to their customers, both current an prior, by giving seven free days. In the November Newsletter, Star Vault announced:
Of course actions speak louder than words, so in order to reimburse our customers for the grief the latest patches might have caused we are adding 7 days of additional gametime to each active account today. And in order to give customers who are not subscribed at the moment the chance to check out the new engine build and the new content, we are adding 7 days to every customer who bought any of the game versions earlier and does not have an active subscription at the moment.
In addition, the company is offering free days to those who resubscribe. Five days for one month, twenty days for three months, and fifty days for six months. If your account was inactive, you’ll be able to log into the account section on the Mortal Online website and see:
Your subscription has been cancelled,
but has not expired.
No further payments will or can be processed on your current registered payment method. Your subscription will expire on Fri, 26 Nov 2010. If you want to continue playing after that you need to reactive your subscription.
More on Mortal Online as it appears. Hit more for the entirety of the newsletter.
Mortal Online is a tricky little bugger. On one hand, if I write anything good about the company I am a paid shill. On the other hand, if I write anything unfortunate or bad about the game or even mildly associated with it, I stand to draw a lynch mob from the Mortal Online forums. So either way, I stand to wake up with the severed head of my Bioshock mini-figure in my bed with me tomorrow.
Today’s video is a humorous one, and comes from a player named Griefa (yes, I get it), who recorded Mortal Online post-patch, taking issue with a small problem, most notably that one of the game’s cities had been picked up and removed causing players to fall through the empty void.
The town has since been replaced, to my knowledge, and all is hunky-dory in the hood that is Mortal Online. Well, at least as far as the city being missing is concerned. The fix took a few days because the developers were off for the weekend.
[Update 6/29/10]With the overwhelming response this article has received, both here and on other websites, I’ve posted a followup below the original article.
Mortal Online is part of a major turning point in the massively multiplayer online industry, but in a way that has little to do with the content of the game itself. I’m not talking about the engines that MMOs run on, or the way that players interact in the growing worlds, or even the size and scope of the world itself. I speak of the way these titles are run, and the communities who pay for them, the promises that are kept, and the breaking point of patience and willpower. Continue to read and you will understand why the era of false promises, infinite delays, and broken dreams is over, but more importantly, why some MMOs will die because of it (not necessarily Mortal Online).
Up to a year ago or so, the typical mantra for buying a game was if you bought a console game and you didn’t like it or it was broken, you could always sell it used for a small payback on the cost of the game. For PC games, up until around 2004, it was possible to just transfer your cd and the key to another person, like a used game sale, but without the option for turning to Electronics Boutique or a real store to sell it for you. With MMOs, on the other hand, there has never been a legitimate way to sell. You have to transfer your account with the game, which risks the account getting banned if the company detects it, leaving you with no money, and no game.
This should not be taken as a generalization when I say that a lot of MMO developers quickly latched on to this idea, and several of those used it to put a choke hold on the player. In recent years, the focus has shifted to giving an MMO enormous amounts of hype prior to release, to pump up the pre-order sales before the closed beta is even done with, the NDA lifted, and the game can be talked about. A few developers walk the same borderline of fraud that you see in commercials, where what they say isn’t technically fraud, but it’s certainly misleading. As an example, many of you have likely mocked the commercials where the advertiser states “prices starting at under twenty five dollars!” only to find that the price starts at $24.99 for a barely working piece of trash and immediately jumps to $100 for the next step up.
Before an MMO launches we are subjected to countless claims of features that are delayed for months on end, if not years, if not scrapped entirely at some point in a secret manner. But these same features are used to advertise and gin up pre-orders, and then the executives sit back and wonder why virtually every subscription MMO in existence has such a low retention rate following its first month. The player is out fifty bucks, and might even convince himself when the developer claims that the feature he wanted that was missing at launch is coming “soon” (read: following two years of delays before it is eventually cut), that he should continue his subscription for a few months just to see how the game turns out.
I am picking on Mortal Online specifically in this article because this is the MMO that really popularized the new fight against the idea that once players pre-ordered, they were at the mercy of the developer no matter how many times/years the game was delayed despite accepting orders, and how many features ended up not being in the game, or being broken, at launch. Players issued charge-backs in large numbers on Mortal Online, so much so that many third party forums relating to MMOs/Mortal Online were regularly filled with information, accounts and advocacy for players to perform said charge-backs.
The moral lesson with Mortal Online is that developers can no longer promise features, and then use initial box sales as a fund to develop those features for actual release some months down the line. After several years, patience and tolerance for this has reached its breaking point, and players are sending a message that these acts that have become so commonplace in the MMO market, are no longer going to work. The legitimate use of a charge back is gaining momentum, and I have no doubt that at this rate it will be powerful enough to utterly destroy an MMO before it even makes it out the door.
As much as I am against resorting to a charge-back, the old “shit happens” excuses just don’t cut it anymore in defending companies that launch unfinished or wholly broken MMOs. In any other video game genre, the kind of stuff developers pull would never be tolerated, and the momentum is moving in such a way that it will no longer be tolerated in MMOs either, especially when companies make the same mistakes over several titles.
Always buy an MMO with a credit card, and never preorder an MMO on Steam (in the event where you issue a charge back, you entire Steam account will be completely disabled). Remember: A charge back is not to be used as an excuse to bum-rush your way into a game without doing any research on it, and is not for buyer’s remorse. It is strictly for cases where what you are promised is not what is delivered. In the case where it is found that you issued an illegal charge back, you can be sued for wire-fraud or theft of merchandise, among other charges, depending on where you live.
[6/29/10]
I wanted to address a few comments I’ve been seeing on various websites in regards to this article, mainly that I was not informative enough with the original article. I was afraid, and apparently rightly so, after I published this that it would gather some notice from the Mortal Online community, on both sides, and it has.
My intention with this article wasn’t to bash any game in particular, but to focus on the broad-spectrum themes that lead up to Mortal Online becoming the scapegoat for a new trend. It has become all too common for developers to start talking far too specifically about a title long before those features are even finalized, or approved in some cases. Interviews about the content of the game now merely run down to throwing out whatever is in the concept stage to get the most ooh’s and aah’s. Although there’s been a few criticisms of my “poor research” in not providing examples for a few arguments, this was by design, as the instant I pointed out a single MMO, or even a selection of MMOs, I would be immediately slammed for “having a grudge” against said game/company. Rather, my goal was to indulge the reader and allow them to fill in the blanks with their own experiences.
One thing I do hold Mortal Online guilty towards, and this stands for a number of other MMOs, is the “here’s a list of features, but not all of them will be in after launch.” Before Warhammer Online launched, Mythic removed most of the capital cities, preferring to have two decent cities at launch rather than all of them in a poor state. The cities, along with the removed classes, would be launched at a later time once the game shipped. Mythic has caught up on classes, but there hasn’t been much as to when, if ever, the capital cities will see release. Given the number of MMOs that have used the undisclosed-future-release plan where the content was silently cut or radically changed, I think it’s safe to say that Star Vault’s lack of specificity was to their detriment.
I have always advertised MMO Fallout as having a focus on the MMO industry as a whole, with insights into the companies, trends, and such, but I often feel that I assume and demand too much out of my readers, by which I mean that I occasionally get ahead of myself and assume that the rest of you have been following my blog since the start (which is why I always try to begin with summaries of what is going on).
The key to this article is that the player will always vote with their wallets in the end, on the issues that really matter, and in this case that issue is the tolerance of players with regards to developers making vague promises with the hopes that the player will continue to stick on until whatever feature it is is released, assuming it is at all.
I stuck Mortal Online in because it is indeed the poster child of the reaction, but not necessarily all factors of the cause considering how newly released it is. Although MMO Fallout didn’t exist at the time, I was closely following the months leading up to the launch of Warhammer Online and Age of Conan. In both of those cases, the populations of the game plummeted following release, especially given that both of these titles broke a record on pre-orders. Although players were disappointed at their purchase, they simply wrote it up as a $50 loss and moved on.
Mortal Online got the short end of the stick because of pre-release fear rather than hype, especially when one staff member talked about their troubles with funding, that caused some players to issue charge backs out of fear that Star Vault was bound to go bankrupt before the game ever launched. Other players saw what they believed to be an irresponsible length of delays, and yes, a great number just rode on the bandwagon with the mantra that “I’ll preorder it, and if I don’t like it I can always do a charge back and troll the forums about how I got my cash back.”
Ultimately I believe Mortal Online became the poster child for this because Star Vault is a tiny company that has seen a lot of stumbles, and people decided that even if they were in the wrong, there was little to no chance of retaliation from a company with pockets so thin that they were selling pre-orders in order to fund the beta.
Here at MMO Fallout I stand up to core principles that I never give a disincentive to trying out a title. The closest you will find to reviews here are the month-in-review articles I do where I give short, one or two sentence thoughts about the MMOs that I am playing at the time. I could increase my hits by a mile by converting MMO Fallout into a website where I plaster ads, talk about why x company wants to rip you off, review MMOs based off of twenty minutes of gameplay, call John Smedley the devil, make funny photoshops of Bill Roper, and generally jump on the troll bandwagon, but I would rather give players the avenue to form their own opinions.
I crack wise-ass jokes about companies and their games, but at the end of the day you will always find me encouraging people to try out the game, no matter what the content of the article, and regularly blast trolls. I recommend people try the game out for themselves, rather than make their decision based off of a review, or something someone wrote on a forum, which is why I regularly post sales, trial information, and more avenues on how to get into MMOs for the lowest price possible. I suggest you read the following, along with the rest of MMO Fallout:
I’m not a man without morals, so I apologize to the Mortal Online community that the original article ended up coming across as a misdirected, poorly sourced flame pit. I rarely follow up articles like this, and hopefully this long-winded response will tie up some loose ends.
To expect an MMO to launch with no down time is ridiculously out of line. Despite the utilization of closed beta, open beta, and finally head start, the servers that run an MMO are usually ground down to the core in the opening month. Lag, random crashes, and more plague the game and launch issues are so common that the rule of thumb with MMOs is that those who are not patient should not become early adopters.
Now, I may come off as being a little more brute than necessary. Server crashes are often fixed in the first few days of launch, and lag disperses as players move out from more crowded areas. Occasionally, however, the server hits hurdles that bring the game down on a regular basis. As a recent example, Darkfall last year had a several month period where it was virtually impossible to buy the game. Those of you who remember World of Warcraft’s launch are probably in the fetal position underneath your desks right now. In many of these cases, the developers ask for the hand of forgiveness by compensating players for lost game-time.
Mortal Online’s servers have not been doing well since launch, and saying that is an understatement. Maerlyn, of Star Vault, announced that there is compensation coming for players, that is being decided by management. While they are still working on fixing the server stability issues, for now the servers will be staffed all day long in order to allow for a manual reboot in the case of a crash, which will cut down on the duration the servers are offline following a crash.
More on Mortal Online’s compensation model when it appears.
MMO Fallout 