Massively

Aion announces holiday items for players

by Rubi Bayer Nov 10th 2009 (52 minutes ago)

NCsoft

The holiday season is approaching, and NCsoft is leading the charge for the annual rush of holiday celebrations and items in MMOs. Yesterday they announced the Aion Holiday Ascension Pack for those of you who haven't purchased the game yet, or are hoping to receive it as a gift.

The Ascension Pack comes with an extra holiday bonus in the form of four gifts to give your character a little boost and shine up his or her appearance a bit. It contains 20 Lesser Life Potions, 15 Lodas Amulets, 15 Lesser Running Scrolls, and a special dye for your character. You'll get a different dye color depending on where you purchase your Ascension Pack, so you may want to choose your purchase place with that in mind.

Amazon – Hot Orange Dye
Best Buy – Mustard Dye
Game Stop – True Black Dye
Target – True Red Dye
Wal-Mart – True White Dye

Aion is only the first game to begin announcing their holiday plans - we're sure much more will be coming soon, and we're looking forward to it!

EVE's Quarterly Economic Newsletter focuses on impact of anti-RMT operation

by James Egan Nov 10th 2009 (1 hour ago)

EVE

CCP

One of the strengths of the sandbox game EVE Online is its player-driven economy, which developer CCP Games monitors through a small team of researchers headed up by Lead Economist Dr. Eyjólfur Guðmundsson (aka CCP Dr.EyjoG). They observe all manner of player interactions and sift through a tremendous amount of data to track how EVE Online's economy changes over time. Their findings are presented to the playerbase (or to anyone curious about virtual economies) in the form of Quarterly Economic Newsletters (QEN). CCP released the 3rd Quarter 2009 report this week, which gives us a look at player demographics and the most popular ships flown by those players. (It's interesting to note that the most popular ship in the game is now the Hulk, a mining vessel which has usurped the Raven battleship as EVE's most flown ship, while Black Ops battleships are EVE's least flown ships.)

This latest QEN also gives various price indices and Market Snapshots, which chart the volumes of a number of popular items traded on the open market. CCP also shows the impact "Operation: Unholy Rage" -- their anti-RMT initiative -- has had on EVE Online's economy with over 18,000 (paying) accounts banned to date. Dr.EyjoG writes, "Unholy Rage taught us a great deal about RMT operations in EVE. We now have a much clearer picture of the extent of operations and the tools and methods they use."

Electric Playground sits down with Blizzard to talk Cataclysm

by Seraphina Brennan Nov 10th 2009 (2 hours ago)

WoW

The gang over at Electric Playground just recently wrapped up their "Week of WoW" segment with a fitting conclusion -- a look into Cataclysm with Frank Pearce, Blizzard's Executive Vice President of Product Development, and J. Allan Brack, the production director on Cataclysm.

While the interview doesn't cover new information, it does give insight as to why Blizzard has chosen to go back and recreate the mainland of Azeroth. Thanks to lessons learned in The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard wants to take their new knowledge and apply it to their old zones, hence the diversity and changing of quests that Cataclysm is bringing to the table.

But don't take our word for it! Check out Electric Playground's interview for the full story.

Global Agenda to feature Vivox voice integration

by James Egan Nov 10th 2009 (3 hours ago)

Massively has been following the growing prevalence of MMOFPS games poised to enter the market in the coming months and years, with the most notable of these being Global Agenda. The game's developer Hi-Rez Studios got in touch with us today to let us know about their partnership with Vivox, who will provide voice features for Global Agenda. Vivox will enable push-to-talk voice chat and in-game news broadcasts "that describe key victories and events associated with Global Agenda's persistent territory control gameplay," states Hi-Rez Studios. An additional (subscriber-only) feature will be out-of-game voice chat that will keep agency members in touch when they're not fragging their rivals. According to Hi-Rez, "Players can use a variety of access methods including the Vivox Web Voice within the toolbar controls, Vivox Voice on Facebook, or calling into a specified chat channel from their phone."

Hi-Rez also announced they will hold a dev chat via Facebook on Wednesday, November 18th, from 10-11pm (Eastern), which will require participants to download the Vivox Voice app for Facebook. A Facebook group announcement from Hi-Rez today states that the dev chat will be limited to 75 people who will pose questions to the Global Agenda devs.

Where in the Champions Online world is Carmel Santiago?

by Rubi Bayer Nov 10th 2009 (4 hours ago)

Champions Online

Cryptic

That is the big question in Champions Online. Ring any bells? Community member Mr. Funsocks began this contest yesterday and plans to continue it on a weekly basis, offering up a pretty nice prize in exchange for your time. Just meet up at Club Caprice at the appointed time and pay your 50n entrance fee. The money goes into a pot along with an additional 5g from Mr. Funsocks. The first person to find this strangely familiar person wins the pot. There are a few rules, including "no excuses", that you can read in the forum thread along with details on where, when, and how.

The contest thread sparked an interesting discussion exploring copyright, fair-use, parody, and Cryptic's wishy-washy policies regarding these issues. It will be interesting to see how that conversation plays out, but in the meantime big thanks and kudos to Mr. Funsocks for creating what looks like a great community event.

Leaked test feedback offers insights into Linden Lab design processes

by Tateru Nino Nov 10th 2009 (5 hours ago)

Back, just before Halloween, a Linden Lab staffer accidentally sent an email intended for internal circulation to a mailing list containing quite a number of Second Life users. We were sent a copy a few minutes later, and the email was widely circulated among developers of third-party Second Life viewers by Halloween.

What caught people's eye about the email was how harsh it was when it came to describing aspects of the upcoming Second Life Viewer 2.0 user-interface (the key feature of that software). It certainly didn't pull many punches leveling criticism at various design choices that were obviously in evidence in the evaluation version that had come up for testing.

And for just that reason we are, after a little thought, rather heartened by it.

One Shots: We could use a vacation here

by Krystalle Voecks Nov 10th 2009 (6 hours ago)

AoC

FunCom

With the chilly, rainy winter settling in for much of the northern hemisphere, scenes like today's One Shots from Age of Conan are welcome sights. If you use those powers of imagination, you can almost imagine the balmy breezes coming in off the water as you disembark in a strange new land. Ray S. sent this great shot in of his first moments in town, and explains the scene: This is the view of Tesso village in Wild Lands of Zelata that greeted my Assassin Deltex when he was fresh off the boat from Old Tarantia in Age of Conan.

We love to look around the lands of Conan, but we need all of you players to send in your screenshots! All you have to do to show off the parts of the world you like best is to email your images to us here at oneshots AT massively DOT com. Be sure to add in your name, the name of the game, and a quick description. We'll put them out here on Massively for everyone to check out and give you the credit. Couldn't be easier!

Gallery: One Shots

The aesthetics of Black Prophecy's Genide faction

by James Egan Nov 10th 2009 (7 hours ago)

We had some good news about Black Prophecy the other day and how things are looking up for the game's developer Reakktor Media. We're hoping more info will be revealed about the game in the coming months, and now they've released a dev blog on the art direction of the game's Genide faction. Whereas the Tyi faction is a cybernetic offshoot of humanity the Genides embrace biogenetic manipulation in their pursuit of perfection. The aesthetics of what the Genides have become is the focus of Black Prophecy Art Director Nick Ebenhoch's dev diary.

Nick kicks it off by explaining the significance of the Genide faction logo and what the symbol was designed to represent. Unlike the more utilitarian Tyi faction which favors a modular complexity, the Genide's cleaner, minimalist aesthetic sense permeates everything they create. This is seen in the smooth and tall look of their various space ships, which have vertical wing orientation rather than the standard horizontal orientation typically seen on such vessels, explains Nick.

NCsoft hints at Guild Wars 2 beta in 2010, launch in 2011

by Rubi Bayer Nov 10th 2009 (8 hours ago)

NCsoft

Fans of Guild Wars have been waiting for well over two years for Guild Wars 2, ever since ArenaNet fired up the hype machine in a big way back in March of 2007. Anet announced Guild Wars 2 and Eye of the North at the same time, and anticipated that the beta for GW2 would arrive in the second half of 2008.

Since the announcement, the Guild Wars player base has become intimately familiar with various versions of the phrases "We haven't released that information" and "TBA", punctuated occasionally with new information.

While the bits of information given here and there add up to something relatively substantial, fans are still asking the big question: When? Obviously the planned 2008 beta didn't happen, and now fans will have to wait a bit longer.

CEO Jaeho Lee referred to GW2 and Blade and Soul in a recent conference call with investors: "I believe there will be certain public events in the year 2010... at least a closed beta test for those titles. Commercialisation will be expected, at this point, probably some time in the year 2011."

At least fans have plenty of time and motivation to finish filling their Hall of Monuments. Silence and delays aside, when Guild Wars 2 finally arrives, most fans trust ArenaNet to give them something well worth the wait.

The systems of battle in Champions Online

by Eliot Lefebvre Nov 10th 2009 (9 hours ago)

Champions Online

Cryptic

We've been getting a generous look under the hood of Champions Online courtesy of designer Brian Urbanek, with the second part of his system-focused developer diary now available. The first part covered the progression and improvement of a player's heroes, while this diary focuses on the mechanics of that ever-present diversion in almost every game -- combat. As one can imagine, with a game whose systems are based on a tabletop roleplaying game dating back more than twenty years, there are a lot of numbers and expressions to be thrown around.

Urbanek explains, in detail, how the team set up values for stats and durability with some baseline assumptions. They knew what they could expect for an "average" player to do in terms of damage-per-second at high levels, and they had some idea of how long they wanted each fight to last (the time cited is twenty seconds). From there, the diary goes into the balancing and scaling factors needed to ensure that players and enemies both are dealing reasonable damage and surviving for the preferrable amount of time. If you like numbers and systems, or just a clearer picture of how Champions Online works, this diary should be perfect for you, with promises of still more to come down the pipeline.