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Global Chat: January 1-7, 2012
We love hearing what the Massively community has to say. What better way to salute the smartest reader opinions and posts than by sharing them in a weekly column? Join us every Sunday morning for Global Chat, where we do just that! This week we've got a poke at the lighter side of game bugs, some thoughts on development costs and how they affect us in the end, and some compliments (we always love those). Ready to see what they are? Click past the cut and let's get started!
This Week In MMO: Interrupting dance edition
It's time for yet another episode of This Week In MMO, and you'll never guess what the topic du jour is. Well, unless you guessed Star Wars: The Old Republic (again), in which case you would be correct. Much discussion is had about the hilarity that was SWTOR's /getdown exploit, which allowed players to interrupt enemy mobs by... dancing at them. Meanwhile, Final Fantasy XIV will resume charging subscription fees tomorrow, January 6th, so if you're still subscribed and don't want to pay, you'd better cancel now. And lastly, on a note of complete and utter excess, the gang reports that one gamer (who we imagine spends most of his time swimming in his money like Scrooge McDuck) has spent $16,000 US on an in-game sword for Snail Games' F2P (irony!) title, Age of Wulin. The kicker? The game isn't even out yet. For the full video, just click on past the cut and have a look.
The MMO Report: Cool balloon bro edition
This week on The MMO Report -- where everyone prefers "a blaster over hokey religions and ancient weapons" -- Casey tries to make the most of a slow MMO news week. He reports that the fallout over Fallout Online has settled, Multiverse (the Buffy/Firefly MMO platform) is dead in the water, CCP is launching EVE Online character avatars into orbit via balloon, and Star Wars: The Old Republic is boasting 350,000 concurrent users. There's no mailbag this week, he relates, because everyone's too busy playing lightsabers with their friends, which is probably true. He also thanks BioWare for teaching him how to /getdown... and I think you should tune in at the five-minute mark to see his moves for yourself. The video's tucked behind the break for your amusement!
SWTOR goes bug hunting with 1.0.2 and prognosticates PvP improvements
With the abundance of bugs and glitches in Star Wars: The Old Republic, fans are looking to James Ohlen's promise of weekly patches to shore up the faults. Yesterday we saw patch 1.0.2 go live with some -- but certainly not all -- of these fixes, as well as an increase in the PvP lockbox rewards and allowing players to emote while mounted. In addition to yesterday's patch, today BioWare plans to roll out an emergency fix to address a few important issues: players crashing to desktop at character select, a problem with the chat channels in which they would stop functioning for some people, and the now-infamous /getdown bug. PvP Lead Gabe Amatangelo also emerged from the BioWare fortress to chat about plans for the future of the game's PvP combat. According to Amatangelo, the team is working on level 50 brackets for warzones, vastly improving open world PvP on Ilum, a new same-faction vs. same-faction warzone, team vs. team queuing, ranked warzone matches, and more. He says that to date, over a million warzone matches have been played, with 39% of those matches played being Huttball and the Empire winning 53% of every match fought.
Breakdancing breaks SWTOR enemies' spirits [Updated]
We've heard of many a bug and exploit in MMOs over the years, but sometimes there comes along one special case that is so entertaining you can't help but wonder if some mischievous developer planned it on purpose. Such is the case with Star Wars: The Old Republic's latest glitch, where players busting a groove actually affects combat. According to several sources that confirmed this, by typing /getdown during combat (a dance move) enemies attacking you will be continually interrupted -- including bosses. Perhaps the bad guys were so amazed that players could do the moonwalk that they become stunned out of awe? If you're hoping to wield your incredible dance powers for either the light or dark side of the Force, know that BioWare is fully aware of this exploit. Considering that the studio removed all mentions of the bug on the forums, we can assume that a fix is coming to the game sooner rather than later. [Thanks to Kaizlu for the tip!] [UPDATE: The Reverend Shaw Moore has arrived in SWTOR and accounts are being banned for getting down. Accounts taking advantage of this bug are being sanctioned with the explanation that the offending characters "participated in abusing game mechanics to prevent enemy NPCs from targeting the user", and that "dancing is currently not permitted outside of special Dance Zones."] [UPDATE #2: BioWare sent us a note saying that the previous update was based on a troll posting to Reddit and that this is a "fake ban email."]
