guild-vs-guild
Latest
Masthead Studios CEO discusses Earthrise's sandbox philosophy
It looks like the sci-fi MMO genre is going to experience quite an influx of new titles in the months and years to come. Beyond the more standard sci-fi MMOs we've reported on in the past, one that's caught our attention at Massively is the upcoming post-apocalyptic title, Earthrise. It seems that beta testing is going to begin "in autumn", as confirmed by Masthead Studios CEO Atanas Atanasov in an interview with Polish MMO-centric gaming site The Art of MMO. While the interview brought to light some interesting revelations about Earthrise as a sandbox MMO, it also nailed down some details such as the system requirements to run the title: minimum requirements are 2 GHz CPU, 1024 MB RAM and 256 MB VRAM video card supporting shader model v3.0, according to Atanasov. But the interview also gives confirmations about guild-based PvP (which Atanasov refers to as 'Guild-vs-Guild' or 'GvG'), character advancement, and the roleplaying opportunities he sees being available to players in the Earthrise sandbox. Check out the entire English version of the interview over at The Art of MMO for more on this title.
Major Guild Wars update drastically changes GvG
Guild Wars players have been anxiously awaiting this large skill balance for a long time, but many weren't expecting this much of a change. Not only have many key skills been buffed, but the nerfing of Ursan Blessing has finally happened. Plus, Guild versus Guild battles have been drastically changed. As with any gameplay changes, there are those who love it, and those who hate it.The key component to the GvG changes involves the complete removal of the Victory or Death finale effect. This means the Guild Battle NPCs no longer walk to the flag stand and the Guild Lord's health has been reduced to 1680, yet he gets a 300 max health boost for the rest of the game when a team obtains a morale boost. What does this all mean for GvG? Basically, previous strategies will need a complete revamp to be effective anymore. This should be interesting for those guilds who have dominated the ladder for so long.
Guild Wars Guru GvG Challenge 2008 starts this weekend
If you've thought about joining the Guild Wars Guru GvG Contest, but just haven't gotten around to it yet, you still have time! Guild registration will close tomorrow at 12PM EDT and there are still a few spots left.If you're unfamiliar with this contest, it is a guild vs guild battle arranged into 5 separate divisions, much like tournaments of the past. There is a division for premier guilds, gold guilds, silver guilds, bronze guilds and casual. The tournament will take place on Saturday, July 12th and the prizes are certainly nothing to scoff at. The grand prizes include a Shiro'ken mini-pet, 500 Tournament Reward Points and a Compaq Presario laptop. Well, at least the mini-pet and reward points are cool.
Dueling as a group or raid
Here's an interesting idea from Shaela over on the EU forums: group duels. Right now, duels aren't a huge part of the game for anyone but lowbies and immature folks looking to pick a fight -- they're very rarely done right, and there's no reward except for a zone-wide shoutout given in the event they're won. But the system could probably use an update, and group or guild duels are a great idea -- all that guild drama could be worked out ingame as whole raids or guilds could clash against each other.Slorkuz weasels his way out of a real answer by saying that this is already possible in game: places like the Gurubashi Arena do let whole groups of people fight each other however they like. He also says that Blizzard has no plans to add any features like this, but he's slightly wrong -- we did get told at Blizzcon that they were going to do more along the lines of Guild vs. Guild combat, if only in the existing BGs. This idea, along with guild housing, is still in the works somewhere, at least.Of course, with any player interaction feature like this, there is always the opportunity for exploitation -- some players have probably refused enough duel invites in their day without having to worry about any more, and whenever you have someone "speaking" (as in, accepting or rejecting a duel) for a group in terms of PvP, you can run into trouble. But for those who really would like to know whether their guild could beat another guild, or just which raid is better than another one, a feature like this would definitely be welcomed.
Corum Online's leveling dungeons
MMOFury has a short interview up with Elliot Coward of Corum Online, a free-to-play, microtransaction-funded MMO (from the same company that runs Flyff and a few more originally Korean games). Corum has a nice little twist though -- in this game, not only do players level up, but so do dungeons. During the week, dungeons that have more players going through them will "level up," and get harder monsters to join, and players can even take over dungeons and gain rewards for their control. The Wikipedia page on the game says that things inside are pretty much taken over by high powered groups and guilds, but considering the size of the game, there's still quite a few dungeons that are uncontrolled. Sounds interesting.To that end, Coward says that the devs are currently working on beefing up the guild system, including building up some systems for guild vs. guild play, and they're always trying to push out more dungeons -- Coward says that "MMOG players can burn through content like a hot knife through butter." Sounds about right to us.
