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TERA community play event coming in March
After a brief sojourn to celebrate the Korean launch of Bluehole Studio's TERA, it's back to the grind for the En Masse Entertainment team tasked with bringing the fantasy action MMO to western shores. January saw En Masse achieve a significant milestone in relation to the game's final server hardware configuration, and the focus is now shifting towards a community play event tentatively scheduled for March. The event will serve two purposes: a test of the new hardware and an opportunity for players and people flitting about the periphery of the TERA community to get an updated look at the game. Event participants will be noticeably free of NDAs, so we're expecting a good bit of new TERA info and impressions over the next little while. En Masse will host a second event "a couple of months later," this time focusing on account management and support systems, with the North American beta to follow. Said beta will be "a multi-part odyssey" according to the official TERA website.
MapleStory hits more than 136,000 concurrent players
Concurrent users are one of those interesting things to track in MMOs -- while they're mostly an indication of how robust the hardware supporting the servers happens to be, they're also a decent look at how many players are enjoying the game at any given moment. MapleStory has managed to set a new record for itself, with 136,000 players simultaneously active in the North American version of the game. That's nearly double the previous high-water mark back in July of 2009. Daniel Kim, the CEO of Nexon America, issued a statement concurrent with the record: "This milestone represents a new high point for MapleStory and is a testament to the growing popularity of the game into its fifth year." Said milestone is also coming on the heels of the first two parts of the Big Bang update, with a third part set to hit the game in early 2011. That means a great deal of new content and two new classes for MapleStory players to enjoy, which turns out to be good news for Nexon.
APB Reloaded blog talks hackers and cheaters
Bjorn Book-Larsson has a lot to say about APB Reloaded, the forthcoming reanimation of APB's corpse, courtesy of free-to-play publisher GamersFirst. Book-Larsson, the company's COO/CTO, has been blogging about the resurgent title for a few weeks now, and veteran players and prospective newbs alike will want to take a gander at his latest entry. The blog focuses on APB's anti-cheat protections and, while it doesn't go into great detail for obvious reasons, Book-Larsson does make a decent case for APB Reloaded's level playing field. First off, he points out that the server-driven game is "more resilient to cheaters than most other F2P MMOs" due to the fact that F2P titles generally don't spend the same kind of money on infrastructure in comparison to your average P2P title. "In APB we are going to run a giant experiment to basically determine if hardware costs/specs have progressed far enough to make F2P server-driven games financially viable," he says. Book-Larsson goes on to discuss the aim-bot problem, as well as various denial-of-service attacks that GamersFirst has dealt with over the past few years. It's an interesting read for anyone curious about APB Reloaded or MMO security, and also offers a humorous bit of insight relating to the over-reporting of cheaters.
