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The Turbine billing system has attained sentience (not really)
We hope you've got a little extra money squirreled away in your bank account because the Turbine billing system is hungry. It seems that some players were charged a bit more than usual for their Dungeons and Dragons Online accounts this week, some of them as many as 100 times their normal VIP fee. TurbineTolero took to the forums to clarify the issue: This impacted a limited number of players after the maintenance work, and we have a list of the affected users. We're working with our partners to make sure that over charges are reversed. You do not need to contact us to receive help, but if you have any questions you are welcome to call or send a ticket (phone is 1-855-WBGAMES and tickets contact can be done via http://support.turbine.com). Our sympathies extend to those affected more than passingly by the bug. [Thanks to Marc for the tip!]
Status Board updated with bugfixes, performance improvements
Panic's well-received Status Board app has been updated to version 1.1, and as you might imagine, it's mostly a bugfix update. The biggest issue fixed was probably a bug with sending standard video out, but that should be all taken care of according to Panic (sending HD video out still requires an in-app purchase). The Calendar List panel also deals with resizing much better, and there are now options for either Celsius or Farenheit listings for each Weather panel you have showing. If you're enjoying Status Board, you may also want to check out our five surprising uses for the app, or take a look at some of the other widgets users have been putting together for the service. Status Board is wonderfully designed, but the app itself is really just a container. It's up to you to fill it up with whatever you'd like to be updated about. If you haven't gotten Status Board for your iPad yet, you can grab it from the App Store for US$9.99. That's a premium price, but Panic clearly put a lot of work into this one-of-a-kind utility.
A small number of Apple TVs eligible for replacement due to Wi-Fi issues
Apple has emailed a note to Apple Store and AppleCare employees as well as authorized resellers stating that a small number of third-generation Apple TVs have an issue with Wi-Fi and are eligible for replacement free of charge up to two years after the device was purchased. Information supplied to the 9to5Mac website mentions that the affected Apple TV products "might experience one of these Wi-Fi related connectivity issues: Cannot locate network, Unable to join network, Dropped or intermittent connection." Serial numbers must be within a specified range in order for the device to be eligible for replacement: The last four letters of the serial number must be DRHN The third and fourth alphanumeric characters must contain one of these pairs: H9, HC, HD, HF, HG, HH, HJ, HK, HL, HM, HN, HP, HQ, HR, HT, HV, HW, HX, J1, J2, J3, J4, J5, J6, J7, J8, J9 Service providers are asked to make sure that the 3rd-generation Apple TV is running software version 5.2.1 or later, eliminate sources of potential Wi-Fi interference and isolate the issue to the Apple TV. If the symptoms still exist, then Apple will replace the unit.
Payback 2 goes free-to-play
Payback 2 arrived on the App Store late last year. It's the sequel to a game called Payback that was sort of a Grand Theft Auto for iOS (before Grand Theft Auto for iOS was actually released). Payback 2 added online multiplayer and a new "custom mode," and as of today, it has gone free-to-play, which means you can now pick it up for zero dollars. The game's seen plenty of updates since its initial release. Just recently, the controls were tuned up, and plenty of bugs have been fixed and extra options added in. By going free, the dev tells us, Payback 2 should attract an influx of new players, which means the multiplayer modes should be well-populated and ready to go. If you haven't given Payback 2 a try, now's the best time to do it.
Fallen Earth rolls out the '13 Vandal
April Fools in the wasteland of Fallen Earth is just like our holiday, except that pranks tend to be a lot more radioactive and fatal than ours. But just as funny, y'know? What isn't a joke is the new Fallen Earth state of the game post, in which the team unveils the latest car coming to the game: the Vandal. The Vandal is a decked-out car with as much style as it has armor. While the model on display was a uniformly plain gray vehicle, the devs promise that there will be several different paint jobs available when it rolls off the assembly line. The team is also working on resolving issues with Blood Sports; it says that these issues should be resolved soon if they aren't already.
Defiance team prioritizing fixes for crashes, lag
The excitement, fun, chaos, and occasional frustration that swirls around every MMO launch is squarely on Defiance's shoulders this week, so Trion Worlds Executive Producer Nathan Richardsson is back with a follow-up to yesterday's post to discuss what the team is currently addressing. Richardsson says that the team has to be agile and that its priorities change on a daily basis. Because of this, today's critical issues are different from yesterday's; the team is working on game server crashes, lag, patching woes, and client crashes. He promised that yesterday's issues were still being worked on, just that these were more important for the time being. He did say that console account linking with the Arkhunter website should be resolved, and that the team's already put out a couple of patches in the last 24 hours with another one on the way to make the play experience more smooth.
Trion Worlds promises that it's addressing critical Defiance issues
Executive Producer Nathan Richardsson has mixed emotions in regards to Defiance's release. "This first day of launch of Defiance has been as awesome as we expected it to be," he wrote in a state of the game post. "And by awesome, I mean we're neck deep addressing all the issues that come up when you scale something up to a million people from a test environment of thousands." Richardsson promised that the large Trion team is working hard to "update, patch, fix, and improve" Defiance post-launch. The most critical problems that he identifies are connectivity problems, missing pre-order items, the scaling of bosses and arkfalls, and broken chat and VOIP. "We appreciate the trust that you are showing us by coming with us and we will address all these issues," he concludes. Speaking of awesome, check out the main theme to Defiance, composed by Bear McCreary, after the jump!
Devil Survivor Overclocked EU busted, Ghostlight working on it
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor Overclocked on 3DS has a few game-breaking issues buried within its European version, which launched on March 29, developer Ghostlight announced."The game will hang/freeze if you summon a demon during battle or if an auction house seller lies about the stats," Ghostlight wrote on its blog. "These problems mean that currently you will experience difficulties that may prevent you from completing the game. Currently we are doing everything we can to fix these problems as quickly as possible so that you will be able to enjoy DSO in full."Ghostlight is working with publisher Atlus and Nintendo on getting a patch out. Devil Survivor Overclocked was originally scheduled to launch in the EU on April 5, but was pushed up to March 29. The US and Japanese versions of Devil Survivor Overclocked hit in fall 2011.
In patch 5.2, automatic flight path discovery is a thing of the past
If you've been on the leveling treadmill -- or if you frequent the WoW forums -- chances are you've noticed that after patch 5.2, you stopped automatically discovering new flight paths. For those of you (myself included) who loved this feature, it's unfortunately an intentional change. According to everyone's favorite floating skull, Zarhym, the auto-discovery of flight paths -- introduced way back in patch 4.2 in June 2011 -- was never intentional. @autumnsunxo @bubblepuffle Unfortunately, you weren't provided correct info. Auto-discovery was never intended. Post to explain coming. - Zarhym (@CM_Zarhym) March 17, 2013 So why's it waited so long? Again, according to Zarhym, it was a complicated problem to crack -- and low on the priority list. @reaper2352 Until 5.2 we couldn't fix it without erasing what paths any character had discovered pre-Cataclysm. It required new tech. - Zarhym (@CM_Zarhym) March 19, 2013 While I mourn the loss of what was one of my favorite Cataclysm-era features -- the run through the Wetlands to pick up the flight path at Menethil Harbor used to be a killer, literally -- I can't complain too much. After all, with mounts starting at level 20, hearthstones on a 15 minute cooldown (with the right guild perks), and flight paths scattered conveniently around the world, getting around is easier than it's ever been, even without automatically discovering new flight paths.
OS X 10.8.3 fixes Pixelmator 'restarting' bug
In December we reported that a bug in OS X 10.8.2 would sometimes cause a user's machine to restart automatically when the user was intensively using Pixelmator. Pixelmator took the brunt of the blame for the bug, but actually the issue was caused by NVIDIA GeForce graphics card drivers and not by Pixelmator's code. The company was stuck with the bug until Apple got around to fixing it. Now that OS X 10.8.3 has been released, Pixelmator has announced that the restarting bug has been resolved. From a blog posting on their site: Since the release of the OS X 10.8.3 update last Thursday, we've been thoroughly testing Pixelmator on it. We can finally confirm that Pixelmator's biggest problem (caused by NVIDIA graphics card drivers) is now solved! For that, we owe a tremendous thanks to the guys at Apple and NVIDIA for listening to us and probably many other developers, and then doing something about it. Go ahead, everyone, and download the OS X 10.8.3 update to your Macs! Pixelmator is US$14.99 on the Mac App Store.
Chaos Theory: Hoppin' TSW's train to Cairo
It doesn't matter one iota what I had planned to talk about today, regardless of how phenomenal it may have been. The fact that The Last Train to Cairo has pulled into the station means I'm hopping on it! Yes, The Secret World's latest update hit this week with barely a day's warning and (thanks to my lifetime membership), I've been sinking my teeth into it since last Thursday. However, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that I have not boarded the actual train part of the adventure. I had no interest in blowing through the new content in just a couple of days; I prefer to savor the new goodies. But I have delved pretty deeply into it and have a experienced a fair share of Issue #6. So how's the ride so far? Keep reading for a test drive, then come watch as Creative Director Joel Bylos joins me for a livestream tour on Thursday, March 21st at 11:00 a.m. EDT on Massively TV.
The Soapbox: No sympathy for cheating
Some years ago, a good friend of mine was chatting with me after he had received a three-day suspension from Final Fantasy XI. "I don't see why they suspended me," he said, with what I assume was an exaggerated shrug and a hang-dog expression. "I mean, I was using FleeTool, but I was just hacking my movement to be faster in cities. It's not like I was really cheating." "So you were using a known cheating tool." "Yeah, but just in the cities." What followed were several sentences from my end filled with so much profanity that attempting to type them out here would make it look as if my vocabulary consisted almost solely of the word "redacted." He had been expecting some sympathy from me, some compassion for his plight. As it turned out, I didn't have any. If you get nailed for cheating, you deserve exactly what you get.
Chaos Theory: The Secret World needs bug spray in Egypt, stat!
Talk about timing. Recently, you all voted that I continue my adventures on my Templar. The timing was impeccable because right in the middle of that vote, The Secret World's next issue was announced. And where will this update be focused? Why, in Egypt -- right where my Templar just so happens to be! Fortuitous for me, to be sure. So I have been (mostly) happily blasting my way through the desert with a shotgun at my hip and a rifle slung across my back, enjoying new-to-me content and anticipating the upcoming new-to-everyone goodies. But not all timing has been good. As mentioned, I've been mostly enjoying my tales in the desert. Why the caveat? There's a bit of an infestation in Egypt, and I am not talking about the beetles that want to devour Said. The place is crawling with bugs! Besides swarming with giant locusts and their tentacled proboscises, Egypt also appears to have a higher prevalence of glitches. I have never encountered so many bugs in all of TSW as I have in a couple of days in that zone. And all at a time when the dev team is dealing with relocation and hasn't been able to jump right in and douse the area with a giant can of Raid. The timing is particularly bad because it's unfortunately right when all eyes are turning to Egypt on the eve of Issue #6. How this release plays out will have lasting affects on the game and how folks view it.
WAR weathers difficult weekend, compensates players
Warhammer Online certainly has seen better weekends than this past one. Because of a nasty bug that caused immense amounts of lag spikes and zone crashes, Mythic was forced to take WAR's servers down while the team worked to isolate and fix the problem. The good news is that the issue has been fixed via a new build and the studio is working on a "compensation package" for those affected. The goodie package includes 10 days of game time, a golden writ, a seven-day XP and RP booster, a special title, and 10 lesser bone wards. The team is still checking some details in regard to the compensation period but will be letting players know when and for whom this package will be available.
The Daily Grind: What quest has frustrated you more than any other?
I have a relatively acrimonious relationship with most of The Secret World's investigation missions for reasons too ornate to detail here. Hell and Bach, however, deserves special mention. It's not that it's one of the game's worse examples, but that the actual mechanics behind clearing the mission are very finnicky. You have to click a series of symbols in just the right way to spell out a phrase, but the symbols are close together, it's easy to miss a click, and to top it off it won't work if you have the reference guide open as you do so. For all-time frustration, that mission ramped up pretty highly, although I enjoyed it once I cleared it. But it's not about what frustrates me, it's about what frustrates you. So what quest has frustrated you more than any other? Was it unclear in its objectives, or were its clearly stated objectives just dizzyingly hard to actually accomplish? Or was it something even more mundane, like a Final Fantasy XI quest that irritated you because you could never find the other people to do it with? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Obscure OS X Mountain Lion bug makes many apps crash
TUAW reader Don McC pointed us to this Next Web write-up about an obscure Mountain Lion crash. If you type File: followed by /// in many apps, they will crash. There are 8 characters in total and the F must be capitalized. I tested this and managed to crash a bunch of apps. Echofon, QuickTime, Safari, and Notes all fell before the 8-character text, although Firefox did not . Most amusingly, when I attempted to open the crash logs in TextEdit, the logs killed the app! So what's going on? Here's what my system log reports: Feb 2 22:18:37 Esopus-Spitzenburg.local TextEdit[8417]: assertion on /SourceCache/DataDetectorsCore/DataDetectorsCore-269.1/Sources/PushDown/DDResultExtraction.c:1576 "CFStringHasPrefix(urlVal, CFSTR("file://"))" failed :wrong extraction: File:/// As the Next Web explains, it's an issue with a built in assertion. Assertions allow programmers to mandate expected behavior, validating input to assure its correctness. In this case, automated data detectors see what appears to be a malformed URL and send off an application exception reporting the internal inconsistency. The exception crashes the application because there's no built-in handler. I tried out the recommended solution (disabling spelling correction and symbol substitution) but it didn't work for me personally. TUAW submitted a bug report to Apple.
Dead or Alive 5 PS3 patch bugs out, Xbox 360 patch delayed to Feb.
Dead or Alive 5 patch 1.03 hit the PS3 on January 22 and was originally scheduled to launch on Xbox 360 on January 29, but that's not going to happen now. The patch has a bug that affects stagger escapes and "prevents users from enjoying the intended design of DOA5," and the Xbox 360 version and a corrected PS3 patch are now scheduled for February, Team Ninja says on Twitter.The proper patch 1.03 will launch at the same time as the Hotties Swimwear and Zack Island Stage DLC packs for Xbox 360 next month."Our deepest regrets for the inconvenience this has caused and we appreciate your continued support," Team Ninja tweets.
Walking Dead XBLM codes being given to players with disc version issues
Telltale Games is issuing The Walking Dead XBLM codes to players affected by the Xbox 360 retail version's "severe hitching." Posting on Telltale's forums, the developer narrowed down issues of "unacceptable freezing or stuttering" to those playing the disc version on a 4GB Xbox 360 with no internal hard drive. The post notes acquiring an internal hard drive resolves the issues, but goes on to say Telltale is giving XBLM codes to those who cannot acquire a hard drive, as long as they supply proof of purchase.The other major issue which cropped up last month saw some players unable to start episodes after the first one; upon trying to load Episode 2, for example, they'd find themselves restarting Episode 1. In another forum post, Telltale says it's submitted a remedying patch to Microsoft which, once approved, is being made available as a title update. The post doesn't note when the update is expected to be available. In the meantime, Telltale suggests how players can confront two different variations of the issue.For those who have online-enabled Xbox Live accounts and are playing the retail version, Telltale says playing the game while connected to Live should remedy the problem. While Telltale doesn't have a guaranteed workaround for the "rare" variation in which save data can be overwritten, the developer notes some users had success with recovering affected save files by copying them across from Slot 1 to Slot 3. This apparently leaves you at the start of the episode you were last playing, but with all previous choices still saved.[Thanks, Johnny]
iOS Do Not Disturb bug gives some users the gift of silence on New Year's Day (update: horribly timed video)
If you're running iOS 6, your smartphone, media player or tablet may be taking a bit longer than usual to shake that post-party hangover. Users are reporting that the latest Apple OS' Do Not Disturb feature remains engaged even after its scheduled period has ended, with the misstep linked to January 1st. As you can see in the screenshot above, the feature fails to flip off automatically, as confirmed by the crescent icon beside the current time -- adjusting the date does seem to offer a temporary fix. When enabled, Do Not Disturb flips the device to silent mode, so you'll need to keep an eye on the screen in order to catch phone calls, text messages and other notifications. The tool does not disable alarms set through the native Clock app, however. There doesn't appear to be an official fix available, but if you're experiencing this issue, you can cancel that last-minute Genius Bar appointment -- Apple reps aren't likely to have a solution just yet. And, if you've been trying to reach an iPhone owner without success, expect a call back only once they've had a chance to check their device. New Year's bugs seem to be an annual tradition at Apple -- the alarm is a frequent target, and while this is the first year for an extended DND, the feature just launched in late 2012 with iOS 6. [Thanks, Martyn] Update: So, apparently Apple didn't get the memo. Cupertino's latest iPhone 5 ad, titled "Dream" and embedded after the break, transports you to the wonderful world of Do Not Disturb. Venus and Serena Williams are playing ping-pong and everything is white. So fun. And when was the ad first released? Just this morning. Didn't you get the notification?
DUST 514's latest build lets you bring the pain from EVE Online allies
If you've been waiting for DUST 514 to show off its integration with EVE Online, your wait is over. Now when you're in the midst of pitched fighting for an area, you don't have to wade through enemy fire and struggle against overwhelming odds. No, you can just call in your allies from outer space, bring down an orbital bombardment in the area, and take possession of whatever survived the initial blast. That's the big takeaway from the game's new build, Chromosome, and it's one that's very welcome. Admittedly the orbital bombardments are currently limited to players on the test server, but seeing as the game is still in beta that's rather appropriate. The latest development blog discussing the update also mentions that this will be the last major push before open beta, and while it's not as flashy as destroying your foes from orbit, there have been a number of bug fixes and improvements. So there's a lot to like in this update, but the best thing is raining death on your enemies with arsenals from the heavens. At least, it's the best thing until the other side has better friends.
