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ArcheAge restricts chat for low-level characters
Papa Trion is lowering the boom on naughty chat in ArcheAge, as the studio announced recently that it will be restricting chat accessibility for low-level characters. From now on, players will need to reach level 15 to access faction, shout, trade, need party, and nation chat channels. Presumably this is intended to combat gold-selling spam and other unwanted advertisements from free accounts. Other changes for build 4.11 include a tougher Kraken, healer weapons as quest rewards, and larger warehouses. Trion says that over two million players registered for the sandpark MMO. [Thanks to Varth for the tip!]
Elder Scrolls Online disables forum PMs, encourages outing gold sellers
The Elder Scrolls Online has disabled PMs... on it's official forums, at least. ZeniMax is attempting to combat gold-spammers, and it's going a step further by setting aside a portion of its Code of Conduct and encouraging players to publicly identify suspected spammers. We request that anyone who has received a private message they believe to be from a gold spammer to post the sender's username as a comment in this thread. As we have disabled PMs, you will not be able to access your inbox on the forums, but if you received an e-mail notification to alert you to the PM you received, the sender's username should be in that e-mail. Please note that our Community Code of Conduct does prohibit naming and shaming. However, in an effort to expedite the process of identifying and banning the spammers' accounts, we are making an exception for this situation. We will investigate each alleged spammer account individually to avoid false reports. [Thanks alleomurand!]
The Perfect Ten: First impression turn-offs
A year ago our very own Shawn "The Mittani" Schuster wrote a memorable Soapbox column around the idea that MMOs had an hour to grab his attention or else he was out the door. No, don't go read it now. You're reading this! Stay! Good reader. I concur with his point that while MMOs may ask us to experience them for the long haul, first impressions still count. And if those impressions aren't favorable right out the gate, it's not likely that we will be around for hour two, no matter how good it is. I know what you're thinking right now: "What is this itching, burning sensation between my toes?" It's Athlete's Foot, and you need to get on that ASAP. You're also thinking, "But Justin, whose opinions I respect, admire, and use to teach my children, what drives you away from MMOs when you give them a try?" Again, it's an itching, burning sensation between my toes. No, not really. It's more complicated than that -- so complicated, in fact, that it requires a 10-point presentation on what turns me off when an MMO is making a first impression. Imagine that!
The Perfect Ten: The 10 people you meet in MMO hell
"Hell is other people," the jaunty Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in No Exit. In this play, three characters are locked together in a small room, where they gradually realize that they are there to torment each other for all of eternity. Plus, there are no toilets, and that's going to get unpleasant fast. It's fun for the whole family -- get your tickets today! We've all met folks in game who leave an unpleasant taste in our mouths for a long time after. With the all of the good of social games comes the seedy underbelly (henceforth referred to as "Camden, New Jersey"), and for every stellar soul you connect with, there is another lying in wait to destroy your day. If MMO heaven is full of supportive guildies and grammatically correct chat channels, then think of MMO hell as a pick-up group gone horribly awry as you run a dungeon that never ends, a dungeon you can never quit. While we'd never voluntarily go to MMO hell, it was inevitable that some of its denizens have escaped to walk amongst us in our games even today. Who are these nefarious devils? Hit the jump to find out!
Rise and Shiny recap: Dofus
Years ago I had to find a job in my new home state of Texas. Luckily for me, my wife hooked me up with a friend who helped me get hired at Starbucks. At first, I hung my head in shame. Later, though, I enjoyed dealing with customers and the free coffee. I had a co-worker, a real chin-scratching, coffee house wanna-be intellectual who would often spend more time dreaming about some game than about getting people on their breaks. He even brought his Macbook to work to sneak in time in the game. I glanced over his shoulder one day and was delighted to see an odd-looking, cartoony, turn-based game on his screen. It turned out that the game was Dofus. I tried it immediately and fell in love with it, but that was years ago. I still found time to revisit the game, but once I started working at Massively, most of my time became dedicated to every other game in the world. Well, it's time to visit it again. During the first part of this week, though, I thought this was going to be a disaster. I stayed strong and battled my way through bot after bot, spam message after spam message, and eventually found the great game I remember. Click past the cut to see exactly what I found!
The Diamond trade gets destroyed in Runes of Magic
There's an understandable problem with selling game currency in subscription games, where it's generally considered verboten for good reason. While some subscription games will sell you things in addition to the monthly fee, there's a general sense that you should earn your advantages. But in free-to-play games that have a cash shop allowing players to purchase items directly... well, the very idea of gold selling seems kind of silly. But it can happen, and Runes of Magic has experienced a bit of a problem of late with the trade of Diamonds (their cash shop currency) for gold. The game has traditionally treated the currencies as interchangeable insofar as players with lots of Diamonds and not enough gold could sell their excess to other players. Unfortunately, the current spate of RMT activities have called for draconian measures: they've taken away the ability to trade Diamonds for gold. They've also temporarily removed the ability to send gold through the mail. The official announcement stresses that this is a temporary measure to combat unacceptable behavior. While less gold spam is a good thing, fewer features are a negative, so this new is a mixed bag for Runes of Magic players.
EVE Online devblog discusses account security
Every MMO suffers the horrors of gold spammers and EVE Online is no different. The RMT (Real Money Trading) industry is massive and EVE's developers CCP have waged a constant war against it in recent years. The PLEX initiative gave players a way to safely buy ISK for cash while at the same time helping players who couldn't afford their subscriptions pay with ISK. The result was a dramatic hit to the RMT market, who had to drop their prices to compete with a legitimate service replacing their own. As part of Operation Unholy Rage in August of last year, EVE GMs also banned over 6200 accounts belonging to farmers known to be supplying the RMT industry. The effect on the market was instant, with the population in farmed mission systems like Ingunn disappearing overnight. Almost immediately, the farmers reacted with a spate of account hackings to claw back some ISK.
Trial account restrictions and the 30 percent problem
A few days ago, we posted on a very interesting statistic: Only 30% of all WoW trial accounts make it past level 10. On some level, it's been assumed that this number explains why Blizzard's taking such care to smooth out the beginning game a bit, to make it easier and more fun to stick with the game past level 10 or so. In a large way, this makes sense. But there may be other reasons beyond game play in play as well. If you're picking up a trial account, chances are that you heard about it from a friend or a blog or a news report. But chances are, you were shown or described a massively armored warrior engaged in fierce hand to hand combat on the back of a dragon flying through the air, or a finely robed mage flinging a fireball at the face of the lord of all magic, or something similarly epic. With that in mind, it might justifably get discouraging to show up in game to find yourself dressed in rags, wielding a toothpick, and being sent to collect wolf pelts that inexplicably only drop off about half the wolves you kill. With that in mind, it's easy to see how a trial account user could get bored pretty fast. But for me, there's one other angle that very few people seem to be bringing up: The social angle.
Runes of Magic community manager Jörg Koonen on game currencies and reducing gold spam
With only two months of operation under its belt, fantasy game Runes of Magic already seems to be enjoying a great deal of popularity. Runes of Magic uses the free-to-play business model, which is discussed in an interview with community manager Jörg "Kerensky" Koonen. Sam "Azerian" Maxted from ZAM caught up with Koonen to discuss the game's launch and where the title is headed in future updates, but their talk quickly turned to some of the details of how the game's economy operates. Koonen discusses how players have responded to Runes of Magic's microtransaction system through the in-game Item Shop, and that by design the Item Shop doesn't sell certain types of items. "We do not sell any weapons or armour or such," he says. "All of this has to be collected by the players through the game." However, Runes of Magic also uses non-microtransaction currencies and some players are concerned that their gold lacks real value in the game. Koonen says that the developers are looking into this. They're presently gathering feedback from the playerbase and are willing to introduce other measures, if necessary, to ensure that non-microtransaction currencies serve a purpose in RoM.
NDOORS CEO on Atlantica Online succeeding in the West
Massively multiplayer online games operating on the free-to-play business model are definitely a mixed bag in terms of quality. As such, they get a mixed reception in the West. Those who like more variety in their gameplay choices than the standard subscription model offers them tend to be more open to alternative business models. Staunch supporters of the AAA subscription model typical of the industry in Western markets have some serious misgivings about what the new crop of free-to-play titles could mean for the industry climate. NDOORS Interactive hopes to change some of these perceptions with Atlantica Online, their strategic turn-based MMORPG. Danny "Ralsu" Gourley from Ten Ton Hammer interviewed NDOORS Interactive CEO Peter Kang about Atlantica Online and how it fits into the industry climate in the West.
Gold spammers at it again
Last week reader Jay sent me a screen shot of something I hadn't seen in a while – a gold seller using /tell to spread their wares. For a long time Blizzard has maintained this is illegal activity, and has taken substantial steps to negate the spammers ability to do this. In game spam protection done behind the scenes has been working well. However it looks like the gold spammers have found a way around this.Initially I was pretty surprised to see the screen shot. After all, this hadn't been happening much. However a couple of days after getting this, I found some gold spam in my chat log as well. I was floored. Now they're back to their old tricks, and even some new ones.
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Invites disabled for trial accounts
"Hey, want to learn how to level the fastest way possible?" If you've played a character below level 30 any time recently, that probably looks infuriatingly familiar. Ever since the new spam protection features in patch 2.1, party chat has been one of the few ways spam has actually been getting through to many of us. You get an invite from a random level 1 character somewhere on a trial account, and then the fun starts in /p. I usually respond with "hey, want to get reported for spamming the fastest way possible?", but it still happens at least every fifteen minutes or so on some servers. A few hours ago, Blizzard went ahead and made the obvious and frequently suggested change: players on trial accounts can no longer send invites (Drysc). They can still be invited to groups by subscribers, so people who are using trial accounts because they're legitimately curious about the game will continue to have a chance to experience group play. I'm optimistic that this change will greatly reduce the amount of spam I get, although I'm also sure the spammers will not take too long to find yet another way to share with us the opportunities of buying gold and powerleveling.
Where's all the spam gone?
In today's breakfast topic, I noted that I haven't gotten any gold spam in the time I've played since patch 2.1.0 came along. And oh, what a change it is! I was always a good little player, taking the time to report any gold selling spam to a GM, but usually by the time a GM got around to looking at my ticket, I'd have gotten at least five more piece of spam -- and that was if I opened my ticket during off-hours.So what's the magical change that's stopped spam in its tracks this patch? Obviously, there's the new spam reporting system, which makes reporting anyone an easy task: just right-click on their name and select the "report spam" option. You'll no longer get whispers, see text, or receive mails from that player for the duration of your game session and the incident is automatically forwarded on to a GM. But even if every player were duitifully reporting every spammer, I wouldn't expect such a dramatic change in the level of spam. CM Drysc notes that as of the patch, trial accounts can no longer whisper other players -- at least not without players whispering them first. I don't know about you, but I think this simple step may have been the magic bullet.
Breakfast Topic: Favorite 2.1 change
We've all had at least a day (our European friends are a bit behind us, but I have no doubt they have also managed to form their opinions) to play with patch 2.1.0 and digest the many changes contained therein. While the Children's Week quests (and the non-combat pets you get from them) are super fun, but what I'm enjoying most is the lack of gold selling spam. At least for me, this near-constant nuisance has completely vanished since the patch came out -- though perhaps I'll have a different opinion tomorrow. So, I ask, what's your favorite aspect of patch 2.1.0?
The gold spam drinking game
The gold spammers are out of control. Since SpamSentry messes up my FuBar addons, I'm subjected to ten tells an hour from "Zuoipwher" and "Mwersdc" telling me that it's a pleasure to meet me and asking me to consider purchasing some of their lovely gold. Some of my guildies whose anti-spam addons are also lacking have been going through the same thing. And our guild has a long, glorious tradition of turning bad things (mildly insane raid leaders, server crashes, etc.) into good things with the use of our old friend alcohol. So now we present: The Gold Spam Drinking Game!
