Anyone Honestly Surprised?

Imagine that, big-time exploiters ousted in EVE Online.

CCP Games has uncovered an exploit in Eve Online that survived in the game for 4 years and may have had a massive impact on the game and game economy. The exploit allowed player owned stations (POS) to generate massive amounts of resources without much work (basically, the game would automatically fill the station's storage silos overnight).

It just goes to show that no amount of economists or player councils can stop the scum of the MMO universe. I was kind of amazed that EVE escaped the massive player-banking scam not too long ago and I suspect the same will happen here. EVE players are just too blinded to realize CCP is the MMO equivalent of the Illinois government.

Not A Good Time For Failing MMOs

Tabula Rasa is going the way of the dodo. Age of Conan may be following as well: Age of Conan Servers To Merge, Funcom Sees Layoffs.

Two ominous signs have come recently for Age of Conan fans; developer Funcom went through a round of layoffs, and they announced plans to merge some of the game's servers in order to maintain a "healthy" population. Despite this, Funcom has maintained that development will continue for both the PC version and the upcoming Xbox 360 version of the game, confident that Age of Conan won't follow Tabula Rasa into oblivion. A writer at Vox ex Machina doesn't share that view, pointing to several of the game's flaws as reasons why it didn't maintain the popularity it enjoyed at launch.

Tough economic times call for tough measures, but a little voice in the back of my head keeps telling me these games probably wouldn't survive even in the best of economic times. I wonder which game will be next...

Left 4 Dead: Boomer Tips and Tricks

I have started playing Left 4 Dead, Valve's new slaughter-the-zombie-hordes co-op shooter. It is a terrifyingly fun game to blow a few minutes on, whether playing against or alongside other players. The more I play, the more I feel like I am not using the Infected (zombies) classes very well, so I went in search of some tips.

I found a very detailed thread on the Boomer class over on the official Steam forums. I have saved a copy below:

Sorry About the AFK

Sorry everyone about the silence lately here on this blog. I'm guessing most of my Constant Readers know the reasons why I am so quiet lately. Have no fear though, I have a big post coming up and I think the Internets will absolutely love it.

Off the Mark

Mark Jacobs outlined upcoming changes to Warhammer Online's open RvR game play. However, Mark simply missed the mark in regards to the true root of the problems plaguing WAR.

The first thing Mark needed to address in his outline was the performance issue. None of the features listed will mean a damn thing if the zones don't stop crashing and players can actually COMPLETE the end game objectives. Every single resource Mythic has needs to be focused on resolving this issue. I posted this thought on the VN WAR message boards, but the thread was locked. However, the last reply before the lock intrigued me.

So basically you want, the combat and career team, the web development team, the quest team, the gui team, and all the other various teams that work on WAR to sit around and look over the client/server/dba engineer teams shoulder while they work on performance?

Yes, every single development team needs to review their respective systems and determine what can be done to improve the performance of WAR. Without resolving this single issue, WAR will not survive long enough to see the other changes into fruition.

The second thing Mark needed to address was the fact that victory is impossible to achieve when enemy warcamps are placed within spitting distance of each other. Victory is important in a game designed around sieging an enemy city. Victory can not be had when the enemies are back on the battlefield seconds after being defeated. Stating that they are actively going to make it easier to get to the fight shows a fundamental flaw and a leaning towards an instant gratification strategy.

It's a double whammy. Mythic wants to encourage more people to get into open RvR and make it easier for them to get there, but they don't want to admit that their game's technical performance is not up to par. Yes, Mythic is probably working hard on resolving the performance glitches, but they need to shut up and admit the problem exists and dedicate every single resource to slaying the beast. Beating around the bush just pisses players off and we're leaving in droves because of it.

Mythic, WAR is UNPLAYABLE in it's current state. New features can not fix bad performance.

With that said, I'm glad they at least are planning new features and should they actually fix the performance problem, WAR will be a much better game. I just don't see the performance issue getting fixed any time soon.