Bugs

OK, AndyMonahan. You win. You broke me. This Ask Massively is for you.

AndyMonahan asked (approximately eight million times): It doesn't matter what games you cover as I can't spend more than five minutes on the site before my eyes bleed. Any news on a choice of background colour?

Do you really think you're going to like the only answer you know I can give?!

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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.

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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.

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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.

If you haven't noticed, Lord of the Rings Online has been offline for a while. Like, a long while. It's the sort of thing that can produce a lot of ill-will from players despite the fact that technically the game itself hasn't changed in the slightest. The fact that the game has been down solely to address back-end issues is irrelevant -- players can have long memories and can be quite bitter about not being able to play their favorite games.

Back when World of Warcraft first launched, many players were equally angry about the game's long periods of unexpected maintenance. Obviously it didn't have a long-term effect on the game's overall popularity, but it was an early blow to the game's population. So do extended downtimes impact your opinion of a game, or do you understand that it's a real possibility in any genre with so many moving technical parts?

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!

Modern War by Gree has some pretty neat things going for it. A lot of the gameplay is not really state-of-the-art, and most of it we've seen before in many social-style games, but it allows for some cool and relatively persistent play on your mobile device. It's hard to find MMOs in today's mobile market. A lot of the time I'll download a new one only to find out that it's not really an MMO at all. There are some really great titles in the mobile/smartphone market, but it takes work to find them.

Modern War is a sneaky one. It's more of a pseudo-MMO but does a few cool things that more MMORTS titles should. It also works nicely on my Nexus 7 tablet, for the most part, except for a few odd problems that I'll cover in a minute. After I'm done, you might understand how mixed up the game feels as it's pretty close to becoming a good game.

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I first intended to use this article as a list of things to avoid if you are an indie dev, and I was going to use Star Sonata, an indie, twitch-based space MMO, as the prime example on that list. The game works, sure, and it obviously has a playerbase that seems to enjoy itself, but I am not sure how long it might take a normal, new player to achieve the same level of happiness. I literally had to re-do this visit to the game because the first attempt was hijacked by a glitchy livestream and other issues. Luckily, the first attempt had primed this second one a bit more, but I have still spent most of the week confused.

The worst part about being so lost in a game like Star Sonata is that it's very easy to see just how much potential the game has. Hopefully, this article -- combined with input from the players -- might just help the developers fix some of the very basic issues that are hurting this game.

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Last weekend, I spent some time with Ecol Tactics, a new turn-based MMO brought to us by Games Campus. It features a lot of the same mechanics we have seen before, similar art design to other titles, and a browser-based, Flash-based accessibility that is always welcome. Sure, I was able to enjoy it for only several hours, but during that time, I noted just why Anime and turn-based combat is still successful and why Ecol Tactics is wise to take such a successful genre and launch a new title within it.

Anime is easy to digest. The characters on the screen feel chunky but agile. There's something instantly likeable about the characters in Ecol Tactics. They are detailed like an army of miniature soldiers. Wisely, the developers show you some high-level spells and combat before you even get out of the newbie area. I have to admit that I looked forward to the day I would be able to lay waste to a half-dozen monsters with a single swipe of my weapon.

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RIFT's come under siege as of late, but instead of that siege being the "vicious creatures from another planar dimension" variety, it's been the players themselves. Trion Worlds has posted that the game became infested with botters over the recent holidays, so the team has taken action.

"As of today, we've already shut down a few thousand accounts over the recent rise in fishing botting, and we've begun removing gains from others in places of extreme bot use. A good number of these botters were brought in, as is often the case, on stolen credit cards and fraudulent RIFT purchases," the development team wrote.

The studio said that while the situation is being dealt with, disabled gamers who use keyboard-assistance software are advised not to use these programs (but aren't forbidden from doing so, either). Trion has plans for "a more creative content solution" for the botting issue that will come in the future.

It's not a good time to be a player on Ultima Online's Atlantic server, to put it lightly. Mythic was forced to rollback the game (and players' progress) yesterday on Atlantic to a backup from two weeks ago. Atlantic is the highest-populated shard in the Western hemisphere.

The official announcement cut straight to the point: "Due to issues beyond our control, I am sorry to have to inform all of Atlantic that we had to revert to a Dec 5th backup. We have tried to retrieve a more current backup but we have been unable to do so due to corruption issues."

Mythic said that it will be compensating affected players with a month of free game time, although that's undoubtedly small consolation to those who have lost progress and acquisitions during this period. Apart from the short announcement, there has been no additional communication from the studio on the issue.

[Thanks to Brad for the tip!]

When you've repeatedly delayed the launch of the new version of the game, what's there left to do? You know you shouldn't have asked that because now you made the Darkfall beta go back in hiding. It was just waiting for someone foolish enough to ask that question.

While Darkfall Unholy Wars' beta was scheduled to begin today, Aventurine decided to hold back on starting it for the time being. What's the hold-up? According to Producer Tasos Flambouras, a nasty bug's floating around that can, well, have an adverse affect on gameplay: "To simply describe the bug in question: It's a persistence bug. Some players, sometimes, will lose all their stuff."

The team is attempting to reproduce and eliminate the bug but said that it will go ahead with the beta after a "few hours" whether or not it's found.

Exploit: an act or deed, especially a brilliant or heroic one or to make use of selfishly or unethically? Well, both. But as much as I wish the title of this week's Wings Over Atreia referred to my amusing (and oh-so-heroic) antics throughout the gorgeous world of Aion, it is actually about the latter. Or is it?

Most likely, one of your first thoughts when you hear the word exploit is that it's a trick that takes advantage of some bug for personal gain. That thought is often followed by images of a banhammer. It makes sense; you are gamers, after all. Now, whether you regard exploits with admiration or with unbridled loathing is a matter of personal opinion. But does it have to be one or the other, or can it be both? It depends on the actual use of the word itself.

Thanks to a recent foray into Lower Udas Temple, exploits have been at the forefront of my mind lately. I have noticed that we actually use both definitions of the word for a variety of situations in Aion, yet we also ascribe the negative connotation to many of them. But is this warranted -- couldn't some actions simply be ingenious examples of problem-solving, or must they all be considered ban-worthy abuse? If the former, where do you draw the line?

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I should have known something was up. I just should have trusted my gut and avoided this game, but no. No, instead I have to be the one who gives into curiosity and says, "Hey, I wrote about that game on my blog almost four years ago... what's it been up to lately?" There's something potentially dangerous about playing a game that has had an identity crisis for so long. Then again, I'm a huge Ryzom fan, and that game has been through the ringer more times than I can remember.

Taikodom is now called Taikodom: Living Universe. I'm not sure when things changed without comparing back to that old blog post, but the changes are obvious. No more avatars? OK then. A different UI? That's fine. But -- and this is where my older gamer memory starts to get the best of me -- I distinctly remember Taikodom being sort of fun back then. The version I played this week was anything but fun.

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I won't be the first one to point this out, but almost as annoying as his eagerness to tell the citizens of Tyria about his new tourist destination (he was so eager that he actually interrupted himself -- constantly) was Subdirector Blingg's use of the phrase "most unique."

No idea what I'm talking about? Then you likely didn't get a lot of hands-on time with Guild Wars 2 over the weekend. While Southsun Cove and the Fractals of the Mists are still around for your enjoyment, you missed out on the Lost Shores event itself.

Some people will dispute whether or not you actually "missed out." They'd argue, I suppose, that there wasn't a ton of missing out to do. We differ on that point. Anyway, jump below the cut to catch the skinny on this weekend in in Guild Wars 2: the good, the unfortunate, and the maddening.

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