NC profits down 40%

NCSoft has issued a report with interesting facts:

• Profits down 40%, to $20 million. 

• Number of concurrent players for their MMOs; LINEAGE, LINEAGE II, CITY OF HEROES/VILLAINS, AION, and GUILD WARS. That's the snippet for L2, but I am not sure what the numbers indicate.
  

• GUILD WARS 2, widely-believed to be arriving this year, has been postponed in a very broad release window , with the explanation that release timing is still "to be announced." (does this mean 2010 or 2011?)
  

Sources:

• Official NCSoft's earnings report for 2008 Q4

also:

• http://games.cristianoleoni.com/?p=25028
• http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/44779/NCSoft-Profits-Down-Guild-Wars-2-Delayed-Player-Numbers-Revealed

Misc News

1. Mr Playmobil died. Hans Beck, the creator of Playmobil toys, the tiny figures loved by children the world over, has died aged 79 on 30/1/2009 (newspaper article in greek). It's interesting to note that so many Playmobil figures have been produced that, if they were real people and had their own country, it would be the most populous nation on earth: 1.3 billion!

 2. We get a new ingame event on Tuesday. It's about valentine's day, but it doesn't include any bows! It *does* include chocolates - which is yet another proof that the story writers at NC Soft have increasingly better ideas.

Mini Search Engine Added

Hello all,

After having difficulties locating posts in our *own* blog (oh my..), we decided to add a mini search engine on the right hand side of this page. I hope you too find it useful.

An alternative way to locate a post is using the "blog labels" (e.g. game info, humor, etc) which can be found below the mini search engine.

Now forget about the labels and check the mini search engine - it's actually helpful!

Usernames and character names

Trivia on naming: 

  A user name can be the same as a character name.

Test:

Created (by mistake) a character named after my account.

Question:

Can you have the same character name in two different servers?

 

 

Additional info for computer scientists (all others please don't read):

Accounts and characters are probably stored in different database tables. Do you think the character name is the primary key? Alternatively, there might be some kind of surrogate key, e.g. a sequence number. It is an MS SQL Server, isn't it? About a year ago Sofia deleted a character named oytis and she has now re-created a new one with the same name. Thus either the character name is not a primary key, or the characters are indeed deleted and not de-activated.

Rioting dragons

That's a Chris Riddell's (British illustrator of children's literature and a political cartoonist for The Observer) illustration, as a comment for the current events in Athens.

Darkfall and theNoobComic

Have you heard of a MMORPG called Darkfall Online, currently in closed beta but announced a long time ago? We have waited and waited and waited, but it' s not ready yet.

The game is expected to feature unrestricted PvP with no peace zones, full (i mean *full*) looting, a huge, dynamic game world that evolves in response to player actions. The majority of player capabilities are determined by the possession of skills, which improve in response to in-game use. Cities can be built, sieged, captured and destroyed by players; all items are craftable; the weather (including directorion winds!) influences the play, and there are many more advanced features.

Gianna Masseti, the author of TheNoobComic.com, was invited to preview the beta. I guess writing one of the best web comics .. has its advantages after all :-) Gianna is an experienced RPG player with a witty pen, so her comments are interesting to read:

In 3rd person view the camera is pretty close to your character and it’s fixed, so you can’t mousewheel back until your character is tiny and you can see for twenty yards behind you. Your chance to spot other people is to actually turn and look. Period.

This is not all, though. If you happen to be a tall guy, like my ork, and you’re fighting someone shorter, like a goblin, you have to aim DOWN at the little fucker while he runs figure eights around you, which means that you have even less awareness of your surroundings.

You don’t get a big ass name on your head, so it’s quite possible to hide behind trees and rocks (not like in other games where some poor sap is trying to ambush you from behind a tree and you can see the end bits of his tag sticking on the sides.

Darkfall seems interesting, it seemed interesting from the first moment Pavlos told me about it. Make sure to check the site, they have a wonderful dragon and lots of impressive artwork.

Note: Aventurine SA, the producing company, is norwegian/greek (!), situated in Athens (!!), with job openings (!!!).

In June, Aventurine confirmed they had signed with Greek company AudioVisual Enterprises to distribute Darkfall in Europe. On October 16th, 2008, Darkfall was publicly presented at Athens Digital Week (i still cannt believe I missed that) and it was mentioned on TV.

OK Aventurine guys, where are you? Please please please invite us for a short visit to your HQ!!

NC firing ppl, Tabula Rasa stops

Can it be true? Tabula Rasa will shut down on February 28, 2009. Before it does, however, the game will become free starting on January 10th. Reason is the low player population. And it is true, I checked.

It is only recently, that in an open letter on the Tabula Rasa web site, the game creator Richard Garriott has announced his separation with NCSoft, the company he partnered with to develop and publish Tabula Rasa.

It will be interesting to see if the Austin branch of the Korean headquartered company will continue to exist considering it was opened to work specifically with Garriott.

NCSoft is going to lay off an undisclosed amount of their employees, too. Their spokesman, David Swofford said, "We're going to be scaling down. We currently don't know how many people will be affected by that."

How will this affect L2 players??

Some (few though) players are expected to migrate from Tabula Rasa, especially given the free time that NC will offer them as a retribution. More importantly though, less NCSoft stuff (especially in Austin), might mean less communication between the players and the (korean) game developers.

L2wh.com Upgraded

Our favorite site has new functionality added! Now you can limit the results of the market-price list. In this new field you can (optionally) enter part of the item name you are looking for.



During the past few months, the l2wh team has been working hard to implement a variety of tools for us. Some of them include:

Black Marketeer Helper:
Tools->Shop Tools->Black Marketeer Helper
Lists the prices of the Black Marketeer NPC (but he sells few items!)

Blacksmith Lahm Helper:
Tools->Shop Tools->Blacksmith Lahm Helper
Lahm is the NPC for the S80 sets/recipes (arktic.net has a list compiled too). This tool lists all the necessary items (shards mainly) you need for each of them.

Mammon Foundation Helper:
Tools->Mammon Tools->Mammon foundation helper
Lists what you need in order to start using a foundation item (usually some special varnish-enhancer). If you ever get a foundation item, that is.

Note: Make sure you re-load the initial page, in order to see all the new menu items (shift +pagereload helps).

Grats L2wh team!!

Aion beta

It has been a week already, that Aion has started its open beta in Korea. Just in case you don't know, Aion is a new game by NC Soft, scheduled to launch in Korea within the year and launches in China, North America, Europe and Japan planned for 2009.

According to NC, the number of players has reached an un-proceeded record

More than 11,000 people were logged into the game after only two minutes of open beta service. In less than an hour, that number had ballooned to 40,000. Currently the number of concurrent players has leapt up to more than 170,000.

According to pirate-ninjas (I like these guys more and more every day), it might be a mistake to implore only korean testers.

There are no plans for any non-korean open beta. There are only a few short Preview-Events planed North America/Europe. So the real beta testing and playerbase influence gonna be again Korea. For NCSoft self proclaimed next big triple A IP (thats supposed to become an international success) this isn’t too promising. With that and the Lineage 2 failure in mind: Aion will be NCSofts next international failure, event tho it got a huge potential - just like Lineage 2 had.

I could be persuaded to give it a try.. Anyone else interested??

Some more Aion-related sites:
Official site: http://eu.aiononline.com/en/
Greek article: http://www.mmorpg.gr/features.php?read=1829
Pirate-ninja's article (and sneak view!): http://www.pirateninjas.net/aion/aion-korean-open-beta/
Aion Global: http://www.aionglobal.com/
Aion Source: http://www.aionsource.com/

What is a "Simple FAQ"?

Well you know what an FAQ is:

FAQ, or Frequently Asked Question(s), are listed questions and answers, all supposed to be frequently asked in some context, and pertaining to a particular topic.

An S-FAQ, or Simple FAQ, is an FAQ with just the basic material needed to understand the topic.

The Blue Clan tries to gather information on some issues (e.g. IoP shards, Elemental Stones) and post it in such a format, making it as clear as possible, for clan members and readers alike. Since we are noobs, we can only gather basic info :)

Stay tuned for more S-FAQs!

Languages useful in L2

Have you ever wished you understood what all these people say?

Those people speaking russian (sps? tut?), chinese (mmm i dont know of any examples), portuguese (q tal?) - seeming 'all greek' ('ela mlka') to you?

I soooo much wish I knew russian! And (thank god) I have studied french at school. And I had a spanish boyfriend, so I know the basic expressions. Still, it is not enough.

Please mail me all words (or "words" or expressions) you find useful in L2, no matter the language. We can compile a tiny dictionary :)

Make sure to vote at the current poll, checking all answers that apply!

Update 23/9/2008: Submissions so far are da/niet, spasibo, quoi, salut, xaxa, kak (not mentioning the english words)

Griefing Definition

For all us noobs out there, a short explanation of what a griefer is about:

"A griefer is a player who plays a game simply
to aggravate and harass other players." (Wiki)

It refers to a player whose only objective in the game is to cause grief, and who cannot thus be deterred by penalties related to in-game goals, because they have no in-game goals other than to cause grief (see Summoner's post about PK motives).

A form of cyber-bullying.

Activities one player considers griefing may be understood by another to be part of normal gameplay.

It is often a form of emergent gameplay, the creative use of a game in ways unexpected by the game designer's original intent. In several games, e.g. first-person shooters, game glitches or physics quirks can become viable strategies, or even spawn their own game types. I think we have lots and lots of those in LII, although in each update they try to stop them.

An act of griefing involves the following three types of actions to be considered grief play: The use or abuse of a game mechanic that was not intended by the game's developers. The inability of the victim to exact some means of retribution beyond utilizing similar unintended game mechanics. The intended purpose of an act of griefing must be to negatively impact the game play of another person. An act of griefing usually meets all these criteria as well as any game specific criteria set by the developers of the game.

The South Park Episode 1008, titled "Make Love Not War", is an excellent parody of the issue based on WoW.






Note: Next week there will be a blog post examining the possible motives and solutions of the issue.

PK motives

It happens quite often that some people will attack a live player for no reason at all apparently.
I understand the motive behind bot-killers or the marking of territory by attacking someone who entered and started stealing mobs from one's grinding spot.
Yesterday, as I was moving around places, I was attacked once by a Red (AKA marked idiot) and another time by a white-turned-purple player.
Since the recent patches (the previous one I think), there is no chance of dropping any item upon the death of a non-red player. So there is no possible bonus for PK a white player.
The penalty for turning red can be quite annoying:
1) the town guards will attack a Red player on sight and they are lvl 62, so this should be especially annoying for the PKers running around Dion, who cannot be higher than 45.
2) the NPC stores will not trade with Reds, except 3 special NPCs (Floran,Hardin's,Spider Nest), but who charge double prices then.
3) The Sin Eater quest is a huge pain.

So what could be the motive for attacking a harmless live player?
I asked the purple man attacking me, why he wished to turn himself Red and he was kind enough to enlighten me:
"I want to increase my PK count" said the player "GreekPower"... (apparently power does not get along well with wits)
Can someone please explain this to me?
Can a high PK count on mid-levels lead to anything other than an adena-drain and possible delevelling from town guards and higher level players, who can easily kill a Red without getting Karma (no penalty and besides there was Hero chat yesterday calling for high-level people to go to Cruma and enjoy a feast on Reds).
Finally there is still the chance to get a dropped weapon from Reds (only the Red players still have a chance to drop their weapon upon death), which should be a detterent for people turning red, provided their brain could process the situation rationally.

Is there any logic really behind increasing the PK count ?

Guys? What are you doing on Friday night?

Have you heard about the Game Convention 2008? Have you heard about NC Soft's party??

As far as the Convention is concerned, it seems that NC provides some means of following what's going on there, even from home.

As far as Clan Members are concerned, remember there is a coffee-and-cookies meeting on Saturday morning (..in Athens), so please don't stay up too late on Friday's party (..in Leipzig).

About our Blog

Hello everyone! Just a quick note to let you know:

1. There will be a new blog post every Thursday, so be sure to check it out. Additional posts might be available during the rest of the week too.

2. LAXTARAS (a.k.a. The Summoner) has promised to investigate what new will be sold at the NPC shops in the Gracia update. Thus he will have valuable advices for us, on what to sell before this update goes live. Appreciated very very much, Summoner!

3. I hope another blog writer, a famous archmage (hint hint?), will provide us some more tips on the next update..

Have a nice week everyone :)

Unreal Engine 3

On March 27th, NCSoft announced the licencing of the Unreal Engine 3 for two unannounced, top-tier massively multiplayer online games.

NCsoft has used Unreal Engine in the past, shipping Lineage II, and the soon to be released Exteel, using Unreal Engine 2.

Through this licensing agreement, NCsoft will be able to take advantage of the latest enhancements to Unreal Engine 3, including:

o massive world support,
o multi-processor support,
o dynamic ambient occlusion (i have no idea what this means),
o fracturing tool and runtime (nor that),
o realistic crowd system
o ..and much more.

“Unreal Engine 3 has a well structured rendering pipeline, and its graphical quality is superb thanks to advanced lighting and shadowing systems,” said Young-muk Choi, lead programmer, Development Unit, NCsoft.

Note that NCsoft does not buy the Engine itself, but the right to use it for future projects. Developers and publishers around the world have also licensed Unreal Engine 3 for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.