Perfect World and Cryptic had to deal with a critical economic issue in the Neverwinter MMO over the weekend that allowed exploiters to make off with millions of Astral Diamonds. These diamonds function as the in-game currency for the game. Rather than allow the perpetrators to benefit from their ill-gotten gains and completely upend the economy, the developers chose to shut down the servers and reset time. Seven hours of server progress were turned back and rendered invalid.
Thanks in no small part to the efforts of our continually amazing Beta community, we were able to quickly identify the exploit and the perpetrators. Once identified, we took immediate action, calling in the entire development and publishing teams to lock down the Neverwinter OBT as we sought out a solution.
Rest assured, the issue has been corrected and we have taken appropriate action against all players who took advantage of the bug, including but not limited to enforcing permanent bans.
Sadly, the damage to the economy was done.
Rather than let the malicious efforts of a few unsavory players linger and continually impact the game’s economy and balance as we progress through these later stages of Open Beta, we have made the extremely difficult decision to rollback Neverwinter to a time shortly before the abuse and exploitation began.
It’s a drastic step, but as we saw with Diablo III, correcting a monetary exploit is paramount to any game that balances gameplay with its economy. An imbalance in the auction house can have a ripple effect throughout the game even if it’s not a free-to-play title. All it takes is an exploit that inflates pricing to ruin the balance.
Neverwinter is currently in beta and should officially launch later this year.
Microsoft is holding their Xbox event tomorrow at 10AM Pacfic time. The event venue (pictured) is in the Redmond, Washington campus of Microsoft. During a recent Major Nelson podcast, Microsoft’s interactive entertainment chief of staff Aaron Greenberg, confirmed that that the May 21st event would be “about revealing the next Xbox platform and our vision for the future of games.” For months, we’ve been hearing rumors about the console, internally codenamed Durango, that have set people buzzing.
Today is Victoria Day. No joke. It’s a holiday they celebrate in some countries. I’ve never heard of a Europa Universalis Day or Crusader Kings Day or Hearts of Iron Day. Just a Victoria Day. Fitting. Victoria is one of the most Important strategy games ever made.
After the jump, yeah, I just spelled important with a capital IContinue reading →
Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes is the add-on that makes the game that made Elemental better even better. That might sound convoluted. For good reason. But if you want meatier tactical combat and more character development in your Fallen Enchantress, Legendary Heroes will deliver. This is the strongest leg in the three-legged renaissance of fantasy strategy gaming consisting of Fallen Enchantress, Warlock, and Eador.
The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing is an action RPG from Neocore, the Hungarian developer who made the King Arthur RTS/RPGs. King Arthur featured some clever gameplay in what was mostly a Total War-a-like, so it’s entirely possible this Diablo-a-like might have a few tricks up its sleeve. For instance, this on-the-fly skill tweaking looks promising. Van Helsing is out this week for the PC, with an Xbox 360 version to follow later this year.
Donkey Kong Country Returns is ported to the Nintendo 3DS from the Wii. Resident Evil Revelations is ported from the 3DS to the Xbox 360 and WiiU. It looks a bit, well, chintzy on the 360, but it’s a good game. Here’s my review of the 3DS version which I presume will mostly apply to these latest gen versions. But you should probably keep in mind this was a far more relevant description of my experience with the game.
Ubisoft goes back to the basics — or at least the Old West — with Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, in which a cowboy shoots stuff. I don’t have any inside information on whether it’s any good, but I have a mental image of two interns in a back room making this game to fulfill Techland’s obligation to Ubisoft while everyone else was working on Dead Island stuff.
Activision is publishing a Fast and Furious branded racing game. Paul Walker isn’t in it. I bet you didn’t know there have already been a whole mess of Fast and Furious games. I hadn’t heard of a single one of them. Paul Walker wasn’t in those either. Quod erat demonstratum.
Denis Dyack posted the above video in response to a Kotaku article that accused Silicon Knights of mismanagement during the development of X-Men: Destiny. In the video, Dyack refutes the charge that Activision was kept in the dark on the budget expenditures and progress of the project. He does admit that “there were some mistakes made” but offers no explanation beyond that for the dire reviews of the game.
Dyack is currently working on Shadow of the Eternals with his new company, Precursor Games.
This week it’s a two-fer, with The Great Gatsby discussion for the first 31 minutes, followed by a Star Trek Into Darkness discussion until the 1:14-minute mark. At that point, we drop into this week’s 3×3 for a discussion of horrific falls in movies.
