Newslist For MMOValue

There are parts of the game that you look at it without a great deal of affection. They’re bland but functional, the sort of thing that doesn’t show up in pre-release screenshots for obvious reasons. Then there are the parts that you look at that could curdle milk based solely on the visuals. They bring you to a state of Lovecraftian horrible knowledge about the hideous true nature of the universe.

Maybe something has been modeled to be something particularly ugly, or perhaps it’s a combination of poor polygon counts and bad choices in terms of color. In creator-heavy games such as City of Heroes and Champions Online, you might wind up with a character whose calculated appearance is eye-searing. What’s universal is that they are so ugly that even if you’re used to playing games with unskinned conglomerates of polygons, they strike you as downright hideous.

What have you seen in your favorite game that made you just recoil in shock, horror, and possibly disgust? Was it a badly-designed model, or something that was meant to be horrific and succeeded far too well? Did you take screenshots to prove how nauseating it was, or did you just get away and never look back?

Castillans Uncategorized

It goes without saying that the times in Fallen Earth are hard. What used to be a cheerful little town is now a jumble of burned-out buildings that have been cobbled back into some semblance of shape by survivors. As a new clone, players will undoubtedly pass through this area on the way to bigger, meaner things. This One Shots, sent in to us by TheExplorer (or Vendayn as he’s known in Fallen Earth) shows off “a scenic view of North Burb and the surrounding land.” At night it even kind of looks peaceful from the outskirts — at least until a mutant prairie chicken shows up and tries to chomp on you.

Castillans EVE Online

On Friday, CCP released the first details of EVE Online’s next expansion, Tyrannis. The expansion’s main feature is a form of planetary exploration and control but details on what exactly that will entail have been limited. Like walking in stations, planetary interaction has always been a major missing component from EVE. It’s been on the drawing board from day one but the technology and resources were never really there to do the feature justice. A prototype planetary flight system was even demonstrated at EVE Fanfest 2004 and while it impressed Fanfest attendees, the feature never materialised. The announcement that Tyrannis will include a form of planetary exploration has a lot of players excited but is their enthusiasm justified? The information we have so far on the expansion is limited to a single devblog, which provides only a general mission statement for the expansion.

In the absence of further information, I find myself wondering what the planetary interaction in Tyrannis might be like. In this speculative opinion piece, I look over the information we know for sure about Tyrannis and go on to speculate on what it might be like.

Read more…

Castillans EVE Online

We recently brought you the news that the closed beta for Battle of the Immortals has been delayed until mid-April. Several reasons were cited, including details such as Windows 7 support, revising the item shop and the AI behavior, and so on. The Perfect World Entertainment team took some time to expand on those reasons for us this week.

Battle of the Immortals is the first game to be published out of Perfect World Entertainment’s new Shangai studio. With a different studio, graphics engine, and design, players can expect a game with a completely different feel than previous PWE offerings. While this can mean great things — such as a revised tutorial system that offers brief flash videos rather than plain text and an auto-navigation feature to guide you to the current monster you’re hunting for a quest — it can also introduce some complications.
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gmaxwell MMOPRG News

There will be realm maintenance this Tuesday from 3:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 a.m. EDT until 11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT. The maintenance should not be any indication that patch 3.3.3 is going to drop, as it just went on the PTR — so don’t expect anything.

The full blue announcement is as follows:

RalvorinnWe will be performing scheduled maintenance on Tuesday, February 23. Maintenance will begin at 03:00 AM PST and conclude at approximately 11:00 AM PST. During this time, all realms and many web services will be unavailable.

Thank you for your patience.

Castillans World of Warcraft

A literal bang, actually. Not only has Planet Calypso updated to version 2010|01 (their new system uses the year and update number, rather than version number) but they’ve also had a small volcanic eruption that’s changed part of the map. Blizzard, eat your cataclysmic heart out.

While the newly re-terraformed area of Cyclops has been visually improved by the team and patched in under the ‘guise of a volcanic explosion, the version update also brings the anticipated mission system to Calypso.

The mission system, which is in a public beta, more or less, is only currently offering 5 tutorial missions to newbies landing on Calypso for the first time. Once you complete those five missions, be sure to offer your feedback in the survey that pops up at the end. That information will be used to make more missions for higher level players, so don’t be stingy!

Also, there’s fish. Remember those fish we showed last time? Yeah, those fish. If you value your ankles, you’ll watch where you swim.

gmaxwell MMOPRG News

The Final Fantasy XIV Roleplaying Coaliton is now officially open to the public. If you want my opinion, you should head over there and register, but as one of the charter members I may be just a wee bit biased. Scratch that — I’m a lot biased, because I tend to think that roleplaying is one of the most important parts of MMOs as a whole.

Unfortunately, it’s an important part that all too often gets mired in a lack of understanding, and so it falls on me to abuse my saopbox and elaborate. Because there’s a picture of roleplayers in the minds of the non-roleplaying public, one that involves speaking in a parody of the early Dragon Warrior games at best and questionable romantic practices at worst. There’s even a sense that most game companies assume roleplayers will just make the best out of the situation no matter what the game is like, making anything added just for roleplaying a pointless addition.

These assumptions are incorrect. And considering how much Square-Enix has already done in favor of roleplaying in Final Fantasy XI, I have high hopes for Final Fantasy XIV. We need roleplayers, and even if you don’t consider them a big deal, odds are good you’ve felt the influence from them.
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gmaxwell World of Warcraft

The random dungeon finder is getting a nice facelift in patch 3.3.3! There are a few things about the current system that cause occasional problems, and they’re being solved.

The most important change is not in the official notes yet, but a Zarhym post clarified that there will be no cooldown on the vote kick function. Combined with the fact that we’ll be able to put a reason for the vote kick in the interface itself instead of having to whisper everyone, I think the classes that queue as tanks for the quick queue and then make it clear that they can’t tank will find themselves doing less dungeons a day now.

The other exceptionally nice part of these changes is that we won’t need to scrub around in general or trade looking for a holiday boss group, and won’t have to travel either.

The full list from the patch notes after the break.

Official Patch 3.3.3 PTR NotesThe Deserter debuff given to players who leave a dungeon prematurely when queuing via the Random Dungeon option has been increased to 30 minutes, up from 15 minutes. The cooldown for using the Random Dungeon option remains 15 minutes.
The Random Dungeon cooldown is no longer displayed as a debuff. Instead, players will see the cooldown time remaining displayed in the Dungeon Finder window when Random Dungeon or Random Heroic Dungeon is selected from the pull-down.
If a player in your party has the Deserter debuff, or is on cooldown from the Random Dungeon option, his or her character name will be displayed in the Dungeon Finder window listed as “On Cooldown,” preventing the group from queuing.
Anyone in a dungeon party can now re-queue their group for a dungeon, as players will still be prompted whether or not to accept their chosen role.
Players who use the Vote Kick option will now be prompted to provide a reason for kicking a party member. This reason will be presented to everyone in the party except for the person voted to be kicked.
When joining as a group, more generous level requirements will be used instead of Random Dungeon level requirements so that players of different levels joining together will be eligible for a greater number of dungeons.
World Event bosses (such as Ahune for the Fire Festival) will now be accessible through the Dungeon Finder. Players must use the Dungeon Finder to access these bosses.
Parties randomly created via the Dungeon Finder will always be arranged in the party interface from top to bottom in the following order: tank, healer, damage, damage, damage.
If a random party is created via the Dungeon Finder and a player cannot roll Need on an item, a reason will now be provided.

gmaxwell World of Warcraft

It’s not too often that we get visual glitches from Lord of the Rings Online, and most of the ones we get seem to be easily corrected. Sometimes they’re even quite pretty, as is the case with today’s One Shots sent in to us by Pojoh from the Firefoot server. How precisely did this happen? We’ll let him explain:

After searching high and low and in-between, Pojoh, my burglar finally found the Blue Lady at Lake Evendim, behind a waterfall. I entered the instance, and decided to take a break before doing another quest, and logged out. When I logged back in, everything had turned blue. I appreciated the irony, since I was with the Blue Lady. This glitch was easily rectified when I walked out of the instance, and then entered back in, but not before I took this screenshot.

Have you captured something strange, yet interesting in your favorite MMO? We’d love to see a screenshot of it. Send it in to us here at oneshots AT massively DOT com along with your name, the name of the game, and a description. (Guild and server welcome as well!) We’ll post it out here on Massively for everyone to enjoy.

gmaxwell World of Warcraft

Love is in the Air ends just before midnight server time tonight. Which means that today is your last day to get your Love Fool title and to try for the naughty, naughty Big Love Rocket Mount.

This is also your last chance to:

Go take a ride on a love boat in Stormwind City or The Undercity.
Have a drunken fling with Jeremiah Payson.
Gorge yourself on chocolates.
Get yourself a Lovely Black Dress.
Share a chocolate treat at a romantic picnic with a friend.
Warning: sometimes events end a little bit before the time in the calendar, so don’t wait until the very last minute to get everything you want done.

Please see our Guide to Love is in the Air for all of the activities to do before the holiday ends.

gmaxwell World of Warcraft

Preparation

Before you start the raid, you must get clear of all mentioned below is a must

-Equipment gatherd from Trial of the Crusader.

-level 245+ gear for 25 ppl version

-level 232+ gear for 10 ppl version

All your tanks and tank healers should be as geared up as possible, as it is quite important.This is due to the first encounter in Icecrown Citadel introduces players to the Chill of the Throne. All Players will suffer an aura debuff which allow mobs to ignore 20% of an affected player’s dodge during melee combat. Also, Lord Marrowgar is a “gear check” boss, if you tanks are not geared enough, they will be easily killed by his Saber Lash will. Meanwhile, your healers will need to be at similar levels to ensure all ppl alive, especially tank.

Also, you guys need to pepare some miscellaneous consumabes:elixirs,buff food, potions ,etc.. These may increase the possibility to obtain the success

Raider Team structure

Your team will be divided into two groups. For the easy understanding of this guide, we’re going to name the two groups metioned below as the Attacker and the Defender

25 ppl version
Tank

-required number:2

-one tank suitable to handle a single mob that hits fast and progressively harder as the combat goes on (Attacker tank), while other tank who is well suited and practiced at picking up and controlling multiple mobs at once (Defender tank).

Healers

-required number:5-6

-at least one assigned as tank healer for each tank, while other 3-4 healers that can help with the tanks and they are also healing the rest of the raid. Assign 1 tank healer and 1 other healer to the Defender, and the rest to the Attacker.
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gmaxwell World of Warcraft

Deathbringer Saurfang Raid Guide

Preparation
Before you start the raid, you must get clear of all mentioned below is a must
-Equipment gatherd from Trial of the Crusader.
-level 245+ gear for 25 ppl version
-level 232+ gear for 10 ppl version

All your tanks and tank healers should be as geared up as possible, as it is quite important.This is due to the first encounter in Icecrown Citadel introduces players to the Chill of the Throne. All Players will suffer an aura debuff which allow mobs to ignore 20% of an affected player’s dodge during melee combat. Also, Lord Marrowgar is a “gear check” boss, if you tanks are not geared enough, they will be easily killed by his Saber Lash will. Meanwhile, your healers will need to be at similar levels to ensure all ppl alive, especially tank.

Also, you guys need to pepare some miscellaneous consumabes:elixirs, buff food, potions, etc.. These may increase the possibility to obtain the success.
Read more…

gmaxwell World of Warcraft

The dungeon finder has really changed what players get excited about the most in the World of Warcraft. It’s a strange world when one of the most anticipated updates to the game is the ability to tell Arthas to shut his yap. No, we don’t mean kill him in Icecrown, we really do mean telling him to shut the hell up. Just in case you missed it in the patch notes we posted a little while ago, there’s this waiting for us in patch 3.3.3:

Culling of Stratholme: Players may now skip the initial introduction dialog to this dungeon once they have completed it at least once.
The pre-Culling of Stratholme dialogue is really cool to experience the first few times, but after that it just starts to feel like a waste of time. The dungeon finder made it even worse, because as awesome as it is, it eliminated some of the social stigma of ditching a group early. Oculus and Culling of Stratholme are the two instances I can always expect some dip to drop from. Hopefully this change and the deserter debuff becoming 30 minutes will discourage that sort of behavior.

Castillans World of Warcraft

Hot on the heels of the Patch 3.3.3 PTR patch notes, Blizzard has activated character copies for this phase of testing. While the realms aren’t up quite yet, and neither is the client, you can definitely copy your live characters over to Broxigar (PVE) or Anasterian (PVP) for impending testing.

A few things to bear in mind: if you’re excited to try out the new Ruby Sanctum raid, that content isn’t going to be in this particular patch. There might be indications of it, maybe some quests or data, but no instance itself just yet. But, since there’s no raid content, this means you can also copy over premade level 80 characters — the perfect way to test out all those new PVP changes.

gmaxwell World of Warcraft

The official Patch 3.3.3 patch notes have just been posted to the official site, and among those notes was news of an upcoming to change to raid buffs.
Several raid buffs have had their ranges increased to 100 yards, up from 45 yards, to prevent select buffs from repeatedly getting applied and removed during highly mobile encounters. Some buffs, such as paladin auras, totems, shouts and Blood Pact are intentionally meant to have shorter ranges and remain unchanged.
The concept does have me intrigued as to what exactly they have planned, but the question remains: with paladin auras, totems, shouts and Blood Pact being unchanged, which buffs exactly are being altered? To my knowledge, the vast majority of complaints about moving outside of the range of buffs mainly revolves around aura effects like totems and paladin auras.

At this time Blizzard has not posted a full list of the raid buffs that have had their range increased, but, as they said, the list is fresh and still incomplete. This also comes at a time where many class specific aura buffs (like Unleashed Rage, Abomination’s Might, and Elemental Oath) are being changed to passive auras not requiring an outside trigger such as a critical strike or a spell cast to activate.

Be sure to watch for class-specific updates detailing further changes, and we will keep you up to date with information as more becomes available.

Castro World of Warcraft