Newslist For MMOValue

Penny Arcade reports that the console version of Blizzard’s Diablo III went through an interesting metamorphosis as it was ported over from the PC. A twin-stick approach was “one of the first prototypes,” according to game director Josh Mosqueira.

Ultimately, that particular control scheme didn’t fly because of Diablo III’s angled camera view. Also, “you can’t blow stuff up or smash things if your thumb is on the right stick and the left stick,” Mosqueira explained. You can read more on Penny Arcade’s E3 DIII console hands-on via Penny Arcade.

ArenaNet has not one, not two, but three website updates that should scratch your stuck-at-work-on-a-Friday-but-thinking-about-Guild-Wars-2 itch.

The first is a Dragon Bash video featuring the dev team doing its best Schuster family pinata-destroying imitation. Next we have another video blurb, this time chronicling Dragon Bash shenanigans at Cologne, Germany’s RPC 2013 event. The third and final update concerns the Dragon Bash climax coming your way on June 18th. The festival will conclude with a single-player instance called Memories on the Pyre, which you can read about via the source link below. You can see the two videos behind the break. (from massively)

Blizzard revealed this week that Diablo III will be coming to the XBox 360 on September 3rd along with the previously announced PS3 release. Path of Exile gave all players a free passive skill reset with patch 0.11.0 this week and officially started its first ever four month long Anarchy and Onslaught leagues.

Diablo III’s upcoming console release was originally announced to be for the PS3 and PS4, but this week Blizzard confirmed that it will also be coming to the XBox 360. Both versions feature four-player offline co-op modes and are scheduled for release on September 3rd 2013. The console versions of the game are surprisingly already far enough long in development for hands-on demonstrations and will be set up for attendees tomorrow at E3.

Path of Exile’s four-month-long Anarchy and Onslaught leagues have now officially started, offering a list of difficult challenges and an exclusive t-shirt reward for anyone who can complete them. This is the first long-term league for Path of Exile and its success may lead to further leagues similar to Diablo II‘s twice-yearly ladder reset. Patch 0.11.0 was also successfully deployed this week, granting all players a once-only full passive ability reset. If you’re thinking of holding onto your reset and using it later, be warned that the reset will disappear if you apply or remove any passive skills from your character.

According to ArenaNet, the introduction of Custom Arenas and Spectator Mode to Guild Wars 2 has resulted in a surge of new tournaments, which naturally has been accompanied by a surge in people shouting about those tournaments. ArenaNet hopes to keep the shouts coming with the introduction of its Authorized Shoutcaster Program.

Under the new program, Authorized Shoutcasters will receive notifications when highly rated teams square off against one another. Those shoutcasters can then jump into the match and stream the content live to what we can assume is a cheering throng of e-sports/Guild Wars fanatics. Streams will be delayed to prevent them from influencing the outcome of matches.

ArenaNet has already selected its first set of shoutcasters based on their community contributions and shoutcasting bona-fides. If you’d like to be considered for the role, you can post a link to your stream on the official Guild Wars 2 forums.

In other, somewhat related news, character slot expansions will be half-off 20% off (math!) from June 7th to June 9th. You can find the offer by checking in with the Black Lion Trading Company in-game. (massively)

If you were looking to play EVE Online or DUST 514 this afternoon, you might want to go with your backup plan. That is because CCP has taken its Tranquility server cluster offline in order to deal with a “significant and sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.”

Tranquility hosts EVE and DUST players, and while CCP initially reopened the servers, it has since decided to close them down in order to conduct an investigation and “an exhaustive scan of our entire infrastructure.” The outage also affects CCP’s web presence. You can follow the situation via the company’s Twitter feed.

A week ago, the news of Star Wars: The Old Republic’s Update 2.2 was revealed , and BioWare’s created a couple of pages to highlight the update’s key features.

The Operation Nightmare page details the new level 55 nightmare-mode operations (Terror From Beyond in 2.2 and Legions of Scum and Villainy in 2.2.2). There’s also information on the high-level underworld crafting plans, guild and reputation bonuses, and bonus weekends coming to a game near you. The next such bonus XP weekend is June 21st through the 24th, by the way.

The guild rewards program page has the full scoop on why it’s so cherry to be part of a SWTOR guild these days. Aside from the free hugs and moral support, there’s a substantial increase to gained XP that guilds can provide — especially if these guilds go on a recruiting spree. (massively)

(FROM MASSIVELY)
EVE Online’s Alliance Tournament XI is coming up this summer, and prospective combatants can now check out the full list of official rules as well as format details. Changes from past tournaments include the elimination of pre-qualifying and group stages, an entry fee of just 5 PLEX, the addition of a practice server, and a new tie-breaking system.

The tournament will pit 64 alliance teams against each other in a single stage that involves double-elimination brackets and random initial seeding.

Diablo III was hit with yet another exploit this week as players discovered a way to duplicate gold via a bug in the auction house. Blizzard responded by shutting down the auction house but did not perform a server rollback to reverse the damage. Path of Exile also released a new Letters of Wraeclast lore feature in its latest update.

Controversy hit the Diablo III community this week as a gold-duplicating exploit was discovered on the auction house. The exploit involved cancelling a bid on an auction within its final seconds, which returned the gold immediately and then returned it again when the auction ended. It’s not known how long this exploit has been in the game, but details of it went public this week and threw the game economy into chaos. Prices on good items were massively inflated and gold was rapidly devalued before Blizzard took the auction house down.

Rather than perform a server rollback, Blizzard decided to audit all transactions on the auction house in order to find those abusing the exploit. This unfortunately won’t repair the damage to the game economy as much of the gold had already been passed onto new owners and the biggest exploiters may have cashed their proceeds out of the game by now. Blizzard zeroed in on 415 exploiters before bringing the AH back online and donated their ill-gotten gains to charity.

This week’s Path of Exile update added several new cosmetic microtransaction items and a few secret vendor recipes. The patch also introduced a new Letters of Wraeclast feature that helps tell the backstory behind some of the game’s NPCs. Grinding Gear Games plans to add voice-acting for these letters soon. (FROM MASSIVELY)

Is there a light at the end of Diablo III’s auction house woes? Blizzard is putting its best foot forward in an attempt to make it so. After a nasty gold duping exploit and the subsequent suspension of all services, the Diablo III auction house is back online — and Blizzard is looking to save face with its return.

Production Director John Hight gave a lengthy explanation of what happened with the situation and why Blizzard responded the way it did. “Only a relatively small number of players had the billions of gold necessary to exploit the bug, and only 415 of those players chose to use this exploit for personal gain,” Hight wrote. “We elected not to roll back the servers in the Americas and are instead working to remove duplicated gold from the economy through targeted audits and account actions (as indicated above) without taking away progress that our players rightfully earned.”

Hight said that the studio is donating all proceeds from auctions conducted by dupers to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.

The world’s most popular MMO has gotten a bit less popular in the last few months, it would seem. During today’s quarterly investor call, Activision-Blizzard announced that World of Warcraft’s subscriber numbers are down to 8.3 million. While that’s still nothing to thumb your nose at, it does represent a significant decline from the 9.6 million subscribers the game was reported to have last February.

Yet, some still regard WOW as the most popular MMO of the market, some say it is lack of challenges, and move on to other games, like EVE Online, and some stick to the game simply because of the time and money they have invested in… What do you say?

Sobriety is overrated. Sure, a lot of games give players the options to get characters plastered, but Age of Wushu takes it one step further by incorporating the pop culture notion of drunken fighting into the game. A character with a high alcohol tolerance won’t just be able to fight after tipping back a few drinks; he’ll actually be able to fight better due to an Evade buff granted after imbibing. Characters with lower tolerance, meanwhile, will just stagger and find themselves unable to react appropriately.

That’s not the limit of what you can do with liquor in a fight, though. You can also spray your opponent with spirits in mid-battle, hopefully intoxicating and disorienting the other fighter. Of course, if you attempt to use this technique on someone with a predilection for potables, you might find that you’ve just handed your nemesis a major advantage. Take a look at some plastered punching in the preview video just past the break.

The downside of picking up some special items and drops in Star Wars: The Old Republic is that a lot of them are limited. Sure, you might be able to buy Revan’s Mask, but you have to decide which of your characters will get to wear it. But that’s changing in patch 2.1. A recent interview sheds more light on the upcoming Collections system, which will allow you to unlock items you have obtained on one character for repeated access.

Once you’ve obtained an item on a character, that item will be marked in your collection, allowing you to recreate that item for that character. Pay a few Cartel Coins and that item unlocks for every character in your account, including characters on other servers. The system will include mounts, armors, and pets, with more room for special promotions and the like in the future. So now you don’t have to worry about who gets the special mount — everyone can get the benefit. (from massively )

EVE is celebrating its 10th anniversary of an action-packed weekend within the EVE Universe. It is not just a party because they are running a campaign on Facebook “likes” to work towards free gifts and fireworks, on Sunday May 5th.

Every “like” that EVE Online’s Facebook page receives will help unlock free gifts for players and hourly firework drops. The gifts will be handed out after downtime on Sunday the 5th of May. There will also be an attempt to break the current PCU record, so the park your accounts and enjoy the display. To keep you entertained, there will be two “Hunt a Dev” roams, prizes, and oodles of player events. You can check out all the details on the official page.

(from massively)

The customization options continue to grow in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Producer Cory Butler told The Old Republic Roleplay that besides the appearance designer and Cathar coming in Update 2.1, players will also be able to change their characters’ names. Finally, Darth LordSnuffleFluff can change his name to Darth LordMegaSnuffleFluff like he always wanted.

Butler explains that the name-change option will be available on the Cartel Market as an unlock. However, since it is an unlock and not a service through the official website, that means some players will be able to change names with in-game credits via the Galactic Trade Network.

Congratulations, SWTOR players, you will now be able to change everything about your character except class and gender when GU 2.1 releases. Buy SWTOR CREDITS here on mmovalue!

It has been quite long, officially one year, since BioWare announced the new player-species for Star Wars: The Old Republic. And today, we finally get the result. SWTOR, through the fansites, explained that the Cathar will eventually come in next major patch, known as GU 2.1: Customization.

Republic players were introduced to the Cathar race early on in their class missions on both Tython and Ord Mantell. Imperial players may have come across the Cathar race on Balmorra. One of the Bounty Hunter’s opponents early on in the piece is a Cathar. This cat-like race is a common sight in MMOs. People seem to have a weird fascination with the cat-look.

The other way that SWTOR gamers may have come across the Cathar race is with the Trooper companion, Aric Jorgan. This Cathar companion will be getting a full facelift with patch 2.1 and GamingFace will be doing a complete “Many Looks Of” post with all the options as soon as possible, so that you can see all of the available customizations.

According to Producer Cory Butler, Cathar can be unlocked for 600 Cartel Coins on an account, and this price will be the same for both Subscribers and Free-to-Play and Preferred Status players. The Cathar have a wide variety of markings and colors available; some may appear more familiar to players than others. And when asked why Carthar is emerging, Bulter said, “One of the reasons we chose Cathar is because they are new and unfamiliar to many of our players — in much the same way as Rattataki and Chiss — but have been well-received by our players.”

You can get more information on Interview with BioWare on the introduction of the Cathar player race with patch 2.1 in SWTOR