About Toby the News Droid

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Attack Of The Whining Pirates

gamedevtycoonThere’s nothing that inflames more debate in the gaming industry than piracy. Which is why I loved the blog post from an indie game developer, who immediately after releasing their game (Game Dev Tycoon), also released a cracked version on a large torrent site.

What happened then is fascinating if not surprising reading: go have a look, a laugh and perhaps shake your head a couple of times.

Would also love your thoughts on this evergreen issue!

The Secret World 1.6.2 Full Patch Notes

TSW 1.6.2 Patch NotesThe full 1.6.2 Patch Notes for you, enjoy!

UPDATE 1.6.2 – APRIL 15TH

NEW!

  • A new Lair encounter has been added! Some intrepid Secret Worlders have found a way to open a portal to the Eidolon of the Outer Dark’s dwelling place! You’ll want to gather 10 of your bravest and send them through to see what they find. Signs are pointing to a strange wreckage around Kingsmouth being the weakest thread between our realities.

GENERAL

  • Using the Reconstructor won’t show the dialog popup on other players’ clients anymore.
  • Opening the character sheet will no longer cause a clothing item to be previewed.
  • Renamed a crate in the Polaris to “Orochi crate”.
  • Fixed a stuck location in The City Before Us instance.
  • Fixed the snake’s sound effects during the mission cinematic for Old Gods, New Tricks.
  • Kingdom counters from Signet of the Kingdom will now have a description when viewed.
  • When earning multiple tokens would take a character over the token cap, the server previously rejected the entire award. Instead, the character now earns exactly enough tokens to reach the cap.
  • Signet of Thinis will now build ranged resources on your hostile target, even when using a purely friendly targeted heal.
  • Removed Mayan K’in from the wallet GUI.
  • Resolved an issue that would leave players with a black screen after repeatedly using the Hellevator in Hell Eternal.
  • Fixed an issue with hat items being removed when equipping certain uniforms.
  • The Envoy of Ca’ d’Oro now sells another item.
  • Fixed the cause of a server crash.
  • Fixed several exploits in PvP, Lairs and Dungeons.

COMBAT

  • Reduced the cast time of Win-Win to 0.5 seconds (was 1 second).
  • Increased the radius of Win-Win to 15 meters (was 5 meters).
  • Increased the max number of targets affected by Win-Win to 5 (was 3).

MISSIONS

Kingsmouth

  • Floater – Mission will now complete when the drone reaches the end of the escort even if player is still on “Defend the drone” goal.

The Scorched Desert

  • The Last Train to Cairo mission icon will now show below Mean Streets’ mission icon.
  • The Last Train to Cairo: You can now re-enter the train segment even if you are disconnected during the intro cutscene.
  • Added louder sound effects while outside of the train in The Last Train to Cairo mission instance.
  • Players should no longer be prevented from reentering Sol Glorificus 329AD if they camp during certain phases of ‘A Time to Every Purpose’ tier two.
  • The City Before Us – Door to Old al-Meryah tunnels will take player to the tunnels instead of Thinis if player is on goal to “Recover the ark”.
  • Burying the Ark in ‘The City Before Us’ now provides team credit.
  • The Last Train to Cairo – Fixed an issue where your weapon was visually missing after the first boss cutscene on the train.
  • King of the Hill – Mummies no longer get stuck in terrain.

City of the Sun God

  • The Binding – The Hollow spear will be removed from player’s inventory when pausing the mission, and the papyrus, hollow shaft, and sharp point will be removed from player’s inventory when picking up the hollow spear again if they already exist.

PVP

  • Fixed an issue where the minigame score was not properly updated when joining a minigame late.
  • Stonehenge will once again have a wave respawn.

Extra SWTOR Maintenance Thursday 14th February 2013

swtor-server-down

It appears SWTOR Patch 1.7 must have had some gremlins in it, as there’s some further server downtime this week. Time conversions:

AEDT: 10pm-Midnight

AWST: 7pm-9pm

NZDT: Midnight-2am

The BioWare announcement:

We will be deploying a patch and performing an unscheduled maintenance this Thursday, February 14th, 2013. Patch notes will be made available shortly after the servers come back up.

The servers will be down for two hours on Thursday, February 14th, 2013 from 5AM CST (3AM PST/6AM EST/11AM GMT/12PM CET/10PM AEDT) until 7AM CST (5AM PST/8AM EST/1PM GMT/2PM CET/12AM AEDT). All game servers will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than two hours, but could be extended.

After the maintenance, please login via the launcher to download the latest patch. If your launcher was open during the maintenance, you must close and reopen it for a fresh login.

Maintenance

Date: Thursday, February 14th, 2013

Time: 5AM CST (3AM PST/6AM EST/11AM GMT/12PM CET/10PM AEDT) until 7AM CST (5AM PST/8AM EST/1PM GMT/2PM CET/12AM AEDT)

All game servers will be offline during this period. This game maintenance is expected to take no more than two hours.

Thank you for your patience as we maintain service for Star Wars™: The Old Republic™.

Queensland Floods: Bond University Turns To Minecraft

Faceroll_in_the_Level_up_LabIf you live in Australia you’ll have definitely seen the impact the weather has had in Queensland over the last week or more, with lots more people looking at being affected as the flood waters move down the river system.

There’s no real good news stories in such a situation but here’s a great yarn on how a Bond University academic worked around the weather to provide a scheduled class in Minecraft.

Have a read of the full story here – and tell us your stories of using games in ways that you otherwise thought you would have!

SWTOR Maintenance: January 8th 2013

swtor-server-down

A patch deployment maintenance downtime tonight of eight hours.

Local time conversions for you:

AEDT:  7pm-3am

AWST: 4pm-Midnight

NZDT: 9pm-5am

The full blurb from BioWare:

 

Hello!

This is a reminder that we will be bringing down servers for eight hours on Tuesday, January 8th, 2013 from 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET/7PM AEDT) until 10AM CST (8AM PST/11AM EST/4PM GMT/5PM CET/3AM AEDT). All game servers, SWTOR.com, and the launcher will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than eight hours, but could be extended.

For more information, please see our previous scheduled maintenance post.

Scheduled Maintenance

Date: Tuesday, January 8th, 2013

Time: 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET/7PM AEDT) until 10AM CST (8AM PST/11AM EST/4PM GMT/5PM CET/3AM AEDT)

All game servers, SWTOR.com, and the launcher will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than eight hours.

Thank you for your patience as we maintain service for Star Wars™: The Old Republic™.

SWTOR Fan Vid: Quintessential Conversations

Kreep, from Pandamonium Guild, has made this rather funny vid showing how everyone may not be treated equal at times:

It is a time of struggle, it a time of rebellion, it is a time for vacation. Wait, what? A few of the galaxy’s greatest heroes are due a little R&R, but one of their number is in for a totally different experience, Star Wars style.

Enjoy:

Thanks to Kaisa for the heads-up!

Guild Wars 2 Wintersday Event Announced

Guild Wars 2 Wintersday

ArenaNet keep churning out the world events and as you’d guess for this time of year, they’ve announced a Christmas-themed event that goes back to the original game: Wintersday. There’s a short vid that previews what’s coming up between December 14th and January 3rd. Check it out for yourself here:

Even though it’s a short video, I like what I see. I’m also impressed that this isn’t just a bog-standard world event with some fairly static content – there are different events planned throughout the weeks of it being live.

Will you be jumping in and taking part?

Guild Wars 2 Free Trial Info

Guild Wars 2 Free Trial InfoArenaNet have announced that they’ll be running a Guild Wars 2 free trial for friends of current players, between the 15th and 18th November. The details:

We want you to experience Guild Wars 2 and Lost Shores with your friends, so on Monday November 12, we will turn on Refer a Friend Free Trial. You will be able to invite up to 3 Friends to play Guild Wars 2 with you for free from November 15-18.

To do so, you need a Guild Wars 2 account in good standing that was created before 23:59 PST (7:59 GMT) on November 6.

We will give you more details once the program goes live, but start thinking about who you want to invite!

I’d imagine this will be a fairly successful campaign given the momentum Guild Wars 2 has built up: what do you think?

SWTOR 1.4.0b Patch Notes

We were expecting SWTOR Patch 1.4.1 to drop, but it was just 1.4.0b. Here’s the incredibly detailed patch notes:

1.4.0b Patch Notes

10/2/2012

General

  • Improved performance for players using NVIDIA graphics cards in an SLI configuration. (Please use the default SLI setting or AFR2, as AFR1 will result in poor performance with SWTOR.)
  • Corrected an issue that could prevent players from exiting their personal starship after completing Group Finder content.

SWTOR: No 12th Slot for Oceanic Servers – Yet

After a marathon server downtime of around 12 hours, things are back to normal but there’s one issue affecting oceanic players on local servers. It seems the 12th character slot isn’t available.

It seems it’s caught BioWare by surprise after being raised by the community, with Joveth Gonzalez posting this a little while ago:

No extra Character Slots for Oceanic | 09.18.2012, 10:05 PM
Hi folks! Thanks for raising awareness for this! Rest assured that Oceanic servers will be getting 12 character slots as well. Apologies for the confusion and the wait as we work on making this adjustment. Thank you for your patience!

No word on timeframes but we’ll let you know if it becomes clear.

GW2 Hits 2 Million Copies Sold: Just The Beginning?

For those (like me) that missed the press release, NCsoft have announced that sales of Guild Wars 2 has broken the 2-million mark. It’s a milestone for sure – some cynics say they’re surprised it took this long, but there’d have to be a great deal of happiness at NCsoft and ArenaNet on the achievement.

Predicting ongoing sales numbers is a bit like tea-leaf reading, but my feeling is that this is the first of many growth milestones for what is a very engaging game. What do you think?

The press release in full:

GUILD WARS® 2 SALES BREAK TWO MILLION UNITS
Critically-acclaimed online RPG quickly surpasses milestone after re-opening sales
NCsoft®, the world’s premier publisher and developer of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) and ArenaNet, developer of the renowned  Guild Wars franchise, has announced that the chart-topping MMO Guild Wars 2 has sold more than two million units. Despite temporarily halting first-party sales and replenishing retail stores to maintain an optimal player experience, Guild Wars 2surpassed the two million sales milestone shortly after turning sales back on.

Guild Wars 2, which launched just over two weeks ago, has captured the imagination of the gaming community around the world. With peak concurrency regularly exceeding 400,000 players and first week sales that placed it at the top of the All Formats charts across ten European territories, it’s clear that demand for the game remains high.

“Reactions from around the world justified the time and care we put into developing Guild Wars 2 and making it into the game it is today”, said Mike O’Brien, president and co-founder of ArenaNet. “And this is only the beginning. We’re continually fine-tuning the game to deliver the polished experience that our players expect, and we’re already working on new adventures and experiences to introduce into this truly dynamic online world.”

Blizzard Start TV Spots for Mists of Pandaria

Blizzard in the US have started promoting the upcoming expansion on TV, with two different advertisements taken from the first cinematic released a bit over a week ago.

Here are the two ads:

For the avid and active WoW player there’s not much in there to get excited about, but we’re obviously not the audience. I also think it might have been good to show a second or two of actual gameplay.

What do you think?

Polls

What impact will the announced oceanic SWTOR server closures have on you?

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