WildStar relaunched as a free-to-play title this past week, running into the usual conversion and launch stumbles: queues, discons, and downtime. Carbine nuked region locks, added new temporary servers to mitigate the load, and wouldn’t rule out a journey to consoles, but it did admit today that the queues aren’t quite at an end yet:
While we’re hard at work increasing the number of players we can let into the game, and we’re making continual improvements that are allowing us to raise concurrency, due to the number of people looking to play we expect the queues to continue for a few more days.
Here on Massively OP, we streamed some chunks of launch week, took the community’s temperature, and pointed our monthly Choose My Adventure at the revitalized MMO.
Read on for the very best of this week’s MMO news and opinions.
GUILD WARS 2
Guild Wars 2’s guild hall arena is ‘a combat sandbox’ - Guild Wars 2's week of dev blogs continues, this time with an update about guild hall arenas. ArenaNet calls its new guild hall arena a "combat sandbox," and today's dev blog is designed to give you…
Guild Wars 2 shares more guild hall details, confirms raid gearing - Guild Halls are a big part of the feature list for Guild Wars 2's first expansion, and with good cause. The ongoing livestreams of the week have shared a lot more details of how the feature…
Guild Wars 2 walks guilds through the process of getting their new home - We all know that guild halls are coming with Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, but how will that actually work? Is there an in-game realtor and papers to sign at a closing or what? It…
Guild Wars 2 enhances its squad UI, preps for Halloween - ArenaNet recently unveiled its enhanced squad UI for Guild Wars 2. It's designed to help players organize their friends, guildmates, and other large groups of players in all areas of the game. Players with commander tags…
Guild Wars 2 details the Druid, raiding, and final expansion test weekend - Guild Wars 2 players will be able to get their collective hands on Heart of Thorns very soon, and that's a good thing. The final test weekend for the expansion will kick off on October 2nd;…
Mission changes coming with Guild Wars 2’s expansion - The Heart of Thorns expansion is changing guild missions in Guild Wars 2. How so? That's what today's website update is designed to answer. New guild mission types for WvW and PvP will be added to…
Guild Wars 2’s former lead designer now develops for Amazon - Amazon has been trying to work its way into game development for a while, but the retailer has a new weapon in its arsenal. Eric Flannum, former lead designer for Guild Wars 2 over at ArenaNet,…
THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES
Camelot Unchained announces early 2016 beta test - Camelot Unchained looks to be moving into beta testing in early 2016. In a livestream yesterday, City State Entertainment revealed that the beta should kick off before the end of this winter. The studio also said that all plans…
Star Citizen’s Chris Roberts responds to publication’s ‘long troll’, threatens legal action for defamation - Unless you've been living under a rock lately, you probably know that Star Citizen and its creator Chris Roberts have been under siege from a certain indie game developer in recent months. The crowdfunded sci-fi sandbox…
Dragon’s Prophet calls it quits in North America - The latest free-to-play fantasy MMO to call it quits is Dragon's Prophet. Daybreak and Runewaker announced today the decision to shutter the title in North America. Dragon's Prophet will continue to be available in Europe and Asia for…
Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen gets investors, development is continuing - Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen missed out on its Kickstarter goals, but that wasn't the end of the road. Visionary Realms, after an extended trip through volunteer development and a dearth of funding, has raised a…
Massively OP’s first impressions of Devilian - Call my stance on Trion World's upcoming Devilian "oh-so-cautiously interested." Personally, I think Trion invited more grief than it wanted with the importation of ArcheAge to its portfolio, and with many MMO players still stinging from the…
SWTOR will introduce level-scaling in Fallen Empire - [AL:TOR]BioWare threw a nerdrage grenade in the midst of its Star Wars: The Old Republic community yesterday when it announced that as of Knights of the Fallen Empire, player levels will automatically scale down to the…
ArcheAge addresses castle construction bug - A quest bug connected to the construction of castles on ArcheAge's Diamond Shores has resulted in Trion Worlds issuing a hotfix over the weekend to address the situation -- and not everyone is happy. Apparently a…
WoW Factor: A wishlist for World of Warcraft’s Legion expansion - We're going to find out a lot about World of Warcraft:Â Legion in November. Not just because I expect that'll be around the time we get our beta announcement and date, which may even be as soon…
Hyperspace Beacon: SWTOR’s TwitchCon infodump - [AL:TOR]So here's a funny thing: When I watched the TwitchCon streams for Star Wars: The Old Republic, I wasn't exactly looking to get new story reveals because most of those had already been spoiled for me.…
EverQuesting: EQII expansion Terrors of Thalumbra launches November 17th - It's happening in less than two months: EverQuest II's 12th expansion is releasing on Tuesday, November 17th. The dev team announced the date and title during a special reveal livestream, treating viewers to tours of the…
EverQuesting: EQ to release The Broken Mirror expansion November 18th - EverQuest fans excited for the game's next expansion should mark Wednesday, November 19th down on their calendars -- that's the day The Broken Mirror launches. Announced during a special reveal livestream, this 22nd expansion revolves around…
The Game Archaeologist: The assassination of Lord British - At the end of August 2015, the fledgling Shroud of the Avatar community gathered together for a massive PvP fight. This wasn't to be a normal battle, however, as Lord British (Richard Garriott's in-game avatar) waded…
CCP lays out EVE’s 2015/2016 roadmap - CCP has published a new video featuring its EVE Online roadmap for the rest of this year and well into 2016. Executive producer Andie "CCP Seagull" Nordgren is your guide to what's next, though you can…
Perfect Ten: Why big MMO expansions are a good thing - I'm not really on board with the trend of saying that big expansions are back. They never left. Sure, we have one coming out for Star Wars: The Old Republic and Guild Wars 2, but World…
Exploring ‘The Video Game Debate’: Modern online game research - Late last year, I published on Massively-that-was a set of articles addressing current research on the relationship between shyness and online game friendships, including a detailed interview with Dr. Rachel Kowert, a lead researcher on the related…
Star Citizen studio ‘grows’ dev team, claims layoffs are ‘streamlin[ing]’ - It's never exactly calming to hear that a large project is laying people off before release, and that's the rumor swirling around Cloud Imperium Games for the past few days. A recent statement from the studio…
Project Copernicus was in trouble long before its $75M loan - The lengthy post-mortem of Project Copernicus and 38 Studios never seems to end, does it? While the answer to "What went wrong?" is multi-faceted at the very least, a new report floating around shows that there were serious red…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
Massively OP Podcast Episode 31: MMO expansions come roaring back
The Stream Team: Exploring ARK’s new snow and swamp biomes
The Stream Team: Let there be Landmark keys!
The Stream Team: 12 Days of TOR, day 5
The Stream Team: Returning to Final Fantasy XIV
The Stream Team: Guarding against Gnolls on EverQuest II’s progression server
The Stream Team: Wading in as WildStar goes free-to-play
The Stream Team: 12 days of TOR, day 4
The Stream Team: Diving into Devilian
AND FROM OUR FRIENDS AT BLIZZARD WATCH
The five spookiest pumpkin patches in World of Warcraft
WoW Archivist: Classic’s melee hunter and the abilities Legion might restore
Every week, get caught up on the MMO genre’s latest news and Massively OP’s best content in our MMO Week in Review! Want more roundups of content? Try Monday’s Not So Massively for fringe-MMO news, Friday’s Betawatch for MMO testing highlights, Saturday’s Make My MMO for MMO crowdfunding updates, and Sunday’s The MOP Up, which mops up all the little bits of news we didn’t cover anywhere else.
