ccp

See: CCP Games

Jagex gets into games publishing while RuneScape crosses $1 billion earned

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Jagex isn’t content to be “just the RuneScape studio” these days. The company announced today that it is preparing to move into the publishing space with Jagex Partners, a “third-party publishing initiative for live games.”

Jagex Partners is hoping to attract all sorts of live games and will support them with a whole suite of tools and services that Jagex has used to keep RuneScape up and running over all these years. This new publishing arm has attracted former talent from NCsoft, EA, Trion Worlds, and CCP. We’ll be hearing more about this initiative next week at Gamescom.

“Jagex Partners is so much more than a go-to-market publishing experience,” said SVP Publishing John Burns in a press release. “It’s the entire toolkit to launch and run a game in live operations, backed by years of experience.”

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EVE Online delays its August release a week, citing the need for ‘additional testing’

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If you were hoping to hop into EVE Online with its August release tomorrow, then I’m sorry to tell you that the patch has been delayed a solid week, and you’ll have to go on participating in the ongoing player war instead.

“Due to the need for additional testing, the deployment of the August release has been pushed back by one week from August 14th, to August 21st,” CCP says. “This means that both the August release and the “Secrets of the Abyss” event will now launch on the same day, next Tuesday.”

The studio promises more info on Friday alongside revamped patch notes (the old updates notes have been temporarily deleted). This particular update was slated to redesign half a dozen iconic shop models and revamp the newbie experience with the new Agency UI.

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World of Warcraft quietly disables the group finder auto-accept on the eve of Battle for Azeroth

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Happy Battle for Azeroth Day, everyone! Starting tonight, World of Warcraft’s newest expansion will release globally and players will evacuate the Broken Isles en masse for fresh content.

And while this should be a time of celebration, Blizzard isn’t making everyone happy. The studio quietly disabled the ability for the group finder to auto-accept players, a feature that was heavily used for world quests and world bosses in Legion. This move has broken several popular add-ons and led to frustration over the removal of a user friendly feature.

Blizzard said that it did this to promote more of social hobnobbing: “The challenge with mods like World Quest Group Finder is that by automating this process for quests that were designed for single players, that’s not actually a social experience — there’s no actual interaction going on. Oftentimes, in fact, it’s just leeching — players can be on their mount, flying in midair, and that quest autocompletes for them.”

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EVE Online overhauls a half-dozen ships and improves the starter experience

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You notice how other studios, rather than scrambling away from next Tuesday’s World of Warcraft expansion release, seem to be trying to compete with it in some way? EVE Online is certainly not the only MMO that’s pushing out alternative entertainment for the larger community. The August release for EVE should improve the game overall with some spiffy ship redesigns, an update to the tutorial, and client performance.

Six iconic ships — the Navitas, Thalia, Tayra, Bustard, Badger, and Crane — are all slated for visual reworks when the patch lands on August 14th. These are all getting better models, textures, visual effects, and animations, so the ship you end up with next Tuesday may seem like a completely new experience.

And speaking of new player experiences: “This update focuses on delivering a new basic starter site for rookie pilots, as well as combat challenges displayed via The Agency and a new Agency UI for training tasks. These challenges are repeatable, but new pilots will only be rewarded with skills upon first completion as part of the rookie orientation process.”

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Massively on the Go: A guide to (re)learning how to catch Pokemon in Pokemon Go

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So, you’re in Pokemon Go, and you just saw a Pokemon. You clicked the little beast and now are in the catch screen. Just straight flick those balls at the Pokemon and hope for the best, right? Wrong! I mean, you can do that, but with very little training, you can throw curveballs, drastically increasing your capture rates, allowing you to complete special quests/tasks. When you combine your new technique with new items to get more candy/dust for your effort, you’ll be amassing an army of digital beasties in no time!

Tracking Pokemon

Especially for those of you played in the very early days in America, Pokemon catching has changed. The “step” system is gone. Instead, Pokemon are often by PokeStops. You can click on the bottom right of the screen to see nearby Pokemon, click the one you want to track, and the game will highlight the area you should search for it. Pokemon with a grass icon can be, well, just about anywhere not near a Stop.

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EVE Online disables part of Abyssal Deadspace’s gameplay for testing

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Now we are not looking specifically in your direction, but there are rumors that you are such an epic EVE Online player — so skilled, so masterful — that you managed to break part of the game due to your moves alone. Perhaps this is just part of your legend in the making, but in any case, CCP is taking a small part of the game’s relatively new abyssal deadspace offline for a possible fix.

“We are currently in the process of running several tests on abyssal deadspace over the course of the next couple of months,” the studio announced. “As part of these tests, we will be disabling the suspect flag that is placed on a pilot upon exiting Tier 4 and Tier 5 abyssal deadspace runs.”

This removal is going into effect August 14th and will come back online when “enough data is gathered.” At that point, the suspect flags are going back up and all will be well with the galaxy once more.

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Check out the winningest EVE Online propaganda from CCP’s latest contest

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Against the backdrop of yet another massive, hyped-up in-game gang war, EVE Online’s propaganda machine is constantly churning, sowing chaos not just for players but for developers and journalists trying to cover the drama. And while most of it is obnoxious trolling, the propaganda art that emerges is often spectacular. (Maybe it’s just me, though – I have a penchant for propaganda art history. At a London guild meetup years ago, I dragged everyone to a propaganda exhibit at the Imperial War Museum. My guildies are the best.)

Anyway, if you don’t want to crawl Reddit or Google looking for examples, take a peek at CCP Games’ recent propaganda contest, which announced and posted up all the winners this weekend. My pick would’ve been the second-place finisher, personally, but they all hold a sort of bizarre fascination. CCP’s top picks, however, will see their posters sold at EVE Vegas, and all the finishers get huge stacks of EVE cash. Check ’em all out below, and congrats to the winners! (I’d love to see a “losers” thread too but couldn’t find it!)

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CCP reveals EVE Online: Infinite Galaxy

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EVE Online’s mobile game now has an official title (sort of)! At ChinaJoy this month, CCP revealed the trailer for EVE Online: Infinite Galaxy, the mobile MMO that it is working on with NetEase. The trailer promises a space opera that spans across over 8,000 star systems. Players will have access to over 100 spaceships for this iOS and Android title.

This announcement comes just days after EVE Online was shut down in China by its old publisher Tiancity. NetEase will be handling the rebooted version of that sandbox as well when it comes back online (and don’t feel too bad for those players, since they’ll be able to import their accounts to the reboot).

EVE Online: Infinite Galaxy should be heading our way in 2019, but you can get excited about it now by watching the trailer below!

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EVE Evolved: A furious supercapital war is raging in EVE Online

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This year kicked off with a bang for EVE Online as rumblings emerged of impending war on a scale that the gaming world had never seen before. It looked as if two massive military coalitions were about to come to blows in the most spectacular way when a small border skirmish between The Imperium and Pandemic Horde escalated out of control. Both sides armed heavily for a battle over a space station and moved hundreds of expensive Titans and Supercarriers into position to prepare for the battle. Players estimated that a fully escalated battle could have seen the equivalent of a million dollars in ships go up in smoke, and the story of EVE‘s first “million dollar battle” rapidly captured the media.

While that battle earned a Guinness World Record for having 6,142 players simultaneously in the same battle, it was far less destructive than anticipated. The Imperium decided not to commit its full forces and ultimately less than 1% of the expected value in ships went up in smoke. Fast-forward to this week and the old rivalry came to a head again as The Imperium teamed up Legacy coalition to launch an all-out assault on a Northern Coalition and Pandemic Legion staging Keepstar in the X47L-Q system — except that this time both sides committed their full forces. The result was one of the most destructive battles in EVE Online‘s decade-and-a-half long history, and this war may be just getting started.

In this edition of EVE Evolved, I dig into some of the history that led to the current conflict and details of the battle in X47L-Q.

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CCP clarifies NetEase’s EVE Online China publishing, plans 2019 launch of EVE Project Galaxy mobile game

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Earlier this week, we covered CCP Games’ newly announced partnership with Chinese mega-publisher NetEase, which is taking over EVE Online in China and taking “New Eden’s Serenity server to the next level for Chinese capsuleers” beginning in October. Today, CCP and NetEase gave a press conference in Shanghai to clarify that it will be the beta test that begins in October (the game has been running its server there for a dozen years already). The last day for the previous operate will be September 30th.

“NetEase Games is working with CCP and the original operator to conduct the seamless migration of players’ data,” CCP says. “NetEase Games will be leveraging its ten years plus of operational experience to crack down on botters and real money traders (RMT) to protect the interests of players, listen to the voices of players more closely, and create a better game environment for players in EVE Online China.”

What we didn’t cover Wednesday was the latest news on EVE: Project Galaxy, which is also being developed with NetEase. Project Galaxy was first announced back in June as more or less a mobile version of EVE. Apparently it’ll be out next year.

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EVE Online is hard at work on fixing downtime and mitigating DDOS attacks

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All of the balance changes in the world won’t help EVE Online players if the game’s servers are down, and considering that the game only has the one server (by design) there’s only one server to go down. As it turns out, this summer has been particularly busy for the game, prompting a new development entry about the game’s ongoing database and login issues. The team is aware of them too, and between DDoS attacks, older code, players congregating for specific battles, and simple server issues, sometimes you aren’t allowed into the epic space battles just due to old-fashioned hardware issues.

The team is working on fixing this, though; there’s a task force working on investigating the login and chat server issues, for example, and the DDoS mitigation is being stepped up for future incidents. Similarly, new hardware is on order and headed for the game’s server farm, so players will know that there are more servers ready to handle the load if things start blowing up. If you’ve been affected by the login issues, we encourage you to read the whole entry to see what CCP Games is doing about the problem.

Source: Official Site

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CCP calls NetEase EVE Online partnership a ‘new era for internet spaceships in China’

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NetEase is making bold moves this summer. First it threatened to sue battle royale clones in retaliation for PUBG Corp.’s lawsuit. Then it dropped a cool $50 million on SpatialOS and vowed to publish an MMO using that platform. And now it’s apparently taking over publishing EVE Online in China.

“We’re delighted to announce that the story of EVE Online will continue in China, as CCP partners with NetEase Games to take New Eden’s Serenity server to the next level for Chinese capsuleers,” CCP wrote this morning. “With a track record of releasing games of high quality in the Chinese market and abundant operating experience in this territory which remains super close to CCP’s heart, NetEase will no doubt prove to be a suitable publisher for EVE Online in China.”

The company says it expects NetEase to take over publishing in October and promises Chinese players that its “core priority is to preserve and protect the history and legacy of their gameplay, and the achievements they’ve worked so hard for in New Eden.”

Source: Official site

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Massively OP Podcast Episode 180: Superstoked for heroic MMOs

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On this week’s show, Bree and Justin do a belly flop right into a big pool of superhero MMOs, news, and fan projects. City of Heroes may be dead and gone many years now, but its legacy still lives on in surprising ways!

It’s the Massively OP Podcast, an action-packed hour of news, tales, opinions, and gamer emails! And remember, if you’d like to send in your own letter to the show, use the “Tips” button in the top-right corner of the site to do so.

Listen to the show right now:


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