All 39 seconds of it.

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The team behind LittleBigPlanet gives you another reason to own a Vita.

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Who doesn’t love “Before and After” home improvement shots? It’s always amazing to see how just a couple of changes, like a coat of paint or a quick do-it-yourself project, can transform a living space dramatically. It’s no different when it comes to WordPress.com blog themes, in which a little customization can go a long […]

Filed under: Polls, Massively Meta, Livestream, The Stream Team

Two weeks ago, y'all had the chance to select a new holiday to help add some cheer to the otherwise bland weeks in the middle of May. The choices teased and tantalized you, but you're a discriminating crowd. In a race was fraught with nail-biting suspense, only one ultimately prevailed. And so it is with further ado we bring to you: Monocle Day!

This Tuesday, May 21st, has been selected to be the auspicious day of this most storied celebration. Why? Because 5/21 splits into 5 + 2 + 1, which of course = 8, and we all know that 8 is just two monocles stacked on top of each other! And as always, Massively TV is here to help you ring in the new holiday, with special shows throughout the entire week. Check out the full schedule of celebratory events hosted by The Stream Team after the break. Then let us know if you'll be wearing your own monocle in honor of the festivities.

Continue reading The Stream Team: Monocle Day edition, May 20 - 26, 2013

The Stream Team: Monocle Day edition, May 20 - 26, 2013 originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 20 May 2013 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: MMO Industry, New Titles, News Items

More details are available from the devs themselves in the video after the break, if you speak Russian. For those who don't, you can catch a few snippits of game video between the interviews and a stretch coming just before the seven minute mark.

Continue reading Obsidian and Allods team up to create Skyforge

Obsidian and Allods team up to create Skyforge originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 20 May 2013 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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• Via: VG 24/7

The prolific voice actor announced he has been working on "the next Arkham game" for the past nine or ten months.

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Jeri Ellsworth has had time for new exiting projects, and one of them is headed to Kickstarter soon.

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A younger, scrappier Batman has brought some new toys to Gotham.

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Scarecrow always was interested in brains.

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Mel Croucher's going back to the game he made in 1984, and taking it to Kickstarter.

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With other publishers and developers expressing doubts about the console's viability, Ubisoft is continuing its efforts on the Wii U.

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Perfect World says the Neverwinter exploit this weekend was performed by "malicious" and "unsavory" players.

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These two kids in Transylvania crack me up.  Their character models are oddly not-child-like, but their dialogue is often quite hilarious so I’ll overlook the looks.

Posted in OurDDOSyndicated

My eighteen-year-old self would be so totally jealous, if only he knew.


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Filed under: Betas, Fantasy, MMO Industry, Neverwinter, Buy-to-Play

This weekend, a massive exploit plagued Perfect World Entertainment's Neverwinter beta as players discovered a way to make billions off of the auction house and Astral Diamond Exchange.

After initially closing the economy to explore the company's options, PWE decided to do a seven-hour rollback of the servers that affects the progress made between 5:20 a.m. PDT (8:20 a.m. EDT) and 12:20 p.m. PDT (3:20 p.m. EDT) yesterday for all players.

"Rest assured, the issue has been corrected and we have taken appropriate action against all players who took advantage of the bug, including but not limited to enforcing permanent bans," the announcement reads.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this one in!]

Neverwinter returns with seven-hour rollback after exploit originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 20 May 2013 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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• Source: Rollback announcement

Filed under: Fantasy, Bugs, Business Models, Economy, Events (Real-World), Game Mechanics, MMO Industry, News Items, Opinion, Free-to-Play, The Daily Grind, Miscellaneous, Diablo III, Neverwinter

In the last few weeks, two big games we cover on Massively have been slammed with exploits that have injured their respective economies: Diablo III and Neverwinter. In Diablo III's case, a gold duping bug apparently pumped insane amounts of cash into the economy. And as reported by players, Neverwinter exploits run the gamut from Foundry abuses to negative auction hall bids that don't consume gold to classes that can one-shot bosses making farming trivial. According to these claims, NW exploiters are making off with thousands of real-life dollars when cashing out their ill-gotten funds.

In both cases, players called for characters wipes and rollbacks, believing each exploit severe enough to merit a clean slate. But in Diablo III's case, while the studio dealt harshly with the exploiters, the developers disagreed with the need for wipes and do-overs, presumably having concluded that such drastic measures would impact the legit playerbase far more than would a dented economy.

That brings us to today's question: Are they right? How bad does an exploit have to be before character wipes and server rollbacks are absolutely necessary?

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!

The Daily Grind: When are rollbacks and wipes absolutely necessary? originally appeared on Massively on Mon, 20 May 2013 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The adorable little adventure game from ex-Dreamworks animator Lionel Gallat will soon become a reality.

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Ouya will be holding a three day event showcasing the work of its developers in a parking lot across from the Los Angeles Convention Center.

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The prolific voice actor announced he has been working on "the next Arkham game" for the past nine or ten months.

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In my opinion, the next big challenge for PvE MMOs is creating interesting content for a group that varies in size. Right now, good PvE content is built for groups of a very specific size, be it 5, 10, or 25 people. As we all know from the past few years, this leads to all sorts of complications where groups have to maintain a bench. Where people have to sit out in order to guarantee that future attempts will have enough people.

I believe this is the one true strength of Eve Online. There is always room for one more in an Eve Online fleet. This makes participating much more fun. You always get to go with the group. You never have to sit on the bench.

The few attempts in the themepark MMOs to allow a variable group tend to fail for a few reasons. Very often the content just becomes a zerg, where you just throw bodies at it. If the content difficulty is fixed, the maximum group size becomes the "accepted" size. We saw this in Vanilla, where dungeons were capable of being done in a 5-man, but everyone insisted on taking 10 people.

Ideally, the size of the group would scale from n to 2n -1.  So if you wanted content for about 10 people, you could go with 7 to 13 people.  This allows the group to divide into two smaller groups that can still do the content.

There needs to be some difficulty scaling involved. If there is no scaling, everyone will insist on taking 13 people always.

But scaling things appropriately will be a significant challenge. I am not sure that a game with variable group sizes can offer such a tuned experience as WoW does.  However, variable group size would make organized grouping much easier, and smooth out a lot of the current social issues with grouping.

Posted in OurDDOSyndicated

Starting several updates ago, I think around U14, DDO started to become a real thorn in my side. Random crashing while zoning into wilderness areas that grew in frequency to a point of crashing while zoning in nearly anywhere. Crashes and general slowness especially after doing inventory maintenance while doing toon hopping. A few days […]


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If you are spending $0 on a game, and the economy is working great for the company and the players who are paying money, but your favored currency is not retaining value well, that means the economy is working. “Working” applies both in the sense of in-game supply and demand (there is WAY more supply [...]

The F2P In-Game Economy is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I have been enjoying the new mode in League of Legends. “All random all middle” is even more frantic fun than Dominion, although almost all strategy is gone in favor of tactics. You can reroll your champion every few games, so it is not fully random. This is especially a good thing for people who [...]

ARAM is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Filed under: Massively Meta, Week in Review, Miscellaneous

At the end of every week, we round up the best and most popular news stories, exclusive features, and insightful columns published on Massively and then present them all in one convenient place. If you missed a big MMO or WoW Insider story last week, you've come to the right post.

This week, Trion Worlds' announcement that RIFT will transition to a free-to-play MMO in less than a month was tempered by news that the studio was forced to lay off a large portion of its staff, though the RIFT team itself was unaffected. Meanwhile, CCP's console shooter DUST 514 officially launched; Massively's Jef Reahard delivered tepid impressions of the game.

Read on for a look at the rest of this week's top MMO stories.

Continue reading MMO Week in Review: Trion's tribulations and DUST's launch

MMO Week in Review: Trion's tribulations and DUST's launch originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 19 May 2013 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A bit over a week ago City of Steam, a steampunk-inspired, browser-based dungeon crawler/MMO-type game went into open beta. So it is kind of launched, but not quite. I November/December of 2012 the game had 4 closed beta weekends, which I played a bit in. So now it has been time to see what the state […]