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Anyone who plays the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) Legend of Mir will have heard the news. Game Network, the subsidiarly of Digital Brothers who run Legend of Mir in European territories as the licensee of Actoz Soft (the holding company of WeMade, the Korean developers of the game) have been told to stop running the game due to a number of problems, royalty payments being just one of them.
In the interim, a legal battle is brewing over ownership of the player database, who actually 'owns' the right to these characters that some players have worked on for over a year? And in the interim, Game Network continue to run their servers AND take payments from customers who wish to pay to play, despite knowing that they were told in October 2002 to wind down operations.
For the players it's a blow. Their characters are going to have to be transferred over to a Korean (and probably laggy) server when Game Network cease to provide service. The Korean servers won't have GameMaster support (not that that ever mattered much) and will exist as long as it takes for Actoz Soft to find a new European partner, at which time the characters will be transferred back to European servers again.
Even so, this might not be possible if Game Network prove legally that the customer database belongs to them and decide to not facilitate character transfers.
So, for Legend of Mir players, these are uncertain times. Quite literally thousands of gamers are going to be affected by this. Things may turn out alright in the end, but then again they may not and the game may never see the light of day in Europe again. A whole gaming community, hundreds of players who've got to know each other and made friends and in some cases even got married, is being uprooted, messed about, annoyed and mucked around just because two companies can't see eye to eye over some smallprint in a legal contract.
The same kind of thing happened with Planetarion recently, another MMOG, although character transfers didn't really apply in this case when they managed to successfully find another company to host and run the game. They just started a new game from scratch, and because rounds of Planetarion only last about 4 months on average and because the existing round was only a few days old, customers weren't too miffed about losing 'work to date', unless of course they were winning at the time.
But with Mir we're talking about longer time investments. Hardcore players, who have nothing better to do, literally, were playing more than 40 hours a week, some of them since August 2001. Some ingame characters were of the 'cooperative' type, levelled by more than one player around the clock just to attain a high level quickly. To lose a character after putting that much work into one must be devastating.
Is this a unique situation or could this sort of occurence happen to other online games? Well, if the game is licensed from one company to another, then yes, this sort of occurence is quite possible. Could it possibly happen in console online gaming? Only time will tell, but it's difficult to envisage a scenario where this problem could arise in the console world, except maybe if Sega were hosting games on their servers for the XBox then suddenly decided not to anymore because they were re-entering the hardware market once again...
Lessons? They say once bitten twice shy, but I don't go for that philosophy. I had a lot of fun in Mir during the 3000+ hours that I played there. Following official announcements made yesterday and today by both GameNetwork and WeMade I finally got around to deleting my characters and uninstalling the game, I've had enough of being mucked around over the last 17 months and really can't take anymore of it. So I've started a Lineage account instead (lol, sucker for punishment or what?).
This time, though, whilst levelling my character in this new MMORPG, I'll be doing so with a little Post-It note stuck to my monitor with the words 'Here Today - Gone Tomorrow' written on it, just to remind me that no matter what I do, or how much effort I put into it, the next time I login it might just be to a blank screen.
A bit like life, really.
(Except for the monitor, Post-It note, login, blank screen etc...)
In the interim, a legal battle is brewing over ownership of the player database, who actually 'owns' the right to these characters that some players have worked on for over a year? And in the interim, Game Network continue to run their servers AND take payments from customers who wish to pay to play, despite knowing that they were told in October 2002 to wind down operations.
For the players it's a blow. Their characters are going to have to be transferred over to a Korean (and probably laggy) server when Game Network cease to provide service. The Korean servers won't have GameMaster support (not that that ever mattered much) and will exist as long as it takes for Actoz Soft to find a new European partner, at which time the characters will be transferred back to European servers again.
Even so, this might not be possible if Game Network prove legally that the customer database belongs to them and decide to not facilitate character transfers.
So, for Legend of Mir players, these are uncertain times. Quite literally thousands of gamers are going to be affected by this. Things may turn out alright in the end, but then again they may not and the game may never see the light of day in Europe again. A whole gaming community, hundreds of players who've got to know each other and made friends and in some cases even got married, is being uprooted, messed about, annoyed and mucked around just because two companies can't see eye to eye over some smallprint in a legal contract.
The same kind of thing happened with Planetarion recently, another MMOG, although character transfers didn't really apply in this case when they managed to successfully find another company to host and run the game. They just started a new game from scratch, and because rounds of Planetarion only last about 4 months on average and because the existing round was only a few days old, customers weren't too miffed about losing 'work to date', unless of course they were winning at the time.
But with Mir we're talking about longer time investments. Hardcore players, who have nothing better to do, literally, were playing more than 40 hours a week, some of them since August 2001. Some ingame characters were of the 'cooperative' type, levelled by more than one player around the clock just to attain a high level quickly. To lose a character after putting that much work into one must be devastating.
Is this a unique situation or could this sort of occurence happen to other online games? Well, if the game is licensed from one company to another, then yes, this sort of occurence is quite possible. Could it possibly happen in console online gaming? Only time will tell, but it's difficult to envisage a scenario where this problem could arise in the console world, except maybe if Sega were hosting games on their servers for the XBox then suddenly decided not to anymore because they were re-entering the hardware market once again...
Lessons? They say once bitten twice shy, but I don't go for that philosophy. I had a lot of fun in Mir during the 3000+ hours that I played there. Following official announcements made yesterday and today by both GameNetwork and WeMade I finally got around to deleting my characters and uninstalling the game, I've had enough of being mucked around over the last 17 months and really can't take anymore of it. So I've started a Lineage account instead (lol, sucker for punishment or what?).
This time, though, whilst levelling my character in this new MMORPG, I'll be doing so with a little Post-It note stuck to my monitor with the words 'Here Today - Gone Tomorrow' written on it, just to remind me that no matter what I do, or how much effort I put into it, the next time I login it might just be to a blank screen.
A bit like life, really.
(Except for the monitor, Post-It note, login, blank screen etc...)
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I play Runescape. I like it
11000+ people play every day.
11000+ people play every day.
I'd like to get into MMORPG's, but I just don't have the spare time for things like that these days. I'd struggle to find the time to play Planetarion or Utopia, to be honest. Not that utopia was really worth playing...
I've only seen my mate playing the game, and it looked pants. I played it a bit, and just had a lugh realy. I just tried to get people "p-k 'ers" and making them get killed. they called me a n00b, but i had the last laugh because they all play 6 Euros a month to play it. Ha.
Perhaps the company should open some sort of helpline. Like the one they opened when Take That split up.
Anyone remember 2am games? That was one worth going on, if that was still about it would be great, that war game would have been perfect for some of us lot to get together and play/fight/argue.
It didn't need anything special to run either.
It didn't need anything special to run either.
MMORPGs are absolute drivel. They are foolishness to the highest degree.
Darn you and your GAD winning ways...
I liked it when Jeff presented the program. Oh how truly terrible it was.
Look at my purple name!
Look at my purple name!
It's a game, get over it
Yah. It's better to go into those things thinking "I'm gonna have a larf."
Hence the launching entire fleet at Sniper every few weeks. Even when he was on the same team as us.
Hence the launching entire fleet at Sniper every few weeks. Even when he was on the same team as us.
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