Horizons Tries Playvault, Artifact Files Chapter 11

StanTheHand writes "Horizons, the Artifact Entertainment PC MMORPG, has joined forces with PlayVault to 'migrate' users from a bunch of other MMO games - it works by 'fetching your old game currency so [Horizons] can provide you with the proper amount of currency on your new game', meaning you can go from being rich on Ultima Online to rich on Horizons seamlessly." In related news, as noted by Terra Nova, Artifact Entertainment "has now filed for Chapter 11 protection from creditors in a move to keep operations alive", although "game play will not be interrupted at all by this decision."

Comments

In related news...

[MobyDisk]

To avoid losing all of their assets, Artifact is using their own technology to move all of their assets from Ultima Online, into the New York Stock Exchange. This, along with the sale of the sale of the "Uber sword of vanquishing" is expected to expedite Artifact return to normal financial operating conditions.

Good Riddance

[delus10n0]

Horizons was an awful awful game. I beta tested it for three months or so, and they never fixed the major problems that people were reporting (very low FPS, sound problems, network lag.) It also just wasn't a very fun game. You'd have to practically read an entire manual to even get started. There was no "jumping in" right away.

Re:Good Riddance

[Asmor]

I was actually paid to beta test it for a couple months, I worked at Atari. I do have to say, the crafting system was the most fun I've had crafting, although the only other MMORPGs I've played are EverQuest and City of Heroes. City of Heroes rawks all other MMORPGs' sawks, incidentally.

Re:Good Riddance

[Don Calamari]

It actually had one of the best user interfaces of any MMORPG I've have seen. It was difficult to use at first, but I thought it was very powerful when I got used to it. But, yes the game did suck pretty bad on all other fronts. The bugs, crappy framerates, lag, lack of content as well as lack of players only got worse after beta.

Economy?

[Teh Suq]

While it appears that nobody cares about Horizons any more, I wonder what allowing someone to bring over stacks of money to a new character will do to the in-game economy. I suppose Horizons is not far away from that next announcement of closure anyway.

It did have potential

[Fiz Ocelot]

I played Horizons for 3 months, started a month after release. It had some good ideas and a lot of potential. I did have a big adult dragon (required a difficult and lengthy quest), fun to fly around the game world for a while.

But the game ran out of content, and was plagued by problems and poor management. I don't really plan to play another mmo (played quite a few), they always seem to turn into a waiting game for more things to do.

How to take advantage of this?

[Daetrin]

How do they decide what the exchange rate is? (I'd try RTFAing, but there doesn't seem to be one)

Whatever the method, there's probably a way to corrupt the system. Someone just needs to come out with a cheapass MMO game that lets you collect vast amounts of money so you can exchange it for currency in another game. You are a cube, you go out into the flat featureless plain where you fight smaller cubes who leave large amounts of gold when defeated. You then go back to town (a really large cube) and save the game.

If the exchange rate is determined by total amount of gold in the game, you jut put caps on the total gold so no one can collect a truely huge amount at a time. Everyone quickly collects (say) a million gp and then converts it to another MMO before collecting more. If it's determined by the compared cost of items, you can have the monsters drop a small amount of gold, but make a dagger cost a copper, and the Uber-Sword of Godslaying cost a single gold, etc.

Whatever the system, just figure out the right exploit, and charge a minimum monthly fee so people can just sit there collecting loot for the game they really care about. Sure, you'd probably get locked out of the exchange program after a while, but you might be able to get a month or so of decent income in before that happened :)

Re:How to take advantage of this?

[Sparr0]

exchange rates are based on the value of the currency in US dollars, as determined by the free market of PlayVault, PlayerAuctions, Ebay, IGE, etc.

Re:How to take advantage of this?

[Daetrin]

Hmmmm, so the question is, can you make signing up for the game cheap and easy enough such that no one bothers selling/buying the currency on ebay and co, other than for your partners with whom you are colluding? And how many such rigged sales would you need to make before it was considered a valid amount?

I'm also wondering if this could even be considered fraud or something similar, although it would certainly be dishonest and underhanded. If you tried a similar trick on the stock market you'd certainly get nailed, but i'm not sure what laws cover this aspect of commerce.

In any case, although it's technically possible it would be damn hard to pull off. Amusing thought though.

Re:How to take advantage of this?

[Drawkcab]

They are only going to bother exchanging currency for their major commercial competitors. There are already dozens of crappy second-tier MMORPGs out there that they wont be exchanging. These secondd tier games are real games that people actually designed to be fun and are played for enjoyment by players. There is no way they will exchange for all the small homemade games like this, so why would they ever exchange with a small homemade fake game that virtually nobody actually plays and is a transparently lame attempt to get money in horizons? If you don't count the graphics, there are thousands of muds with hundreds or thousands of players each, all of which have a real economy rather than a transparent fraud, and horizons obviously wouldn't transfer from MUDs, but they'd probably go for an established MUD before your game. You make it sound like there will be some automatic drone that will make these exchange decisions, but it will be human beings who aren't complete morons.

And how useful will your horizons money be in a few months anyway since the game is obviously on the road to financial oblivion already and cancellation?

Re:How to take advantage of this?

[Daetrin]

Geez, lighten up dude. It's not like anyone is going to try this, so just enjoy the amusement factor :)

Re:How to take advantage of this?

[Unoti]

I thought Horizons was a crappy second-tier MMORPG itself.

Virtual World Bylaw #1

[Midnight Warrior]

An excerpt from my Virtual World Bylaws (rules to live by). This exact scenario fits the bylaw perfectly.

The world must be able to exist when the vendor loses interest and shuts down the hardware.

Peer-to-peer networking is an excellent example of letting a good thing keep running even when somebody wants it to come down. The same resiliency should be applied to virtual worlds. Distribute the servers that manage the virtual areas or worlds and localized hardware problems only mean a degredation in service.

Likewise, folks who are open with their underlying engine will find their technology replicated so that the world continues without them. Find a balance with openness and intellectual property or risk having your worlds be meaningless six months after creation. Note the difference between a graphics engine and an object interaction/scene description engine.

Vendors around the world will testify that customer service is the hardest part of MMOGs. No vendor wants to keep a customer support team paid and trained for 300 total players. If the technology is open, then those 300 players can play when they want and they will be expert enough to keep it running.

But what about artwork and the licensing that goes with it? Yes, that is a troubling sticky point. So what I recommend is that at the moment the vendor decides it's time to abandon, they exercise a clause they signed with all the graphic artists that says all royalty payments stop when the support section for that world closes. The artwork should then be released under something like the Creative Commons License. This ties the company's profit line to the royalty distribution, if one exists at all, and as long as the venture is profitable to someone, the artists involved should be compensated.

Re:Virtual World Bylaw #1

[KDR_11k]

I think they should just put their server software up for download once they shut down the game servers. No need to fiddle around with artwork licenses and such (since the artwork itself is still covered under the game EULA), just let 'em run the servers, maybe give 'em the tools you used to add content and perhaps release the main game under the GPL (so no competitor can just copy from your old code). The problem would of course be that sustaining your old game might create competition for your new one.

Re:IMO...

[Marc_Hawke]

I'm not a jaded ex-player either. I'm a jaded ex-fanboy/devotee. I followed this game very closely for many years, I was a prominent member of the community, (on the official boards while they lasted and then on the Vault Network.)

Many times during the development, I sent personal email and posted many open letters to the management of Artifact Entertainment telling them how their customer service was lacking and that they should work just as hard on that as they did on content as it was just as important.

Anytime I found an openning, I told them how 'now' would be a good time to get the CS Head some good air-time with the community, on how they could have their CSR's and WM's practice their jobs by interacting with the community.

I recieved several replies from A.E. including one just a few months before they released saying that they weren't interested in customer service at that time and thought they'd be able to put something together at the time of release.

Funny how their plans didn't work out.

Canceling your account

[coldtone]

The biggest thing that pissed me off with horizons is that when I was done playing after a few months I had to phone in person to cancel the billing. This is just awful. I can sign up online quick and easy, but to cancel, well I have to phone in wait in the queue and then talk to an agent to get my billing canceled.

If you can sign up online, you should be able to cancel online. Period.

Re:Canceling your account

[Austerity Empowers]

You can cancel online at ibillcs.com if you are willing to throw your credit card number and email address on that site to do the subscription lookup.

Of course, I had to call the # to find that out.

Re:Canceling your account

[Elsebet]

I actually was able to log into the third-party billing site and cancel my subscription. Granted, I did it this month after trying the 7 day trial (lasted about 3). However my boyfriend didn't have that option and he too had to call in to cancel, for reasons we could not determine.

The worst part of this game is it feels so unprofessionally developed. The interface to log in is a web page, and you have to enter your login credentials twice just to log in. Then you proceed to pick your server/character, still on this web page. It looks terrible, I mean even Ultima Online had a client login screen where you picked your server and character.

However they did have subclassing available from Day 1 of your character's life instead of FFXI's level 18 + difficult quest. *sigh*

Re:IMO...

[Gridpoet]

i also followed the game from the day that the website went live...

i watched as they posted awesome ideas and talked about what sounded like a freaking sweet game...then the suits came in and fired the
people with vision and "dumbed" the game down till there was nothing left...all of us on the message boards perdicted this was exactly what would happen...

i have 4 words for em
"WE TOLD YOU SO!"

so SUCK IT SUIT BOY!