Mabinogi Official Announced

Generation 1 should’ve been a hint to this, but today it can be confirmed, and all I can say is “Man, this was a short Open Beta.”

As reported by MMORPG.com, Mabinogi will be entering official service on March 27th. (This Thursday.)  This means that along with Generation 1, the full range of cash shop services (which at least one must be purchased to play through the storyline) and character cards will be made available.  For now, I will stand by my prediction that one service will be 7000 NX ($7 USD) and that all three (a.k.a. the Fantasy Life Club) will be 14,000 NX.  I at this point would have no idea how much either the standard or the premium character cards, or any other CS goodies that I’m not aware about, would cose.

As soon as I find out about any pre-official server closures or patches, I will be posting them here.

*Major Security Alert* – Massive Attack Targeting Gamers Uncovered

As eWEEK.com has reported, McAfee has managed to uncover an attempt to infect some ten thousand webpages with a malicious javascript file that installs a keylogger onto the victim’s computer that occured on March 12th.

Security researchers at McAfee’s Avert Labs discovered the attack March 12. According to the security vendor, the hackers have injected script into valid Web pages to include a reference to a malicious .JS file. The file uses script to write an IFRAME, which loads an HTML file that attempts to exploit several vulnerabilities, including ActiveX control vulnerabilities affecting RealPlayer, Baofeng Storm, Xunlei Thunder DapPlayer and Ourgame GLWorld Global Link chat, McAfee officials said.

-Brian Prince, eWEEK.com

So far, from what the article reads, high-profile sites were not affected but all online gamers should be careful and make excessive note of activities going on when browsing, and scan your computer to ensure that you haven’t been effected already.  So far, nothing serious has seemed to happen among Nexon’s games, but it has caused widespread account hackings across popular games such as Everquest 2:

A LOT of people I know in EverQuest 2 have had their accounts hacked and characters stripped. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear if MS was targeted as well.

-Lindsay, Mapletowers

This is a serious issue and everyone should take caution, regardless whether they play any online games or not.

KartRider OB: One Day Extension

It was just announced today that KartRider would be available for one more day; If you haven’t gotten your final races in and want to, it would be the best time to now.

KartRider Open Beta will end on March 19th, 2008, at 5:00 PM PDT.

And, just on a note, the announcement says that it will be going down for “long-term maitenance.”  In other words, expect it to be months before we see it again.

Generation 1 Is Coming

Update: I realized that I made a mistake when comparing my pricing prediction to other versions.  This has been noted and changed.

We don’t know exactly when, but if the new event announcement on the official website is of any indication, we could be expecting this in the next patch, which could be happening next week. (Or to be more specific, next Wednesday given the dates on the events.)

When the generation 1 storyline is implemented, I would also think that the cash shop and cash services would be to an extent, as the mainstream story requires NX to access.  (I’m not sure if it’s automatic if you’ve already purchased a service or what.)  This means we might also be seeing services and character cards available for purchase sometime soon as well. (As for the price for each, I’ll get to a prediction on that in a second)

Now, the three events:  They’re giving away quite a bit of stuff; Maybe not as much as in the game card surprise contests, but quite a bit.  The first contest listed is a leveling contest: The highest level at the end of the contest will get 512MB DDR3 memory nVidia GeForce 9600T.  (Man, if I could ever wish I could have that rather than this dumb onboard Intel graphics.)  The next 20 will all recieve 14k in NX.

The second event is a buddy event.  Everyone who has over 20 people on their buddylist (bleh, I have 19 right now.) will be entered.  One random user will be selected to get a Logitech Cordless Desktop MX5500 Revolution, and another random user will get 14k in NX.

The third event is just your normal roll call event.  Login between now and the end of the contest period to be entered.  One user will get a 32 inch Sony LCD TV, one will win a Dell 24 inch widescreen monitor, three others will win a $50 U.S. Best Buy gift card, and 20 others will get… yes, 14k NX.

Now, 14k is kind of an odd number to be giving away NX in, and that’s when I thought about it hard; Maybe it has something to do with the service pricing for NA Mabingoi.  When compared to other versions it isn’t all that bad in terms of pricing, as the more populated verions (Korea for example) would be more expensive.  There are usually three services available: the Extra Storage service (which allows you to store items in the red area at banks, along with other things such as guild creation and management), the Nao revival service, (which allows you to call for Nao a certain amount of times if you die) and the advanced play service. (Which gives you a bunch of nifty enhancements)  You can usually buy one of these services or go with the “Fantasy Life Club” and get all three for the price of two.

That being said, my prediction is that one service will cost 7k NX, and for all three be 14k, as to conform with the pricing scheme from other versions.  As well, I would also think that these services would last 30 days at most, and right now I can’t really give any prediction on the cost of character cards.

So, that’s it for now.  Just as a warning, though, if you do want to get the best out of Mabinogi, make sure you have NX handy. (It shouldn’t be that much of a problem because just about all of North America has access to prepaid cards.)

Also, Nexon has chosen the 10,000 pre-open beta participants that received a cowboy hat.  If you played on Feb. 23rd or 24th, you can login to your account on the website and then click the banner; If you were chosen to receive one you will get a coupon code that you can redeem at any bank.  On top of that, if you’re a FilePlanet subscriber (NOT a FilePlanet free user) you can get a Pan hat (a hat depicting the head of Pan, the flagship sheep of this game) from the Mabinogi FilePlanet page.

gMS Returns to the Permaban

It has been announced in-game today, although there’s no website source, that gMS is going back to permanently banning hackers on their first offense, effective immediately.

 

This is probably something that people have been waiting on for fifteen months, and the decision couldn’t come at a better time, as gMS is on the verge of, if it isn’t already, another hacking crisis with the leak of the Power Guard hack.

When Nexon originally implemented the 30 day ban for hacking (plus perma ranking ban) it was because they wanted to give users that didn’t think they were breaking the rules a chance to learn from their mistake.  Now they’ve decided to forget about it and finally step up to the plate and put hackers where they belong.  Kudos to them for going back to their old policy.

Also, patch 0.52 takes place tomorrow and it is a long one.  Monster Carnival and Horntail are two possibilities as they are a part of gMS Tespia, but I guess we’ll see what happens.