1UP is appealing to gamers to take a 5-10 minute break from their games to fill out the 2008 MMO Gaming Study survey. Those who make time for this no fail quiz by December 1st will be entered in a Sweepstakes to win a $300 American Express Cheque.

Attention FileFront Community!
We want to hear about your MMO gaming experience. Help shape how MMO games are built and be entered in an exclusive sweepstakes drawing to* win a $300 American Express Cheque. * Survey only takes about 5 to 10 minutes and your input would be greatly appreciated.

In addition, you can earn additional entries into the sweepstakes. The first 500 completed surveys will earn a double entry into the prize drawing.

*Directions for the survey:*
1. Step#1: _[CLICK HERE TO START SURVEY]
2. Fill out the entire survey to be eligible for the drawing. *Please fill out the entire survey by December 1st in order to be eligible.*
One entry per household only, additional entries will be void. The winner will be notified as soon as a winner is selected.

Thanks again for your continuing support.

Tabula Rasa is preparing to surrender Spring 2009. NCsoft has announced that it will be shutting down live servers February 28th. The game will go free to play January 10th, however it appears that gamers will still have to pay December’s dues.

Players can look forward to special in-game events as sort of a last hurrah. The parting Message from The Tabula Rasa Team follows the break. I can’t say I didn’t see this one coming.

Read the full article »

You may be reading that title up there and thinking that’s a typo; like I must’ve forgotten a zero or something. And you’d be right, I did forget something: not to round up.

Richard Garriot’s Tabula Rasa has fallen on hard times lately — what with other high-profile MMOs like Age of Conan and Warhammer Online stealing away their thunder — but I don’t think we realized quite how far the game has been sinking. Many retailers, including Gamestop, have stopped carrying the game altogether; but the clearest indicator that all is not well with NCSoft’s space MMO probably comes from Amazon.com. Right now, the online retailer has dropped the price of Tabula Rasa to $0.96 (once again, no, that’s not a typo).

I never thought I’d see the day where I could have a single dollar in my hand and either get a double cheeseburger at McDonald’s or a high-profile MMO, but here we are. Just another example of how difficult it is to top the mighty empire that is WoW.

The word from industry insiders is NCsoft is trimming its European office after scrapping the unnamed MMO it was working on. GamesIndustry.biz says about 50 positions are being cut. Funding for the MMO will be returned to the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA). That’s all GBP 950,00 although it shouldn’t hurt NCsoft since it was dipped into. I wonder if NCsoft gets to keep the interest.

It’s also rumored that Tabula Rasa will be discontinued within a few months due to its lack luster performance.

The game, led by Richard Garriott enjoyed a high profile launch earlier this year, but has failed to capture the imagination of the gaming public, and one source told GamesIndustry.biz a few months ago that the company “would kill for 300,000 subscribers right now,” when comparisons were made with CCP’s Eve Online.

I’m really not surprised having Richard “General British” Garriott aboard couldn’t save Tabula Rasa. It tried to appeal to both Western and Eastern audiences and failed at both.

Manchester University has released the results of a study on the Gold Farming industry that guesstimates its profits at $500,000 a year. According to the study, titled “Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on ‘Gold Farming’: Real-World Production in Developing Countries for the Virtual Economies of Online Games,” the industry employs 400,000 people world wide who take home an average of $125 a month.

Manchester University’s Richard Heeks told BBC News that although the study is sound, the Gold Farming industry is “a digital underworld populated by scammers and hackers and pornographers” so it’s hard to nail down exact figures.

“It seems unlikely to be less than $200 million per year, and it could well be more than $1 billion per year,” he said.

At those figures, you’ve got to wonder why every time you log into Lord of the Rings Online, World of Warcraft or any number of other MMOs you’re assaulted with offers as soon as you step inside civilization. Of course 80% of Gold Farmers are Chinese and their cost of living and standards of comfort can be quite different than those in the US.

Although the “services” Gold Farmers offer are annoying to most, they couldn’t exist without a demand. Steven Davis, chief of game security firm Secure Play agrees that it’s not likely this plague on MMOs will die out anytime soon.

“When you get people with more money than time and time than money the two will find a way to meet,” he said.

“You could get rid of it,” he said, “but you would get rid of one of the most fundamental parts of player-to-player interaction.”

NCsoft has announced an agreement with some of North America’s largest retail chains to offer pre-paid NCsoft Game Cards for use with its MMOs. The game cards are for City of Heroes, Tabula Rasa and Exsteel and come with bonus in-game items.

City of Heroes and Tabula Rasa game cards will allow gamers that don’t have credit cards get in on these subscription games. Exsteel cards are good for micro transactions for the free-to-play MMO, similar to cards offered for Gaia and Maple Story.

Gamers can now find NCsoft Game Cards for City of Heroes and Exteel at Target stores City of Heroes, Exteel and Tabula Rasa cards hit Best Buy August 3 and Rite Aid will begin offering City of Heroes cards on September 3. NCsoft will be adding more retail stores to its program in the near future.

A full description of cards benefits for each MMO follows after the break.
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For this Friday Night Fight on Tabula Rasa, Richard “General British” Garriott is set to go head to head with boxing champ Jesus Chavez aka. “El Matador”. Fortunately for Garriott, the fight involves avatars and takes place in the C.E.L.L.A.R. (Coalition of Enlistees Likely Looking for Aggressive Retaliation) 3 arena online.

The opponents will battle hand-to-hand sans armor on the TR Test Server starting at 6pm Central time. Here’s a teaser to get players ready for this epic MMO confrontation:

Personally, my money’s on Garriott, unless Chavez happens to be a closet MMO player. In that case, all bets are off. For more details on Friday Night Fights read a quick Q&A on Massively.

via Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa

Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa Deployment 10 update is live. New content for the update includes the Looking For Squad (LFS) system and Nine Month Veteran Awards.

There are also changes to existing content such as the infamous double and tri-barrel shot guns, and tweaks to abilities designed to make combat roll at an even more frenetic pace. A few more abilities have been altered to use the Skill Proficiency System as well.

There are many minor tweaks but there’s seem to be no major nerfing of existing content. Tabula Rasa players can read through the full patch notes on Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa.

NCsoft’s Brian Hudson, a developer on Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa, has contributed a developer diary on Velon Hollow. This upcoming instance will introduce two new features for Tabula Rasa; item sets and zombies.

Imagine that an evil alien race has developed a serum capable of suppressing your personality and trapping you in your own mind. The chemicals make you stronger and more aggressive, and the sight of human flesh makes you hungry. As the last of your sanity slips away, you are only slightly aware that your friends and family have become your latest meal!

It’s a great concept but it doesn’t really fit in a science fiction game. It’s definitely in the survival horror genre. It would be a great mod for Half-Life… oh wait that’s Left for Dead. Maybe they should concentrate on developing more of the sci-fi aspects.

Who wants to play I was a teenage zombie… Well I do, but not enough to commit to Tabula Rasa over one instance.

You can download the Tabula Rasa – Velon Hollow Developer Diary“>Tabula Rasa Velon Hollow dev diary courtesy of FileFront.

via FileFront

Thanks to a direct comment to European gaming site Eurogamer, I guess the record is straight on just how well Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa is doing for its publisher NCSoft.

According to the report by Rob Purchase, NCSoft spokemen claim that the fledgling MMO is in fact in high demand in Europe (much like David Hasslehoff in Germany it seems) and a recent trial promotion did gangbusters in business for the game.

“Tabula Rasa has a dedicated player base, which is growing month on month.” The NCSoft Europe mouthpiece commented.

Tabula Rasa’s success was brought into question a few weeks back when the sales numbers reported by NCSoft failed to highlight this long in production game as a highlight for the MMO company. While Lineage II and Guild Wars both made the highlight reel, Tabula Rasa was suspiciously absent for a game that was supposedly highly anticipated and doing well.

“Tabula Rasa offers players a different kind of MMO experience, enhancing our portfolio of game titles. The game play mechanics are very different to that of a typical MMO – those who have experienced the game have recognised these innovative features and applauded them.”

Now I’ve played Tabula Rasa and I guess I really don’t count as one of those players who “experienced the game and recognized the innovative features”, nor have I “applauded them”.

I know its become fashionable to rail against Tabula Rasa since its launch, and I guess I’ve done my share but I really was expecting more from a game created by one of the father of the Computer RPG. Sony’s Planetside did many of the same things years ago and failed almost as spectacularly.. though no one on that development team is paying to be shot into space by the Russian Space Agency so it was a less spectacular failure I guess. I wonder what metric they are using for success. The other question is.. how is it doing with the American audience? Is Europe it’s only successful arena?

Source:Eurogamer