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Role Playing (Games) Entertainment Games

Horizons Tries Playvault, Artifact Files Chapter 11 22

Posted by simoniker from the notso-goodso dept.
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."
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Horizons Tries Playvault, Artifact Files Chapter 11 More

Horizons Tries Playvault, Artifact Files Chapter 11

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  • In related news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @02:15PM (#9804508) Homepage
    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 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by delus10n0 ( 524126 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @02:48PM (#9804893)
    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.
    • 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.
    • 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? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Teh Suq ( 655848 )
    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.
  • 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? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Daetrin ( 576516 ) on Monday July 26, 2004 @06:22PM (#9806841)
    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 :)

    • 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.
      • 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

    • 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

  • An excerpt from my Virtual World Bylaws [christian.net] (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 ser

    • 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.
  • 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.
    • 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.

    • 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

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