News

• 

  Farewell Firefall

  2017-07-08 16:07

  Late to the party but nevertheless. Just a few days ago I wanted to write some news post about the whole The9 vs Qihoo 360 lawsuit that was discussed a month or so ago on the Firefall forum and Reddit, but given the latest development, this seems quite unnecessary to bring up.

  Firefall has been taken offline.

  Red 5 Studios or whoever remains in charge of Red 5 Studio's operation has published a news item, that they'll shutdown the servers on the 7th of July, which was yesterday. The game servers supposedly aren't accessible anymore, while the auth server currently still works and the forum can also still be accessed.

  While it's always sad to see a game go, for Firefall it seem like the better path to close it down. The game has been in a broken state for nearly a year now and nobody knew what was going to happen to it. While shutting down isn't the option people wanted to see, at least it's an option and the big question mark in the air is finally gone.

  In addition to the shutdown announcement the news post claims that Red 5 Studio will instead develop a mobile version of Firefall. What this means exactly is left to speculations. Given the different platform it's pretty clear, that we won't be seeing anything close to what has been Firefall for the past decade. Firefall got to where it was due to its excellent combat and ambitious approach of creating an MMO, the mobile experience will never be the same. As the worst case, we might just get a clone of some popular game, but with a re-branding with Firefall's IP, for example Candy Crush but with Crystite. We can hope that it will end up as something neat, but having seen The9's operation in the past, the chances are high that it won't be very good.

  For some reason one of the moderator of the Firefall sub-reddit decided to lock down the sub-reddit. We're currently in communication to get it unlocked again, so we all still have a place to tell our Firefall tales and share some good old memories. Firefall's community has been a great one, we made many friends and got to learn some lessons how to deal with trolls. I hope we can stay in touch for the future. Don't hesitate to join the Firefall Discord server.

  

• 

  TeamSpeak 3 Server Shutdown

  2017-06-19 13:06

  Firefall has been on life support for a long time now. Starter missions are broken, leaving new players without a way to do missions. And once you do get to level 20, you can't enter the battle lab to pick an advanced frame. But also the boss instances have failed to work properly.

  With no crafting, no new content, broken existing content and no future in view, it's no surprise that most players left.

  RAWR4Firefall was never able to recover again, or rather there was never anything to recover to. We came into existence out of the need to provide information about crafting and resource gathering, yet both has been removed "to be added back in the future", unfortunately we'll never get there.

  The website is not going anywhere in the never future, we'll prevail until the final destination.

  However since the army isn't really in existence anymore, we decided to shutdown the TeamSpeak 3 server. We're not sure how many have been using it in the past, but I don't think it was ever used for Firefall anymore.

  As an alternative, I recommend you join the unofficial Firefall Discord server. There you'll find some veterans - some are still playing - and you get a place to voice com and chat, now that the TeamSpeak 3 server is getting shutdown.

  Firefall Discord Server: https://discord.gg/PzHqmTS

• 

  Devtracker Weekly Round Up, October 17th

  2016-10-17 12:10

  Hello and welcome to the 189th Devtracker Weekly Round Up!

  By terricon4 via Reddit

  Still nothing new on the forums, still no total server failure, and still no news of anything to come from R5 or The9. In other words, the same thing we've had every week this past month or two, and with minimal exception three.

  That all said there is still some "news" as it were regarding the Devtracker Weekly Round Up itself. I'm sure you're all getting tired of reading blank posts every week, and it doesn't look like that's changing anytime soon and I've already kept this up for a while to date just in case anything changed but it doesn't look like that's happening. So, this is quite possibly the final issue of the Devtracker Weekly Round Up that will be coming out. I haven't really played Firefall for quite awhile, I'm not exactly finding enjoying conversations on it's forums or Reddit anymore either, so I'll quite possibly start to fade out of existence only to eventually disappear from your memories completely. There were definitely some good times I had with Firefall and with many of you who've also played it, but I guess I'm finally acknowledging that all as more or less over for me.

  So, despite the considerable amount of willpower it's taking not to automatically write "till next time" at the end of this post, for now, so long!

• 

  Devtracker Weekly Round Up, October 10th

  2016-10-10 12:10

  Hello and welcome to the 189th Devtracker Weekly Round Up!

  By terricon4 via Reddit

  Once again a new week has come and with it absolutely nothing news related to Firefall. So ya, another week without anything to really talk about here. Servers are still up, people are still AFKing in them, and many parts of the game are still broken. So ya... till next week everyone... stuff....

• 

  Devtracker Weekly Round Up, October 3rd

  2016-10-03 11:10

  Hello and welcome to the 188th Devtracker Weekly Round Up!

  By terricon4 via Reddit

  You know how last week had all that awesome news? Ya, me neither... well guess what. We've got another week like last week, that is to say nothing. Still no activity on the dev account, no news, no obvious closure of the game or the like, nothing. Oh except for the part that Firefall shows as having had a very slight (and likely temporary) increase in population at the start of this month relative to last months. Crazyjeremy has apologized for having started multi boxing and has stopped so as to not skew the numbers further.

  Well, that's it for this weeks article. Till next week everyone, you probably won't get anything knew then but you'll keep coming back and reading this just because you're all desperate creatures of habit. So until then, I bid thee farewell.

• 

  Devtracker Weekly Round Up, September 26th

  2016-09-26 11:09

  Hello and welcome to the 187th Devtracker Weekly Round Up!

  By terricon4 via Reddit

  It's been about a week since the last devtracker weekly round up so this probably comes as no surprise that another one is being posted, but you wanna know what will come as a surprise? Nothing, there is absolutely nothing to talk about this week. Even less than last week. And at this point I'm sure that comes as no surprise to any of you. There has been nothing of note on the forums, no big events in Firefall itself except maybe that short outage on Tuesday, and nothing here on Reddit. Seriously, all week long not one new thread, this will be back to back Devtracker posts on the front page it looks like.

  So ya, till next week everyone, here's to hoping you have something else to occupy your time.

• 

  Devtracker Weekly Round Up, September 19th

  2016-09-19 11:09

  Hello and welcome to the 186th Devtracker Weekly Round Up!

  By terricon4 via Reddit

  Once again there is not really anything to seriously talk about in news, just the general state of the game. Ever buggy, but with slight variations in what is buggy at any given time. Currently it seems instance changes, tornado portals, battle lab, and other instance related things are not working reliably (read as, try again and again and you may get lucky). Market seems a bit questionable, especially involving red bean transactions, and can apparently take a few days to send you your mail. Oh, but I've seen a couple mentions that the authentication system might be working again, so there is that. All in all, ya, not much to say, same old same old for the most part. So ya... witty outro remark goes here.

• 

  Devtracker Weekly Round Up, September 12th

  2016-09-12 08:09

  Hello and welcome to the 185th Devtracker Weekly Round Up!

  By terricon4 via Reddit

  After last week with the big drama of the servers suddenly and unexpectedly going down, there has been a bit of a stabilization. While still at least one instance of the website going dark happened and varying issues involving the login servers for Firefall itself have been ongoing, there haven't been any more complete blackouts that I've noticed (but it's not like I'm always checking so, eh...) so things may be a bit more stable for awhile. Still, there are various issues when you do actually get in game past the login server, with some of the services/npcs, and other things not working so it's not all hunky dory, but at least you can play some of the game. There haven't been any new announcements or posts by the r5Admin account, so no other news or stuff to report on there either. So that's pretty much it for this week. Till next week everyone, enjoy whatever you're doing! Seriously, gaming, painting, dressing up, genocide, whatever it is if you're doing it you might as well try to enjoy it.

• 

  Devtracker Weekly Round Up, September 5th

  2016-09-05 15:09

  Hello and welcome to the 184th Devtracker Weekly Round Up!

  By terricon4 via Reddit

  On August 30th, at around 1:30 AM PST, the forums and game login servers went dark. According to a post on the forums this was unexpected and so probably not planned (don't want to say for sure not planned because who knows what the internal communication is like with the recent staff changes and all). During this time there was a lot of unhappy people and expectations that Firefall was being shut down... just check the other Reddit pages around this point in time, you'll see what I mean. But then everything came back up, though not exactly working perfectly, and stuff tried to go back to normal. Unfortunately a surprise outing with no communication from a studio that's largely gone dark lately isn't taken well with the ex/playerbase. Among the various issues, Firefall was reported to Steam by some people and has been removed from the Steam store (download links still work). According to another post they expected it to be back within two or so days, but that hasn't happened. I'm guessing with the whole verification issue probably having been included in the initial reports Steams not that interested in re adding Firefall to their games lists again until that's fixed.

  So! Let's continue on with how the rest of the week went... On September 1st around 2 or 3 AM PST the forums and game went offline again. Around 12AM they came back online again. Once again there were some Reddit posts about this and then some for it's return. There has been no announcements or information relating to this outage.

  Then on September 4th at around 12pm PST the game servers and website once again went dark. And then sometime that evening around six or seven PM the game and site returned again. By this point it seems people have stopped caring enough and there haven't really been any new Reddit threads to announce these changes.

  So, by the time you read this, it's entirely possible the servers will have once again gone dark and with people not reporting changes on Reddit as much it's probably best to refer to the steamcharts for server info and outage times. While it still counts peoples clients just sitting at login and all, if you look over the past week you'll be able to see the rough times of the outages and use that as a template for the future if you want to check yourself how long they've been down. Here's to hoping they'll get steady and stay up again for awhile as there are still a number of people who do play and enjoy the game (those of you reading this possibly included) but as always the future is uncertain, though after this week probably a bit darker than it was seeming the last one.

  And that's it for this weeks article, till next time everyone, please donate any spare server monkeys or hamsters you may have to R5 so they can keep things running. Toodles!

• 

  Are the servers back?

  2016-09-01 18:09

  I'm sure everyone has heard that the Firefall servers where down for approximately one day - I mean some MMO news sites panicked and started releasing posts that Firefall is now finally closed etc. - but as we've heard from the mysterious r5admin account on the forum, it wasn't intended and there are some technical difficulties.

  Today however the servers were down again. This time we got word that it was intentional to fix some more issues. When the servers seem to have finally recovered I logged in and could exchange a few words with a R5-er called robin001 (maybe our r5admin?). During the chat the server suddenly went offline again, but recovered within a few minutes. According to robin001 it was another hiccup and they're trying to fix these technical difficulties.

  During the chat he also once again stated that Firefall will stay online. To questions of how long or if development will continue he didn't provide any answer.

  Stay tuned for more updates and lets hope Firefall doesn't just sink in the next few months.