Homepage:http://www.dawntide.net/

In the last year there was been a trend to move back to open worlds and skill based character progression, much like Ultima Online. Dawntide is a small game in the sea of many attempting to find a niche in the saturated MMO market.

Dawntide is being created by WAI or Working as Intended. Dawntide is a fantasy game with humans and lizards are fighting for control of the map. They are both trapped in this world by an impassable mountain called Cieve.

The game is meant to be an open sandbox world where anything can happen. There are plans for factions and territory conquest. The hope is that societies will spring up to build cities and governments to control the populace within the game.

Since this is a quick post please visit the website for more details about the game. I hope to follow this up with more details after a few days of playing in the open beta.

Now that we are into the new year, what games are we looking at? Well, here is a list of games have our interest:

Stargate Worlds
Age Of Conan
Warhammer Online
Huxley
Star Trek Online
Dark Fall Online
The Agency

Although we try and keep up-to-date on as many MMO titles as possible, these are the games that will have our interest to start off the new year. We hope to keep you informed of the more interesting tid-bits of news as we read or hear them.

When you get your new online game, you really just want to install it and play. Some, actually look at the instructions and notice you are asked to open a slew of ports. Others just try to connect and find that it fails. Each may lead to the step of searching how you open these ports or why you need to.

The newer type of online games want to provide rich features to the user base. They like to push automatic updates to you, provide news through a game management client, in-game advertisement, monitor your PC while playing and report this information back, etc… Still, all of these should be outbound connections and shouldn’t require you to open a single port inbound (unless you are hosting a game or running a server).

I believe the following are possible problems when a game asks you to open up several inbound ports:

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Some of you may have heard of the book, Exploiting Online Games by Greg Hogluhd and Gary McGraw, which is a modern day look at the security of MMO’s.

If you haven’t been paying attention, you may not have noticed that the virtual items in online games are producing real currency. For some who realize this, they have taken an aggressive and efficient approach to obtaining the virtual items needed to make cash through the use of bots or other tools. Others use phishing attacks, malware, trojans, keyloggers, and more to obtain access to your account and then steal all of your items which you have worked so hard for.

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Go Vote!

http://www.gamespot.com/best-of/?tag=nl.e579