In conjunction with the debut of this all-new Living World chapter, the first Guild Wars 2 expansion Heart of Thorns will be free for all players who own or purchase Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire, beginning today. Any player who previously purchased Heart of Thorns will receive an exclusive Heart of Thorns Veteran’s Pack of in-game items containing a unique Mordrem glider, “Vanguard” title, and voucher for one of a possible sixteen different gem store armor skins.

The Icebrood Saga marks the beginning of a new adventure in Guild Wars 2’s storyline. It is a time of tentative celebration for all the races of Tyria in the wake of the Elder Dragon Kralkatorrik’s heroic defeat by the members of Dragon’s Watch. But whispers from the Northern Shiverpeaks tell tales of ancient forces stirring from their slumber. While the Sons of Svanir—a renegade cult of norn who have turned away from worshipping the Spirits of the Wild—devote themselves to the elder ice dragon Jormag, stories of the dragon’s strength and virtues begin to spread alongside its corrupting influence.

The Icebrood Saga will introduce a wealth of new features, including Strike Missions, which are epic 10-man boss encounters that combine the group coordination skills of raids with the large-scale conflict of a Guild Wars 2 meta event. New boss creatures will also populate the environments of Grothmar Valley and the Northern Shiverpeaks, including the ominous, newly-awakened Drakkar first seen in the original Guild Wars, while new Masteries will be available in Episode One and Episode Two that will explore the history and influence of the Spirits of the Wild, the mystic animal deities of the norn.

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MXM or Master X Master joins Marvel Heroes this week in announcing its closure. NCSOFT in an official post today says that final day will be on January 31st 2018. According to NCSOFT, the decision came down to business.

“Deciding to close the game is not a decision we come to lightly, but ultimately it came down to a matter of business—we explored several options, but none of them were sustainable. We truly believe that MXM is special, and offered a lot of new ideas to change up the MOBA genre, but in trying to carve out a niche for itself, we failed to connect with players.”

From now until its closure, real money purchases will be unavailable. Players will be able to get all unlocks in game for in-game currency. In addition, refunds for full purchases will also take place. The terms for refunds are for the period between August 30th and November 16th.

Further in the official post, NCSOFT goes on to say that MXM was made to attract MOBA players. They believe their game challenged the status quo, and would revitalize the genre. Unfortunately, it was not enough to challenge the established juggernauts on the market. Check out the official post here.

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It’s been a strange few days for fans of NCSoft games with the sudden changes to the banned countries list and now it looks as though there have been various DDOS attacks against their games overnight; reports from WildStar, Blade & Soul and Guild Wars 2 state that all three MMORPG’s have been suffering from outages due to apparent DDOS attacks.

The issue for Guild Wars 2 appears to be more severe than the other games affected in the most recent DDOS attack; the unexpected Guild Wars 2 outage seems to have removed quite a bit of content from the accounts of players. Reports from players on the official Guild Wars 2 forums suggests that Gems have been mostly effected by this.

Gems are the premium currency in the game which could suggest a motive for the attack but the missing items are slowly being returned to accounts; Gaile Gray the Communication Manager from ArenaNet has officially commented on the issue to ask that players wait a little while before reporting missing items as many seem to be returning after a few hours. This also seems to be affecting a range of other in-game items, titles and even game achievements.

This is certainly good new for most players but not all Guild Wars 2 players have been given back their missing content.

No explanation has been given to the attack on NCSoft games however some have suggested that this could be in retaliation to the sudden country blocks that were placed earlier this week on those games.

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A strange situation seems to have emerged with some of the MMORPG’s being published by NCSoft as more reports have been emerging that players are being blocked from WildStar and Guild Wars 2 without warning. The WildStar blocks have been officially confirmed on the website however, the issues with Guild Wars 2 appears to have been an accident.

A member of the ArenaNet team that developed Guild Wars 2 commented that the Ukraine block was an accident and that several other countries were also affected; the team have now fixed this so Guild Wars 2 players should be able to access the game like normal.

WildStar appears to be a legitimate block however as a new list of countries have been added to the “Blocked Countries” list available on the official website; in addition to this, players from those regions have been receiving emails telling them that they would no longer be able to access the game.

According to the list, these new countries have been added due to legal and security reasons but an official statement from NCSoft has not been released yet about this sudden change. They were originally kept separated from a list of countries that were blocked due to sanctions from the US Department of State but they have now been combined; the wording on the page has also been edited to remove all mention of US sanctions forcing them to block certain countries.

In addition to this block from WildStar, the Lineage website has also updated its block list with the same countries without explanation; Aion and Blade and Soul also have the same countries on their blocked lists.

It’s a strange and sudden move which hasn’t been explained yet; this seems to be affecting almost all MMORPG’s from NCSoft and some suspect it could be due to politically driven sanctions but there has been no confirmation of this.

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