Blizzard has backed off of their plan to display your real name in their forums. We are still left to wonder how they ever thought it would be a good idea in the first place.
With the Starcraft II beta back up we get an interesting look into how many people are playing World of Warcraft at any given time. There is an information box which displays the current active players, numbers of Starcraft games going, etc. The graphic shows all players for WOW and SC combined. The number has been as high as the 800,000's and as low as 200,000. It would be interesting if someone were to try and chart the WOW activity levels.
July 12, 2010
July 10, 2010
I Don't Accept Your Terms
I got an email today informing that the Terms of Service for the Playstation network have changed. What has changed? I have no idea as the email just informs me that there was a change, possibly many changes, or maybe they fixed a spelling error. Perhaps it is my fault entirely for not memorizing the terms when I signed up for an account.
So I won't be accepting their terms if they can't put in the effort to inform me what has changed in their massive legal document. I will keep using my account though. This is a funny line:
You linked me to your website so I could read your terms of service. So basically you are tricking me into agreeing by linking to your site for the document you directed me to review?
I know this is nitpicking, but if a company wants their Terms of Service to be respected they should put in the effort to make it easier for the end user to understand them. Many people don't read these things as it is and it is frustrating for the people who do when you just toss out something and expect us to understand it.
So I won't be accepting their terms if they can't put in the effort to inform me what has changed in their massive legal document. I will keep using my account though. This is a funny line:
Please don’t use our Sites if you don’t agree to these Terms of Service because once you are on our Sites, you have to follow the rules.
You linked me to your website so I could read your terms of service. So basically you are tricking me into agreeing by linking to your site for the document you directed me to review?
I know this is nitpicking, but if a company wants their Terms of Service to be respected they should put in the effort to make it easier for the end user to understand them. Many people don't read these things as it is and it is frustrating for the people who do when you just toss out something and expect us to understand it.
July 7, 2010
Customer Irritation Level
We are now a day and a half into the fiasco that is announcement of what RealID is really for, taking away your privacy. You know it isn't going well when you make the national television news in Canada.
There are now nearly 30,000 posts on the US forum, nearly 10,000 on the EU forum, thousands on every other WOW forum and even videos on Youtube getting ten of thousands of views. The overwhelming response is negative. Some of the defenders are likely trolling, which is ironic.
Now people are starting seeking information other Blizzard employees, they don't have to look very far. Just pull out their Burning Crusade manual and flip to the back. Developers always want people to look at the credits, right? I don't think they intended to be for this reason. This is exactly why you don't publish your information unless you have a good reason. If you piss someone off, it just makes it easy for them to find you.
Markee Dragon made a 30 minute video response to this. I listened to it in the background as I did some work. He brought up a lot of good points like people who are in situations where they handle sensitive information, they can't post. I saw a post saying a teacher would be risking their job because it is against their rules of conduct. He also brought up another good point about the mass discrimination there will be against people with Chinese names. You know, the whole gold farming stereotype.
Towards the end of the video, Markee revealed that he came across an interesting tidbit of information when working with EA. They have a "customer irritation level" metric. It is used to measure the player response to game additions. The goal is get the bar as high as it will go while staying just below the level where players press the cancel subscription button.
There are now nearly 30,000 posts on the US forum, nearly 10,000 on the EU forum, thousands on every other WOW forum and even videos on Youtube getting ten of thousands of views. The overwhelming response is negative. Some of the defenders are likely trolling, which is ironic.
Now people are starting seeking information other Blizzard employees, they don't have to look very far. Just pull out their Burning Crusade manual and flip to the back. Developers always want people to look at the credits, right? I don't think they intended to be for this reason. This is exactly why you don't publish your information unless you have a good reason. If you piss someone off, it just makes it easy for them to find you.
Markee Dragon made a 30 minute video response to this. I listened to it in the background as I did some work. He brought up a lot of good points like people who are in situations where they handle sensitive information, they can't post. I saw a post saying a teacher would be risking their job because it is against their rules of conduct. He also brought up another good point about the mass discrimination there will be against people with Chinese names. You know, the whole gold farming stereotype.
Towards the end of the video, Markee revealed that he came across an interesting tidbit of information when working with EA. They have a "customer irritation level" metric. It is used to measure the player response to game additions. The goal is get the bar as high as it will go while staying just below the level where players press the cancel subscription button.
July 6, 2010
Blizzard Is About to Ruin the Internet
It looks like companies just don't understand the internet anymore. First Facebook wants to make everything about you open to the public. Now Blizzard is going to force you to display your first and last name if you want to post on their game forums. There are many reasons why this is a terrible, terrible idea.
The first being is stalking. There have been so many cases of people getting harassed through the internet. People have commit suicide over it. Has anyone every pissed you off so much in a game you wish you could beat them up? I haven't, but I've seen this reaction countless times on forums and talked about on Xbox Live. Now Blizzard is going to give them the first piece of information to really do some damage to you.
What can someone do with a name? Well if you have a Facebook account or Myspace than you are going to be easy to find. From there they will be able to locate a lot of forums you post on, possibly your phone number, your email, etc. Now they can harass you in many ways.
But what if they want to take it beyond playful phone calls at 2AM in the morning? You managed to get them so mad that they want to steal your WOW account. Blizzard asks for your first name, last name and email to retrieve your Battle.net password. If you post on the forum, your attacker knows your first and last name. That can be used to find your facebook and email address. Once the attacker has that, they go to your email and activate the forgot password recovery. If you selected the question what school did you go to and have it listed on your Facebook, you are in deep trouble now. They have full access to your email account and possibly many other places such as your bank, personal message and any number of forums you post on. All that is left is to reset the Battle.net password and delete you WOW characters!
Security on the internet is designed around private information. What is the name of your first pet. Who is your favorite teacher. What is your birthday. Many of this is now available for all the world to see. The final piece of the puzzle is connecting your online persona to your Facebook profile. When that happens you are one huge target for whoever does not like you.
I think Blizzard is going to back track on this idea fast. There are already tens of thousands of posts all over the internet about this change. From what I gather the response is overwhelmingly negative.
One final note, what is Blizzard going to do if someone has a legitimate name that has something obscene in it? If Blizzard attempts to censor it they will likely be liable for a discrimination lawsuit. They would also have to disable the world censor on their forum if that person wants to include their name in their posting.
RealID is a real disaster.
*Added*
A Blizzard employee decided to test out this new policy by posting his name. We now know he lives with his mother and will likely go home to a full answering machine. Funny enough, later on in the topic he warns people that just because you know someone's name does not give you the right to find out more information of said person. Then the topic was locked.
The first being is stalking. There have been so many cases of people getting harassed through the internet. People have commit suicide over it. Has anyone every pissed you off so much in a game you wish you could beat them up? I haven't, but I've seen this reaction countless times on forums and talked about on Xbox Live. Now Blizzard is going to give them the first piece of information to really do some damage to you.
What can someone do with a name? Well if you have a Facebook account or Myspace than you are going to be easy to find. From there they will be able to locate a lot of forums you post on, possibly your phone number, your email, etc. Now they can harass you in many ways.
But what if they want to take it beyond playful phone calls at 2AM in the morning? You managed to get them so mad that they want to steal your WOW account. Blizzard asks for your first name, last name and email to retrieve your Battle.net password. If you post on the forum, your attacker knows your first and last name. That can be used to find your facebook and email address. Once the attacker has that, they go to your email and activate the forgot password recovery. If you selected the question what school did you go to and have it listed on your Facebook, you are in deep trouble now. They have full access to your email account and possibly many other places such as your bank, personal message and any number of forums you post on. All that is left is to reset the Battle.net password and delete you WOW characters!
Security on the internet is designed around private information. What is the name of your first pet. Who is your favorite teacher. What is your birthday. Many of this is now available for all the world to see. The final piece of the puzzle is connecting your online persona to your Facebook profile. When that happens you are one huge target for whoever does not like you.
I think Blizzard is going to back track on this idea fast. There are already tens of thousands of posts all over the internet about this change. From what I gather the response is overwhelmingly negative.
One final note, what is Blizzard going to do if someone has a legitimate name that has something obscene in it? If Blizzard attempts to censor it they will likely be liable for a discrimination lawsuit. They would also have to disable the world censor on their forum if that person wants to include their name in their posting.
RealID is a real disaster.
*Added*
A Blizzard employee decided to test out this new policy by posting his name. We now know he lives with his mother and will likely go home to a full answering machine. Funny enough, later on in the topic he warns people that just because you know someone's name does not give you the right to find out more information of said person. Then the topic was locked.
July 5, 2010
Modern War Addendum
While playing yesterday I remembered one of the points which was apparently replaced: sniper rifles. It is absolute nonsense that someone can one hit kill you with a sniper rifle. If you get shot in the head, okay. But there should be no difference being hit with an assault gun and a sniper rifle in the chest. Even more frustrating is "quick scope snipers" that run around and one shot kill you. They have unlimited range, one hit kill and only have to aim at you. In comparison to a shot gun which has a tiny range, and won't kill unless you hit dead center.
Also I experienced another moment of extreme latency when I knifed a guy, completed the whole animation and saw blood, but he didn't die. When he killed me I saw he was actually laying down and I knifed into thin air.
This will be my last rant about MW2.
Also I experienced another moment of extreme latency when I knifed a guy, completed the whole animation and saw blood, but he didn't die. When he killed me I saw he was actually laying down and I knifed into thin air.
This will be my last rant about MW2.
July 3, 2010
Britannia Manor
I saw a link to this documentary about Richard Garriott's house and life on Stratics. It is interesting seeing where his game design perspective is coming from. He sure likes to collect a lot of weird stuff. In it he mentions his first game, Akalabeth: World of Doom, netted him over $150,000 right out of high school. It was such a success because most games at the time were on the level of Asteroids, just lines and text.
Moderns Warfare 2 is Bad List
I was considering making a top 10 video about things that suck about Modern Warfare 2. That is never going to happen because it would be a lot of work and by the time I could get to it, we would be on Modern Warfare 5. So I'll just post it here. These are not in order of sucky-ness.
- Host Migration - If you are going to do player hosting, you could at least make it so that host migration does not fail so much. It seems like at least 1/3 of the time migration fails and the match ends. This is especially frustrating when the game is seconds away from ending and the host quits to avoid a loss. Other improvements could be made such as making the screen black so someone can't spend 5 seconds spotting you.
- No Guns Only Mode - It would be so great to have a guns only mode. No claymores, C4, grenade launchers, RPGs, kill streaks, thermal, heartbeat sensor or anything. Just bullets flying everywhere. I think a lot of people would enjoy this.
- Lack of Bug Fixes - After two or three patches, there hasn't been a single new bug fix. The bug where you get stuck with the bomb case in your face remains. One night I was in a game where some enemies were invulnerable in a domination match. Someone pointed out that a couple guns don't work with silencers. They are releasing new maps, couldn't they do fixes also?
- One Man Army - Many people agree that this perk is unbalanced. It gives you unlimited ammo. People don't even use it for the intended purpose, switching classes. They spam the same class over and over, recharging a grenade launcher or RPG. I think a nice fix would be to make it so the ammo level remains the same. So if you use 2 grenades, switching to that class again will not return them. Combine this with point #6 and you really have no idea where to shoot.
- Hit Detection - It is too generous.
- Latency - This just kills the game on a competitive level. I can watch a kill cam and see my opponent step into a doorway, but he never appeared on my screen. The person hosting the match always has an advantage over everyone else.
- Bullet Penetration - Bullets can go through anything. Why even have a FMJ attachment? I swing around a corner and watch bullets clip the corner to kill me. If you don't have FMJ, then your bullets shouldn't go through 75% of the stuff they are currently able to. It makes it impossible to take cover.
- Spawning - It is just horrid. I have posted a video of one occasion which was slightly unfair. There is so much room for it to be improved but the developers just don't care about it. This highlights how they view the game, as a casual shooter.
- Hacking - Basically they have never attempted to stop it. There are thousands of people on the top of the leaderboard with 16 billion points or something. I see those people with the modified usernames all the time. Sometimes I am in games which are acting really weird and it is obvious someone is doing something. I bet someone who ends up hosting a match could lag out specific players or the entire enemy team. It certainly feels like that has happened on a couple of occasions.
- $1,000,000,000 and nothing to show for it - Activision made well over a billion dollars on this game and show absolutely no sign of supporting it beyond the map packs, which make them at least $100,000,000 more per release. How about a tournament mode? How about addressing any of the concerns listed here? I would love to see what the player activity numbers are. I suspect there is a huge drop off starting in January and then spikes with the map packs. Then compare that to another game like Call of Duty 4 which was going strong well after a year of release.
July 1, 2010
Why UORares Was Broken
I did a bit of investigating today to find out why the UORares Item Database submit form was not working anymore. There is an administrator panel in which I am supposed to see items awaiting approval, but it was always blank. It did work at one time because I added a couple dozen items when it first opened.
The cause of the issue was an invalid itemid being assigned when submitting the form. A simple changing of +1 to +2 fixed it. If for whatever reason you wish to submit an item, it will sit waiting for me to approve it. One other thing broken is images don't get saved. I'm not really keen on spending time to fix that considering the site is not used anymore.
I am saddened that the bug was not with the administrator control panel itself. There is no doubt that over the past 6 years that some people have attempted to submit a variety of items. There was no error message indicating the item was never received. I was hoping there would be some to approve.
It is interesting looking at the code for one of the first PHP applications I had written. There are so many things I know now that would make it require a lot less lines and be a lot more efficient. It is in fact so bad I can't to reuse it for anything. Every line literally needs to be rewritten. At least it still works.
The cause of the issue was an invalid itemid being assigned when submitting the form. A simple changing of +1 to +2 fixed it. If for whatever reason you wish to submit an item, it will sit waiting for me to approve it. One other thing broken is images don't get saved. I'm not really keen on spending time to fix that considering the site is not used anymore.
I am saddened that the bug was not with the administrator control panel itself. There is no doubt that over the past 6 years that some people have attempted to submit a variety of items. There was no error message indicating the item was never received. I was hoping there would be some to approve.
It is interesting looking at the code for one of the first PHP applications I had written. There are so many things I know now that would make it require a lot less lines and be a lot more efficient. It is in fact so bad I can't to reuse it for anything. Every line literally needs to be rewritten. At least it still works.
Anyone Remember UORares?
It has been about 5 years since UORares went inactive. I was put in charge of the site back sometime in late 2003 I believe. Unfortunately it died a slow death due to the rare community falling apart due to developer neglect. If only we had Event Moderators back then.
Every once in a while (with the while being over 2 years) I like to post some news. By some chance if someone visits UORares and does not know about UOGuide's newsletter, now they will. I also changed the poll, but it appears to be broken. Votes are not being accepted.
Speaking of the newsletter, I am very happy how it turned out. It was a lot of work but I am proud of making it. I did receive a bit of criticism for the banner. It was put together in about 15 minutes to add a little color. If anyone wishes to make a better one it would be appreciated. I am hoping the construction of the July newsletter will have a lot more contributor's. If I am to do this every month I won't have much time to work on other site projects.
How about something funny? The fanboi wars between Apple and Android are always a source of comedy. Someone has made a funny set of videos showing the ridiculousness of the arguements. One involves someone trying to purchase an iPhone at a regular cellphone store, the other is a misguided attempt to get a non-iPhone repaired in an Apple store.
Every once in a while (with the while being over 2 years) I like to post some news. By some chance if someone visits UORares and does not know about UOGuide's newsletter, now they will. I also changed the poll, but it appears to be broken. Votes are not being accepted.
Speaking of the newsletter, I am very happy how it turned out. It was a lot of work but I am proud of making it. I did receive a bit of criticism for the banner. It was put together in about 15 minutes to add a little color. If anyone wishes to make a better one it would be appreciated. I am hoping the construction of the July newsletter will have a lot more contributor's. If I am to do this every month I won't have much time to work on other site projects.
How about something funny? The fanboi wars between Apple and Android are always a source of comedy. Someone has made a funny set of videos showing the ridiculousness of the arguements. One involves someone trying to purchase an iPhone at a regular cellphone store, the other is a misguided attempt to get a non-iPhone repaired in an Apple store.
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