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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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?
4. 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.
   
5. Hit Detection - It is too generous.
   
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. $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.

I had to redo the list because I lost my text file. It isn't exactly the same and I had better examples for each point. This list does not mean I think MW2 is a bad game, it is just a pity that stuff like this makes it very frustrating. Good online matches are few and far between. Maybe 1 out of 10.

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.

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.

UOGuide Newsletter

Since about the time I first setup UOGuide, I always wanted to do a newsletter. It is just one of those things websites used to do. You don't see it much anymore. The UO team has done one randomly for the past couple years but it has been a while. The first one will likely go out tomorrow night.

If you haven't yet signed up, you should.

I have spent a lot of time working on both UOGuide and our guild website for HOT Guild. I added an arcade and gold modifications to make things a bit more interesting on the forum.

The Mediawiki developers said the next version, which has the nice new Vector skin, was going to be out weeks ago. I was hoping to be able to implement it by now. Oh well, maybe next month.

I have a lot of big ideas for new features on UOGuide. Hopefully I will be able to get one or two added during July. In the mean time I am trying to promote all the stuff UOGuide can already do, such as host a guild website and personal page, or promote a fansite.

If I can improve the UO community just a little bit, that would be a nice thing.

Factions is on the Brink of Ruination

I just had to post a quick rant after reading the developers idea on changing Town Sigil corruption.

So, instead of being a constantly ongoing battle open for potentially all towns, the game instead would be a series of concentrated battles for single town at a time. At any given time, all online players would be able to tell what town's capture window is open. The idea is to capture that town's sigil, hold it for a short time to corrupt it, then successfully return it to the town. Failure of any faction to do so means the town goes uncontrolled until it comes up for capture again the next day.

This just can't be happening. I was so excited about them updating factions. But now every change they unveil or idea posted is dreadful. This latest one just lowers my expectations to the lowest point.

Everything about this proposed idea is wrong. Instead of huge epic fights over all 8 cities, you are regulated to a single one at a time. One week a city will be available at 2PM, the next at 2AM. Why did they take out 24 hour corruption timers? Because it was so difficult to guard for that amount of time. Now they want you to fight 24 hours a day every day. No 3 day breaks. The entire concept of town ownership is tossed out the window. Towns are going to be swapping hands every day.

I really wish Draconi and the gang was still in charge.

Kitchen Sink Forever

There is yet another video out showing footage of the infamous Duke Nukem Forever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CwHzclyYnI

From this is becomes crystal clear (even though we knew already) why the game was never released. They tried to cram too much stuff into one game. Underwater, driving, interactive slot machines, destructible environments...................plus whatever else we haven't heard of yet. That is just too much for a brand new game to take on.

You can add some neat stuff here and there. Maybe vehicles. Maybe underwater. But not all at once.

They claim the game was close to release. In reality it wasn't. They just kept adding more and more. Development was destined to go on for eternity. Or in another word, forever.