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Not only has Sony (now Daybreak) not run Project 1999 into the ground, they took the unusual step of officially endorsing it in 2015.

We have recently entered into a written agreement with Daybreak Game Company LLC that formally recognizes Project 1999 as a fan based, not-for-profit, classic EverQuest emulation project. The agreement establishes the guidelines that we as a project must follow, but it will allow to us continue to update the game without risk of legal repercussions.

This is quite a change from their attitude a decade earlier, when they forced Winter's Roar, a customized emulated server, to shut down.

When you don't have friends, cards are really just a stack of colored paper. That's the problem I've always had with Dungeons and Dragons and multi-player games like that. When I was a kid I used to buy D&D books and modules and be fascinated with the lore and how much fun it all sounded. But when the realization hits you that you don't have anyone to play it with, it all becomes pretty useless.

I ran into a similar issue. (1) Very small circle of friends. (2) None of them interested in playing role playing games like D&D. (3) People get married, buy houses, start pumping out kids, and aligning schedules becomes near impossible.

You're not alone in being alone. I recommend something like an MMORPG where you can meet people and develop online friendships. My favorite has always been EverQuest.

My list:

Rogue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Seriously been playing this game since the early 80s and have never "Won" there are thousands of variants but there's a particularly nice Android version: https://play.google.com/store/...

Ultima 7/7.5: http://www.gog.com/game/ultima...
Revolutionary when it came out. My friends and I in high-school literally sat their with our mouths hanging open the first time we launched the game. The MMO based on it was one of the first I'd call a true mmo: http://www.uo.com/ (let the flame wars begin on that statement, just so you know ahead of time: I don't care)

https://www.everquest.com/ -- first 3D mmo worth its salt. Huge time sink though.

Robocraft -- Build robots out of legos... then blow them up. Super fun. It's my current game. http://store.steampowered.com/...

But when you buy a MMO, you have to know that it's not a permanent thing.

Yet amazingly, Everquest and even Ultima Online are still running, after 13 and 15 years respectively.

Since the subject came up, I'm going to mention that EverQuest is going to launch their Free-to-Play program in about a week. (the original, EQ2 has been F2P for a while now) info is at http://www.everquest.com/free/ (also a new fresh server starting.)

I don't work for Sony, I just like (and play) EQ. In fact I work for a competitor.

I'm not a fan of the F2P model, I plan to keep my regular sub; but an MMO needs fresh blood to stay healthy, and I'm hoping this will boost the userbase.

> I don't grasp why using real-world combat tactics which work
> very well at keeping you alive are considered "n00b" in FPS combat games.

In poorly-designed MMORPGs, using tactics like shooting at monsters where they can't get at you or from a ledge is considered an exploitation. Indeed, supposedly monsters could NOT originally hit you through a wall, but they had to allow that to prevent people from shooting at stupid giants in Oasis of Marr through the doors of the huts, who'd just stand there indefinitely, struggling to get at you through the door they could not fit through.

Ahh, that was a fun game. I remember when people figured out that the ships were actually coded as if they were NPCs, and the speed of the ship was controlled by "giving" it a very heavy weapon that slowed it down to the desired speed.

So some enterprising warriors started using the "disarm" ability on the ship, which would drop its weapon, and the ships would go wizzing through the oceans. Oh, the hilarity of it all.

Then you could cast a certain spell on your skeleton pet (dull mind), which wouldn't do anything, but once in awhile it would take (or not take and wear off, as the case may be) converting your pet into an NPC skeleton monster mad at you. Recast pet over and over until it's at max level (you used to have to do this), give your pet two daggers to turn them into a slice and dice machine (also a cool feature now long gone) and do this right by a zone, and zone out when it takes. Pet sticks around as an NPC attacking anyone who comes near.

And then there was PvP charming the bad guys like Trolls and Ogres, and making them sit (as a friendly pet) next to a guard in Freeport, then leaving. Charm eventually wears off, guard suddenly sees them as an enemy. Poof!

And you used to let your pet be able to /guard you and have it stand in a place. It would attack any non-positive faction NPC that wandered by, not just ones attacking you. Hence it would run around like the guards outside the halfling city used to do, killing bats and rats for hours. That fun was taken away, too.

And in WWII Online, things like bushes were permanent, indestructible fixtures on the landscape. Now the physics engine was quite good -- if a car or truck crashed, it might flip over. A truck would even spill the soldiers sitting in back. So what people would do was load up a truck with soldiers, and deliberately crash at high speed into a bush, flipping the soldiers over the fence into the German camp, thus avoiding the "proper" assault through the front gates.

Have an entire Virtual Life. ... Where do I sign up?

here , here , here , etc.

Yeah, because we all know that realgeeks never spend money on stuff they don't need

Yeah cause we all know that geeks never spend money stuff they don't need

Hmm... But what if you have to pay $9.95 a month (on top of your ISP charges) for said encyclopedia?

Wonderful point. It's very clear that nobody is going to want to pay for any service over the internet.

I don't do crack, and I don't do crack either. That's why I'm worried about going to the poor house for copyright infringement rather than going to prison for possession of cocaine without a prescription. Did you read the Bright Tunes opinion? If anybody needs to lay off the crack, it's the U.S. Congress *cough*DMCA*cough*Bono Act*cough*.

Yeah, I should help out. Problem is I have a full time job and two major hobbies... sigh.

many of the "higher" programs (oracle, architect, seraph, merovingian etc.) "hang out" in the matrix? why?

Basically it boils down to: Yes, if you want to play the latest 3D-Games you better get a new machine.

I don't see why this is bad? I personally dislike 3D Games since they all look alike. If you want you can still play great games with older Hardware, the whole simulation, build-up scene for instance. And most likely your system could even handle games such as DarkAge of Camelot or Everquest, wich are games with a focus on gameplay and not grafics. I agree, there are a lot of crappy games out there with really stunning grafic fx, but i don't care about them (anymore). I let my friends play them and when one diamond among them is found i consider wether it's worth the hardware upgrade. The last game i did this for was Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Had to upgrade for 20$ and get a TNT2 to play it at decent fps. Now i wonder what doom3 brings. Is it worth the upgrade to Radeon/GeForceFx? I don't know. Maybe I will keep waiting for WarhammerOnline until I upgrade. But someone will betatest for me and then i can still stick with my XentorTNT2/32MB and keep playing Anno1503 or DarkAges.

In an industry scrutinized by the government as a drug infested haven that pollutes our communities and destroys the ability to lead a productive life, there is another industry that has the potential to become even more dangerous than any drug addiction. I'm not supposed to be writing this. What was supposed to happen was I prove my thesis that I couldn't be sucked into a virtual reality like many people I have met before. I never really understood what I was getting myself into when I started my research experiment, playing a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.

Three years ago at a nightclub I bumped into an old friend of mine who went by the nickname "Iggy". I was really amazed to see him because no one had seen nor heard from Iggy in over a year. Many of his friends had all wondered what happened to him.

"Jesus Iggy, where in the hell have you been?!"

"Everquest," was all he said. He looked down at his feet when he said it.

"Huh?" I had no clue what he meant.

"I've been playing Everquest."

As we spoke, Iggy opened up to me and confessed that he had lost his job, his friends and didn't want to go out much anymore.

"It's an addiction. I'm only out tonight because the server is down for patching and I'm miserable."

For some reason, he couldn't look me in the eye while he was talking. He was obviously embarrassed.

"Um. Okay." I mean, what was I going to say to something as incredulous as that? I've heard of game obsessions, like those college kids in the seventies that murdered their whole family while playing a Dungeons and Dragons game, but I just thought that sort of obsession lies only in the minds of sociopaths or people with a lot bigger problems than playing a game. Iggy was a really nice, normal guy who had lost a lot to some online role-playing game called "Everquest". I had no idea what to make of it.

I never saw Iggy again. Neither has anyone else who knew him that I have asked. Since that night I really pondered the absurdity of his situation. It nagged at me.

On the web you can put the words "gaming addiction" into Google and discover a thousand and one sites for support groups, self help courses, testimonials and various studies. There's the "Everquest Widows" forum, a site called "Ariadne - Understanding MMORPG Addiction", and a myriad of articles on topics like game addiction and the innocent bystanders that suffer from it.

As one Everquest Widow puts it, "I plan on starting "Widows Weekly." It will be a group that meets in a local coffee shop. Here, spouses can talk and help one another through this difficult process, and begin to realize that there is a life out there despite the loss of our loved ones. I plan to send the bill for coffee and snacks to Verant. It would be but a small compensation on their part to repay me and others for the loss of our loved ones--so pay up, Verant!" -- Christine Gilbert CD Mag.com

What I find interesting is that many of the people who author these articles or sites have usually neither played the games or have just been the "victims" such as spouses or family. Others who dissect the topic of game addiction tend to be outsiders looking in, shaking their heads or turning the study into one giant mouse in the maze science experiment. It's rare that you find someone, who actually plays games passionately, speak up or write anything about negative side affects.

The more people I met who played computer games, the more I wanted to understand the obsession. I also had another stake in this because my partner, Low, is a gamer and a "geek" in every sense of the word. Not to mention my fiancé. It was beginning to cause some strain on us from time to time in terms of "quality time". I was getting really angry with him on a regular basis actually. According to Low, it was I who had the problem, not him. This is how most gamers think. Deal with their gaming or don't deal with it at all. They will play either way.

So I eventually decided to do some investigation and find out what makes these gamers and role players tick. What sort of recreation has the ability to absorb people to the extent that marriages break up, jobs are lost, and they lose friends? How does playing a game on a computer make someone lose functionality in the REAL world, because they want to spend too much time in some imaginary reality? For crying out loud, I thought, it's just a game.

I had a lot of questions but no one I talked to had answers. Gamers would tell me, "You won't understand unless you are a gamer yourself." Ok, no problem. I figured I could just play a game I find entertaining and get bored and write about what nut cases gamers really are.

It just wasn't that easy. This little experiment of mine turned out to be more dangerous than I ever imagined.

I wasn't able to begin playing a game right away. The opportunity just never really presented itself directly to me. There just wasn't a game I really liked enough to "get into it" for long enough. Low would play his Quake, Unreal Tournament, Black & White, Carmageddon, Fallout, Diablo II and a multitude of other first person shooters, but nothing seemed all that captivating to me and there was no way I could play these games with him due to his extreme level of skill and years of practice in a 3D environment.

I played a little Diablo and actually had a bit of fun with that, but I found I only really enjoyed it when I played with Low or our friends in multi-player mode. We would go "adventuring" together as they call it, fighting demons and wizards and monsters and coming out winning or dying, but having some fun just playing together. It was my first taste of actually playing with another player in a game as a team. But when Low moved onto the next game, bored with Diablo, I didn't have the same drive to play anymore. So I put my project aside and put up with his gaming as best as I could.

Massive Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORPG) have been around for many years. You can find thousands of websites, magazines, web-zines and the like that are devoted to the enormous market out there for online gaming. Sites like GameSpy, that literally receive millions of visits per day from gamers and industry types from all over the world, provide an almost infinite amount if information about these types of games. Hundreds of thousands of people play games like Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, Asheron's Call, and Ultima Online each day from all over the world. With the upcoming launch of The Sims Online, analysts and game reviewers are expecting the largest online game community ever seen to develop.

"The Sims promises to be one of the most interesting human experiments in the history of the Net." -- David Kushner, Entertainment Weekly

Low had tried many of these MMORPG's. He never stuck with one very long because, as he puts it, "I got tired of being a crappy tree-elf that always fell out of the damn tree village." In Ultima Online, he "got tired of having all my stuff stolen from me and getting killed by stupid 'PKers' (Player Killers)." Apparently for him, the rewards were far and few between to keep him interested in these games. He also has a very short attention span with most games. Play it, beat it, and move on to the next game is his motto. The more games you play in a single year the more well rounded you are apparently. With the new enhanced graphics engines, hardware and development that goes into games these days, it's amazing how stimulating the market can be right now.

Early in 2001, however, Low's opinion of online gaming changed drastically. He read an article about a new online role-playing game that was set about 30,000 years into the future, on a colonized planet. The story line was science fiction themed, with monsters, mutants, futuristic weapons, wars, and sinister political plots. The player would have the ability to create a character avatar from a wide variety of attributes and be surrounded by very realistic 3D graphics, with incredible scenery and sound. You would have to defend yourself, form guilds, make friends and alliances and your goal would be to "learn" or level your character as the game progressed in order to increase your skills and possessions. There would be PVP (player versus player) combat, PVM combat (player verses mobile or "mob" for short, a term used to explain computer generated enemy or monster) and a variety of other things one could do while in the game online. You could fly a plane, morph into animals and go on dangerous missions and epic quests. The game was called Anarchy Online.

Something about this Anarchy Online game really had his attention and right after it came out in July of 2001, he bought his copy and began playing, and once again I lost him to a game. He could not stop going on and on about how "cool this or that was" or the graphics or all the people he was meeting. His excitement was just ridiculous in my eyes but I had been through this before. Nevertheless, the game also captured my interest because of its science fiction theme. I am a sci-fi buff and the storyline had such a great plot that they actually sell the novels online for it. I read the chapters as they were released and was hooked on the storyline.

Low bought another copy about two weeks later. "I want you to play with me." By this time we were under some strain because he was really absorbed by this game every night. It looked really intimidating to me and I opted not to play it right away, stalling for time. The 3D environment bothered me because any game I had ever played, like Diablo, for example, had always been in third person view, which is a bird's eye view of the environment. The 3D graphics were dizzying as I looked over his shoulder from time to time.

In the end I caved in under the pressure and began playing it in September of 2001. I was a horrible player in the beginning, running into walls and getting lost or killed all the time. It didn't matter to me. I was playing a game with my boyfriend and found with each day that went by, I wanted to log on and play more and more.

So what was the appeal? Before I realized what was happening, I became addicted to playing this game. While logged into this game I met wonderful people, via their avatars, laughed to funny antics via chat window discussions, and experienced a futuristic sci-fi world via incredibly realistic 3D graphics and sounds. We ran through swamps with mutant wolves chasing us, the sound of our feet making wet suction sounds just like you would have in reality. We could hear birds chirping in forests we scouted and vultures crying overhead as they spotted us and attacked.

Our adrenaline would pump as we fought for our lives against twenty-foot tall robots with buzz saws for hands, or as we went on safaris to hunt giant brontosaur-like animals. We had the ability to heal and save each other as well as other members of our team at the time. We also had the ability to gain the respect, over more than a year later, of many online players, for being a great couple of characters in this game. We have, in fact, become high-ranking officers in our guild, which is almost like a family or alliance with other people to help you in the game.

In South Korea, some in-game alliances are valued more than real life friendships. A game called Lineage: The Blood Pledge has captivated approximately a third of the population. In Lineage, characters can take on the role of Princes, Wizards, and Knights and vow their loyalty to their clan or guild. This loyalty had lead to an incident in 2001 where a player was nearly beaten to death in real life for virtually killing the character of another player.

"He boasted that he had offed the gangman's virtual character just for the fun of it. Bad idea. The roughnecks dragged the 21-year-old into the urinal and pummeled him until he was covered with real-world bruises." -- By Michelle Levander, Time Magazine

It is easy to lose yourself to your imagination while you become someone you could possibly never be in the real world. You can become a hero, a bad ass, a wealthy person, someone with special powers or gain an enormous amount of respect from people who look up to you. This isn't to say you can't be that kind of person in reality, but what if everyone had this ability to find respect, admiration and status, simply by being in the environment long enough. What if all you had to do was play each day and level higher and higher, each goal leading to a new goal of achievement and possibilities. And what if you never had to leave the comfort of your chair to do this?

What if you could really become a diva, a soldier, a magician, or a samurai, and people respected or admired you unconditionally as long as you had a long red bar looming over your virtual head. Or, as in especially my case, what if while you were in this virtual reality, you didn't have to worry about deadlines, due dates, over 1000 emails per day to read and answer, or day-to-day stress that comes with what I do. The virtual reality could absorb you so much, that for the time you are logged in, you forget everything else. It doesn't seem to matter whether you are a strict role-player (someone who stays in character) or 'hardcore' (someone who spends more time in-game than an average user). You still can be addicted and absorbed with the attention you get.

The official Anarchy Online Community Forum, which gets thousands of posts per day, has also been one of my sources for observing how obsessed people have become with the game. Recently, a devoted and well known player had to throw in the towel due to her addiction problem.

"The level to which I got into things here is what has lead me to this point where I must say goodbye. My internet addiction and denial of it has taken me to a point where I must get a hold of it. I realize that many people have what it takes to play a game like this "casually" in a healthy manner. I am unfortunately not one of those people. I am currently battling bi-polar disorder (manic depression) and the escapism that a game like AO offers is too much like a drug for me."

The ability to be respected, to be admired, and to succeed, even in an imaginary world, is a very powerful lure. It can cause a person to produce endorphins, a chemical released into the brain that causes a feeling of energy and well being. Gaming also causes adrenaline production and extreme excitability. Scientists have proven that endorphins and adrenal rushes are incredibly addictive.

"There are indications that pleasurable games and activities cause the body to produce endogenous opiates such as endorphins. These substances are actually addictive. Some addictive drugs, such as heroin, are chemically similar to these natural substances, while other addictive drugs are thought to stimulate their production."
-- Leonard Holmes, Ph.D. from the article, Is Pokémon Addictive? 1999

It should be easy to see why gaming can be addictive as a direct result of the physical effects on the body. I also believe that people can become addicted to respect, admiration and power as well. Even though the production of endorphins can be a positive side affect in one way, it can be easy to overindulge and put aside productive living. But there are many ways to do this and online gaming is not the only vice out there. People find many different ways to escape the problems in their life or to combat stress.

People log on each and every day to find a level of respect that doesn't come easily in day-to-day life. They log on to escape reality or to escape other real problems such as illness and stress. I have met people in this game who have mental disorders or physical impairments. I have also played with people who are in IT jobs all day long, listening to customer complaints, getting bitched at regularly. Some have even admitted that they never hear the words "good job" in the real world.

One player who works in the IT technical services industry, told me "I get my faith in people restored when I get online. People treat me with respect and are actually nice to me. They don't expect anything in return. Also, they believe me when I tell them something because of my level in the game."

I know of other overly stressed out people who log in each day to escape their day-to-day experience of working or living in hard reality. We met a person in game, for example, who is an EMT. Everyday he witnesses death and horrible accidents. He told us that he plays the game to get it all out of his mind. I also met a nurse online with a similar story, and a school teacher who teaches eleventh grade in the Bronx, NYC, who is very stressed out by his job.

"Most human beings pass through periods in their lives, when they feel compelled to engage in some apparently mindless activity that, for the time being, seems to provide some relief from the prevailing chaos in their lives. This could be something as simple as spending hours in front of the television set. Or going on uncontrollable buying sprees just to feel and smell the newness of the product. Or getting into a series of dead-end relationships. Or going on eating binges. Or playing computer games, uncaring of unattended work piling up. Or playing snooker every evening at the club regardless of the family's legitimate demand for more attention. In other words, binging on anything potentially destructive to the body or the soul. Fortunately for many of us, after a period of this compulsive indulgence, we pull ourselves back to the mainstream and get on with our lives, until the next compulsion hits us."
-- Dr. Vijay Nagaswami, from the article, Who? Me? An addict, The Hindu Folio 2001

This is not to say that there are not positive aspects to interacting with people online. Online gaming opens the doors to people who might not have the ability to do so due to time, geography, or many more reasons. Gaming online is an inexpensive and quick way to make new friends, chat with people all over the world and share an experience with people you would never meet because they may be continents away.

One of our online friends, for example, who goes by the character name "Docker", lives in Leiden, Netherlands. Another friend, "Chanell" lives in Einselthum, Germany. These are really interesting people we would never have met if it was not for the game we play online. I asked Chanell why he started playing online games.

"It all began with Diablo II being released. Then my friend, Yppo, made me try it online. I found it was an incredibly boring and annoying game. Then Yppo made me try it online and I loved it. I joined his clan and had months of online fun, then it got boring, close to the moment DAoC [Dark Ages of Camelot] was released in Europe. While I went to DAoC, Yppo chose to go to A.O." Eventually Chanell started playing A.O. as well.

When asked how playing A.O. affects his social life, he reflected, "As for my friends... yes we hang together a lot less. This could be related to A.O. or the fact that we don't work in the same city anymore. I am not totally sure. I still have a lot of phone calls and meetings so I am not "lonesome" it just isn't an as high frequency as before."

And with that I can only think that one's social life is in the eye of the beholder. I interact with Chanell almost every day. In fact I interact with more people than I ever have before because of playing a computer game. They just are not all physically in my proximity.

Interaction with people... It got me thinking and I began to develop my own theories on what causes the addiction. Psychologists can use fancy terminology like "Motivation Factors" and "Attraction Factors" such as self-esteem and self-image problems. They can harp on the role of achievement problems and relationship deficiencies in a person's personality. But I think I can sum it up to one word that would work for any individual needing his or her game "fix" each time they log in, regardless of how well rounded they are in their lives or how much of a basket case they could be perceived as.

RESPECT.

I think it is just that simple. I like the feeling I get when people look up to me in the game or ask my opinion. It seems to be a common drive for players in general. That is, to be respected for being the best and reaching the next level in the game.

Not everyone who plays games neatly fit into these Psychologists stereotypes. "Solories", another Anarchy Online player, is an example of someone who just logs on for the sake of play.

"I would say that I am responsibly addicted, meaning I have never been late to work due to AO.
My wife would prefer that I not play AO as much as I do, but I always make time for her every night, and try and do one thing planned together every weekend. I have never been late to work, but the first night I played AO I stayed up until 4:00 am and had to get up at 6:00 am and the next day I played until midnight. I don't feel that AO affects my work habits, work is work and when it is time to play, it is time to play. I enjoy watching my character grow in his skills and MMORPG's in general let you get away from the normal day to day monotone life and do something out of the ordinary. In AO I am Solories Enforcer of Rubi-Ka a defender of the cause. I fight battles that help my guild get better and help the clans win a war against the Omni."

In the process of my gaming experiment, I became a casualty of the concept of being respected. If someone had asked me in September of 2001 if I expected to be obsessed with an online role-playing game a year down the road, I would have said with confidence that I am one of the most level headed non-addictive persons I know. No way could this happen to me. In fact, I would have been reminded of poor old Iggy and his demise.

I technically have ended my experiment. In the process, I haven't lost my job, and due to our simultaneous obsession, I have not lost my fiancé either. I haven't lost my real life friends, but they do sometimes look at me funny when I talk about the game I play. Low and I get our work done, run our business and have a great balanced life together I think. Anyone who actually knows me in real life can tell you that I have no self image or esteem problems and in fact, I have been accused of having quite an ego. I won't even go into Low's ego. I will admit though, that I have missed quite a few parties, nights out with the girls, shopping, and some chores needed around the office and home because of Anarchy Online. I will also admit that I want to log in as much as I possibly can every single day.

People have worse entertainment addictions than playing computer games. If I am going to be addicted to something, I would choose online gaming over drugs, bowling, gambling, television, or being a baseball fanatic easily. I don't have to wear ugly shoes, lose my hard earned money or do the wave next to someone I don't know and that just about makes it a no-brainer for me. It IS after all just a video game, like Neal describes in his great novel, Snow Crash. It is just another amusement park.

"Amusement parks in the Metaverse can be fantastic, offering a wide selection of interactive three-dimensional movies. But in the end, they're still nothing more than video games."
--Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

And I will leave you with that. Signing on now... Tenjikiito, level 157 Female Solitus Adventurer, Advisor to the Clan Guild Synergy Factor, the best damn guild on the world of Rubi-Ka, with the best damn virtual people one could ever virtually meet.

Special thanks to the following people for help with my research and leveling:
Sohjiro (Low Tek), Theevilcouch, Demnspawnt, Akarah, Chanell, Sheffy, Mr. Cheeze/Conqueso, Solories, Kirishami, Docker, Ramzie, Boco (who is to blame for all of this), Sultanx, Asmoran, Caddock, Meurgen, Tergwannabe, Trus, Ayanamie, Cplkane, Spherana, Ankokujin, Thedwarf (aka Notmyfault), Stromm, Molg, Butwalrus, Ciyt/Toonot, and Yokoduna.

Related links:

Anarchy Online
Dark Age of Camelot
Ultima Online
Diablo II
The Sims
Everquest
Try Anarchy Online free for 7 days! (We dare you to). =]

Indeed. I run a 866 with 512MB (RDRAM) and I have no problem running TWO copies of Everquest through the magic of EQW. I always hear people bitching and moaning about how their system is struggling by and I just wonder what they are doing wrong.

I bet a good defrag would make more difference for most people than upgrading their processor.

On a related note, I'd love to see the peformance test of an 866/512MB system versus a 1.8/128 system, or a similiar test of a 1.8 with a (what is it, 10something RPM) versus a 2.4 with a 7200 RPM or 5400 (?) RPM drive and see which performs better for the average user.

My hunch is INTEL and AMD wouldn't be happy with the results. When are they going to finally start putting out other components that are fast enough for the good chips anyway?

I've been warning my friends still hooked on EverCrack and DAOC that they're throwing their lives away... maybe this will convince them.

Dark Age of Camelot and Everquest do this. I think Anarchy Online does too, but I'm not positive on that one. This allows the publisher to change the EULA on the fly, and presumably makes it more difficult for the user to claim ignorance since he has to explicitly accept the terms every time the program is run.

[talking about tv and online addiction ONLINE, thats like holding an AA meeting at a BAR.]

No, it's like holding an AA meeting at an opium den/casino/crack house that sells cigarettes and has a liquor license.

> IM - is a world of divided standards, so you can only talk to AOL users if you're an AOL user, MSN if your an MSN user, etc

Goodness forbid we get a little competition in the IM 'biz'. Look ma, no ICQ number! Anyway, there are multi-network clients out there.

> email - is a world where you need to sift through 20 spam messages to find your one message. Also the monoculture of email clients created a nightmare reality of viruses.

Don't know about you, but my spam filter catches virtually all of the crap; but maybe I'm just lucky. Can't do anything about Outlook usage, though.

> nntp - spam is certainly a problem, as is the bulk of news services no longer carrying binaries.

There are more efficient ways to distribute files nowadays. I hope I'll never have to uuencode anything ever again.

> Search - pay per search, or commercially-supported search (ie - paid-for results placement).

Only an issue when the engine doesn't tell you it's a paid link. Don't know about others, since I mainly use Google.

> Stock Trading - find me a stock worth investing in today

I forget, were hugely inflated IPOs part of the original Internet spec?

> WEB - commercial consolidation funnels most people to portals.

I've yet to see statistics showing how many people use these portals, instead of switching to something else instantly. I know my 12 year old sister doesn't use her default portal.

> Nobody can afford to host anymore

Has it really gotten more expensive? I thought prices were going down, if anything.

> 70% of the URLs were dead

Creating and hosting a web page costs time and money. Did it used to be different?

> Free Music - the age of napster is finished.

Darn, why am I the last to know these things? I'd better disconnect from Morpheous then. Thanks for the heads up.

> Free Software - I'm not talking about Free Software, I'm talking about that which the BSA is making extinct. Warez.

Hasn't the BSA been making Warez extinct for about 10 years now? (Since the BBS days?)

> Marketing - ah yes. If you're an advertiser, the internet is your friend

Last I heard advertisers were leaving the Internet in droves. Of course, marketers are idiots who aren't used to getting any feedback on the "success" of any of their drivel^H^H^H^H^H^H ads.

> there's nothing out there for them but advertising and crap

I notice you're still here.

There seems to be a backlash against the Internet since the dot-com stock crash. People have gone from proclaiming it as the best thing since sliced bread to saying it's the worst thing since New Coke. I'm one of the unreasonable heathens who thinks it was something in between. I also think the average user does like having broadband. Web pages are getting bulkier (and flash-ier) all the time, music is still popular online, and nevermind all those online games.

Hate to burst your bubble, but I think this inter-net thingy might be around for a while.

Part of the problem with windows is that many of the users, particularly the typical consumer-types, are too lazy to download the patch, are unaware of the danger, or just plain haven't heard of the security holes, so they never patch.
A possible solution? The infamous EverQuest (otherwise known as EverCrack) forces users to, on connection, scan for new patch files, and *requires* them to patch before play. Perhaps if Microsoft implemented something like this, it would at least solve the problem of known security holes in home users.
Of course, that only solves the known and patched ones, if you want to get all the unknown ones you need a miracle ;)

Wow.. ya know, it's just a shame I run Linux[debian] and spend my time kernel hacking[ko]. I could be playing lots of Windows games. They have such neat features, like accelerated T+L, patches for bugs once every 2 hours, delayed release dates, MMORPGs that act like giant Troll-o-matics[eq], massive resource requirements, memory leaks, and - you guessed it - pathetic sequels... I don't know what's wrong with the Linux gaming scene nowadays... You just can't seem to get that same good old homegrown unreliability and monthly credit expenses. I'm green... no no, I forgot, the SOD is blue... with envy

Oh yea baby, I would be good at this. You see, the crappy OS I am forced to use at home to play the games I like to play regularly fscks up and locks my keyboard. There are times when I don't feel like rebooting to fix that, especially if I'm surfing and don't plan on using the keyboard much. So occasionally I'll visit a site that I have to log in to. When this happens, I just look around on the page for the letters/numbers which make up my username/password and copy paste them one or two at a time into the appropriate box. So when the keystroke loggers come, I'll be ready. Who'd have thought that locking my keyboard out at random times would have been a feature?

Steven

What I'd really like to see is a goal-free 3D world like the Snowcrash Metaverse, but it will take games to get there ;)

Its been around for at least 4-5 years already.

While it hasn't been around quite as long, there's a little goal-free diddy you might have heard of right here. At least, I've been playing with it for 2 1/2 years and I still haven't figured out the goal.


SP

Somebody obviously hasn't learned that releasing a buggy product receives BAD REVIEWS and NEGATIVE FEEDBACK! Censoring that feedback isn't going to change the quality of the game.

If there was more time spent improving the game rather than trying to engineer public opinion, they wouldn't have this problem.

I have a level 60 monk on Everquest

And a 90 rogue in Nexus:tk\

But I'm not addicted.

I can quit whenever I want. Alhough I don't try. because I don't want to.

EverQuest is the most addictive game ever. I've lost count of the total number of days I've spent playing this in the last year.
Don't need to say any more, any other players will know what I mean already.

As one of many (many!) who got nabbed with EverQuest addiction, I can honestly say that MMORPG's have a huge effect on human interaction. Moreso than PNP RPG's ever did. My world changed overnight, and remained that way for many months, as my interest level in my 'virtual' self grew stronger.

I consider myself to be a 'seasoned' RPGer, and I know how to segment my RL responsibilities from my 'virtual' ones. Many children, however, do not - and I see this movement to consoles as a replacement for television for those who engage in it, insofar as it will eat up all free (and not-so-free) time they have.

Don't get me wrong, I had some wonderful experiences in EverQuest. I made many friends, and enjoyed an enlightening view into the interactions of netizens in a virtual landscape. But for those of high-school age and younger, this will make an addictive passtime even more accessible. Parental control will me a must here.

I thought that Verant, makers of EverCamp, were supposed to make the Startwars MMRPG?

I run a fairly large EverQuest-related humor site, so I've been following this issue since it started (even if only to make fun of it).

What's happening here is a thorny problem where individual "privacy" headbutts with everyone's best interests.

A quick background for those not in the know, Verant Interactive produces and maintains EverQuest, a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game. Thousands of players connect to Verant-administered servers and play alongside other players in a persistent world. It's the second major-market title in the MMORPG genre started by Ultima Online.

The way these games work is centralized servers store all the state information about the virtual world. To be general, nothing is stored client-side. This is required, because unlike games like Quake, the world is persistent. An early incarnation of this type of game was Diablo. The main difference between the newer games (UO and EQ) and Diablo is that with Diablo, all your character information was stored client-side. This became a major problem for the game, as it was only a matter of time before the file formats were reverse-engineered and people started modifying their characters to be super-powered.

By storing the information server-side, this type of cheating is avoided. No matter what you do, there will always be people who want to cheat, and if the information is stored server-side, people will try to exploit the server to cheat, or will "enhance" their client software in order to give them an unfair advantage in the game. Ultima Online has had a long history of dealing with this type of problem. Many security weaknesses in the UO servers were discovered (and fixed), but at the same time, these weaknesses were exploited by people, most often to do devestating things to other players of the game.

Recently, EQ has had the same things happening to it. A program known as "Show-EQ" has been around for quite some time, which simply gives a player an unfair advantage in the game. Verant has dealt with this in a subtle manner, changing their client/server data stream every so often to set back development of the utility.

In the past couple weeks, other programs for EQ have begun to pop up, with more nefarious purposes. The EverQuest servers have been crashed on more than one occasion by these programs. This is what brought Verant to suggesting drive-scanning. It's one thing if someone is just cheating, but it's another thing completely if they're maliciously trying to crash the game.

They took their first countermeasures not too long ago, by adding a feature to the client software that scans your Windows task list and looks for these "external utilities". If it finds one, it flips a "I'm a cheater" flag on your account and you end up with a cancelled EQ account.

They proposed to extend their search to the hard drive, to see if any of these programs even exist on your system... and this is where people started to get upset.

Verant has been very open and forthcoming about the proposed changes, keeping active discussions regarding the issue on the various websites dedicated to EverQuest, offering reasoning and explantions of the scanning process, and they even required all users to answer a poll question regarding the issue on login to the game (which turned up 80%+ in favor of the scanning).

Even with the overwhelming support of the scanning by their playerbase, they responsibly decided to back down on the issue.

Now granted, what they suggested could be a huge tool for abuse and privacy intrusion, but they did not try to "sneak" it past their users in any form. What they were proposing was nothing compared to some of the things that people thought they were planning on doing (there have been some heated arguments about it the past few days).

In short, its not really that they intended to intrude on people's privacy, but that they were seeking to increase the quality of their service and actually have a way to enforce their "no cheating" rules.

Verant should be commended on their responsible handling of this entire incident, not trashed in the court of public opinion based on reports that only tell half the story, like the one posted here on Slashdot.

Far be it from me to start a flamewar, but it seems to me that you might be experiencing EQ burnout and therefore giving EverQuest a harsh representation.

My experience with EverQuest has been pretty positive. I started beta testing for the game a little bit over a year ago and continued to play it past the release for six months. During that time, I played a variety of characters up to level 20.

If you yourself played EQ long enough to build up a 50th level (highest level possible for you people who don't play the game) and 25th level character, then something must have brought you back to the game night after night.

Both the best and worst part about EverQuest is its addictiveness. It's been called "EverCrack", a name that suits it pretty well. I remember when I was in the high point of my addiction cycle I would stay up into the wee hours of the morning questing with friends. March 16th was EverQuest's one year anniversary and according to EQ Vault, they hit their 200,000 active subscribers mark. Obviously, despite all the people who have quit the game to its negative aspects (camping, large time investment, ebay item farmers), a large number still remain faithful to the game.

In my opinion, Verant Interactive is the best developer of massively multiplayer online games currently out there. EverQuest easily dominates over its competition. While Ultima Online was created first and Asheron's Call offers some innovative features, both lack the customer service and addictive quality that make a truly good online game stand out. One of the reasons I quit EQ was to beta test for Asheron's Call, which I highly regret doing now. Despite being the newest online RPG on the market, the game was poorly developed and rushed prematurely to meet the holiday season. How typical of M$. However, Verant's game design and customer policies allow me to rank it high amongst game developers, almost equaling Blizzard. My advice to all you Star Wars fanatics out there is to keep your eye out for news of when Verant will begin accepting applicants for their beta test and book your spot.

On a side note, The Ruins of Kunark, a expansion to EverQuest is due to be release next month. I'm planning on buying it to begin my relaunching into the world of Norrath.

I thank you for your sweetly faked attention.
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

Undoubtedly, some people would bend or break the rules of the game, either just for the joy of hacking, or in an attempt to gain skills or items in the game that are beyond their current means.

So, the next question is : is that a bad thing? I suppose that it is, under many circumstances, but I can imagine a game where part of the fun is to see how far you can hack the rules - within certain limits.

Particularly bad for those of us in Europe (see that other story today :-) since it's online only.

If you want to keep a life, don't start playing this game. Or at least, put an alarm clock beside your computer so that you don't suddenly realise you're supposed to be getting up for work in half-an-hour's time.