Unfortunately, for any complex game, you have to pay per play. A simple economics course: Let's assume you have an average bandwidth of 2Kbyte/s per user. An OC12 link (622Mbits/s) cost up to $200,000 per month, depending on your negociation and provider. Such a link serves about 40,000 simultaneous users tops. If you postulate that one user plays about 1/8th of the time (3h per day - btw, this is the average playtime for Everquest, 20h/week), each user has to pay almost $1/month just for the bandwidth.
The pay-for-software models for network games work fine because they drastically lower the bandwidth requirements (i.e. a lot of things are done on the client) or let player host the servers (and thus fund themselves the bandwidth).
Yes and no. Well, there are a lot of things that can be done, and I'm (insert here picture of dubious looking boss reading this over my shoulder) not at liberty to discuss, confirm or infirm anything at all. But basically, we're not selling a software. We'll be selling service, namely hosting on a solid infrastructure a game world we've put a lot of effort into. That's what we're really selling. Not a game, but the service.
And to dispell a myth: we're not going to make a closed game software out of an open source library. The GPL itself prevents that: if you got the client, you got the client source. Not a hacked down, pared down version but the exact software you're going to run on your system (and the server, even tough it's not really mandated by a strict reading of the GPL - but you're going to have it too). What will be "closed" is the game data, which is covered by classic copyright rules (i.e. enjoy it at home, but you're not supposed to use it publically except under our terms. Well, apart from citation rights, i.e. screenshots:) )
> I'd be interested to know how they plan on funding this GPL'd game without publisher assistance
We already have funding. Enough to have a team that is on par with most MMORPG being currently developped, and enough cash flow to pay them for the duration of the development. And you know the best? We sold the project to our current investors because it was a Free software project.
You really think we'll run this from our offices in France? LOL!
What you're trashing now is our network card on a mid-range celeron PC (the PC itself is fine - it's just those annoying "memory overflow packet dropped" messages that flood the console). And this is probably because I haven't gotten around to tinker with the kernel params; the PC is running a "straight out of the box" kernel.
When we'll open the game (heck, when we're going to beta test it), we're going to have some OC12s somewhere and run it on higher end boxes (and part of the beta will be making sure those boxes stay stable under massive netload).
Besides, every single MMORPG out there crashed hourly the first week they got on the market (the equivalent of being slashdotted for them). I do expect we'll overestimate how prepared we are, regardless:)
Right now, our office gets 2s pings to most of the Internet, but the server is ok: 96.5% idle, 108M active, 2852K free... (ok the US are slowly waking up, and the morning wave of slashdotters is coming)
The internet ads market is already crashing. It's not even viable anymore to let small sites live, I don't expect it to be able to let games with massive infrastructure costs to live.
Selling games in stores is almost mandatory from a marketing point of view. Why? Because it exposes people who haven't heard about you to the game.
The target population is gamers who are on the internet. Trying to reach as many of them as possible from the Internet side is hard. Very hard. On the other hand, reaching them from the game side is easy: most gamers go to a store every few months at least.
Now, we haven't frozen the distribution model yet. But there's nothing to prevent us from using a dual model similar to what evolved around GNU/Linux. After all, you can download and install your favorite distribution from the internet at no "apparent" cost. Or you can buy one of the various CD distributions.
Yeah, but it doesn't solve them problem. The average MMORPG player plays about 20h a week (of 168 hours). Having virtual avatars running means that only about 1/8th of your population is real - the rest is bots running.
Quake was killed by opening the source because of its game design. Quake is a game where player skill is what counts. Borging kills these games flat in no time.
You wont have autoaim bots in our game, because we will provide autoaim already in the game. Everything that can be automated client-side, we will provide an automation already in place, and it will be part of normal gameplay.
That's how you defeat cheating. By making it irrelevant. Cheating is futile, you will be assimilated:)
> How do you seperate player from bots or bot-assisted players?
Answer: You don't. You design your game in such a manner that Borging (love that term for augmented clients) is not a large issue. That means you do not aim: you select a target and the server determine how well you hit. You do not roll your dice: the server does it for you. And so on.
Yes, this places severe constraints on the game design. But thank god, RPGs are a good way to do this, because they put an emphasis on "skills" that are linked to the character (which is server side), and not on the player (which is the Borg side).
Besides, if some Borging improves the game... well, we'll put it in the official client anyway:)
That's about what we intend (and it's in part what you get with the current "snowballs" technology demo). The code is a tool. It's the celluloid that you use in a film, no more. What's interesting is what you see in the movie, not whether it's being down with 35mm or digital downloads on your home theater.
Maybe. Or maybe not. Believe me, code is cheap and easy. Anybody with a modicum of logic can produce passable code. Very very few people can produce any form of art significantly distinguishible from my 3-year old niece's scribblings:) There's also the mention of "better game"? What makes it a "better game"? A server that crashes when you've got more than 20 players? A server that stops whenever the university dean decides it's a waste of resources? We're not competing against the hobbyists. We're a service industry. The strength of Nevrax isn't its code. The code is a tool to achieve one thing: service. A community of thousands player interacting. You can't achieve that with limited resources; a full fledged server takes about half a million in hardware, and thousands of dollars per month in connectivity. You can't do that, and remain free (as in no-cost). We do want hobbyists to create stuff. We're counting on them to use our code, to add to the code, improve things, spot errors, laugh at our mistakes. But they're not competition.
That's still a non-solution. And don't think being open or closed has anything to do with whether or not you'll have cheaters - you will have them.
The only option is to have a game design in which you are resilient against cheating (meaning, move as much as you can server side, send the client only information he should display anyway, and so on).
Vincent Archer - archer@nevrax.com (yup)
the majority of paper punching systems used in the U.S. do not produce repeatable results when ballots are tallied more than once
The answer to that is the usual KISS method (Keep It Simple and Stupid): 1 ballot per candidate, with the name written in a very large and visible font (in fact, each candidate submits its own ballot image). People grab one of each ballot slips, pick the one they prefer, put it in an enveloppe (or fold it), and put it in a sealed box. It's almost impossible to confuse ballots in that case. If you want electronic counting of these ballots, then each ballot can have a bar code at the bottom.
Well, having signed nothing and and clicked nothing, anyone who did this is not bound by any license agreement. The "illegal" part does not exist. As far as I know, it is not illegal to read anything, except those documents covered by military classification.
So, the only recourse from Microsoft is to claim that this material was stolen from them. Which is kind of hard, since it was downloaded from a public portion of their site.
Thing is, there are probably as many loopholes for and against it that it would be a very interesting legal battle:)
It's considered that only what would be available to the senses of the character should be made available to the client. This is one of the big problems.
Congratulations. You've hit the major blocking point of all on-line games so far. Raph Koster (old MUDder, and lead design on UO) did sum it up in his on-line design rules: Don't trust the client.
The client is in hostile hands. Anything you send to it is available to the player, and anything you receive from it can have been made out of thin air by the client (in particular, never let the client be the only one to enforce your rules).
There are only two solutions to your dilemna. Send more than you probably should, and let the client display it all. Or put more processing power, and do it correctly. But even then, you have other constraints.
One example: I want to be realistic, so I send the client only what is in front of the player (no 360 eyes). Problem: if the player turns around, what happens. Two things may occur: If the client turns around, then he sees nothing, and suddendly things pop up in his field of vision (the server has been notified of the new vision angle and replied 200ms later with new data). Or the move goes to the server, the server sends back your new angle of vision along with new visible data. New problem: Your character is unresponsive: you turn around... and the character starts turning around 1/3s later.
So, in the end, your character does have 360-degrees field of vision, even if the basic mode is subjective vision. And so on.
However, unless I am mistaken this time around, there are only a couple of hundred people playing on the test server at a time and it is with the understand that your character can be deleted at anytime, or other nasty things may happen.
It is also stated that this is where they test some of the things that will go on your production server. People were understandably upset at what they saw as potential changes everywhere. And it is revealing of Verant's history that people immediately assumed that this was a possibility.
Quite simply. Make sure your player gains nothing by having such a help available. Of course, this excludes a whole range of games, such as most FPS, where the real game IS aiming at your opponent. But for a RPG, where it's not your abilities that count, but those of the character, there's zero need to have the player do the aiming. You are going to roll pseudo-dices anyway to figure out if you hit.
The main problem of ShowEQ is not that it cheats or hacks the server. It doesn't.
It's that it shows you all the information sent to the client, even information purposefully hidden for gameplay reasons.
With showEQ, you do not need to train your Sense Heading skill; you always know where you are.
With showEQ; you do not need a ranger, you have a full (not screen limited) list of all Mobs present.
And so on. ShowEQ users do not cheat per se, they just have a whole lot more information at their disposition, and thus make a lot better decisions. Verant does not think that playing that way is playing fair (it isn't, notably on the PvP servers).
Well, according to what they said people replied. I don't know, I never saw the poll till two hours ago:)
Anyway, most of the people are frogs in the water. They don't see anything wrong with a "little heat", and cannot see where that kind of slippery slope leads. Where do you draw the limit?
To checking your EQ registry? Your entire disk? Your mail aliases to verify you are not a friend with a known cheater? The contents of your mailbox to verify you are not submitting items to auction for EBay?
Once you start signing away your rights, drawing the line at a later point and starting to defend them become a lot more expensive.
By your logic, I am not doing illegal, so I think the police is justified in putting a vidcam in my living room ("just to check and react if you are burglarised")?
No, I know, I think the government is justified in putting a tracer under your skin to monitor your health and position permanently.
Not really from Origin proper (i.e. it is not an Origin-supported product), but if I remember right, it was done by one of the developpers there. You may have a look at the site here or go directly to Origins' ftp (check the FAQ first).
This specific bill (which has passed the Parliament and Senate readings, and now only has to go back once to the Parliament after the Senate's corrections before it can be made law) has exactly two consequences:
1: Unless you are a big company, there is no way you can devote the manpower to register all your users. Exit the small content providers. 2: Anyone who wants to post anonymously will open a page on Geocities or somewhere else, where such a legislation doesn't exist.
What the government fails to see is that there is exactly 0 difference and 0 added cost accessing a WWW page stored somewhere in New Zealand, for example, rather than France. So the net effect isn't to make "illegal" content disappear or more easily prosecutable. It's to change it's URL:)
Nice analogy, but the best one I ever heard was comparing it to a car:
Unix cars: "Our cars are robust and fast" Win cars: "Our cars are so easy, you don't even need a driver license to know how to use one"
Of course, since you need less technical proficiency to use it, you get less technical proficient people to use it. Wonder why the accident rate is higher?:)
Slashdot Mirror
I knew I should have put some bold, flash and italics on the end of that sentence :)
Unfortunately, for any complex game, you have to pay per play. A simple economics course: Let's assume you have an average bandwidth of 2Kbyte/s per user. An OC12 link (622Mbits/s) cost up to $200,000 per month, depending on your negociation and provider. Such a link serves about 40,000 simultaneous users tops. If you postulate that one user plays about 1/8th of the time (3h per day - btw, this is the average playtime for Everquest, 20h/week), each user has to pay almost $1/month just for the bandwidth.
The pay-for-software models for network games work fine because they drastically lower the bandwidth requirements (i.e. a lot of things are done on the client) or let player host the servers (and thus fund themselves the bandwidth).
Yes and no. Well, there are a lot of things that can be done, and I'm (insert here picture of dubious looking boss reading this over my shoulder) not at liberty to discuss, confirm or infirm anything at all. But basically, we're not selling a software. We'll be selling service, namely hosting on a solid infrastructure a game world we've put a lot of effort into. That's what we're really selling. Not a game, but the service.
:) )
And to dispell a myth: we're not going to make a closed game software out of an open source library. The GPL itself prevents that: if you got the client, you got the client source. Not a hacked down, pared down version but the exact software you're going to run on your system (and the server, even tough it's not really mandated by a strict reading of the GPL - but you're going to have it too). What will be "closed" is the game data, which is covered by classic copyright rules (i.e. enjoy it at home, but you're not supposed to use it publically except under our terms. Well, apart from citation rights, i.e. screenshots
Both run on the same server. Smother one, smother the other. :)
> I'd be interested to know how they plan on funding this GPL'd game without publisher assistance
We already have funding. Enough to have a team that is on par with most MMORPG being currently developped, and enough cash flow to pay them for the duration of the development. And you know the best? We sold the project to our current investors because it was a Free software project.
You really think we'll run this from our offices in France? LOL!
:)
What you're trashing now is our network card on a mid-range celeron PC (the PC itself is fine - it's just those annoying "memory overflow packet dropped" messages that flood the console). And this is probably because I haven't gotten around to tinker with the kernel params; the PC is running a "straight out of the box" kernel.
When we'll open the game (heck, when we're going to beta test it), we're going to have some OC12s somewhere and run it on higher end boxes (and part of the beta will be making sure those boxes stay stable under massive netload).
Besides, every single MMORPG out there crashed hourly the first week they got on the market (the equivalent of being slashdotted for them). I do expect we'll overestimate how prepared we are, regardless
Right now, our office gets 2s pings to most of the Internet, but the server is ok: 96.5% idle, 108M active, 2852K free... (ok the US are slowly waking up, and the morning wave of slashdotters is coming)
The internet ads market is already crashing. It's not even viable anymore to let small sites live, I don't expect it to be able to let games with massive infrastructure costs to live.
Selling games in stores is almost mandatory from a marketing point of view. Why? Because it exposes people who haven't heard about you to the game.
The target population is gamers who are on the internet. Trying to reach as many of them as possible from the Internet side is hard. Very hard. On the other hand, reaching them from the game side is easy: most gamers go to a store every few months at least.
Now, we haven't frozen the distribution model yet. But there's nothing to prevent us from using a dual model similar to what evolved around GNU/Linux. After all, you can download and install your favorite distribution from the internet at no "apparent" cost. Or you can buy one of the various CD distributions.
Yeah, but it doesn't solve them problem. The average MMORPG player plays about 20h a week (of 168 hours). Having virtual avatars running means that only about 1/8th of your population is real - the rest is bots running.
Not good if you want a social game...
Quake was killed by opening the source because of its game design. Quake is a game where player skill is what counts. Borging kills these games flat in no time.
:)
You wont have autoaim bots in our game, because we will provide autoaim already in the game. Everything that can be automated client-side, we will provide an automation already in place, and it will be part of normal gameplay.
That's how you defeat cheating. By making it irrelevant. Cheating is futile, you will be assimilated
> How do you seperate player from bots or bot-assisted players?
:)
Answer: You don't. You design your game in such a manner that Borging (love that term for augmented clients) is not a large issue. That means you do not aim: you select a target and the server determine how well you hit. You do not roll your dice: the server does it for you. And so on.
Yes, this places severe constraints on the game design. But thank god, RPGs are a good way to do this, because they put an emphasis on "skills" that are linked to the character (which is server side), and not on the player (which is the Borg side).
Besides, if some Borging improves the game... well, we'll put it in the official client anyway
That's about what we intend (and it's in part what you get with the current "snowballs" technology demo). The code is a tool. It's the celluloid that you use in a film, no more. What's interesting is what you
see in the movie, not whether it's being down with 35mm or digital downloads on your home theater.
Maybe. Or maybe not. Believe me, code is cheap and easy. Anybody with a modicum of logic can produce passable code. Very very few people can produce any form of art significantly distinguishible from my 3-year old niece's scribblings :)
There's also the mention of "better game"? What makes it a "better game"? A server that crashes when you've got more than 20 players? A server that stops whenever the university dean decides it's a waste of resources?
We're not competing against the hobbyists. We're a service industry. The strength of Nevrax isn't its code. The code is a tool to achieve one thing: service. A community of thousands player interacting. You can't achieve that with limited resources; a full fledged server takes about half a million in hardware, and thousands of dollars per month in connectivity. You can't do that, and remain free (as in no-cost).
We do want hobbyists to create stuff. We're counting on them to use our code, to add to the code, improve things, spot errors, laugh at our mistakes. But they're not competition.
That's still a non-solution. And don't think being open or closed has anything to do with whether or not you'll have cheaters - you will have them. The only option is to have a game design in which you are resilient against cheating (meaning, move as much as you can server side, send the client only information he should display anyway, and so on). Vincent Archer - archer@nevrax.com (yup)
It's almost impossible to confuse ballots in that case. If you want electronic counting of these ballots, then each ballot can have a bar code at the bottom.
Well, having signed nothing and and clicked nothing, anyone who did this is not bound by any license agreement. The "illegal" part does not exist. As far as I know, it is not illegal to read anything, except those documents covered by military classification.
:)
So, the only recourse from Microsoft is to claim that this material was stolen from them. Which is kind of hard, since it was downloaded from a public portion of their site.
Thing is, there are probably as many loopholes for and against it that it would be a very interesting legal battle
The client is in hostile hands. Anything you send to it is available to the player, and anything you receive from it can have been made out of thin air by the client (in particular, never let the client be the only one to enforce your rules).
There are only two solutions to your dilemna. Send more than you probably should, and let the client display it all. Or put more processing power, and do it correctly. But even then, you have other constraints.
One example: I want to be realistic, so I send the client only what is in front of the player (no 360 eyes). Problem: if the player turns around, what happens. Two things may occur: If the client turns around, then he sees nothing, and suddendly things pop up in his field of vision (the server has been notified of the new vision angle and replied 200ms later with new data). Or the move goes to the server, the server sends back your new angle of vision along with new visible data. New problem: Your character is unresponsive: you turn around... and the character starts turning around 1/3s later.
So, in the end, your character does have 360-degrees field of vision, even if the basic mode is subjective vision. And so on.
Quite simply. Make sure your player gains nothing by having such a help available. Of course, this excludes a whole range of games, such as most FPS, where the real game IS aiming at your opponent. But for a RPG, where it's not your abilities that count, but those of the character, there's zero need to have the player do the aiming. You are going to roll pseudo-dices anyway to figure out if you hit.
The main problem of ShowEQ is not that it cheats or hacks the server. It doesn't.
It's that it shows you all the information sent to the client, even information purposefully hidden for gameplay reasons.
With showEQ, you do not need to train your Sense Heading skill; you always know where you are.
With showEQ; you do not need a ranger, you have a full (not screen limited) list of all Mobs present.
And so on. ShowEQ users do not cheat per se, they just have a whole lot more information at their disposition, and thus make a lot better decisions. Verant does not think that playing that way is playing fair (it isn't, notably on the PvP servers).
Well, according to what they said people replied. I don't know, I never saw the poll till two hours ago :)
Anyway, most of the people are frogs in the water. They don't see anything wrong with a "little heat", and cannot see where that kind of slippery slope leads. Where do you draw the limit?
To checking your EQ registry?
Your entire disk?
Your mail aliases to verify you are not a friend with a known cheater?
The contents of your mailbox to verify you are not submitting items to auction for EBay?
Once you start signing away your rights, drawing the line at a later point and starting to defend them become a lot more expensive.
By your logic, I am not doing illegal, so I think the police is justified in putting a vidcam in my living room ("just to check and react if you are burglarised")?
:)
No, I know, I think the government is justified in putting a tracer under your skin to monitor your health and position permanently.
Hey, you have got nothing to hide, after all
Not really from Origin proper (i.e. it is not an Origin-supported product), but if I remember right, it was done by one of the developpers there. You may have a look at the site here or go directly to Origins' ftp (check the FAQ first).
This specific bill (which has passed the Parliament and Senate readings, and now only has to go back once to the Parliament after the Senate's corrections before it can be made law) has exactly two consequences:
:)
1: Unless you are a big company, there is no way you can devote the manpower to register all your users. Exit the small content providers.
2: Anyone who wants to post anonymously will open a page on Geocities or somewhere else, where such a legislation doesn't exist.
What the government fails to see is that there is exactly 0 difference and 0 added cost accessing a WWW page stored somewhere in New Zealand, for example, rather than France. So the net effect isn't to make "illegal" content disappear or more easily prosecutable. It's to change it's URL
Nice analogy, but the best one I ever heard was comparing it to a car:
:)
Unix cars: "Our cars are robust and fast"
Win cars: "Our cars are so easy, you don't even need a driver license to know how to use one"
Of course, since you need less technical proficiency to use it, you get less technical proficient people to use it. Wonder why the accident rate is higher?