The ironic thing is, I don't actually mind the CU. And were I not still forum-banned I'd probably be one of the people saying 'give it a chance'.
It's the inability for Sony's developers to understand basic database integrity concepts that worries me. We trust these people with our credit card details?
Incidentally, other folk's forum bans are allegedly being rescinded. Mine, unsurprisingly, hasn't been. It's almost as if they WANT to lose subscribers.
Apologies for replying to the first FP, (I'll post this as a regular reply as well, for double the downmods! Feel free to mark this as Redundant, but at least you've read it!:) )
Although this is probably too introspectively geeky for the regular Slashdot community, I feel it best to explain what's been going on with the Europe-Chimaera server. (One of the most populated servers.) As SWG is very much a social game, I have found myself as both head of a guild and mayor of a Player City. This is a copy of a mail I sent to both my guildmates and citizens:
--- Greetings all!
Apologies for the impersonality of this mail, I'm sending it to both my guild and the citizens of Moonlight Valley. Need to cover a lot of people.
In short, Europe-Chimaera has fallen apart. The Combat Upgrade failed on our server, specifically the item conversion. So the entire server has been rolled back to an earlier backup and the conversion run again. And again. Rather than taking a backup of the database before running the conversion in the first place, they've instead rolled back to a substantially earlier version. From almost two weeks ago!
That's two weeks of gameplay lost, because some idiot didn't bother making a backup of the latest data. Even _I'M_ not that stupid, and I'm hardly the person to be speaking about data integrity. I don't believe there's been a disaster of this magnitude in the history of modern MMORPGs. (I'd like to be proven wrong here)
This has also occurred, to a lesser extent, on the Bloodfin server, although it's disheartening to learn that they were rolled back to a more recent backup than ourselves.
The upshot of this unprofessional behaviour is that all the pre-CU preparation we've done has been for naught. Resources; Money; XP; even new characters have been removed. For a game which eschews enjoyable content in favour of mindless grinding, this has been an unmitigated disaster. Current conservative estimates from this server alone put the number of accounts cancelled at over 400 - a substantial percentage of the population. This includes quite a few 'big names' as well, not just the whiners of the month. And it may include me as well...
Naturally, there have been posts on the SWG Forums related to this absolute shambles. And yes, a few from myself pointing out the shoddy way in which the customers (i.e. the company's main source of income) have been treated. Unsurprisingly enough, we've had postings deleted left right and centre. And several forum bannings, _myself included_. The overall attitude from me and many other recently banned folk is that it's a deplorable way to run a business, but that we're still sticking around. So it seems nearsighted to start antagonising the few members of the community who wish to remain.
Despite all the good wishes spewed forth at the start of the year by various interchangeable figureheads in the SoE hierarchy, this is a return to a draconian 'Us vs. Them' policy. Failing to realise that the community can only thrive with co-operation from both developer and consumer, these mass bannings only serve to drive another nail into the coffin.
So I'm left in the unenviable position of considering whether or not I should carry on feeding money into the SoE propaganda machine. Don't get me wrong, I love this game, and have hopefully garnered a reputation as being a reasonably well-balanced fair speaking member of the community. However, these have been trying circumstances for all of us. Undue pressure has been placed on all of us, with very little feedback or response from the developers. Steam has needed to be blown off by both sides. To have a Customer Service Representative treat the community's rightful indignation as a joke is a dangerous precedent.
Compensation has been offered, which is an insulting 4 x XP earned for a week. This is lip service at best, and an insult to the people who are still in the game. Given the current issues with earning exp
Apologies for replying to the first FP, (I'll post this as a regular reply as well, for double the downmods!) Although this is probably too introspectively geeky for the regular Slashdot community, I feel it best to explain what's been going on with the Europe-Chimaera server. (One of the most populated servers.) As SWG is very much a social game, I have found myself as both head of a guild and mayor of a Player City. This is a copy of a mail I sent to both my guildmates and citizens:
--- Greetings all!
Apologies for the impersonality of this mail, I'm sending it to both my guild and the citizens of Moonlight Valley. Need to cover a lot of people.
In short, Europe-Chimaera has fallen apart. The Combat Upgrade failed on our server, specifically the item conversion. So the entire server has been rolled back to an earlier backup and the conversion run again. And again. Rather than taking a backup of the database before running the conversion in the first place, they've instead rolled back to a substantially earlier version. From almost two weeks ago!
That's two weeks of gameplay lost, because some idiot didn't bother making a backup of the latest data. Even _I'M_ not that stupid, and I'm hardly the person to be speaking about data integrity. I don't believe there's been a disaster of this magnitude in the history of modern MMORPGs. (I'd like to be proven wrong here)
This has also occurred, to a lesser extent, on the Bloodfin server, although it's disheartening to learn that they were rolled back to a more recent backup than ourselves.
The upshot of this unprofessional behaviour is that all the pre-CU preparation we've done has been for naught. Resources; Money; XP; even new characters have been removed. For a game which eschews enjoyable content in favour of mindless grinding, this has been an unmitigated disaster. Current conservative estimates from this server alone put the number of accounts cancelled at over 400 - a substantial percentage of the population. This includes quite a few 'big names' as well, not just the whiners of the month. And it may include me as well...
Naturally, there have been posts on the SWG Forums related to this absolute shambles. And yes, a few from myself pointing out the shoddy way in which the customers (i.e. the company's main source of income) have been treated. Unsurprisingly enough, we've had postings deleted left right and centre. And several forum bannings, _myself included_. The overall attitude from me and many other recently banned folk is that it's a deplorable way to run a business, but that we're still sticking around. So it seems nearsighted to start antagonising the few members of the community who wish to remain.
Despite all the good wishes spewed forth at the start of the year by various interchangeable figureheads in the SoE hierarchy, this is a return to a draconian 'Us vs. Them' policy. Failing to realise that the community can only thrive with co-operation from both developer and consumer, these mass bannings only serve to drive another nail into the coffin.
So I'm left in the unenviable position of considering whether or not I should carry on feeding money into the SoE propaganda machine. Don't get me wrong, I love this game, and have hopefully garnered a reputation as being a reasonably well-balanced fair speaking member of the community. However, these have been trying circumstances for all of us. Undue pressure has been placed on all of us, with very little feedback or response from the developers. Steam has needed to be blown off by both sides. To have a Customer Service Representative treat the community's rightful indignation as a joke is a dangerous precedent.
Compensation has been offered, which is an insulting 4 x XP earned for a week. This is lip service at best, and an insult to the people who are still in the game. Given the current issues with earning experience, all this will do is return 4 XP for each creature killed, instead of 1. It is no compe
Robin of Sherlock by Delta 4 on the Speccy. Geez, that had a nasty swear filter. Basically, whenever anything slightly rude was typed in, the message 'SWEAR YE NOT' was displayed, and then the computer reset itself.
All very well and good, but this was a Quill adventure (Quill was kinda like a text adventure generation kit), and thus any words were limited to four characters apiece.
The result of this was that an innocuous command like 'BREAK WINDOW' was equivalent to 'BREAK WIND'. Which apparently deserved a reset. Or any command with 'WIND' in, come to think of it.
Halfway through the game there was a window where it seemed reasonable that to progress you had to listen at it. Which, naturally, warrented a reset.
My, how I regretted only ever using the Ramsave that evening.
Yes, you can still play. However, patching the servers to handle all the extra JtL content has overloaded them to the point where severe latency problems make the game nigh on unplayable. Delays of up to several minutes for chat and even simple actions such as looting corpses are now the norm.
The Customer Service Response to this server side performance issue has been to suggest that customers disable Pixel Shading.
That'll teach me not to RTFA. Mark down with extreme prejudice, Slashboteers!
And everyone else, read that n3rfed link! Although it fails to mention that the European release date has been set at 29th October for the past few months. It was only 'rescheduled' yesterday.
If they'd known there would be delivery problems, then the very least they could have done was not lie to the customers about it.
Due to a genius marketing decision by Activision, the European distributors, players in the Old World don't get to see the expansion until November 5th at the earliest. The latest date predicted is November 19th.
It's almost as if they WANT the players to move onto WoW.
Or download them, DRM-free, from your favourite P2P network. Decisions, decisions...
Seeing as RPG books usually come jam packed with additional cut out pieces with permission granted to photocopy and all that, then maybe it would be an idea to make these extra bits available to download from the publisher's website.
Not everyone can afford / be arsed to find a colour photocopier in their neighbourhood.
As anyone who bothered to download the client and had the misfortune to install it on their system would testify... Fightbox is shit.
Sure, some coked-up media suit in Soho would be wetting themselves at the chance to merge broadcast TV with games culture, but the problem with that is for such a concept to work, they need to have a playable game. Instead, we get 'Quake on a 386' levels of sluggishness, piss-poor gameplay, and drab, unimaginative design.
Although I would GLADLY buy a beer for someone who manages to customize their fightbot with a 'Goatse' skin and get it broadcast on national TV.
Anyway, everyone KNOWS the best interactive 'gaming' TV in the UK is on Game Network after 11pm.
No, because it's yet another example of an inappropriate design metaphor, to paraphrase Jakob Nielsen.
It's yet another gimmick site, only one that expects the gullible public to cough up money.
And no, I haven't read a single line of editorial. Whatever good intentions the authors had have been destroyed by the infantile behaviour of the website.
Slashdot Mirror
Sor... D'OH! :P
There were reports on the Europe-Chimaera board that innocent bystanders who were just in the vicinity were getting forcibly relocated too.
I'd post a link to the thread, but it's been deleted.
Little men with big erasers.
The ironic thing is, I don't actually mind the CU. And were I not still forum-banned I'd probably be one of the people saying 'give it a chance'.
It's the inability for Sony's developers to understand basic database integrity concepts that worries me. We trust these people with our credit card details?
Incidentally, other folk's forum bans are allegedly being rescinded. Mine, unsurprisingly, hasn't been. It's almost as if they WANT to lose subscribers.
Apologies for replying to the first FP, (I'll post this as a regular reply as well, for double the downmods! Feel free to mark this as Redundant, but at least you've read it! :) )
Although this is probably too introspectively geeky for the regular Slashdot community, I feel it best to explain what's been going on with the Europe-Chimaera server. (One of the most populated servers.) As SWG is very much a social game, I have found myself as both head of a guild and mayor of a Player City. This is a copy of a mail I sent to both my guildmates and citizens:
---
Greetings all!
Apologies for the impersonality of this mail, I'm sending it to both my guild and the citizens of Moonlight Valley. Need to cover a lot of people.
In short, Europe-Chimaera has fallen apart. The Combat Upgrade failed on our server, specifically the item conversion. So the entire server has been rolled back to an earlier backup and the conversion run again. And again. Rather than taking a backup of the database before running the conversion in the first place, they've instead rolled back to a substantially earlier version. From almost two weeks ago!
That's two weeks of gameplay lost, because some idiot didn't bother making a backup of the latest data. Even _I'M_ not that stupid, and I'm hardly the person to be speaking about data integrity. I don't believe there's been a disaster of this magnitude in the history of modern MMORPGs. (I'd like to be proven wrong here)
This has also occurred, to a lesser extent, on the Bloodfin server, although it's disheartening to learn that they were rolled back to a more recent backup than ourselves.
The upshot of this unprofessional behaviour is that all the pre-CU preparation we've done has been for naught. Resources; Money; XP; even new characters have been removed. For a game which eschews enjoyable content in favour of mindless grinding, this has been an unmitigated disaster. Current conservative estimates from this server alone put the number of accounts cancelled at over 400 - a substantial percentage of the population. This includes quite a few 'big names' as well, not just the whiners of the month. And it may include me as well...
Naturally, there have been posts on the SWG Forums related to this absolute shambles. And yes, a few from myself pointing out the shoddy way in which the customers (i.e. the company's main source of income) have been treated. Unsurprisingly enough, we've had postings deleted left right and centre. And several forum bannings, _myself included_. The overall attitude from me and many other recently banned folk is that it's a deplorable way to run a business, but that we're still sticking around. So it seems nearsighted to start antagonising the few members of the community who wish to remain.
Despite all the good wishes spewed forth at the start of the year by various interchangeable figureheads in the SoE hierarchy, this is a return to a draconian 'Us vs. Them' policy. Failing to realise that the community can only thrive with co-operation from both developer and consumer, these mass bannings only serve to drive another nail into the coffin.
So I'm left in the unenviable position of considering whether or not I should carry on feeding money into the SoE propaganda machine. Don't get me wrong, I love this game, and have hopefully garnered a reputation as being a reasonably well-balanced fair speaking member of the community. However, these have been trying circumstances for all of us. Undue pressure has been placed on all of us, with very little feedback or response from the developers. Steam has needed to be blown off by both sides. To have a Customer Service Representative treat the community's rightful indignation as a joke is a dangerous precedent.
Compensation has been offered, which is an insulting 4 x XP earned for a week. This is lip service at best, and an insult to the people who are still in the game. Given the current issues with earning exp
Apologies for replying to the first FP, (I'll post this as a regular reply as well, for double the downmods!) Although this is probably too introspectively geeky for the regular Slashdot community, I feel it best to explain what's been going on with the Europe-Chimaera server. (One of the most populated servers.) As SWG is very much a social game, I have found myself as both head of a guild and mayor of a Player City. This is a copy of a mail I sent to both my guildmates and citizens:
---
Greetings all!
Apologies for the impersonality of this mail, I'm sending it to both my guild and the citizens of Moonlight Valley. Need to cover a lot of people.
In short, Europe-Chimaera has fallen apart. The Combat Upgrade failed on our server, specifically the item conversion. So the entire server has been rolled back to an earlier backup and the conversion run again. And again. Rather than taking a backup of the database before running the conversion in the first place, they've instead rolled back to a substantially earlier version. From almost two weeks ago!
That's two weeks of gameplay lost, because some idiot didn't bother making a backup of the latest data. Even _I'M_ not that stupid, and I'm hardly the person to be speaking about data integrity. I don't believe there's been a disaster of this magnitude in the history of modern MMORPGs. (I'd like to be proven wrong here)
This has also occurred, to a lesser extent, on the Bloodfin server, although it's disheartening to learn that they were rolled back to a more recent backup than ourselves.
The upshot of this unprofessional behaviour is that all the pre-CU preparation we've done has been for naught. Resources; Money; XP; even new characters have been removed. For a game which eschews enjoyable content in favour of mindless grinding, this has been an unmitigated disaster. Current conservative estimates from this server alone put the number of accounts cancelled at over 400 - a substantial percentage of the population. This includes quite a few 'big names' as well, not just the whiners of the month. And it may include me as well...
Naturally, there have been posts on the SWG Forums related to this absolute shambles. And yes, a few from myself pointing out the shoddy way in which the customers (i.e. the company's main source of income) have been treated. Unsurprisingly enough, we've had postings deleted left right and centre. And several forum bannings, _myself included_. The overall attitude from me and many other recently banned folk is that it's a deplorable way to run a business, but that we're still sticking around. So it seems nearsighted to start antagonising the few members of the community who wish to remain.
Despite all the good wishes spewed forth at the start of the year by various interchangeable figureheads in the SoE hierarchy, this is a return to a draconian 'Us vs. Them' policy. Failing to realise that the community can only thrive with co-operation from both developer and consumer, these mass bannings only serve to drive another nail into the coffin.
So I'm left in the unenviable position of considering whether or not I should carry on feeding money into the SoE propaganda machine. Don't get me wrong, I love this game, and have hopefully garnered a reputation as being a reasonably well-balanced fair speaking member of the community. However, these have been trying circumstances for all of us. Undue pressure has been placed on all of us, with very little feedback or response from the developers. Steam has needed to be blown off by both sides. To have a Customer Service Representative treat the community's rightful indignation as a joke is a dangerous precedent.
Compensation has been offered, which is an insulting 4 x XP earned for a week. This is lip service at best, and an insult to the people who are still in the game. Given the current issues with earning experience, all this will do is return 4 XP for each creature killed, instead of 1. It is no compe
http://www.leagueofpirates.com/sirvival/queuedance .html
Robin of Sherlock by Delta 4 on the Speccy. Geez, that had a nasty swear filter. Basically, whenever anything slightly rude was typed in, the message 'SWEAR YE NOT' was displayed, and then the computer reset itself.
All very well and good, but this was a Quill adventure (Quill was kinda like a text adventure generation kit), and thus any words were limited to four characters apiece.
The result of this was that an innocuous command like 'BREAK WINDOW' was equivalent to 'BREAK WIND'. Which apparently deserved a reset. Or any command with 'WIND' in, come to think of it.
Halfway through the game there was a window where it seemed reasonable that to progress you had to listen at it. Which, naturally, warrented a reset.
My, how I regretted only ever using the Ramsave that evening.
Yes, you can still play. However, patching the servers to handle all the extra JtL content has overloaded them to the point where severe latency problems make the game nigh on unplayable. Delays of up to several minutes for chat and even simple actions such as looting corpses are now the norm.
The Customer Service Response to this server side performance issue has been to suggest that customers disable Pixel Shading.
It's worse than that. UK stores such as Game and HMV have it in their storerooms already.
They've just been told under contract that they're not allowed to sell it yet.
That'll teach me not to RTFA. Mark down with extreme prejudice, Slashboteers!
And everyone else, read that n3rfed link! Although it fails to mention that the European release date has been set at 29th October for the past few months. It was only 'rescheduled' yesterday.
If they'd known there would be delivery problems, then the very least they could have done was not lie to the customers about it.
Due to a genius marketing decision by Activision, the European distributors, players in the Old World don't get to see the expansion until November 5th at the earliest. The latest date predicted is November 19th.
It's almost as if they WANT the players to move onto WoW.
No wonder Sue has to be invisible. It's the only way to escape his lecherous advances and avoid permanent internal damage.
Choose a player who sounds the most clueless
You imply that clueful people get suckered into this kind of crap?
Or download them, DRM-free, from your favourite P2P network. Decisions, decisions...
Seeing as RPG books usually come jam packed with additional cut out pieces with permission granted to photocopy and all that, then maybe it would be an idea to make these extra bits available to download from the publisher's website.
Not everyone can afford / be arsed to find a colour photocopier in their neighbourhood.
No he wouldn't. It's the same as any business. You fuck up, you get a pay rise and a management job.
I'll take two!
Didn't they invent Karma in the first place?
Or was that the joke?
Just try reading it in Lynx. Oh, the horror!!!!
As anyone who bothered to download the client and had the misfortune to install it on their system would testify... Fightbox is shit.
Sure, some coked-up media suit in Soho would be wetting themselves at the chance to merge broadcast TV with games culture, but the problem with that is for such a concept to work, they need to have a playable game. Instead, we get 'Quake on a 386' levels of sluggishness, piss-poor gameplay, and drab, unimaginative design.
Although I would GLADLY buy a beer for someone who manages to customize their fightbot with a 'Goatse' skin and get it broadcast on national TV.
Anyway, everyone KNOWS the best interactive 'gaming' TV in the UK is on Game Network after 11pm.
Slashdot is bullshit on the left, bullshit in the middle, and bullshit on the right.
Well, if you loiter round Slashdot long enough, you'll find even the most poorly scrawled Viagra spam to be better writing.
No, because it's yet another example of an inappropriate design metaphor, to paraphrase Jakob Nielsen.
It's yet another gimmick site, only one that expects the gullible public to cough up money.
And no, I haven't read a single line of editorial. Whatever good intentions the authors had have been destroyed by the infantile behaviour of the website.
Site design like that does NOT qualify as "professional journalism" by any stretch of the imagination.
Hell, it makes the evil purple of Slashdot Games look positively well-designed.
Two separate unified configuration systems, that is.
This XForm configuration idea will be, thankfully, desktop agnostic.
I thought he'd be taller