OK, I'd be pissed off. If however the film was stolen in an audatious flo-mo assault around the theatre by a legion of cloned thieves and I knew my film would resume shortly after no financial cost to myself it'd be worth it. If somebody had just trashed the MMORPG's database then I'd have been pretty disgusted at the vandalism - however the flair with which this was executed would have given me enough enjoyment not to get pissed off about the delay in the world returning to normal.
we should launch real world insurance for your MMORPG seeing as people care so much and attribute real money to their virtual assets? Would naturally involve a security audit of the hosting code to allow the underwriters to calculate premiums - which would incidentally make interested reading for those planning which game to sign up with.
Ooog tricky one that - might be a flaw in my troll/insightful/interesting post. No - as you could actually be depriving people of things of real value. Basically given the opportunity I'd have exploited the god hack but I don't have the desire to rob a bank. Maybe I'm just psychologically flawed - but I suspect there's a well reasoned arguement for my actions somewhere in my head that got lost on the way out.
that's why most of us found the whole incident so funny. People getting so so irrate about losing something so completely and utterly meaningless. Basis of half the comedy you experience, the juxtapositioning of different peoples perception of value.
It doesn't have any real "value" Everything in life has it's value assigned to it comparatively. My £10 note only has a value as I know I can exchange it for goods and services. Maybe if this MMORPG had a community trading in goods and services for Real Money (e.g. could be auctioned on Ebay), and if Ubisoft refuse to reinstate lost items/money then perhaps there would be a case for persuing the hackers for remuneration.
then they wouldn't be able to be insured, and fortunately without insurance they would be prevented from operating. I always find the insurance industry has a good view on the world as they have to put a financial value to practically everything. Maybe MMORPGs should have hacker insurance - I suspect if the insurance company had had a look at their code it would have told them where to go.
I'd pick the pieces up and put them back on the board and wonder wtf was running the security at my grand-master event. I believe there is also a difference, between the crude act of knocking over a board and being a member of a party of invading gods. One is stupid, one is reasonably skillful and made me laugh out loud in the office.
The perp has to write a script that ups the stats of everybody in the game. Yep - I'd force them to write a sql statement.
It'd completely right their wrong and still leave me with the wonderful mental image of several thousand lockins bouncing up and down on their chairs at the indiginity of losing their hammer of asnogamore and sword of schithering.
or perhaps it was a poor analogy on my part. Basically you pay them for the experience of playing the game. If you're character loses some stats over this then it's not taken away the last month's worth of fun - nor will it prevent you spending the next month enjoying building up the character. You're not financially any worse off, you've not suddenly lost days from your life you'd have spent working productively.
Look at it like Slashdot karma, I'd not be too bothered if mine all vanished. I write as I enjoy posting, not to obtain some mythical level of superiority.
If I create a game with crappy security then it's going to get hacked. Doesn't matter by who - but it's going to happen - I dare you to deny this! If I release said game and charge people for it, then surely I must take some responsibility? Every time a MS patch is released for an exploit the Slashdot response is to slate MS - you don't get them petitioning to track down and prosecute every person who used the exploit. In fact why patch software at all? Why should we waste our time writing code to fix the gaping flaws we left on a nicotine fuelled all nighter.
It's not an investment. You pay them money every month and you walk away when the game finally shuts down with absolutely nothing. You pay because you enjoy playing it. I've coded a couple of things that are currently exposed to the real world, both for work and in my own time. When somebody (as always happens) finds a bug in say my community board and happily starts running amok they usually go wild for a bit, somebody points me in their direction, I tell them to please stop it - which they do. Usually I ask them what they did (if I haven't figured it out), fix the bug and mod them up. I've played about with other people's stuff with much the same response. The world needs people who look up and wonder how it all works and have a play with it. Rules in the real world can be broken, and occasionally it does good for those in this etheral domain to be given a good shake as well. Keeps stuff interesting.
My bank has reasonably good protection from hackers. If they didn't I wouldn't bank with them, perhaps people should have applied that to their choice of MMORPG (if you look there are enough reports of similar happening on this game before). Answering your point though, if they did hack into a bank then yes, there should be repercussions, but they didn't. Spitting in the street doesn't lead to homicide, it's not a long slippery slope that needs to be nipped in the bud. Just apply some perspective.
the manufacturer got massively sued over it - following your logic this wouldn't have happened as it'd have been all the fault of people who crashed into you. There has to be some duty of care placed on the MMORPG provider, otherwise you could just produce a game with no security, wait until somebody hacked it and then sue them for the entire lost revenue your game would have had. Hackers should be treated like a force of nature, they're always going to be there and you should take all reasonable precautions to protect yourself from them.
Yes....erm....compensation normally covers you for things that you don't like doing - "If I hadn't been in the car wreck my boss would have paid me a months salary for being at work". These people PAID to potter around building up their orcs - they enjoyed it. Now they get the opportunity to do it all over again, lucky lucky people - double the fun.
If you genuinely believe some poor kid deserves to be banged up and have his life wrecked because he dropped your Orc in the sea then Get A Life. There's plenty of serious REAL problems on this planet if you feel like crusading for something worthwhile.
sadistic and omnipotent deities should be a selling point for any fantasy MMORPG? If yours doesn't have them then it's not worth playing, try the real world.
People will find more and more exploits in iTunes or produce tools to 'enhance' - it's popular, people are using it, it's inevitable. Apple will be forced to tighten up the scheme more and more in response and eventually this will start to intrude upon the users experience. RIAA will demand X, Apple will point out that this will infringe on the users experience causing them to spend less money with iTunes. RIAA will threaten to music supply, Apple will cave in as they have no choice. iTunes will suffer. If anybody thinks that the RIAA will accept Apple's perfectly valid point that they shouldn't screw over the end users who're pouring the money in the front of the behemoth then just look at the attitude RIAA has had before screwing over only legitimate users with protected CDs, and for that matter the industries own success with medialess music. I'd have been under the impression we'd all have been paying for it from Napster for several years by now if I'd swallowed the industry spiel.
Those two paragraphs aren't entirely different. The first is user perception and the second is the actual fact in this case. Apple have placed themselves between their end Apple users and the RIAA. By closing the feature in this release they have firmly indicated which way their loyalties lie and the likely resolution of future 'conflicts' between the two groups they bridge. To my little Apple friends, "Steve loves money more than you - and will tighten down the screws more and more until you stop feeding him the cash"
It's a Tivo, It's a Media Hub, It's a PSP sync station, it's a DVD burner, it's going to suck your Amex dry - the only problem being when you try to use it to play a game you realise it's just a PS2 which I can pick up for f'all currently. Surely once you've sunk all your cash into such a lovely beast and it's nestling beneath your TV set it's going to make you slightly reluctant to upgrade to a PS3 and lose all that lovely functionality. I never understood why people bought All-In-Wonder Cards if they were serious game players always wanting the latest technology and I've no idea why anybody would buy this. Games consoles are supposed to be disposable items - bought the day they came out for a reasonably large sum and forgotten in the back of your cupboard 4 years later. I don't want to have to invest in my consoles, take out finance on them etc. Actually a thought hit me as I was typing all this, I think what Sony have just done is take a Tivo Box with a DVD burner they already had knocking about in research and plugged in the "PS2 on a chip" thingie they were banging on about recently. I suppose if the PS2 function is a freebie then it's a good enough way of getting a few potential new PS2 game customers who would never normally dream of straying into their local game shop. Sony also have a spoiler attitude, killing DC with PS2 rumours, trying to knobble GBA SP with PSP and now XBox Media thingie with this.
There's that from the obvious Apple fan-boy (or girl) who will defend Apple to the death - the type who still contends that their $2500 PowerBook is faster than their neighbours £1250 Dell.
The other is from the DRM hater who believes all music should be free and was gunning for Apple from the moment they announced they'd be charging for music and you wouldn't automatically get mailed CD copies to hand out to strangers in the street.
I'd like to position myself between these two camps. I'm not a great lover of Macs, but I do have a sneaking admiration for Apple. Apple are the first company that has actually managed to bring the record labels together and produce a service that actually does work. You can search for a tune you want, click and it's in your ears on your Ipod on your way to work the next morning - all legitimately, artists having been paid etc etc.
The problem as a few people have touched upon is that this update could be the tip of the iceberg - they've changed the way my software operates at the behest of some evil RIAA request, does this mean they'll cave into every whim of them in furutre? So far Apple have closed an undocumented 'feature' of their previous offering. They never said you'd be able to do it, so you can't sue them now they've closed it. If you don't like it, don't upgrade, stop using ITunes, put a masonary spike through your ipod and post it back to Steve - otherwise quit whinging.
I used to have a Palm and then upgraded to an e740 which I had paired with a SE T68i. This let me browse the net, have PIM functionality, check my email, see if anybody was about on my IMs etc etc. The problem was having to carry around two things, travel with two chargers - I started leaving the PDA behind when I was out and about. I've now replaced both with a P800. It's a little bit bigger than my old phone, but still easily fits in my pocket and more importantly does absolutely everything I want. Whilst the traditional PDA does boast more features such as Office document editing etc, the small screen and input difficulties made it much more trouble than it was worth. The P800 to my mind is really the first genuinely useful combi PDA/phone and they're only going to get better.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I'd be pissed off. If however the film was stolen in an audatious flo-mo assault around the theatre by a legion of cloned thieves and I knew my film would resume shortly after no financial cost to myself it'd be worth it. If somebody had just trashed the MMORPG's database then I'd have been pretty disgusted at the vandalism - however the flair with which this was executed would have given me enough enjoyment not to get pissed off about the delay in the world returning to normal.
we should launch real world insurance for your MMORPG seeing as people care so much and attribute real money to their virtual assets? Would naturally involve a security audit of the hosting code to allow the underwriters to calculate premiums - which would incidentally make interested reading for those planning which game to sign up with.
Ooog tricky one that - might be a flaw in my troll/insightful/interesting post. No - as you could actually be depriving people of things of real value.
Basically given the opportunity I'd have exploited the god hack but I don't have the desire to rob a bank. Maybe I'm just psychologically flawed - but I suspect there's a well reasoned arguement for my actions somewhere in my head that got lost on the way out.
that's why most of us found the whole incident so funny. People getting so so irrate about losing something so completely and utterly meaningless. Basis of half the comedy you experience, the juxtapositioning of different peoples perception of value.
It doesn't have any real "value" Everything in life has it's value assigned to it comparatively. My £10 note only has a value as I know I can exchange it for goods and services. Maybe if this MMORPG had a community trading in goods and services for Real Money (e.g. could be auctioned on Ebay), and if Ubisoft refuse to reinstate lost items/money then perhaps there would be a case for persuing the hackers for remuneration.
I'd thank them for sparing me the rest of it (or is that an unpopular view around here)?
then they wouldn't be able to be insured, and fortunately without insurance they would be prevented from operating. I always find the insurance industry has a good view on the world as they have to put a financial value to practically everything. Maybe MMORPGs should have hacker insurance - I suspect if the insurance company had had a look at their code it would have told them where to go.
I'd pick the pieces up and put them back on the board and wonder wtf was running the security at my grand-master event. I believe there is also a difference, between the crude act of knocking over a board and being a member of a party of invading gods. One is stupid, one is reasonably skillful and made me laugh out loud in the office.
The perp has to write a script that ups the stats of everybody in the game. Yep - I'd force them to write a sql statement. It'd completely right their wrong and still leave me with the wonderful mental image of several thousand lockins bouncing up and down on their chairs at the indiginity of losing their hammer of asnogamore and sword of schithering.
or perhaps it was a poor analogy on my part. Basically you pay them for the experience of playing the game. If you're character loses some stats over this then it's not taken away the last month's worth of fun - nor will it prevent you spending the next month enjoying building up the character. You're not financially any worse off, you've not suddenly lost days from your life you'd have spent working productively.
Look at it like Slashdot karma, I'd not be too bothered if mine all vanished. I write as I enjoy posting, not to obtain some mythical level of superiority.
If I create a game with crappy security then it's going to get hacked. Doesn't matter by who - but it's going to happen - I dare you to deny this! If I release said game and charge people for it, then surely I must take some responsibility?
Every time a MS patch is released for an exploit the Slashdot response is to slate MS - you don't get them petitioning to track down and prosecute every person who used the exploit.
In fact why patch software at all? Why should we waste our time writing code to fix the gaping flaws we left on a nicotine fuelled all nighter.
It's not an investment. You pay them money every month and you walk away when the game finally shuts down with absolutely nothing. You pay because you enjoy playing it.
I've coded a couple of things that are currently exposed to the real world, both for work and in my own time. When somebody (as always happens) finds a bug in say my community board and happily starts running amok they usually go wild for a bit, somebody points me in their direction, I tell them to please stop it - which they do. Usually I ask them what they did (if I haven't figured it out), fix the bug and mod them up. I've played about with other people's stuff with much the same response.
The world needs people who look up and wonder how it all works and have a play with it. Rules in the real world can be broken, and occasionally it does good for those in this etheral domain to be given a good shake as well. Keeps stuff interesting.
My bank has reasonably good protection from hackers. If they didn't I wouldn't bank with them, perhaps people should have applied that to their choice of MMORPG (if you look there are enough reports of similar happening on this game before).
Answering your point though, if they did hack into a bank then yes, there should be repercussions, but they didn't. Spitting in the street doesn't lead to homicide, it's not a long slippery slope that needs to be nipped in the bud. Just apply some perspective.
the manufacturer got massively sued over it - following your logic this wouldn't have happened as it'd have been all the fault of people who crashed into you. There has to be some duty of care placed on the MMORPG provider, otherwise you could just produce a game with no security, wait until somebody hacked it and then sue them for the entire lost revenue your game would have had. Hackers should be treated like a force of nature, they're always going to be there and you should take all reasonable precautions to protect yourself from them.
Yes....erm....compensation normally covers you for things that you don't like doing - "If I hadn't been in the car wreck my boss would have paid me a months salary for being at work". These people PAID to potter around building up their orcs - they enjoyed it. Now they get the opportunity to do it all over again, lucky lucky people - double the fun.
If you genuinely believe some poor kid deserves to be banged up and have his life wrecked because he dropped your Orc in the sea then Get A Life. There's plenty of serious REAL problems on this planet if you feel like crusading for something worthwhile.
sadistic and omnipotent deities should be a selling point for any fantasy MMORPG? If yours doesn't have them then it's not worth playing, try the real world.
People will find more and more exploits in iTunes or produce tools to 'enhance' - it's popular, people are using it, it's inevitable. Apple will be forced to tighten up the scheme more and more in response and eventually this will start to intrude upon the users experience. RIAA will demand X, Apple will point out that this will infringe on the users experience causing them to spend less money with iTunes. RIAA will threaten to music supply, Apple will cave in as they have no choice. iTunes will suffer. If anybody thinks that the RIAA will accept Apple's perfectly valid point that they shouldn't screw over the end users who're pouring the money in the front of the behemoth then just look at the attitude RIAA has had before screwing over only legitimate users with protected CDs, and for that matter the industries own success with medialess music. I'd have been under the impression we'd all have been paying for it from Napster for several years by now if I'd swallowed the industry spiel.
Those two paragraphs aren't entirely different. The first is user perception and the second is the actual fact in this case. Apple have placed themselves between their end Apple users and the RIAA. By closing the feature in this release they have firmly indicated which way their loyalties lie and the likely resolution of future 'conflicts' between the two groups they bridge. To my little Apple friends, "Steve loves money more than you - and will tighten down the screws more and more until you stop feeding him the cash"
At last I have another use for that 800W Son-T Agro in my closet (if you don't know, don't ask). I will be all powerful *maniacal laughter*
It's a Tivo, It's a Media Hub, It's a PSP sync station, it's a DVD burner, it's going to suck your Amex dry - the only problem being when you try to use it to play a game you realise it's just a PS2 which I can pick up for f'all currently. Surely once you've sunk all your cash into such a lovely beast and it's nestling beneath your TV set it's going to make you slightly reluctant to upgrade to a PS3 and lose all that lovely functionality.
I never understood why people bought All-In-Wonder Cards if they were serious game players always wanting the latest technology and I've no idea why anybody would buy this.
Games consoles are supposed to be disposable items - bought the day they came out for a reasonably large sum and forgotten in the back of your cupboard 4 years later. I don't want to have to invest in my consoles, take out finance on them etc.
Actually a thought hit me as I was typing all this, I think what Sony have just done is take a Tivo Box with a DVD burner they already had knocking about in research and plugged in the "PS2 on a chip" thingie they were banging on about recently. I suppose if the PS2 function is a freebie then it's a good enough way of getting a few potential new PS2 game customers who would never normally dream of straying into their local game shop. Sony also have a spoiler attitude, killing DC with PS2 rumours, trying to knobble GBA SP with PSP and now XBox Media thingie with this.
There's that from the obvious Apple fan-boy (or girl) who will defend Apple to the death - the type who still contends that their $2500 PowerBook is faster than their neighbours £1250 Dell.
The other is from the DRM hater who believes all music should be free and was gunning for Apple from the moment they announced they'd be charging for music and you wouldn't automatically get mailed CD copies to hand out to strangers in the street.
I'd like to position myself between these two camps. I'm not a great lover of Macs, but I do have a sneaking admiration for Apple. Apple are the first company that has actually managed to bring the record labels together and produce a service that actually does work. You can search for a tune you want, click and it's in your ears on your Ipod on your way to work the next morning - all legitimately, artists having been paid etc etc.
The problem as a few people have touched upon is that this update could be the tip of the iceberg - they've changed the way my software operates at the behest of some evil RIAA request, does this mean they'll cave into every whim of them in furutre?
So far Apple have closed an undocumented 'feature' of their previous offering. They never said you'd be able to do it, so you can't sue them now they've closed it. If you don't like it, don't upgrade, stop using ITunes, put a masonary spike through your ipod and post it back to Steve - otherwise quit whinging.
I used to have a Palm and then upgraded to an e740 which I had paired with a SE T68i. This let me browse the net, have PIM functionality, check my email, see if anybody was about on my IMs etc etc. The problem was having to carry around two things, travel with two chargers - I started leaving the PDA behind when I was out and about.
I've now replaced both with a P800. It's a little bit bigger than my old phone, but still easily fits in my pocket and more importantly does absolutely everything I want. Whilst the traditional PDA does boast more features such as Office document editing etc, the small screen and input difficulties made it much more trouble than it was worth. The P800 to my mind is really the first genuinely useful combi PDA/phone and they're only going to get better.
Seriously. Nobody's going to get rich from them and they're well, not sexy.
I haven't got a clue - but they interfere.....