10$ per pos- I mean... I don't know what you're talking about! Why! The audacity of some people! Why, if I weren't almost drowning in hundred dollar bills from my lucrative vide game reviewing/astroturfing business I would be inclined to get off of my lazy ass and take offense at that remark!
Muahahah! As a servant of chaos it is my duty to help destroy the infrastructure around me!
No, seriously... I payed attention to the machine. It never got haX0red or anything. It just sat there being a quiet little win2k box for about 2 months until I bought a new machine and went back to living behind my firewall/router.
No! Tragedy! My world is at an end! Some useless wanker on slashdot has made a sarcastic comment at me and denied me the pleasure of enjoying a pizza with him. Alas, I perish!
No no no, I dug my p2 350 out of the closet and plugged it in to my router. Then I intentionally went into my router and told it to put the win2k box on the DMZ, totally naked. Entirely intentional.
Afterall, WTF do I care about it? It's a p2 350 that I was using to play games (Master of Orion, Pax Imperia) it didn't do anything important. It could melt down to slag and catch on fire and cause me only minimal annoyance.
Heh, I got one of those a couple of weeks after I stuck my win2k box back on the net. I laughed for about 20 minutes, then I turned of windows messaging service and went about my business. I couldn't believe the guy wanted 20$ for that.
Part of that depends on how you view the game. Do you just view it as being unable to play for an hour or two, or do you view it as having played for 2 hours and then having that time erased?
If it's just a matter of, "Oh, I can't play right now..." it's annoying, but not anywhere near the kind of pisser that "I spent 2 hours hanging out with my friends and guildmates, we camped some bandits, found a really nice weapon, then went and raided an enemy camp and burned their inn to the ground and killed their weaponsmith... Then POOF, it all got erased."
That's frustrating.
The DEGREE of frustration isn't the same as losing 2 years worth of skill. But the TYPE of frustration is the same.
I've seen people having the Login server problems and I can understand that. Apparently UBI/Wolfpack underestimated badly the amount of servers they would need to support the logins. But I think that's improving. I have heard (totally unsubstantiated, just word of mouth bitching) that the Mac version of SB actually has steeper requirements than are listed because they didn't have as much time with Mac OSX to optimize it. Rumour has it that Mac OS performance will increase dramatically over the next 6 months or so. But as I said, this is all totally unsubstantiated rumor culled from a few people I know who work in the gaming industry and have contact with the Wolfpack folks.
As for the issue with Massive guilds stomping down on a server, I don't think that will ever be a problem. There's just not a good way of stopping other people from forming competing large guilds, or pledging fealty to each other and banding together against you. Also, don't underestimate the power of intrigue. More than one large guild has been shattered by an inside man planting rumors and dissention in the ranks. Superpowers and their rise and fall are an inevitable part of the game world. But they won't be able to dominate so long as people are actually interested in bringing them down. You don't want that summoner near your city? Keep your bloody scouts out watching for him. Set up your perimeter. Run your city like a bloody military installation. Shadowbane is going to take a radical change of thought processes for some people from other MMORPGS. You don't just go farm monters and level. The idea is to help your guild TAKE OVER THE WORLD. >:)
There's the third category that both think it's bloody fucking hilarious, and ALSO think the peopel who did it should have the shit slapped out of them for fucking with other people.
Well, In *MY* D&D game in *MY* basement if some random person wanders in and claims they are killing all of the ACTUAL players and stealing their stuff the rest of us can beat the shit out of them for being in our house without permission.
And if that's not quite what you're looking for, even if one of the players suddenly decides to reach across into the DMs stuff and grab a big pile of papers or pencil in stuff in the DMs notes or anything like that the DM can slap the shit out of him and make him stop. Some wanker started changing the DMs notes in Shadowbane, so now they get the shit slapped out of them. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Should you have to take responsibility for every possible future exploit that might be found in your software? Even to the point of interacting with software or hardware that doesn't exist at the time of the games release? I believe that due dilligence should be excersised, but there is a limit to the permutations of attacks that can be run on the software within a limited time frame so a line has to be drawn somewhere. And even then, a combination of legal enforcement and technological correction is still the best solution.
I imagine that no matter what it is there is someone around who will ridicule you for it. Does that make it less enjoyable for you? No. Does that make you less annoyed when you for some reason aren't able to engage in it? No.
So shut the fuck up with bashing other peopls hobbies. You don't have to be such a worthless git about it. Some people play an hour or two a day, some people play 12 hours a day. The people who are REALLY pissed about stuff like this are the ones who play 2 hours a day, and this shit happens during that time frame. They aren't obsessive about the game, but they like to play it. And they were unable to do so during their window of opportunity because of some little punk shit like yourself that believes other peoples time has no value. So you just keep masturbating in your closet while you think about how much cooler you are than people who play online games. Maybe someday it will be true.
I enjoy martial arts. I pay for the priveladge of being instructed. I LOVE performing the techniques and sparring. But at the same time I seek a greater level of profficiency in my art. Were I to be bashed in the skull and somehow lose the last 2 years of my knowledge regarding martial arts I would NOT be happy. Yeah, I get to learn it all again. That's great and all. But in my attempt to attain a greater level of profficiency I've just been set back by 2 years. The idea is the same, just because I enjoy doing something doesn't mean there is no greater goal behind it. The striving for improvement is part of what makes competition and games fun and if my improvement was suddenly whiped out then a fundamental part of the experience has been removed and must be regained.
You pay 40$ a month for cable TV. It's just entertainment, no realy value behind it beyond that. Some jackass hacks the cable company and broadcasts 80's daytime soapoperas on ALL of the channels for a week. Hilarious? Yes. Wrong? Also Yes. This is precisely the same thing. And believe me, your average Television watching joe schmoe will NOT be amused that "Who wants to marry a millionaire friends star island 3" has been pre-empted by Days of Our Lives reruns from 1985. The bottom line is that people paid for their entertainment, someone else fucked their entertainment up. The person doing all the fucking up should be punished for depriving me of a service I paid for, and for depriving the company of revenue. End of story.
Weird, your experience has been completely opposite of mine. I can actually reboot my machine from a hard freeze (I hit the stupid windows menu key during a battle, after which I then ripped the key off of the keyboard) fire up shadowbane, and log back in in under 10 minutes. I was back in the fight before the monster was dead.
And yeah, there are "Uber-Guilds" because the point of the game is nation building. Free Corps has 900 members. Some of those are alts, but probably 400 of them are unique players. It makes for some good massive combat.
I'm kind of surprised at all of the people complaining about the issues they are having when I haven't had any of those problems...
And you can't spell worth fuck. That doesn't make it right or legal for me to bash your skull in with a brick just because the brain inside isn't functioning up to my high standards.
Regardless of the strength or weakness of the security measures taken by UBISoft the act of attacking the servers in this fashion is still both illegal AND wrong. If I happened to be within convenient driving distance of the person who was responsible for this I would quite likely pay them a visit to explain to them just how wrong this is by demonstrating the inherent lack of security in their residence.
Not to mention, most people playing chess in the park will kick the total shit out of you if you walk up and overturn their board. And they probably won't stop just because you stop moving... People take competitive games seriously.
Would it make it less wrong? The issue at hand is not "Was it difficult?" the issue is "Was it WRONG?" and I say yes. Stealing someone elses time via the destruction of their pursuits is wrong. If you create something and I destroy it I've wronged you.
UBI is just the publisher for this. The game was created by Wolfpack studios. And I know during the development at least they seemed like they were interested in putting out the best possible game and damn the production deadlines.
I have to say that I started playing AFTER most of the chaos of the original launch had cleared up. I started the day after the last rollback and I've only experienced bad lag one time. I've only had one crash, and it was caused by me accidentally tabbing out of the game. My system is a Celeron 2.2ghz, 384mb PC2100 DDR Ram, a Radeon 7000, and Win2k Pro. The only gripe I have about the game is that it's very DARK... I have my brightness turned all the way up and it's still dark. But I have the same problem with Quake3, so I don't think it's the game.
As for massive combat, the Free Corps on Death has 900 members. Over 200 of them at once assaulted an LoD city the other night. There were around 450 people involved in combat at one time in a city and while there was some lag, especially for people on poor connections, everything went more or less smoothly. I'd say Shadowbane is doing quite well now, despite problems in the past and even in spite of this recent incident.
So we'll deserve to be destroyed due to stupidity instead of idleness... Whichever. If as a global society SOMEONE can figure out a solution given 800 years of lead time then we're doomed as a species anyways.
More importantly, there's a fucking LOT of us. You don't kill 6.3 billion people overnight with a disease. And some significant percentage will be immune to it simply due to random genetics. Even if that's only 2-3% that's still a hell of a lot of people to start rebuilding. Our culture and society may be in danger from some massive disease outbreak, but our species isn't.
That's because there are many many many subsections of Sony. Sony Media and Sony Electronics tend to be fiercely competitive within the company and rumors occasionally circulate about pranks being pulled against members of either section. In my opinion the Sony Electronics section is by far the better organization.
Well, I pay the same amount no matter how many telephone calls I make per month (local of course, but a friend of mine has the same thing for long distance for a flat fee) and I pay the same amount per month no matter how much TV I watch. So what's the difference here? Television is a pretty high bandwidth medium. That's a lot of data to be sending around. What's the fundamental difference between that data and this other data over here? The 'net is an incredibly Advertising heavy environment, there's no reason I should be paying per gigabyte to receive those ads. If the ISP advertising model needs to include commercials that pop up once per hour and go through a 3 minute flash presentation in order for me to keep paying 40$ a month for unlimited 1.5mb down 384k up then I'm fine with that.
Slashdot Mirror
10$ per pos- I mean... I don't know what you're talking about! Why! The audacity of some people!
Why, if I weren't almost drowning in hundred dollar bills from my lucrative vide game reviewing/astroturfing business I would be inclined to get off of my lazy ass and take offense at that remark!
Kintanon
Muahahah! As a servant of chaos it is my duty to help destroy the infrastructure around me!
No, seriously... I payed attention to the machine. It never got haX0red or anything. It just sat there being a quiet little win2k box for about 2 months until I bought a new machine and went back to living behind my firewall/router.
Kintanon
No! Tragedy! My world is at an end! Some useless wanker on slashdot has made a sarcastic comment at me and denied me the pleasure of enjoying a pizza with him. Alas, I perish!
So... Uh... neener neener! >:)
Kintanon
No no no, I dug my p2 350 out of the closet and plugged it in to my router. Then I intentionally went into my router and told it to put the win2k box on the DMZ, totally naked.
Entirely intentional.
Afterall, WTF do I care about it? It's a p2 350 that I was using to play games (Master of Orion, Pax Imperia) it didn't do anything important. It could melt down to slag and catch on fire and cause me only minimal annoyance.
Kintanon
Heh, I got one of those a couple of weeks after I stuck my win2k box back on the net. I laughed for about 20 minutes, then I turned of windows messaging service and went about my business. I couldn't believe the guy wanted 20$ for that.
Kintanon
Part of that depends on how you view the game. Do you just view it as being unable to play for an hour or two, or do you view it as having played for 2 hours and then having that time erased?
If it's just a matter of, "Oh, I can't play right now..." it's annoying, but not anywhere near the kind of pisser that "I spent 2 hours hanging out with my friends and guildmates, we camped some bandits, found a really nice weapon, then went and raided an enemy camp and burned their inn to the ground and killed their weaponsmith... Then POOF, it all got erased."
That's frustrating.
The DEGREE of frustration isn't the same as losing 2 years worth of skill. But the TYPE of frustration is the same.
Kintanon
I've seen people having the Login server problems and I can understand that. Apparently UBI/Wolfpack underestimated badly the amount of servers they would need to support the logins. But I think that's improving.
I have heard (totally unsubstantiated, just word of mouth bitching) that the Mac version of SB actually has steeper requirements than are listed because they didn't have as much time with Mac OSX to optimize it. Rumour has it that Mac OS performance will increase dramatically over the next 6 months or so. But as I said, this is all totally unsubstantiated rumor culled from a few people I know who work in the gaming industry and have contact with the Wolfpack folks.
As for the issue with Massive guilds stomping down on a server, I don't think that will ever be a problem. There's just not a good way of stopping other people from forming competing large guilds, or pledging fealty to each other and banding together against you. Also, don't underestimate the power of intrigue. More than one large guild has been shattered by an inside man planting rumors and dissention in the ranks. Superpowers and their rise and fall are an inevitable part of the game world. But they won't be able to dominate so long as people are actually interested in bringing them down.
You don't want that summoner near your city? Keep your bloody scouts out watching for him. Set up your perimeter. Run your city like a bloody military installation. Shadowbane is going to take a radical change of thought processes for some people from other MMORPGS. You don't just go farm monters and level. The idea is to help your guild TAKE OVER THE WORLD. >:)
Kintanon
There's the third category that both think it's bloody fucking hilarious, and ALSO think the peopel who did it should have the shit slapped out of them for fucking with other people.
Kintanon
Well, In *MY* D&D game in *MY* basement if some random person wanders in and claims they are killing all of the ACTUAL players and stealing their stuff the rest of us can beat the shit out of them for being in our house without permission.
And if that's not quite what you're looking for, even if one of the players suddenly decides to reach across into the DMs stuff and grab a big pile of papers or pencil in stuff in the DMs notes or anything like that the DM can slap the shit out of him and make him stop.
Some wanker started changing the DMs notes in Shadowbane, so now they get the shit slapped out of them. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Kintanon
Should you have to take responsibility for every possible future exploit that might be found in your software? Even to the point of interacting with software or hardware that doesn't exist at the time of the games release?
I believe that due dilligence should be excersised, but there is a limit to the permutations of attacks that can be run on the software within a limited time frame so a line has to be drawn somewhere.
And even then, a combination of legal enforcement and technological correction is still the best solution.
Kintanon
What's your hobby?
I imagine that no matter what it is there is someone around who will ridicule you for it. Does that make it less enjoyable for you? No. Does that make you less annoyed when you for some reason aren't able to engage in it? No.
So shut the fuck up with bashing other peopls hobbies. You don't have to be such a worthless git about it. Some people play an hour or two a day, some people play 12 hours a day. The people who are REALLY pissed about stuff like this are the ones who play 2 hours a day, and this shit happens during that time frame. They aren't obsessive about the game, but they like to play it. And they were unable to do so during their window of opportunity because of some little punk shit like yourself that believes other peoples time has no value.
So you just keep masturbating in your closet while you think about how much cooler you are than people who play online games. Maybe someday it will be true.
Kintanon
Uh, That's from a total system freeze including a reboot of my system. The actual logging on part of it takes about 2 minutes. Give or take.
Kintanon
You are quite obviously not a chess grandmaster then.
Kintanon
I enjoy martial arts. I pay for the priveladge of being instructed. I LOVE performing the techniques and sparring. But at the same time I seek a greater level of profficiency in my art. Were I to be bashed in the skull and somehow lose the last 2 years of my knowledge regarding martial arts I would NOT be happy. Yeah, I get to learn it all again. That's great and all. But in my attempt to attain a greater level of profficiency I've just been set back by 2 years. The idea is the same, just because I enjoy doing something doesn't mean there is no greater goal behind it. The striving for improvement is part of what makes competition and games fun and if my improvement was suddenly whiped out then a fundamental part of the experience has been removed and must be regained.
Kintanon
Think about it this way:
You pay 40$ a month for cable TV. It's just entertainment, no realy value behind it beyond that. Some jackass hacks the cable company and broadcasts 80's daytime soapoperas on ALL of the channels for a week.
Hilarious? Yes. Wrong? Also Yes.
This is precisely the same thing. And believe me, your average Television watching joe schmoe will NOT be amused that "Who wants to marry a millionaire friends star island 3" has been pre-empted by Days of Our Lives reruns from 1985.
The bottom line is that people paid for their entertainment, someone else fucked their entertainment up. The person doing all the fucking up should be punished for depriving me of a service I paid for, and for depriving the company of revenue. End of story.
Kintanon
Weird, your experience has been completely opposite of mine. I can actually reboot my machine from a hard freeze (I hit the stupid windows menu key during a battle, after which I then ripped the key off of the keyboard) fire up shadowbane, and log back in in under 10 minutes. I was back in the fight before the monster was dead.
And yeah, there are "Uber-Guilds" because the point of the game is nation building. Free Corps has 900 members. Some of those are alts, but probably 400 of them are unique players. It makes for some good massive combat.
I'm kind of surprised at all of the people complaining about the issues they are having when I haven't had any of those problems...
Kintanon
And you can't spell worth fuck. That doesn't make it right or legal for me to bash your skull in with a brick just because the brain inside isn't functioning up to my high standards.
Regardless of the strength or weakness of the security measures taken by UBISoft the act of attacking the servers in this fashion is still both illegal AND wrong.
If I happened to be within convenient driving distance of the person who was responsible for this I would quite likely pay them a visit to explain to them just how wrong this is by demonstrating the inherent lack of security in their residence.
Kintanon
Not to mention, most people playing chess in the park will kick the total shit out of you if you walk up and overturn their board. And they probably won't stop just because you stop moving... People take competitive games seriously.
Kintanon
Would it make it less wrong?
The issue at hand is not "Was it difficult?" the issue is "Was it WRONG?" and I say yes. Stealing someone elses time via the destruction of their pursuits is wrong. If you create something and I destroy it I've wronged you.
Kintanon
UBI is just the publisher for this. The game was created by Wolfpack studios. And I know during the development at least they seemed like they were interested in putting out the best possible game and damn the production deadlines.
Kintanon
I have to say that I started playing AFTER most of the chaos of the original launch had cleared up. I started the day after the last rollback and I've only experienced bad lag one time. I've only had one crash, and it was caused by me accidentally tabbing out of the game.
My system is a Celeron 2.2ghz, 384mb PC2100 DDR Ram, a Radeon 7000, and Win2k Pro.
The only gripe I have about the game is that it's very DARK... I have my brightness turned all the way up and it's still dark. But I have the same problem with Quake3, so I don't think it's the game.
As for massive combat, the Free Corps on Death has 900 members. Over 200 of them at once assaulted an LoD city the other night. There were around 450 people involved in combat at one time in a city and while there was some lag, especially for people on poor connections, everything went more or less smoothly.
I'd say Shadowbane is doing quite well now, despite problems in the past and even in spite of this recent incident.
Kintanon
So we'll deserve to be destroyed due to stupidity instead of idleness... Whichever. If as a global society SOMEONE can figure out a solution given 800 years of lead time then we're doomed as a species anyways.
Kintanon
More importantly, there's a fucking LOT of us.
You don't kill 6.3 billion people overnight with a disease. And some significant percentage will be immune to it simply due to random genetics. Even if that's only 2-3% that's still a hell of a lot of people to start rebuilding. Our culture and society may be in danger from some massive disease outbreak, but our species isn't.
Kintanon
That's because there are many many many subsections of Sony. Sony Media and Sony Electronics tend to be fiercely competitive within the company and rumors occasionally circulate about pranks being pulled against members of either section.
In my opinion the Sony Electronics section is by far the better organization.
Kintanon
Well, I pay the same amount no matter how many telephone calls I make per month (local of course, but a friend of mine has the same thing for long distance for a flat fee) and I pay the same amount per month no matter how much TV I watch. So what's the difference here? Television is a pretty high bandwidth medium. That's a lot of data to be sending around. What's the fundamental difference between that data and this other data over here?
The 'net is an incredibly Advertising heavy environment, there's no reason I should be paying per gigabyte to receive those ads. If the ISP advertising model needs to include commercials that pop up once per hour and go through a 3 minute flash presentation in order for me to keep paying 40$ a month for unlimited 1.5mb down 384k up then I'm fine with that.
Kintanon