Archives for bugs category
If there’s one thing that MMO gamers all agree on, it’s the short list of things we almost universally hate: cheaters, gold (or equivalent currency) farmers searching for your credit card, and bugs. Oh, the dreaded bugs. They do so much damage to your gameplay experience, why doesn’t the company just fix them? The inimitable Scott Jennings tackles this question in his latest column on game design, explaining that the main reason bugs don’t get fixed faster is because doing so is much harder than it seems.
As he points out, the architecture of an MMO is a tricky thing at the best of times, frequently only held together with the coded equivalent of a wing and a prayer. Some bugs are so massively detrimental to the game that they get to jump to the head of the class, but others are annoying and bad but not at the highest priority. Or — as sometimes happens despite everyone’s best efforts — fixing the bug would require doing so much damage to the rest of the game that it’s better to work around it. If you’re wondering why your favorite company hasn’t fixed a much-hated bug, this article should prove an interesting read.
Filed under: Bugs, Culture, Game mechanics, MMO industry, Opinion
Scott Jennings discusses fixing bugs in live games originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 12th, 2009 at 1:00pm by Eliot Lefebvre
Filed Under: bug-fixes, bugs, culture, game-mechanics, lum-the-mad, mmo-industry, opinion, scott-jennings
Hackers, as everyone knows, were scheduled to be the mirror class to Choppas… wait, no, that’s not right. We’re not talking about one of the classes of Warhammer Online, we’re talking about that scourge of the paying and fair-playing populace of every MMO. The most recent developer diary on the game’s official site is with John Cox, development manager, discussing some of the ways and means that allows Mythic to fight against the scourge of hacking and try and keep the game on the level.
Cox discusses a number of techniques, starting with the most obvious: that several people working on fighting the hacks are part of hacking communities, observing silently and sometimes even testing them internally to develop a response. He also discusses why some of the progress on fighting illegal behavior is a bit slower than the community would like, and why it’s not always as possible to shut things down straightaway on the server end. With a discussion of some of the holes in detection, which includes an explanation of why the game briefly had Vista users almost universally flagged as hackers, it’s an interesting look behind the scenes at Warhammer Online’s efforts to fight the good fight. (That is, the one not involving Order versus Destruction.)
Filed under: Fantasy, Bugs, Exploits, Warhammer Online
Warhammer Online developer diary on combat with hackers originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 07 Nov 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on November 7th, 2009 at 6:00pm by Eliot Lefebvre
Filed Under: bugs, developer-diary, ea, electronic-arts, exploits, hackers, john-cox, mythic, mythic-entertainment, war, warhammer-online
After dealing with shortages and that PS3 friends list thing, a few Borderlands players have now reported encountering an online glitch that erases everything. Yes, folks — it’s so bad, we had to put it in italics.
You can check out the list of ongoing issues for yourself over at the Gearbox forums, where the biggest perpetrator is undoubtedly the glitch that causes a player’s stats to be downgraded to a big fat zero following another player joining or vacating an online match. Another glitch does the same thing, only with your entire inventory of weapons; Gearbox says the worst issues are fairly infrequent, as scary as they may sound.
As of right now, there’s currently no fix or workaround for a lot of the potential game breakers, though the majority of issues aren’t as bad as those listed above. Still, Gearbox is working to resolve these issues and if you’ve found something that isn’t on the list, we suggest you hit up the technical support section. We can all make these lands a better place … together.
[Via 1UP]
Gearbox details known Borderlands glitches, workarounds originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on October 27th, 2009 at 4:15pm by David Hinkle
Filed Under: borderlands, bugs, gearbox, gearbox-software, glitch, glitches
Filed under: Bugs, Business models, Exploits, Crafting, News items, Second Life, Legal, Virtual worlds
Remember Kevin Alderman (known in Second Life as Stroker Serpentine), CEO of Eros LLC who is one of the plaintiffs who have filed a lawsuit against Linden Lab for negligence with respect to security and failing to act in accordance with their obligations under the DMCA? Well, it can’t be a good week for either him or for the Lab.
During Linden Lab’s Burning Life event in Second Life this year (a sort of living pop-art showcase and party that draws many spectators) persons only presently known to the server logs left a cache of copied content, including at least one of Alderman’s latest products, and a whole swag of other content belonging to other designers – free for the taking.
It isn’t really Burning Life’s fault, but if you had to place the stuff somewhere where many people would take it, none-the-wiser that it was unlawful content, that would be the best place at this time of the year.
Continue reading Second Life designers burned at Burning Life
Second Life designers burned at Burning Life originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Posted on October 27th, 2009 at 11:30am by Tateru Nino
Filed Under: bugs, burning-life, business-models, crafting, dmca, eros-llc, exploits, kevin-alderman, legal, linden-lab, second-life, stroker-serpentine, virtual-worlds
