Minor correction to my post yesterday - it seems that the Anti Globalism account is not actually submitting stories. burnitdown has been submitting to the front page under that name.

Once there was a game called UFO: Enemy Unknown. A turnbased game that saw you take a small squad of soldiers to battle a host of nasty aliens. It was so good I played just the demo over and over again until finally I could buy the full game.

Brilliant... well up to a point. For all its tactical brilliance, too many battles ended in you having to hunt down a final missing alien all over the place. It also suffered from that typical turnbased syndrome that many real world tactics just don't happen in a turn-based world.

Enemy of the Deep put the action below sea level, and while good was just more of the same.

Then came X-Com: Apocalypse. (It changed the name to appease the unwashed masses in the colonies) and it was good... kinda.

It added a realtime element, rather then each soldier on the field being given their own turn, you would pause the game, give orders to your squad and then resume watching your soldiers carry out your orders, or at least attempt to do so.

It gave turn-based gaming what it never had before, real firefights. For the first time your heavy machine gunner really was laying down a blanket of fire to cover your advancing troops, for the first time your soldiers really dived out of the way of incoming fire rather then just stand there and take it because it wasn't their turn.

The game also added multiple factions, and many other goodies but sadly it was also a game from those days when graphics just did not scale and today the game looks truly horrible.

Cue a void of many years before we got our next change to go kick alien but tactically.

Lots has been tried and it all failed, we had turn-based that seemed to increase the endless waiting of the orignal and real-time that failed to do what Apocalypse did.

To be clear, both turn-based AND realtime have their problems.

• Turn-based suffers from a lack of realism, machine gunners provide covering fire, they do NOT wait their turn to squeeze of a quick burst. Soldiers react to being shot at and don't just stand there. It quickly becomes micro-management if you have to drag your squad through endless turns just to travel across the map.
• Realtime needs player AI, your soldiers need to do more then just execute the last command. This means they should be able to engage the enemy on their own, take cover if under fire, switch equipment as needed, switch targets as needed etc etc. Without this it can become even more a case of micro management then the turnbased game.

  Apocalypse did it nearly all right. A soldier on their own would attack any enemy, switch to the most dangerous one, take cover behind anything close if needed. This made for some of the most intresting battles I ever seen in a computer game.

  So what is needed to make a true semi-realtime UFO/X-Com sequel.

  You are the commander, selected from thousands of other ordinary human beings by the X-com project (the original games were just a training program) you have been chosen to be the tactical brain behind a program setup to deal with the increasing numbers of alien sightings.

  The first part of the game functions as the tutorial and sees you being asked to deal with several early missions involving events that may be related to the increased number of sightings, including investigating several human organisations.

  The X-com organisation has you making the tactical decisions with overall strategic orders coming from the various real world organisations, your task is to keep your real agenda (keeping the world out of alien control) with appeasing those who fund your program. Not all of them share the same goal, or even your goal.

  Early on their is also demand that you keep your actions as secretive as possible for risk of finding to many opposed to you.

  In the beginning you find yourselve equipped with real world weapons for your combat missions. Resources are limited but realistic, you are outfitted as a small special forces team could be expected to be. You got high quality equipment, basics in ready supply (No special forces unit in the real world needs to hustle for bullets) but limited in scope. Your currency for improving this is NOT just money but also goodwill with various real world organisations, if the US likes you, expect a carrier force to be assigned to your unit, if the USSR likes you, you may get advanced air transport capabilities, the Israeli's like you, you get advanced intelligence, the arabs supply more money then you could hope to spend, etc etc.

  Offcourse their are counters to this as well, not everyone will like you to be friendly with their enemy, especially if they perceive your actions to harm them.

  Before a mission becomes available your job is to insruct your scientists to research what tech you find most desirable, instruct engineers to use this research to augment your gear and to train your soldiers in prepration for the next mission.

  Your soldiers are an entire segment of management on their own, soldiers who are injured need to heal BUT can also spend time studying during that (slows the healing somewhat but wastes less time) Soldiers on intensive training are not available for combat until finished while on-site study might see them ready in a couple of hours. Ready teams can be instantly deployed, but the constant pressure wears them out.

  Then there is the question of deployment, your main base has the best facilities but makes it hard to respond quickly to events in remote corners of the world.

  When an mission occurs your first decision will be to decide to respond or not. Make an attack to stop an alien take over of the vatican and you might just give youreselve a load of bad press, while a similar assault on the pentagon (if the US is friendly to you) might be far more acceptable. (Hush it up as a terrorist strike)

  Then comes the question of what units will respond and how long you will wait before the attack will commence. Do you take the small elite team and drop them by parachute, use local agents, take the time to get a proper force ready. An option is also to attack with the first squad to arrive, then as combat takes place reinforcements could arrive.

  Further tactical decisions are what back up forces to deploy, Evac choppers, gun-ships, civilian rescue teams.

  The combat area itself is fairly large to accomadate real world tactics and the use of light support vehicles, they should also be random like the original X-com games. Combat starts with you having to insert your forces, this changes by the mode of transportation. Parachute drop, helicopter insertion or just driving in from a corner of the map.

  The insertion is for the first time a real part of the battle, as the parachute drop will see your forces scattered over the map and a helicopter drop gives you the firepower of the chopper to clear the landing area.

  Once your troops are on the ground they form themselves into small squads as dictated by their role, machine gunner team, mortar team, sniper duo etc etc.

  Typically a mission will see you first move your combat units (not individual soldiers) to secure the drop zone, then proceed with the mission objective. Units are given directions of were to go, and how to get there, typically you want to move as fast as possible until combat starts. The units however will use their OWN AI to execute their orders and change them as needed. A soldier being told to run down a corridor will STOP and open fire if an enemy appears. Soldiers receiving fire will not slowly walk to their destination, they will either speed up returning fire on the move if possible, or crouch down and return fire or try to get to their destination under cover.

  Not all units are combat units and for larger missions you mind find medical forces and other support units who need to be escorted and protected.

Just, No.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/27/1626243

Nothing needs to be said. Writing should not be a crime.

FYI, the text of what he wrote is at the chicago tribune ... not particularly pleasant, but hardly worth an arrest warrant.

Jade Empire for the PC has once again caused me to question the way RPG's handle alignment. In the game you have two path's. Open palm and closed fist, with the ingame explenation being that neither are by themselves good or evil. That is all very nice but during the game itself that is never realized. Open palm is the nice hero, defender of the weak. The closed fist follower is little more then a pathetic jerk.

It is all the sadder because the main antagonist is such a true work of pure evil while he appears to be an open palm character for the main part of the game.

Master li, the grand strategists at first seems to be the one who opposes his evil brothers path, saving your own live and given you a home as well as countless other students, as well as siding with you against the bully Gao the Lesser.

When his true intentions are revealed this show that all his kindness was no more then acts to serve his own goals. True evil, BUT structured, sensible evil. Not the complete and utter madman/jerk/psycho your own closed fist options make you out to be. Follow the closed fist and not once do you even come close to his kind of grand evil. You will just be petty and small minded. Bah.

It ain't much better if you play a good character. You have to be polite! Who says politeness == good?

Actions count, not words.

The problem is with the limited amount of reactions you can show. One quest involves a mother and daughter you first meet leaving a town fallen upon hard times. You can warn them about slavers in the woods but they leave regardless. Later you find them captured, the daughter in the process of being broken for he new master.

What options could there be?

• NOT MY PROBLEM. Simple, what do I care about these people. Or is it? After all I warned them, told them to stay in town, a town I saved by the way so the problems they were fleeing went away. They not only did not listen to me, but also put no faith in me. So we have two decisions. One is, that I look out for number one and do not involve myself in things that don't affect me. (problem with this path is that it would make an amazingly short game "villain threathens the kindom", "not my problem" THE END). The other is that I did my part, if they will not listen they deserve what they get.
• The path of greater profit. What decission will gain me the most money. The slaver? The mother and daughter pair? Killing them all?
• The open palm/good path. Free the slaves, sure they remain weak because of it, because every wich way they turned, someone is willing to get them out of the effects of their own bad choices but hey, that is what being a good guy is all about. NWN2 has this to an extreme were you keep rescuing the same couple. BUT should I just free the slaves OR kill the slaver as well?
• The closed fist path. Have the slave girl kill her slaver. Freedom comes to those who are willing to fight for it. BUT again this can be deeper, do I step in if the fights goes the wrong way? After all there is a difference between being willing to fight for your freedom and actually being capable to do so. God helps those who help themselves BUT that doesn't mean you can't give a hand. Would letting the fight be fair, in wich case a large adult male slaver would probably win over a small young girl be fair?

Ah decissions. And what of the after effects. Would helping them out now, just lead them to get into yet more trouble later on? What effect has killing her slaver have on a young girl? It could make her strong, tell her that you can affect your own destiny and make into a person who will fight for justice and freedom. It could also tell her that everything can be yours at the point of a sword.

No wonder CRPG's take the easy path of just giving the player two simple choices.

A common complaint about current MMORPG's is that they reward time spent in game and not skill. There is an essential truth in this but the question has to be asked what can be done about this.

An often heard suggestion, especially from the online FPS crowd is to raise the amount of twitch so that their FPS skills can finally be used in these types of games.

It sounds sensible but their is a fundemental flaw with this reasoning. Basic online FPS games already have a hell of time of handling a small group of players. Just how are you going to provide a lag free enviroment for thousands of players? Current games already have enoug difficulty with lag and warping, would you really want to play a game like this if twitch type skills were essential?

The problems of twitch gaming are already self evident in current games. The "they are in the walls" bugs from everquest 2 and the "cannot see enemy" bugs from WoW. These are simply the result of trying to create a massive free form 3D world.

What I mean by this is that you and the AI can essentially move anywhere you want except were the collesion detection comes into effect to simulate walls. So, the game frequently gets it wrong because movement code and the collesion code are not always in sync.

So what would happen to a MMORPG that does away with this free form 3D and instead attempts a different approach.

Say a game world that is presented similar to games like Jagged Alliance and X-Com: Apocalypse.

I name the last one especially because it is semi-realtime. Imagine these games but with you in control of a single character.

Rather then directly controling the movement of your avatar you select her destination and the AI then attempts to move there. Just for movement alone this gets rid of a shitload of problems.

First there is lag affecting rendering. Your computer can easily compute the path and then execute it, it would only have to send the requested destination to the server. The server offcourse performs the same calculations and updates it world data accordingly. ONLY if an error is detected, because the client has made an error in its calculations for whatever reason, does the server need to send the proper path calculation to the client. In theory, this would save a shitload of data transmission and in high lag situation still allow the player to move smoothly as long as nothing is in his path.

There is another advantage, with no need to hold down the walk key AND steer with the mouse at the same time, the player is free to do other things, like type in the chatbox.

But an even simpler result is this. All of sudden Jagged Alliance style interactions with the enviroment become possible. Players leap or climb over fences, pull themselves up ledges or swing down from lampposts.

In combat this too has an advantege. Gone would be the days of two 3D characters standing meters apart going through their unconncected animations. Instead you would finally be able to line the avatars up and have proper interaction going on. No more standing in the middle of that huge dragon, no more swinging widely over the head of a dwarf yet still doing damage.

What current MMORPG's share is that you start the game as a low level player, gain XP, level up and reach the top. Getting there is a long trek, wich some may never complete but when you arrive then that is it. Just sit there, re-do the same grind over and over with only the top level content offering any kind of challenge and wait for an expansion to raise the level limit.

So what could change this, and why should it be changed?

Death could change it and for the same reasons it exists in real life, to kill of the grumpie oldies and make room for a fresh new generation.

I've decided to move any "journal entry" type outpourings to my occasional blog at blog.gornall.net

[This is actually just here for reference - it's a post from my history that I've referred to a couple of times, and it's a pain to find...It's been slightly updated for formatting, clarity and grammar. Here's the original Post]

Some history:

Waaay back in the mists of time (1988) I was a 1st-year undergrad in Physics. Together with a couple of friends, I wrote a virus, just to see if we could, and let it loose on just one of the networked machines in the year-1 lab.

I guess I should say that the virus was completely harmless, it just prepended 'Copyright (c) 1988 The Virus' to the start of directory listings. It was written for Acorn Archimedes/BBC micro's (the lab hadn't got onto PC's by this time, and the Acorn range had loads of ports, which physics labs like :-)

[edit: the above is misleading - it only worked on BBC's. The lab had 50 or so BBC's and 2 Archimedes, and I was trying to convey that as well, and mixed up the words]

It spread like wildfire. People would come in, log into the network, and become infected because the last person to use their current computer was infected. It would then infect their account, so wherever they logged on in future would also infect the computer they were using then. A couple of hours later, and most of the lab was infected.

You have to remember that viruses in those days weren't really networked. They came on floppy disks for Atari ST's and Amiga's. I witnessed people logging onto the same computer "to see if they were infected too". Of course, the act of logging in would infect them...

Of course "authority" was not amused. Actually they were seriously unamused, not that they caught us. They shut down the year-1,2,3 network and disinfected all the accounts on the network server by hand. Ouch.

There were basically 3 ways the virus could be activated:

• Typing any '*' command (eg: "*.", which gave you a directory listing. Sneaky, I thought, since the virus announced itself when you did a '*.' When you thought you'd beaten it, you'd do a '*.' to see if it was still there :-)
• The events (keypress, network, disk etc.) all activated the virus if inactive, and also re-enabled the interrupts, if they had been disabled
• The interrupts (NMI,VBI,..) all activated the virus if inactive, and also re-enabled the events, if they had been deactivated.

On activation, the virus would replicate itself to the current mass-storage media. This was to cause problems because we hadn't really counted on just how effective this would be. Within a few days of the virus being cleansed (and everyone settling back to normal), it suddenly made a re-appearance again, racing through the network once more within an hour or two. Someone had put the virus onto their floppy disk (by typing *. on the floppy rather than the network) and had then brought the disk back into college and re-infected the network.

If we thought authority was unamused last time, this time they held a meeting for the entire department, and calmly said the culprit when found would be expelled. Excrement and fans came to mind. Of course, they thought we'd just re-released it, but in fact it was just too successful for comfort...

Since we had "shot our bolt", owning up didn't seem like a good idea. The only solution we came up with was to write another (silent, this time :-) virus which would disable any copy of the old one, whilst hiding itself from the users. We built in a time-to-die of a couple of months, let it go, and prayed...

We had actually built in a kill-switch to the original virus, which would disable and remove it - we didn't want to be infected ourselves (at the start). Of course, it became a matter of self-preservation to be infected later on in the saga - 3 accounts unaccountably (pun intended :-) uninfected... It wasn't too hard to destroy the original by having the new virus "press" the key combination that deleted the old one.

So, everyone was happy. Infected with the counter-virus, but happy. "Authority" thought they'd laid down the law, and been taken seriously (oh if they knew...) and we'd not been expelled. Everyone else lost their infections within a few months ...

Anyway. I've never written anything remotely like a virus since [grin]

Simon.

• The end of direct control

  There seems to be a move towards more twitch. Gamers are using macro's to fight enemies so we force them to twitch to grind their XP. Eh, no. If players can come up with 1 macro to fight all your enemies then there is something wrong with your enemies. Create better AI and more diverse fighting styles. Current twitch reasoning seems to follow advertisers reasoning. People are going to the toilet during the ads. Make ads longer so people will still get ads when they return from the toilet.

  I am proposin a system closer to that found in games like Jagged Alliance. Your avatar in real time will find her way to the clicked destination based on skills, stance settings, enviroment and enemy presence. Leap/climb, sneak/run etc etc.

  Direct control has problems:

  1. High bandwidth, every twitch has to be send to the server and all the clients in the same area.
  2. Low predictability in low bandwidth enviroments.
  3. Bad animation match up. If I hit you with my sword and you block that is just statistics. The changes of the animation involved reflecting the numbers is zero. Because your position and mine ain't fixed on a grid the animator can't line them up.
  4. Low enviroment interaction. Check the animation for leaping over a fence in Jagged Alliance vs ANY free 3D game. Tomb Raider can only pull the really nice moves when the animator knows where she is going to be. How many MMORPGS with melee combat have anything like the melee combat we so love in Martial Arts movies? Leaping over the heads of enemies? Let alone actuall wrestling. Not even Oni style body on body interaction is possible.
  5. Low interaction between player and game. Because you have to control every twitch of your avatar you can't chat or control other elements of your game.
  6. Low strategic awareness. You can't look behind your avatar.
  7. Some stats don't make sense. Intelligence. If your avatar is not in some control then their intelligence is never tested. Intelligence would allow an avatar to determine how save a move is. Low intellgence avatars would make more stupid moves. Effects as fear become far more realistic.
  8. Easier to deal with connection losses. Your avatar would keep fighting according to your preset orders.

  There are offcourse disadvantages as well. The most obvious is the need for really good AI. Enemy AI is meant to be defeated. If they pull an amazing stupid move then that is okay. They are meant to die. It would be far less fun if your own AI avatar blows themselves up.

  Another problem is that by definition twitch has a more instant appeal. The only reason to go for less direct control is to increase the weight of tactics and that means a steeper learning curve.

  MMORPG's on the other hand are supposed to have long lasting appeal. My belief is that a strong tactical element lasts longer. Proof? The lifespan of Counter Strike vs Quake.

  • Adjusting world areas

    A MMORPG needs to be massive. A true RPG that allows you play a wide range of roles needs to have a truly gigantic space in wich the players move. To be a lone scout you need an area that is truly remote. To be a trader you need to have multiple areas worthy to trade between.

    To create this you would need to create several areas. At start of the game some of them will designated as developed and some as undeveloped. Developed areas are were the player starts live, these areas are well patrolled. Undeveloped areas are barren and extremely dangerous. Other areas are in between. As the game develops some developed areas will become more popular this can be offset by increasing taxation. In response some underdeveloped areas will further develop.

So, this just occurred to me. It probably ought to have occurred earlier, but hey, I'm getting on a bit these days, and since I'm blogless [oh the shame!], here is as good a place as any to post it ...

France and Apple are about to have an argument... France wants home-grown companies to have some chance of competing with Apple, and under the guise of "won't someone think of the children^W consumers", they're trying to level the playing field. (I think it's already established that I'm a cynic...)

Apple, on the other hand, see no reason to give their competition the keys to the door. As I've posted before, Apple sells a media-experience - from alpha to omega, Apple try to make it easy for people to buy itunes tunes for their ipod. This model may in fact survive this new law, any French machinations to the contrary, but from Apple's perspective, why take the risk ?

So, the French government has spoken, and apparently Apple ought to have "seen it coming"... How could a mere company have any hope of outwitting them ? Well, there's this thing called the "internet"....

Consider if Apple did a deal with the credit-card companies - they make an Apple- (or perhaps, given the 'other' Apple, iTunes-) branded credit card with the following perks:

• Now, if you're in France, you *always* get free delivery of physical Apple goods - even though it's being shipped from (wherever). Just like when you buy over $X normally.
• The previously "French" site can be re-hosted in the US (say), and users from France with Apple cards get to buy the same tunes as they currently do in France (to work around any international rights issues). You could play games with auto-recognising users at www.itunes.com to make it easier...
• They could even offer itunes-points. Let's face it, you're more likely to spend sufficiently to be able to claim a free $0.99 tune, than a 2-week holiday in Hawaii, and unlike other $0.99 "gifts", a free tune has value...

This way, Apple get to keep most of the business (all those people with ipods whose addresses Apple know) and poke the French government in the eye (all the profits that were being taxed in France are now being taxed in the US (or wherever).

From Apple's perspective, it's a better option than "pulling out of France" and sends the message that Apple aren't just going to roll-over when anyone comes knocking. The movement of the tax revenue might sway other nations not to do the same thing, as well. Sure - it's pure 'noise' in the grand scheme of things, but every trend starts with a single event, and no government likes to *lose* tax revenue...

Now Steve (perhaps that's "Mr. Jobs" to the likes of me :-) might not like it - from what I can see he's generally opposed to brand-dilution (well, duh!), but if Apple need options in the face of a hostile foreign government, perhaps it's worth considering. Just a thought :-)

Simon.

So, I was reading that Sony had installed DRM onto Macs as well as onto Windows machines, and I was curious to see how they got around the system protections to prevent software like this from doing exactly this...

They didn't.

Contrast the experience of a windows user: Consumer puts a cd into their computer with the intention of playing the cd. The cd takes advantage of a feature in Windows and installs software in the background without consumer's knowledge. Consumer is owned.

To the experience of the Mac user: Consumer puts a cd into their computer with the intention of playing the CD. Up comes a dialogue box asking for Admin privileges. Consumer gets to deny the 'owning'...

Now it's possible that 'consumer' would just click ok, type in their username/password, and allow Sony to do their dirty deeds, but since they've almost certainly put a CD into their computer before and it didn't do that, I doubt it. I'm pretty convinced my mother wouldn't type in a password - she'd probably call me to ask why it was doing that...

In any event, I prefer the Mac method - you at least get a chance to deny the installation of the rogue software, and even if you screw up and it installs, the contents are a simple "ls -lrt /System/Library/Extensions" away, to see what's been installed...

Simon

So, I don't write many journal entries any more, but the cowardly attack (let's face it, any terrorist attack is that of cowards) on London this morning merits mention, I think.

The terrorist announcement mentioned the Brits being in fear from North to South, East to West. Whereas that may have described some countries' reactions, it didn't come close to ours. Let's just look at some of the reaction...

There was an interview of a woman who was on one of the bombed trains, 2 carriages down. She was calm and concise in how she described the events. She was confident that they would be caught. She said others around had a similar disposition.

The Mayor of London released what I thought was a pretty good statement. Let me just pick out the part he addressed to the cowards:

Finally, I wish to speak directly to those who came to London today to take life.

I know that you personally do not fear giving up your own life in order to take others - that is why you are so dangerous. But I know you fear that you may fail in your long-term objective to destroy our free society and I can show you why you will fail.

In the days that follow look at our airports, look at our sea ports and look at our railway stations and, even after your cowardly attack, you will see that people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfil their dreams and achieve their potential.

They choose to come to London, as so many have come before because they come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don't want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.

And finally, a piece I found on a football forum:

No-one in Britain has over-reacted, it's not in our nature to do so. There'll be many dark, scared days ahead for everyone who lives or works in London or any of the major cities in the UK, and there will be overwhelming feelings of sympathy for those who have lost friends, family or loved ones in these cowardly attacks today.

But it won't change anything. There will be no sudden feelings of "these people have a genuine issue", no hands of friendship offered, no olive branches extended. There will be no immediate "Let's invade " or severing of diplomatic links with any countries. There will simply be a very through, in depth, but quiet investigation.

And when we find out who did this they will pay.

Rest in peace those thirty people who died today. Their lives have meant nothing to their killers, but their deaths have brought tragedy to those who loved them.

From those who were attacked, to those in power, to the common man, the theme is the same: complete disdain for the cowards; controlled anger that will focus the effort to find them; and an unshakeable determination that above all, the cowards must not win.

What does that mean ? It means that life will go on, and that (apart from the personal tragedy of the victims families) nothing will change. There's no magic bullet for terrorism, but ignoring the effects of the cowards actions whilst seeking them out and (I suspect) simply eliminating them, quietly, would appear to be the best option.

I'm actually in two minds about that last sentence. There is a lot of good PR to be had from publically arresting, trying, convicting, and treating a terrorist like any other murderer. The IRA members jailed in the H blocks long tried to argue they were political prisoners rather than murderous cowards...

On the other hand it could create a martyr. The other option is simply to quietly kill the coward and claim (perhaps even accurately) that there was no other way, if it ever got out to the public. I can't imagine many things more terrifying to a terrorist than to have colleagues just turning up dead. "Am I next ?" is a real problem for a coward...

Simon

Some of you may have noticed (hah!) that I no longer have a link to http://hostip.info in my signature. This is because I've just sold the domain :-) BTW the purchaser tells me he'll be operating it pretty much the same as it was before...

Moving to the US (even to a well-paid job, and being used to a high-costs city like London) has proven to be relatively expensive. Houses in Silicon Valley start at about $600k and mortgages are bare-minimum 10% down - most are 20%, and then there's the car to buy (I wanted a convertible, so that's another $30k). It all adds up.

So, out of the blue, I get a request to purchase hostip.info - it looks like a typical spam email, but it mentioned escrow, so I reply from a never-before-used mail alias, and we start to talk. We strike a deal, everything happening via www.escrow.com, and all is sweetness and light. The purchaser puts the money in, I transfer the domain, and escrow.com are in the process of paying me the money.

All this is in stark contrast to selling on ebay, where (if you read my previous journal entry) sellers are completely vulnerable to being screwed over by A.Nybody.

There's not much more to this, except that maybe, just maybe, it means I can get a house with a pool, rather than without - a dream of mine for a long time :-)

Simon

So, it's all done and dusted, I'm now officially a resident alien in California. I have to say that it has had its' ups and downs, and that's *with* a large company bending over backwards to help...

Question: Why doesn't my credit rating from the UK follow me to the US, when I'd happily sign anything appropriate... Trying to buy anything on credit (and I need a car and want a house) is pretty much impossible atm. I managed to get the car at exorbitant interest rates, and it's vaguely possible I *may* get a mortgage if hoops A-Z are jumped through. Did I mention the hoops were on fire ?

Question: Why is it totally impossible to get around CA without a car, yet I need to take & pass a driving test in CA within 10 days of arrival to legally drive here. Did I mention that you need a social-security number for a driving licence ? And that it takes between 12 and 60 days for an alien to get a SSN ? Er, shurely shome mishtake, ociffer ?

Question: Where are you all hiding the brown sauce (HP, Daddies, etc, not steak sauce), and real bacon (the stuff with meat in it). Ok, this one's tongue-in-cheek (looking for the sauce!) - different countries, different foods... But dammit I like brown sauce!

Question: How on earth do bars do business in CA ? You need a car to get anywhere, and you can't drink pretty much anything when you get there !

Question: Was it really necessary to keep all us visa applicants waiting outside in the pouring rain for 2 hours before sitting in the embassy for 5 hours (waiting for a 5-minute interview), dripping on the carpet ? Sure I know all this is in the name of security, but this was London for crying out loud - we're used to being bomb-targets, we just prefer to be dry at the time...

So despite my moaning, I'm happy to be here - I've landed a great job at a fantastic company that's going places, and I'm on a steady salary, which is nice when you've been a partner in a s/w consultancy. To quote a friend of mine - sometimes it's nice to come in out of the rain for a while. If you've never managed a company you probably won't understand, but if you've got your degree, think of that weight that lifted from your shoulders after your last exam, and you'll come close...

So, alls well in the land of the free, apart from the brown sauce, that is :-)

Simon

So, I'm annoyed.

I'm moving to the USA, which amongst other things means selling various things I can't/don't want to take with me, and Ebay would seem to be an ideal way to get rid of reasonably expensive items (motorbike etc.)

First ever time as a seller (thought I've bought lots before), and it's been a disaster. There exist trolls who simply bid on things without any intention of paying, and Ebay (the organisation) tolerate this - there's little protection for sellers.

Ebay charge you a fraction of the "sold" price, even if the person doesn't pay up. So, the only person out of pocket is the seller - it's in Ebay's interest to continue the status quo, and there is no obvious attempt to track down the scumbags who have made false bids. The only action taken is to invalidate the bidding account, and what good is that ? The saying "shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted" comes to mind!

So, you can either re-offer the item to another bid (and if you do this, all trace of the previous unfulfilled auction seems to disappear! Hmmm.) or relist the item. You can't do the former then the latter. Neither consequence is spelt out (or if it is, it's sufficiently misleading that someone who's just been the subject of a scammer can easily miss it).

So, you decide to offer to the next lowest, and that doesn't work (the guy only gets 24 hours to respond, and emails you later saying he'd missed the chance, grrr).

Then, with impatience and anger rising, you re-list (at your own expense again) the item on Ebay, and EXACTLY THE SAME THING HAPPENS.

This time, I was alert, and did a 'By Buyer' search - the offending character (ladd_eugene) had bids outstanding totalling over £20,000. I cancelled her bid, and the system told me she had bid £2000 on my auction (when the bike eventually sold for £561...)

So, if I was ebay, and I wanted to deflect criticism of not caring (due to it ultimately benefiting ebay) about sellers, I would do some of:

• Require that bids are not more than 1.5 times the current bid or bid + {$£}500, whichever is smaller.
• Offer a deposit of {£$}100 which users could voluntarily subscribe to, which removes the above limit. They have to pay the deposit in advance, and it counts towards the item. They lose it if they screw around of course
• Only allow bids on (user's feedback) + 1 auctions at a time
• Limit total bid exposure by username.
• Send the seller an email whenever a categorised item has a bid outside 2 std deviations from the normal for that category. Should be possible to use browser keyword searches to define the categories.
• Allow sellers to see the maximum bid price from buyers.
• As a consequence, prevent bids from the same IP as the sellers as well.

The current situation just stinks, if you're a seller. Some lowlife can ruin your sale with impunity, and there's no comeback. This is a pain under normal circumstances, but it's a *royal* pain when you're about to leave the country, and time is of the essence. Failed auctions I could have done without...

Still annoyed, but at least I sold the item this time, even if it cost me about £35 more than it ought to have, and hey, in a week's time I'll be in California [grin]

Simon