What Game Devs Should Learn From EVE 270

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday May 20, 2010 @06:27AM from the watch-out-for-volcanoes dept.

An anonymous reader passes along this excerpt from Gamesradar about EVE Online's Council of Stellar Management (CSM), a group of elected player representatives that serve to facilitate communications between the developers and the community: "On the last day, the devs announced that after the earlier discussions about improving the CSM’s ability to effect change, the CSM was being raised to the status of its own department within CCP. This is revolutionary; in one swift move, the CSM went from what could be considered a glorified focus group to what CCP considers to be a 'stakeholder' in the company, given equal consideration with every other department in requesting development time for a project. That means the CSM — and the entire playerbase it represents — has as much influence on development projects as Marketing, Accounting, Publicity and all the other teams outside of the development team. This is, of course, the stated intention. But has any developer gone to such lengths for its fans?"

Aion Servers To Merge, XP Grind Softened 108

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday May 20, 2010 @02:00AM from the now-only-takes-one-and-a-half-eternal-souls dept.

Massively reports that NCSoft's fantasy MMO Aion will soon be getting a round of server mergers to balance player populations and shore up in-game economies. A newsletter from Aion producer Chris Hager also brought word that character transfers will be an option starting in June, and NCSoft will be "offering them to all of our players for free for a limited time." This is happening in the lead-up to the game's 1.9 patch, due on June 2, which contains a number of measures to make the XP grind a bit less harsh (among other things; patch notes). They're creating more quests, increasing XP rewards from existing quests, and implementing a system that "grants you experience bonuses as you continue to play."

Scientists Say Toads Can Predict Earthquakes 66

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday April 01, 2010 @04:38AM from the does-the-toad-think-it's-safe? dept.

reillymj writes "Researchers claim toads sensed a severe earthquake last year five days before it hit. Last spring's L'Aquila earthquake devastated the medieval city of the same name in Italy. Five days earlier, a group of biologists noticed some toads behaving strangely in a pond nearby that would later be the quake's epicenter."

8-Year Fan-Made Game Project Shut Down By Activision 265

Posted by Soulskill on Monday March 01, 2010 @02:09AM from the of-doors-and-ways-out dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Activision, after acquiring Vivendi, became the new copyright holder of the classic King's Quest series of adventure game. They have now issued a cease and desist order to a team which has worked for eight years on a fan-made project initially dubbed a sequel to the last official installment, King's Quest 8. This stands against the fact that Vivendi granted a non-commercial license to the team, subject to Vivendi's approval of the game after submission. After the acquisition, key team members had indicated on the game's forums (now stripped of their original content by order of Activision) that Activision had given the indication that it intended to keep its current fan-game licenses, but was not interested in issuing new ones."

Youtube Pulls Original "Rickroll" Video 97

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday February 25, 2010 @01:13PM from the keep-rolling dept.

@VentureBeat writes "Youtube pulled the original 'Rickroll' video Wednesday night. Don't worry, after a lot of email about the loss of such an important piece of cultural history, Youtube put it back up, saying that they're never gonna say goodbye to the video that's had over 30 million views."

Comment Re:Proudly Canadian (Score 1) 104

by mershin on Saturday February 20, 2010 @02:34PM (#31211484) Attached to: Tech Companies Say Don't Blame Canada For Copyright Problems

The CRIA went after a canadian based P2P distribution site (isohunt), but AFAIK has not gone after 'end-users'. Personally I don't think going after sites like isohunt does much to deter those that will download illegal copies. When 1 site goes down, 5 more come up, hosted in some foreign country.

I'd like to think that if movie & music (and other content) publishers adopted an online distribution mechanism for a fair fee, the industry would flourish instead of flounder. Case in point, last I heard iTunes wasn't doing too bad for itself. It has even allowed indy artists to have a business model that works, instead of trying to get picked up by a publisher, which is not an easy task.

At the end of the day, imho it's a matter of dinosaur business models screaming bloody murder because they're unwilling to adopt to the fast-changing technological world. I applaud the companies that have tried new content distribution models.
I think games are on the forefront, with platforms like steam, or EAs downloader. We just don't need those software boxes lying around anymore. Manuals can be online PDFs or websites easily, convenient, and cheaper to both the publisher & consumer.

Researchers Make a Case For Learning Through Video Game Creation 68

Posted by Soulskill on Monday January 25, 2010 @04:26AM from the now-third-graders-get-to-experience-crunch-time dept.

ub3r n3u7r4l1st sends along this snippet from Science Daily: "Computer games have a broad appeal that transcends gender, culture, age and socio-economic status. Now, computer scientists in the US think that creating computer games, rather than just playing them, could boost students' critical and creative thinking skills as well as broaden their participation in computing. ... 'Worldwide, there is increasing recognition of a digital divide, a troubling gap between groups that use information and communication technologies widely and those that do not,' the team explains. 'The digital divide refers not only to unequal access to computing resources between groups of people but also to inequalities in their ability to use information technology fully.' There are many causes and proposed solutions to bridging this divide, but applying them at the educational and computer literacy level in an entertaining and productive way might be one of the more successful. The team adds that teaching people how to use off-the-shelf tools to quickly build a computer game might allow anyone to learn new thinking and computing skills."

Comment Re:as good as WoW? (Score 1) 306

by mershin on Thursday February 22, 2007 @03:48PM (#18112552) Attached to: Ask CCP About EVE Online

hmmm.. I don't know where you got your numbers, but they are not correct. I don't know how many concurrent players a WoW server can handle. Based on the number of servers, one would assume not that many, perhaps in the 5-10k region per server? They do have 'server queues' for a reason :) Anyone know what the real number is for player/server in WoW? When Vanguard did beta tests, I believe their 'high cap' was somewhere in the 5-10k region, so that's where I'm taking that number, but it's still a guess at best.

EVE on the other hand has one single live server, and it supports 30k players+ at a time (I tend to see 10-25k on at any point.). The only place I can see where you got the 400 number is perhaps the current limitation of a zone within the eve server. If 400+ ppl just happen to be all staring at a each other in EVE, the server lag would be high due to having to send coordinate data of each player to every player there.

Perhaps there is a misunderstanding of the difference between total players per server vs total concurrent players connected to the server.

Example:
WoW = 50k per server before 'full', 5k concurrent connections allowed before it has a queue? (just a guess)
EVE = 160k subscriptions, so 160k per server, 30k+ concurrent connections. Their max # was in the 30k range. I don't know what their theoretical maximum could be. EVE likely lags more if there's too many players in the same region. It can likely handle a lot of players if they were all evenly spread out :)