Blizzard – Page 2 – Ciaran Laval

December 9, 2013

Nobody Does It Better, Makes Me Feel Sad For The Rest

Nobody does it half as good as you, baby you’re the best.

Second Life has long had strange issues, for example there is an issue known as “Prim drift” whereby a prim does not seem to be in the location where you last left it, or prims mysteriously seem to disappear and then reappear, it seems there may be an explanation for this!

The Guardian breaks the news: Spy agencies in covert push to infiltrate virtual world of online gaming. Allegedly, The NSA and GCHQ decided that they need to infiltrate The Horde in World Of Warcraft and human avatars in Second Life. Furries everywhere celebrate smugly at this news. This does possibly explain why The Horde seem to win more often than not in the Warsong Gulch battleground in World Of Warcraft.

Not surprisingly Linden Lab haven’t responded to The Guardians requests, The Guardian claims :

“Microsoft declined to comment on the latest revelations, as did Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life and former CEO of Linden Lab, the game’s operator. The company’s executives did not respond to requests for comment.”

However in the land of Azeroth, there has been a response :

“The California-based producer of World of Warcraft said neither the NSA nor GCHQ had sought its permission to gather intelligence inside the game. “We are unaware of any surveillance taking place,” said a spokesman for Blizzard Entertainment. “If it was, it would have been done without our knowledge or permission.” “

I’m sure that the NSA and GCHQ are delighted that their covert efforts went undetected by the GM’s in World Of Warcraft, I mean it would be far more embarrassing for them if Blizzard declared “Yeah, our GM’s knew all about it.”

However the article does suggest that Linden Lab were talking to the security services, indeed it seems Linden Lab tried to sell a use case of virtual worlds as being a place where you could observe the behaviours of non US citizens without leaving the USA. I’m sure those agents who quite enjoyed the idea of leaving US soil to observe the behaviours of non US citizens were a tad miffed about this, although wild speculation that they joined the PN or griefed sims with giant penises to wreak revenge over this suggestion have been strenuously denied. The article claims:

“In May 2007, the then-chief operating officer of Second Life gave a “brown-bag lunch” address at the NSA explaining how his game gave the government “the opportunity to understand the motivation, context and consequent behaviours of non-Americans through observation, without leaving US soil“.

Continue reading “Nobody Does It Better, Makes Me Feel Sad For The Rest”

November 6, 2013November 6, 2013

I Got Two Turntables And A Microphone

I downloaded a Sinclair Spectrum emulator for the android the other week. After the initial buzz of seeing all those old game titles from the eighties my interest waned. The android is a bit clunky for such games, many games don’t work and time has not been kind to many of them. However it was a thrill at first. When I had a Speccy as a kid, so did lots of my school friends. We’d share games (piracy as my teacher scolded us, so don’t try that at home). We’d go to each others houses, we’d have fun not only due to the games but because there was also a social aspect.

I left the Speccy behind many moons ago, as I did the Commodore Amiga after that, and I have been looking to see if there’s a legal Amiga emulator but will most likely go through the same cycle as I did with the Speccy emulator, thrill, then flat and no social side to keep the interest.

As it’s my blog I can draw comparisons between the Speccy and Second Life, a bit of a stretch it may be but I can draw them. The Speccy was not the height of technology on release, there were better products around but the Speccy caught the imagination. Therefore software developers were alerted to it and stretched the Speccy to limits beyond what many thought it was capable of, Lords Of Midnight springs to mind here. The Speccy had the people and of all the ingredients that make a product a success, that is arguably the most important one.

Roll forward many years and Second Life is simply where it’s at in virtual world terms. Cloud Party has some very impressive concepts going for it. I like their royalty system on content sales whereby if you sell an asset with royalties enabled, if someone else then sells another asset whilst using your asset as part of the build, you’ll receive a royalty payment. Cloud Party has also had materials for quite a while now. Another impressive apsect of Cloud Party is that objects are not the only limiting factor in a build. In Cloud Party you can have x amount of objects, or x amount triangles or x amount of bandwidth, whichever you hit first will strike the build limit. This is a well considered concept as objects are far from the only issue when it comes to performance.

Kitely has some impressive offerings, such as putting sims to sleep when not in use due to using a cloud based system. Kitely is also not only cheaper than Second Life, but for those who may only spend a few hours a month there they have a time based billing option and under any plan you get at least one free sim to play around with.

Inworldz is also cheaper than Second Life, Jim Tarber and the team are also moving in directions Second Life isn’t, as can be seen in the Inworldz Techblog where they inform visitors they’re implementing physX and project Thoosa, which is aimed at making everything run faster and more efficiently. Inworldz has also implemented Qarl’s mesh deformer project.

However despite these advances in other virtual worlds, Second Life still has that magical community ingredient and what makes this all the more impressive is that Second Life still has the community despite the fact that Linden Lab have been actively distancing themselves from the Second Life community for a few years now.

Continue reading “I Got Two Turntables And A Microphone”

June 22, 2012

Diablo III And The Mysterious Case Of Restricting Content

Blizzard, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to restrict people who buy the digital version of Diablo III from unlocking full game content for up to seventy two hours. Let’s just look at this again, someone buys the game and then can’t play the game properly. This is a shocking and appalling way of going about business.

Players are unable to get past Act 1 or level 13 until the account restrictions are lifted, these are unintended consequences of the account restrictions according to Rock, Paper, Shotgun. The intended consequences are:

No public game access for unverified digital purchasers.
No auction house access (real-money or gold) for unverified digital purchasers.
Unverified digital purchasers cannot trade items or drop items for other players to receive.
Unverified digital purchasers are not able to chat in any public or game channels.
Unverified digital purchasers cannot attach a custom message to friend requests, but they can send/accept friend requests, and play with their friends.
Global Play is not available for unverified digital purchasers.

Again let’s consider that this is for people who have purchased the game via digital download, not for people playing a demo of the game.

Continue reading “Diablo III And The Mysterious Case Of Restricting Content”

June 22, 2011June 22, 2011

Looking a Gift Horse In The Mouth

As I am not certified for a SL press pass, I look to the SL press for news and information on things happening at Linden Lab, I used to look at the main blog but that seems to be in sore need of some care and attention. The forums aren’t so bad, and the mesh forum for those interested in mesh, is interesting viewing, even for those who don’t like mesh, it’s interesting viewing! However for general information I keep an eye on the SL press and SL Press member extraordinaire; Inara Pey, has an interesting post regarding SL8B, or more to the point about the lack of Linden involvement at SL8B. I agree with the main thrust of Inara’s post, to quote in part:

“SL8B represents a marvellous opportunity for LL to reach out to the user community and communicate with us – so where are they?

I’m not talking about glad-handing or getting involved in in-depth discussions about who, what, when, where, how and why; rather I’m talking about getting up on stage and giving an overview of what is coming down the road, thing like:

What is happening with Viewer 2?
What is Mesh going to look like? (Given many haven’t see the results from the Beta Grid)
What is happening around service improvements like Group chat and server-side lag issues?”

The SL8B Blog itself is on its own blog, containing far more information about happenings than Linden Lab’s own official blog, have they outsourced the birthday event or something? I know Linden Lab officially take a hands off approach to SLCC.

Continue reading “Looking a Gift Horse In The Mouth”

November 12, 2010January 12, 2014

Worlds Can Collide Sometimes

Battle.Net the Blizzard partner site that caused a kerfuffle over the way they wanted to engage with Facebook and display real names on the forums has evolved into quite a useful tool. I can now talk to friends who are playing on different realms or even in different games in the Blizzard family and now that they’ve removed the threat of Facebook, real names on the forum and displaying your friends of friends when they shouldn’t be being displayed, it’s now something worthwhile.

However, at some point this sort of tool will be more beneficial if it extends across other worlds, such as Second Life, and allows you to talk to non Blizzard game users. There’s also something else they’ve introduced that’s handy, an authenticator. Basically, with this little USB device, you can only login to your account or the game, whilst it’s plugged in, and whereas such a device is far from perfect, it’s an improvement in security. Continue reading “Worlds Can Collide Sometimes”