LostStraw

I was just about to say that

Doing due diligence on trying to reduce false positives is probably very costly considering how many letters they'd have to send out to even make a dent in the pirate population. Note that the RIAA had trouble with this during their lawsuit campaign even though they only went after relatively few individuals. If the game sells 2 million units and the piracy rate is 50% that makes sending out 20,000 letters only cover a potential 1% of all people pirating said game. The resources to individually verify that each those 20,000 actually pirated the game would be astronomical in and of itself -- let alone actually to sue all of them individually. A company telling someone they will sue them unless they pay, even though the company would probably not actually go through with the lawsuit, sounds an awful lot like extortion to me. This is much worse than DRM of which I don't oppose for the most part (except for the restrictions on fair use). With DRM there's the option not to buy the product, or to possibly return the product (not true in all cases) if it's defective. With the mass mailing it's essentially a lottery that you're automatically entered into no matter what -- only the prize really sucks.

That was only one of the issues they pointed out. Yes, that's exactly why piracy is so popular. The tactic of trying to sue every pirate while having innocent people caught in the crossfire will most likely fail though. Currently the US Copy Right Group is running into roadblocks with their mass lawsuit against pirates. I figure a lot of this will hinge on how that case turns out. I'd rather have stronger, hardware based DRM...

Link It'll be DRM free I disagree strongly with the practice of "shake down" letters I'm conflicted Shake down letters? Do you also disagree with security guards nabbing shoplifters? Despite all the excuses (I was just testing it, I'm too poor, after completing it I've decided it's not worth anything, etc) people pirate because they can get away with it. There is no fear of being caught and punished. CD Projekt is attempting to change that, I hope it works out for them but I'm not convinced it will. When company A mass mails letters to people that says pay X dollars or we'll take a you to court -- that's a shake down. Especially if they send out enough of these letters (doesn't have to be very many) that it would be financial infeasible to take all or even a majority of the recipients to court. They're hoping to instill enough fear that a large percentage of the recipients simply fold and send them the money they're asking for. Usually the amount of money asked for is low enough that taking the risk of ending up in court is not an attractive option even from a time management perspective (time lost from work etc..). The problem that I have with this is that if an innocent person receives one of these letters what do they do? Do they just give in and send the company the money that's being asked for or do they take the risk they might wind up in court where they would have to pay much more in legal fees to defend themselves. Here's a research paper on piracy detection and false positives: http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/dmca_hotsec08.pdf

Link It'll be DRM free I disagree strongly with the practice of "shake down" letters I'm conflicted

I question APB's status as an MMO in the first place. It wasn't competing against WoW, it was competing against every other FPS on the market.. except it had monthly fees.

On a slightly related note to video games: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/f...-sale-doctrine/

Here's the gameplay trailer. The style is very different from the CG trailer... it looks very... Borderlands. http://www.gametrailers.com/video/pax-10-firefall/704072 From the website: http://www.firefallthegame.com/ So it seems it's a FPS MMO with an emphasis on instances and multiplayer modes, although, from the gameplay trailer it looked like there was a lot of open space to explore too. Edit: Some more information: http://www.gamingnexus.com/FullNews/Red-5-.../Item19442.aspx I will definitely be checking this game out when it gets released.

You can't do this on the PC though: http://www.maxconsole.net/content.php?41893

Apparently the launch has been plagued with technical problems.. bugs, crashes and what not. There's a patch for it out already but I have no idea what the current state of the game is as I don't own it.

It's not piracy, it's patent infringement. There's no mention of them using of any of Uniloc's protocols or software.. only the claim that they're infringing on a Uniloc's vague and over broad software patent.

Dungeon Siege 1 wasn't so limited It allowed up to 8 players in co-op and even included a multi-player only campaign. Dungeon Siege 2, however, only allowed up 4 players in co-op although according to the Wikipedia article on it there is a simple .ini file edit to allow up to 8.

http://www.spokeo.com/ I only searched for a few folks and couldn't find them but this does seem to be a popular site for people searches. There was a lot of information on the people who did come up in the results though.. although I can't be sure how accurate that information is. When looking up myself it gave some outdated address information and said I was in my mid 90's. There are probably better sites with more available information but it's not really something I want to dig into

The Facebook account of the moderator was recently closed, possibly due to the harassment. The mod in question is a paid employee of Blizzard and he's an important community manager working with Diablo 3 mostly. On the forums there are blue names and green names for moderators. The blue names are are Blizzard employees while the green names are volunteers from the community, I'm not sure how much power the green names have though. The forums have been quite bad since the game launched and it worries me that the people who troll the forums and cause it to be the cesspool it is right now will have access to this extra bit of information that will make identifying a person that much easier. The thing about data mining is not necessarily that one piece of information will reveal your identity but rather many small pieces will. People are upset about the change because they still want to participate in the official Blizzard community but also want to keep their real life and their game life as separate as they can. This can be especially important if ones peer group would ostracize them for playing such a game. It can also be important in terms of finding a job, employers already search through social networking sites and I expect this would be another potential avenue. The thing with social networking sites is that when I post information I expect it to be public and attached to my name.. not so much with a game forum.

This has to be one of the worst ideas.. ever. This will not take away the power from trolls, it will give them more tools to be even more malicious instead. Now they'll be able to imitate real individuals as well as be able to harvest a wealth of information on posters they want to harass online and off. This might get rid of the casual trolls but it opens up so many more avenues of attack that it's just appalling. It's not like blizzard doesn't have the income to hire more moderators and implement some decent forum systems that would reduce the trolling problems they have.... Protesting folks are already harassing one of the mods who gave out his real name (see the comments): http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/American...Gameriot.com%29

The PS3 uses a specialized version of OpenGL ES 1.0 and considering that this game is going multi-platform there must be some folks at Obsidian who know a bit about OpenGL. It's not just like it can just be recompiled though -- someone would need to convince the Square Enix folks that they would make more money from the port than it would cost to port it. Also.. I'm not so sure about automatically getting a Linux version just because there might be a Mac port. Rage is being developed for the Mac but so far there is no plan for a commercially supported Linux version -- although there probably will be something released. I'm just not sure Square Enix would be up to releasing a product that they didn't officially support.

It is possible that it will work with Windows7 64bit. I played through it just fine 2-3 weeks ago after changing the Dungeon Siege configuration around a bit. However, in searching for a solution to get it working it did seem that there were some folks who couldn't get it to run in a playable state.. so.. disclaimer: "Your results may vary."

Noooo....? Once every 3 hours there will be a small add for the VoIP service provider unless you pay an extra 1$ (for 30 days). The ads will only play upon entering a new instance so as not to interrupt the combat. Essentially it makes the monthly cost 11$ instead of 10$ if one absolutely can't stand the ads. The in-game VoIP service can be opted out of as well allowing the user to use another program in its place. Sooo.. it's really not that bad.

How do you beat Brayko if you have created a stealth/no combat character? I managed to do it on normal. He was the first boss I faced so I didn't even have that many points in stealth and no points in any other skills. It took a lot of running around and focusing on his minions with an assault rifle. Eventually the minions stopped spawning and it got a bit quite a bit easier as he didn't run off to the top balcony anymore and there weren't any other enemies to worry about.

Giant Bomb E3 XCOM interview: http://www.giantbomb.com/e3-2010-xcom-interview/17-2785/

Wii for the Xbox 360

I wonder if they've already finished all their hardcore stuff

Nope. Kinect wants you to get married and have kids.

That dialogue was so canned Kinect looks cool to me... just not so much for hardcore game

I remember the angry postings when some game companies started the one time online activation scheme and how it wasn't fair. Then more companies hopped on the wagon and it has pretty much become the norm for many AAA games. If other companies start to pick up the always online DRM I suspect the reaction to be the same and this DRM will seem much more fair when the next more intrusive DRM comes around. It takes one company to really step out and get the ball rolling -- now we just have to see if more companies follow suit and stick with it. EA did it with Command and Conquer 4 so I'm really intrigued to see if they'll implement it in any other titles too. Blizzard is essentially doing the same thing as well but in a much smaller and more subtle way with the removal of LAN multiplayer support in Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 -- taking a feature that was once available offline and making it online only. Activision also tested something like this out by not including any dedicated servers for Modern Warfare 2 but they have since reversed their stance and will be including them in the next Call of Duty title.