anonymous

I only know two people who play an MMO and they only play WoW, so that doesn't even count since I'm not going to play WoW. And they're not so much "friends" as just people I know in the same company that I work at. So . . . No, I don't know anyone who plays MMOs, I guess.

WTF is a Jonas Brother?

Does CCP Guard still kick puppies?

Steep learning curve? That's an understatement. There's no manual or guide. Just a randomly filled wiki and countless third party sites to refer to and hopefully after hundreds of hours of reading, you'll start to put things together.

There is a semi-official manual, now, put out by a third party. It's so comprehensive, that CCP even sells it in their online store now and recommends it.

The manual is in two volumes - each about 400 pages and selling for $50 (including shipping). That's right. A $100, 800 page manual for the game.

@SgtBaker1234556

It completely baffles me, also. I am a major open-source proponent, but sometimes you just need something very specific to address custom environments. That's often the case when you already have a special set of data, a special security need or authentication need, or you need certain hooks that simply don't already exist in an available solution.

However, writing a piece of forum software is simply not that complex. They may have had a year to do it, but it should only take a month to fully write, test, and implement a fairly simple forum with authentication. Everything their new forums did could have been quickly put together.

The last time I needed forum software, I didn't like how everyone just used pre-existing solutions on their sites so that users had to create a whole second account just for the forums and login separately. You see this almost everywhere and it's frustrating. So, I just wrote my own, so I could control authentication and session handling, entirely. I also didn't like that the most popular forum software NEVER has threaded discussions. That is so damn annoying. So, I wrote my own. The threaded portion was actually probably the most difficult to do correctly (recursion and pagination and all).

Anyway, I had it written and tested and ready for deployment in three weeks with no additional help. And after it was deployed, it served my 100,000+ members for over a full decade excellently.

So, when I see major mistakes like this . . . it really frustrates me. If a guy (kid, at the time, really) could put something together that is fully featured and secure from scratch in three weeks, why can't a group of professional developers at a several hundred person company do it? Especially since there are usually already existing tools to handle the security portions? (It's not like they'd have to write cookie handling or session handling and authentication entirely from scratch).

The very first rule of using cookies is that you never store anything other than a simple salted hash key. Everything else has to remain server-side.

That amateur oversight is bad enough, but the worse offense is that during the forum beta testing, CCP were alerted to these exact exploits by players. They ignored these warnings and released it, anyway.

I played Rift for about eleven hours a day for twelve straight days starting the hour it was launched, but haven't touched it since. What it comes down to is that it's just another typical MMO. It's a well-refined version of traditional MMO, but . . . it's still all "lots of people playing the same single player RPG in a big world with other people who are also playing their own instance of a single player RPG" and no "it's a player driven sandbox". As such, nothing about it is compelling enough to stay and it suffers the same generic feel that all the other MMOs tend to.

It's like a really good modern pop song. It may be well produced and catchy, but it gets old quick and is still just another meaningless pop song.

Damn, that's pretty generic looking. Did they copy and paste the characters from RF Online a few years ago? Or Aion?

Hell, yes. This could be the non-space-ship EVE-style MMO I've been pining for. Do it do it do it do it!

Above all, CCP.

For all the whines and criticisms they have to put up with saying that they're ruining the game or they don't care about it anymore, etc, etc. Their vision remains ambitious and amazing and seemingly impossible. They truly seem to put a lot of heart into their product and they are in the position not to let ambition be overridden by a publisher or other investor say "rush it out, we can't afford perfection". What other developers talk seriously about ten year plans and fifty year games? Who else spends several years frustrating customers with glorious promises of ambulation, but doesn't actually roll it out until they feel they have reached the right level of experience and realism?

More importantly, who else throws a massive party with bands and comes out on stage and performs songs for their audience and dresses up and gets half naked on stage and is otherwise willing to put themselves out there for the entertainment of their fans? Who else lets their fans so far into their far-out-there plans (most developers hide from it, because there's a risk of players holding them to promises that were just ideas being thrown around). Who else takes their own game so seriously? Who else has their own 3D designers get into a boxing ring and play chess in front of a massive crowd (all streaming live over the internet) and then beats the hell out of each other, until blood flows?

CCP is imperfect. EVE is imperfect. But damn, they always manage to draw me back in. They ruin me for every other MMO I'd like to play. Their ideals and endeavors and ambitions are so awe-inspiring and magnificent that you easily get caught up in the dream.

I love a lot of developers. I love a lot of individual developers within companies, too. But above all, CCP makes me feel like a giddy day-dreaming twelve year old boy all over again.