Broken Toys

Is it just me, or is EvE a really nice game concept hamstrung by some ridiculously terrible implementation? I enjoy some of its game mechanics and ideas, but it can be hard to get into due to its unfriendly UI and design aesthetics. The level of either ignorance or laziness to use boot.ini for your game configuration is just astounding.

Let me clarify that: the terrible CLIENT implementation. It’s quite the achievement on the server side due to the shard size that they maintain, however, I get the impression that they’re pretty strong on the server stuff and perhaps not so much on the client side.

I just read through the first few pages of that first link and I have to say that the level of technical ability/knowledge is impressive.

Or perhaps my expectations of forums are just really low from my experience with WoW forum.

How did this make it past QA?
For people that are not computer smart, this ‘oops’ might be costly.

Anydiem: The UI became much more customizable with this patch. You can now move, resize, lock & integrate most of the UI elements. Its a step in the right direction.

Yes, but does the graphics patch have the giant ship-swallowing interstellar women? I mean, they seemed to promise that as a new feature…

(referring, of course, to a much earlier post…)

http://brokentoys.org/2007/10/27/there-may-be-some-subliminal-message-here/

I am a bad person. I laughed very loudly at this.

When I first started playing Eve, I thought the devs were joking about how much they drank. Their posts often had drinking references, but I just cynically figured they believed the young punks buying their game would think that was cool.

Now, I’m convinced they really are drunk all the time. It’s the only explanation for all the weird stuff that goes on with this game.

Heheheh! So many paid shills working overtime to cover CCP’s ass

“Or perhaps my expectations of forums are just really low from my experience with WoW forum.”

Whatever are you talking about? Couldn’t be the time AVG flagged a Warcraft file as a trojan and legions of failures insisted it was Blizzards fault for putting a trojan in their latest patch, completely ignoring the fact that the patch survived many AVG updates before the file was flaged, or that the file in question existed on both instalation CDs.

Couldn’t be that.

“Or perhaps my expectations of forums are just really low from my experience with WoW forum.”

Whatever do you mean? It’s not like when AVG flagged a WoW file as a trojan, all the idiots on the forums insisted that Blizzard had supplied a trojan in their latest patch, despite the fact that the file exists on the instalation disks, was never altered, and multiple AVG updates came out between the patch and the problem day.

Oh right, they did.

So, um, did any of you see the latest cries of “Blizzard hates Canada”? The new twist is that “the previous contest was open to Canadians, so Blizzard is just lazy and inconsistant.”

The last contest was a submission-judging contest. The current one is a lottery. Figure it out, Canuckle-kids.

Oh come on! That wasn’t posted when I went to retype it!

Good God, are you two psychics?

Man.

Bah pretenders! WW2OL did that about 4-5 years ago with a patch that wiped people’s HDs who had a certain configuration. boot.ini file? Weak!

How did this avoid the Stupidity tag? Curious minds want to know.

Ah HA! THAT explains where my boot.ini file went to last night. I was wondering just what it was that had caused it to go poof on me.

I remember SOE downloading a Word Macro virus… Why? Because, there was no need to virus scan a patch before release at least that is what SOE thought.

Now we have a company that released a patch that no one at the company fully tested on an XP box.

People who make games become over confident and that leads to huge, stupid mistakes.

Pools of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor (the remake not the old Gold Box classic) was made with a demo version of InstallShield. If you tried to uninstall it without patching (a very likely scenario given the horridness of the actual game), then it would randomly delete large swathes of your Windows install.

I believe Ron Paul is behind this, a first step in his no foreign shenanigans.

“Good God, are you two psychics?”

No, no. The first post didn’t show up and I got an error, so I retyped it, but accidently put in a different name. PM is Pat. Pat… M! (I also used a different email, for no good reason.)

So I feel like a goof for posting off-topic junk twice.

Your title had me seriously frightened for a second or two!

Note to self: when designing software, always, ALWAYS give data files a unique prefix.

I predict ZERO repercussions for CCP apart from a few lost accounts. Its a small hinky and rather corrupt company – losing one dev for this fiasco is gonna be like losing half their live team . If the previous corruption scandal had no effect on CCP – neither will this debacle.

This is MMOG gaming people! Crack dealers get away with occasionally spiking the dope and killing some of their customers – but eventually they all come back to the dealer.

Its the nature of the MMO beast. Even with a mediocre product, you get to treat your customers like twats. Good deal what!…

This is the sort of thing that just makes me want to go back to the floppy demo load of DOOM. Better yet, checkers. Checkers can’t brick my computer.

./boot.ini, /boot.ini

Not seeing a difference here.

Let’s not forget a hat-tip to Window’s pathetic security model for making this all possible.

Oh, sorry [CLICK] Vista [CLICK] fi–[CLICK]–xed [CLICK] that….

@troop

In all fairness we (WWIIOL) only deleted the nt.dll and then only in open beta. Even we wouldn’t let that go LIVE. Hehe. I feel for those guys. It’s pretty humbling to have to tell your players not to turn off their computers until you can get a fix out and even more humbling to realize that if you miss one, then there’s no way to contact that player again. Ah those were the days.

Technically, this only broke pre XP SP2 machines, the rest can boot without boot.ini (they flash a warning about it missing), but it’s a pretty major Oops

I think this is biggest fuck up ever by a legit MMO. Years from now it will be a gamer tivia point that locks EVE into a spot in history(among nerds like us.)

I suspect that some people will have to take there PCs into a shop to get this fixed – I bet CCP will end up paying for it. 10 free days of play or something like that isnt going to cut it.

Boot.ini trainwreck? Cake.
Icing? CCP says “Yeah, you know our PvP endgame stuff – the whole conquering regions/sovereignty/POS warfare thing? Don’t do it until we say you can, because Trinity broke it in all sort of interesting ways. Anyone who ignores this will be banned for exploiting”

28 hours AFTER patch deployment and dozens if not 100’s of POS’s were destroyed and looted by people exploiting bugs, which have had no punishment done to them.