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On Mac OSX, It Installs Internet Explorer, And On Linux, It Forces You To Vote Republican
Well, that’s an unfortunate patch bug.
CCP’s latest major patch to the EVE-Online client, Trinity, comes with an optional DX9-enhanced graphics patch that dramatically improves the visual quality of the in-game graphics through remade models, textures, and HDR. It also has an unfortunate bug: the incredibly stupid choice of boot.ini as a game configuration file, coupled with an errant extra backslash in the installer configuration. The result is that anyone who installs the enhanced graphics patch overwrites the windows XP c:\boot.ini file with the EVE client configuration file, bricking the machine on the next boot. Discussion in a couple of forums threads is becoming understandably heated.
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about 2 years ago
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.
about 2 years ago
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.
about 2 years ago
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.
about 2 years ago
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/
about 2 years ago
I am a bad person. I laughed very loudly at this.
about 2 years ago
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.
about 2 years ago
Heheheh! So many paid shills working overtime to cover CCP’s ass
about 2 years ago
“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.
about 2 years ago
“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.
about 2 years ago
Oh come on! That wasn’t posted when I went to retype it!
about 2 years ago
Good God, are you two psychics?
Man.
about 2 years ago
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!
about 2 years ago
How did this avoid the Stupidity tag? Curious minds want to know.
about 2 years ago
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.
about 2 years ago
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.
about 2 years ago
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.
about 2 years ago
I believe Ron Paul is behind this, a first step in his no foreign shenanigans.
about 2 years ago
“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.
about 2 years ago
Your title had me seriously frightened for a second or two!
about 2 years ago
Note to self: when designing software, always, ALWAYS give data files a unique prefix.
about 2 years ago
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!…
about 2 years ago
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.
about 2 years ago
./boot.ini, /boot.ini
Not seeing a difference here.
about 2 years ago
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….
about 2 years ago
@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.
about 2 years ago
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
about 2 years ago
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.
about 2 years ago
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”
about 2 years ago
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.