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Discord revolutionizes online conversations with... forums
Discord, the social messaging service that helped to displace old-school internet forums, now wants to bring them back.
As internet forums die off, finding community can be harder than ever
Before social networks took over the internet, message boards were perhaps the most essential way for people to come together online and talk about whatever was on their minds. Our discussion spaces have evolved dramatically, though -- message boards aren't as important as they used to be, thanks to the decade-long onslaught of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and more. Many formerly prominent destinations are closing up shop, including the message board I called my online home for well over a decade.
CompuServe's still-active forums are finally shutting down
It turns out that Instant Messenger (AIM) isn't the only thing that AOL is shutting down next month. On December 15th, Oath (AOL and Engadget's dear parent) is also closing what remains of the CompuServe forums which, yes, still actually exist. CompuServe had the first ever mainstream online forums well before the internet came along, letting users connect to its central servers via old-school dial-up modems. You can credit (or blame) the company for allowing some of the first online group chats about subjects like investing, politics and religion.
'Witcher' developer forum hack exposed 1.8 million gamers
If you're a big enough The Witcher fan to have joined CD Projekt Red's official forums, you may be in for an unpleasant surprise. Members signed up to Have I Been Pwned have received emails warning them of a reported hack in March 2016 that compromised over 1.8 million forum accounts. Passwords were encrypted, thankfully, but you're encouraged to change your login just in case. The issue isn't so much the actual threat as the lack of notifications -- for many, this is the first sign that something went horribly wrong.
Epic Games is the latest hacking victim
Not even a chainsaw bayonette (or the stealthy gent up above) could stop Epic Games from falling prey to hackers. The Unreal Engine-maker sent emails to members of its forums announcing that unauthorized access to usernames, email addresses, passwords and birthdates may have been accessed by an intruder. From the sounds of it, the only channels affected were related to Bulletstorm, Gears of War, Infinity Blade, UDK, and older Unreal Tournament titles.
Internet forums are good for you
Internet forums have a positive impact on life satisfaction and lead to increased involvement in communities outside the confines of the online world, according to a study published in Computers In Human Behavior. Redditors might be doing it right. The study approached users on a range of interest, lifestyle and hobby forums. The study split users into two groups: stigmatized subjects (like mental health discussion), and non-stigma related forums (sports, cooking and the rest). They were then polled about their reasons for joining the forum, how they felt about it, their life satisfaction and offline engagement with "issues raised in the forum". Author lead Dr. Louise Pendry of the University of Exeter said that: "As well as finding answers, our study showed users often discover that forums are a source of great support, especially those seeking information about more stigmatizing conditions."
Crowfall says 'play2crush' wasn't meant to mean 'everyone else sucks'
Were you put off by Crowfall's hardcore "play2crush" reveal just before Christmas? You weren't alone. One player told studio ArtCraft that the original announcement "felt a little too political attack ad" -- and he got an official response on the game's new forums. Creative Director J. Todd Coleman explained that Crowfall's controversial introduction wasn't quite meant how it was taken: You know, that original play2crush site wasn't meant to be "everyone else sucks." It was a mea culpa. We're the guys who make these games. The first line was "where did WE go wrong?" "We" didn't mean everyone else, it meant us. It meant me. I wrote that because I feel like I have let you down... by not pushing myself to innovate. It was too easy to pitch "wow in space" or "wow with vampires" or "wow with space vampires." I want to fix that. I want to build something new. The game released its first screenshot and city siege concept art (below) yesterday, exposing a stylized graphical theme and meaty statistics panel. You can sign up for the beta by rolling up an account on the official site right now. The mysterious countdown timer on the front page currently has just over 40 days remaining. [With thanks to Leiloni for bringing the post to our attention.]
Blizzard opens new dedicated Ashran forum
If you have an opinion about Ashran, now there's a place for you to take it. Blizzard CM Kaivax posted that there's a new forum dedicated solely to Ashran. It's right here, although it doesn't appear to have a counterpart in Europe yet. Ashran's been a hot topic as of late for problems with queue times and difficulty in balancing it - with some players having used Ashran to gear up it's not not uncommon to see people discussing one faction utterly dominating the zone now. If you're interested in Ashran and possibly in contributing your voice to the discussion (you may have a good suggestion for fixing the issues, or just a perspective that hasn't been considered yet) then head over to the new official forum for the PvP zone and make your voice heard.
Sound Off! What apps do you use to cash in on your car?
When you live in a crowded city, having a vehicle can sometimes feel more like a burden than a luxury. Finding parking, paying for insurance, dealing with the occasional fender bender – managing all of these things could drive even the most serene among us to the brink. But hey, it's 2014, so of course a handful of smart folks have come up with ways to make your car work for you instead: Lyft, Getaround and... what are we missing? Tell us in the Engadget forums! Or if you think it's better to ditch a car completely -- how would you go about selling it online? Sound off, people.
Blizzard makes changes to official forums
So if you use the official forums a lot, you should probably be aware that they're going to change. This November 12th (known by its official name, Aaah it's the Day Before Warlords) the role sub-forums - Damage Dealing, Healing and Tanking - will be closed, along with several others. In addition, the Fan Fiction forum is being merged into the World's End Tavern forum. Kaivax has the skinny. Kaivax - Changes coming to the WoW forums Nov. 12 On November 12 at 6:00 p.m. PST, we will be closing the following sub-forums permanently: Tech & Science Books & Comics Raid & Guild Leadership Community Events & Creations Class Roles ->> Damage Dealing, Tanking, & Healing Additionally, the Fan Fiction forum will be merged into the World's End Tavern forum at that time. We will also be opening some new sub-forums immediately thereafter, with the launch of Warlords of Draenor. We suggest that you save any content in any sub-forum (that you wish to keep a copy of) as soon as possible. source So if you make use of those forums, and there's something on there you want to keep or save, get on that - it's gone in six days.
Trion's games DDoSed again
E-thugs are at it again: Trion's MMO services are once again under attack. Last night, the official RIFT twitter account announced, "Ascended, our servers are experiencing a DDoS at the moment. We're working to restore network stability as quickly as possible." On the official forums, RIFT Executive Producer Bill "Daglar" Fisher confirmed that ongoing RIFT lag problems are compounded by the attacks: "Adding on top of the oddities that people are reporting, we've also been under DDOS attacks and our network team has been working to minimize the impacts of these." Overnight, even the first few pages (five, as of the time of this writing) of the RIFT general forums were flooded with spam from attackers. Several low-traffic forums on the ArcheAge boards have also been spammed early this morning. [With thanks to Omedon for the tip and apologies to Daglar for the temporary demotion!]
Enter our 'In The City' sweepstakes and we'll fly you to NYC for Expand!
So there's this free Engadget Expand shindig happening November 7-8 at the Javits Center in New York City that you've probably heard about. We've announced a bunch of exciting speakers, including RJD2 and Arati Prabhakar (who heads up DARPA), and plenty more will be added soon. You're super pumped and can't wait to experience the future of technology, but don't live anywhere near NYC. What's someone like yourself to do?
Sound Off! Are you sticking with Facebook Messenger?
Facebook's Messenger app isn't new -- it's been around since 2011. It was up to users to decide if they wanted a separate app or if they liked exchanging messages inside the regular Facebook app. Now if users tap the message icon on Facebook, a message appears telling them to move over to Messenger. It's no longer an option; it's a requirement Facebook put in place to deliver "the best mobile messaging experience possible."
Salem releases first major content patch under new management
The colonial perma-death MMO Salem has faced some publisher problems over the last year or so, but indie dev Mortal Moments has swooped in to take over the ambitious project recently. Project Lead John Carver made a formal introduction when the transfer was finalized, but what's even more interesting is the 51-page forum thread that answers many of our burning questions about the game's future. Carver touches on some important points that could get Salem back on MMO gamers' radars: "Some could argue that it has had its day. Some could say that the people have spoken and that the game itself is over, finished, destroyed. But is it? Salem offers the promise of witches and paranoia but currently delivers neither. Salem tantalizes us with the prospects of creatures in the darkness and all that is the unknown in Colonial America, yet we have only argopelters. Salem entices us with the wealth of possibilities afforded by Animal Husbandry, Alchemy, Wagons and Ships, none of which are in the game yet." If these staple features were finally added to the game by this new developer, would potential players give it another shot? Would you? Salem has just released its first major content update under Mortal Moments, and the studio aims to stay true to the game's original plan (no pay-to-win, no PvE servers, etc). [Thanks for the tip, Chrysillis!]
Infinite Crisis refocuses development on new player experience
The dev team behind DC-Comics-based Infinite Crisis has come to a realization: there are a lot of MOBAs out there. So to set themselves apart from the rest, Creative Director Cardel "Annuvin" Kerr has penned a post on the official forums detailing how the devs will be putting some new content on hold to focus on revamping the new player experience. Luckily for us, the major tasks have been bullet-pointed: We will be holding back new Champions until the September Update -- We're still building Champions behind the scenes, and will resume their normal release schedule starting in September. Balance patches will be released as we iterate on design improvements -- You can expect these updates about once a month. We will continue to focus on the iterative cycle that is the foundation of good balance. Technical patches will be released with balance updates to make the game more stable and less prone to crashes. Crashes lead to more AFKs, and that quite frankly, sucks – so we'll continue to push out fixes. Credit -- err, Bug Stomping -- We will continue to fix bugs that you file, and that we find on our own. Expect an even larger presence on the Forums -- We're working on a lot of stuff, and much of it is based on what we've seen you all doing and saying. As a result, you can expect even more posts from developers asking and answering questions! Be sure to check out the entire post for more details on the team's plans with Infinite Crisis over the next few months.
Path of Exile removes Snapshotting
Wondering what the folks developing Path of Exile are up to these days? A new dev blog from Grinding Gear Games details some major changes to the game as the Snapshotting mechanic is being removed. Snapshotting allows players to lock in the benefits of a specific set of items, passives, or gems and quickly swap them to another configuration, giving the combined benefits from both sets. While not technically illegal in the game, the devs say that it has hindered game balance for too long and needed to be removed. Check out the video after the cut to get a better idea of what Snapshotting is (was!), and be sure to read through the entire dev article for more information on how the game will be balanced moving forward.
Warlords of Draenor: High level characters vs. lower level content
In the new theorycrafting sticky on the Warlords of Draenor Alpha forums, there's a big post by Celestalon that explains how we're going to be able to solo old raids and such with the item squish making us proportionately less powerful in those raids. It's worth breaking down here, for those of us (like me) who enjoy that sort of thing for either fun or transmog. First up, all players will gain a damage reduction factors when attacked by creatures that are lower level, starting at Cataclysm content and heading down from there. Creatures from Mists of Pandaria and, presumably Warlords of Draenor will not be affected by this. So once a creature from Cataclysm content or below (Wrath, BC and Vanilla) attacks a character that outlevels them, there will be a formula that determines how little damage the character takes. Celestalon presented it as such. LevelDiff = PlayerLevel - CreatureLevel if (CreatureExpansion < Pandaria) then // 10% DR per level diff, with a floor of 10% DamageTakenFactor = max(1.0 - 0.1 * LevelDiff, 0.1) else DamageTakenFactor = 1.0 end What this means is that, when your level 100 character goes inside a level 80 Wrath raid, they'll have a very large reduction in how much damage they take.
Reddit's tech community just got scolded, is no longer front page news
Thousands of self-managed forums make up Reddit's sizable corner of the internet, but only a few dozen bear the coveted "default" status that places them on every new user's list of subscribed communities. Now, there's one fewer. A dramatic saga of censorship, poor moderation and keyword-based deletion scripts have ousted the technology subreddit (/r/technology) from the default list. The change came shortly after users sleuthed out a number of keywords that, if present in a post's headline, would cause it to be automatically deleted. The community's moderators eventually confirmed that a bot called AutoModerator was used to cull content -- specifically targeting politicized or controversial terms. Unfortunately, the banned words included terms like anti-piracy, SOPA, NSA, Snowden, Bitcoin and even CEO, ensuring that dozens of hot-topic stories would never make it to Reddit's front page.
How much transparency do you want?
It's come up time and again, and it's always an issue that's fascinated me -- how much information on how World of Warcraft is designed do we actually want? Some of us would be bored to tears by a technical discussion of the whys and wherefores of a design decision, while others would be absolutely fascinated by it. I'm sure no one's forgotten about the era of the 'Ghostcrawler experiment' and the sharp rise of communication from the game's developers. Today we have quite a bit of communication from people like Brian Holinka, Chadd Nervig, Ion Hazzikostas, Owen Landgren and others. I've always felt that it was a very good thing overall for the game to have that channel, with the devs taking time to explain design changes and what they mean. The question becomes, how useful is it to you, and how effective is it in getting players to understand the why behind changes? Frankly, I think we all know that for every player who reads and absorbs dev interaction in the spirit in which it is meant, there's another who uses it simply as an excuse to blame said person for ruining the game. This goes back to before the time when devs were the ones delivering the news, mind you. I remember the days of Tseric, and the way the forums made him the villain in their self-generated narrative.
EU class role forums are now closed [Updated]
The class role forums have closed their doors. Takralus posted on them yesterday that they're doing so to concentrate the discussion into existing forums (which I'm taking to mean the class forums). The role forums are currently in read-only mode, and will remain that way until April 8, when they are removed entirely. The role forums were launched in October 2008 with the original intent of replacing the class forums. Blizzard backtracked on that quickly after the player base revolted, and they left everything in place as it is today. Ghostcrawler was a big poster on the role forums and used them extensively before he made his switch to Twitter. However, as we all know, the forums were not always a happy place. Takralus' full announcement after the break. Update 3:22 p.m.: Bashiok let us know that this only applies to the EU. They have no intention of closing the US class role forums at this time.
