crisp-thinking
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TERA integrates technology to combat gold farming for North American launch
When Scott Hartsman made his comments regarding gold selling, it's unlikely he planned it to become such a focal point for so many other companies and games. But it's certainly become a focal point for players, and TERA's development staff has decided to take the war on gold selling a step further. It was announced today that the game's launch will see the integration of the Crisp Platform, an automated service set to monitor in-game behaviors to try and detect cheating, gold farming, and botting before a player has even noticed these things taking place. According to the official release, the platform is based around a steady analysis of player behavior, looking for erratic patterns and unusual behaviors to flag potential abuses. In theory, this will allow En Masse Entertainment's support staff access to easy data at a glance, allowing any attempts at gold farming to be detected and stopped before the point that the money gets put up for sale. How successful that will be is going to depend on the implementation, something we won't know about until the game's launch in spring of next year.
Parents can breathe a bit easier thanks to Crisp Thinking's NetModerator
Letting your children play MMOs can be a tricky balancing act for gamer parents. On the one hand, you want your children to have fun playing games online while gaining socialization and computer skills. On the other, you're a protective parent who wants to make sure your kids are safe -- without making them live in a bubble. You can teach them about online safety and how to protect themselves, but there's always the possibility that something will take a wrong turn. Thankfully, it seems that a company called Crisp Thinking have developed a tool to help parents in their fight for online safety. Their system, called NetModerator, has been put into place in kid-friendly MMOs like Free Realms and FusionFall to combat against predators, bullies, and the like. It watches for certain keywords and phrases during online interactions. When detected, the system will step in and moderate the conversations -- allowing for real-time changes in potentially dangerous situations, as opposed to a reactionary method of dealing with abusive or predatory accounts after the conversations have taken place. The entire concept is fascinating, so we're sure parents will want to pop over to VentureBeat's Games Beat and check out Dean Takahashi's great write up about this new technology. With an accuracy rate of 98.4% in terms of flagging dangerous and harmful conversations, and the ability to learn cloaked phrases, we're sure parents will be glad to hear that there's another layer protecting their kids from online danger. It's no replacement for the first line of defense -- good parenting -- but it certainly doesn't hurt. [Thanks, Pete!]
