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DayZ cracks down on 'Bounty' mod
You'd be hard-pressed to find a dedicated DayZ player who doesn't think the game's already exciting enough. Even so, there is a trio of gamers who have decided that the hardcore zombie survival mod needs some spicing up. Hence, the creation of a real-money version of the game called DayZ Bounty. DayZ Bounty requires players to pay per life but offers income in return if the gamer is good enough to take out NPCs and other humans. Co-creator James Ortiz said that it made the game far more interesting: "We figured that if people had a value on their life... there'd be something to fear besides the zombies." Unfortunately for the Bounty team, DayZ's creators are calling for an end to the mod. A spokeperson for the development team said that Bounty "undermined" the title, and asked for a cessation of the project. "It changes the focus of DayZ from being a creative, enjoyable, gritty gaming experience to a game that is based almost solely on financial gain," the spokesperson explained, "and that is not something we want to be associated with."
EVE Evolved: Three ways to break Retribution
EVE Online's upcoming Retribution expansion is set to revolutionise PvP with its brand-new criminal and bounty hunting systems. Players will be able to hunt down criminals who show their faces in highsec, and bounty hunters will track not just individuals but also entire corporations and alliances. If past expansions are any indication, however, the first thing players invariably do with any new feature is to try to break it. Some people will undoubtedly find ways to bend the new gameplay into scams, others will trick players into getting themselves killed for a few laughs, and a few will hunt for borderline exploits. We now know enough about Retribution's new features to figure out some of the ways they can be potentially abused. The ability to sell kill rights opens up a whole new scam based on tempting players with a juicy target and then pulling the rug out from under their feet. The new Suspect flag that lets players dispense justice to criminals can also be used to bait innocent players into getting themselves killed. There may even be a way to get rid of bounties for free, undermining one of the expansion's core mechanics. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at three potential pitfalls in the upcoming Retribution expansion, how they might work when the expansion goes live, and how to protect yourself from falling victim to them.
EVE Evolved: Bounty hunting and revenge
Last week I looked into the major PvP changes coming in EVE Online's upcoming Retribution expansion, from the piracy revamp to a new global flagging system that puts players in the driving seat of justice. This week CCP Games revealed full details of the upcoming bounty hunting system revamp, and I have to say I'm really excited. The new bounty system not only makes bounty hunting a viable profession again but also gives players a way to deal significant financial damage to their enemies without getting their hands dirty. As if that weren't enough, players will even be able to enforce the law on their own terms, trawling high-security space for criminals and lighting them up for everyone to kill. Corporate- and alliance-level bounties will push grudges to new levels, enabling a new type of passive financial warfare. The new bounty system can also be used as a tool to motivate troops into battle, a way to incentivise boring but necessary starbase warfare, and even a method for running tournaments. In this week's EVE Evolved, I get ridiculously excited about EVE's upcoming bounty hunting revamp and explain why it makes the Retribution expansion a complete game-changer.
EVE Online dev blog discusses Bounty System revamp
It takes some impressive cojones for a game developer to come right out and say that one of its game's systems is broken, but that's exactly what CCP has done in the latest EVE Online dev blog. "The bounty system is broken!" reads the opening to the post, which -- surprise! -- focuses on all the ways the game's current bounty system is borked, and more importantly, how CCP plans to go about fixing it in the upcoming Retribution release. CCP's main goal with the bounty system revamp, according to the post, is to "give people faith that money they put into the bounty system has a fair chance of actually leading to their target crying tears of fear and frustration." Lovely! CCP also wants to "support bounty hunting as a career choice, preferably in a way that makes it possible for newer players as well as older players to get involved." To top it all off, the studio is expanding the bounty system to cover corporations and alliances as well, so if you've got a grudge against a corp and the money to put all its members six feet under, you're in luck. The full list of changes coming to the system is mind-numbingly extensive, but if you'd like all of the fine details, you should head on over and give the official post a read-through.
Alleged HP TouchPad running Android appears, can be yours on eBay (update: and another one!)
In an extraordinarily convenient turn of events, one buyer of a firesale-priced HP TouchPad at Best Buy a couple of days ago claims his came out of the box with an extra special treat -- it's running Android, 2.2 to be exact. A possible explanation for the existence of this unicorn tablet can be seen in the two YouTube videos posted of the device so far, where it flashes a Qualcomm Innovation Center (Quic) logo which suggests it could be some kind of development project that slipped into retail. We queried Qualcomm about this TouchPad's provenance ourselves and received only a "We have no comment on the video" in return, so the decision to believe that it's real or a particularly well executed hoax is yours. Now, you can be the first to solve this riddle since the owner has put it up for sale on eBay. Need another potential perk? How about the ability to snag a TouchPad-running-Android bounty posted by HacknMod that's up to $2,150 as of this posting. Relevant links are below, including the initial Reddit post, both videos and the auction, so while our credit cards will remain securely in our wallets those who are more trusting -- or just can't believe that anyone would would be dumb enough to try and sell a fake -- can put a bid in if they so choose. Update: Apparently one of our own commenters, Shahzeb Jiwani, has come into possession of a similar device. Luckily for us, he's chosen to make a ROM dump available over on RootzWiki, so check out his video after the break or head over to the thread there as they try and find out how to make this work on everyone else's $99 tablet. [Thanks, David & Dennis]
Neato XV-11 robot vacuum gets its very own open source LIDAR hack
There's nothing like a little bounty to light a fire under a group of open source fanatics, is there? We saw this principle applied recently when Adafruit offered up cold, hard cash for an Open Source Kinect driver, and now one enterprising reader over at robotbox.net has gone and hacked the LIDAR unit on a Neato XV-11 robot vacuum -- and won $401 for the effort. What's this mean to you? Well, the gentleman (who goes by the nom de hack Hash79) can now read data sent from the optical ranging hardware on the vacuum to a PC. There has been a pretty enthusiastic group of hackers surrounding the device for a while now and now with a little hard work (and a $399 autonomous robot vacuum) you too can have a 360 degree scanning LIDAR with one degree accuracy and a 10Hz refresh rate. Pretty sweet, right? Video after the break.
Officers' Quarters: Accelerating guild achievements
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available from No Starch Press. News broke last week of a new Cataclysm beta patch that added a host of guild achievements to the game. MMO Champion has the full list. Some of these achievements -- such as looting 200,000 gold from creatures -- you may decide to allow to simply accumulate over time. After all, most of them can be earned through the natural course of events, assuming your members participate in all aspects of the game. However, if you'd like to pursue these guild achievements aggressively, this column is for you. Let's take a look at how you can accelerate some of these achievements and how you can motivate your guild to help. First of all, let's talk about the motivation that the game itself will provide. Earning guild achievements, according to August's guild advancement Q&A, provides "nice, fat chunks of experience [that] feel great when you get 'em." We also know from blue poster Mumper that "anything that grants guild XP will also grant guild faction." Putting two and two together, we can conclude that earning a guild achievement will also award the players who earned it a hefty dose of guild reputation. This extra guild rep and guild experience may be motivation enough. But why stop there? Let's take an active role, as officers, in providing organization and incentives.
EVE mission runners and their tormentors rejoice! New Level 4 agents added
Mission running in EVE Online is one of the more lucrative activities players can spend their time doing, at least while in the safety of high security space. The cumulative rewards from NPC bounties, loyalty points, salvage, and loot -- in addition to the mission rewards from NPC agents -- make Level 4 missions a decent ISK/hour income for many of EVE Online's pilots. Level 4 missions are the most popular, due to their relative ease and multiple battleship (high bounty) NPC spawns which yield better loot drops and more salvage components, as well as optimal loyalty point gain. However, the grouping of agents that give the best missions leads to 'mission hubs' where hundreds of players operate in the same solar systems. The latest dev blog by EVE's lead content creator CCP Molock is simply titled "New Level 4 Agents", and deals with dispersing the crowds (and clutter) from some of the high sec mission hubs in New Eden. CCP Games has added twenty-three new level 4 agents to the game in locations a bit removed from the heavily populated mission hubs, hopefully encourage more mission runners to fill quieter solar systems in the galaxy. Molock lists the new agents, along with their corporation and quality, as well as system security ratings for each location.
Empyrean Age details revealed in EVE developer chat
MMORPG.com invited a few of the EVE Online staff from CCP Games to participate in a live developer chat this past Sunday. MMORPG.com was kind enough to provide a complete log of the chat, which was hosted by their own Community Manager, Laura 'Taera' Genender. Among the EVE Online devs present were CCP Greyscale (game designer/factional warfare), CCP Ginger (ISD manager/storyline), t0nyG (lead writer), and CCP Wrangler (community manager). The developer chat was primarily focused on the changes that The Empyrean Age and its factional warfare will bring, but the CCP staff addressed a number of other issues and concerns as well:
HTC Kaiser fans cough up over $5,000 for homebrew video drivers
Sure, it seemed like we'd heard the end of the story on HTC phones and the case of the missing drivers, but the cats over at the xda-developers forum have something else in mind. There is currently a $5199.51 bounty on offer from various members of the group for a hacker (or hackers) who can come up with drivers to get their Kaisers' Direct 3D up to par, thus increasing the video capabilities of the phone. If you've followed the case, you'll know that HTC has essentially stonewalled users looking for an upgrade to their poorly performing handsets, and has intimated that if customers want improved video performance, they should look to future hardware as opposed to upgrades on their current models. Clearly owners are looking to take matters into their own hands -- and they're willing to pay for it. We can't wait to see what they come up with, and if anyone out there has the ability and the time, here's a stack of cash that could be yours.[Thanks, Jaime]
$10,000 Mac hack bounty not yet claimed
Update: One of the two targets has been compromised.How do you spice up a security conference in lovely Vancouver, BC with a sense of risk, reward and fun? If you're the organizers of CanSecWest, you offer a prize to anyone who can work an exploit on two MacBook Pro machines; said prize, originally just the laptops themselves, is now a cool $10,000 thanks to sponsor & security appliance vendor TippingPoint. Both machines are freshly patched with Thursday's security updates.As of earlier today, ZDnet blogger Ryan Naraine reports that nobody has claimed the bounty, and conference organizers have moved to the scheduled phase II plan; challengers, who originally had to attack the machine remotely over the network, now may send URLs to the judges and have them opened in Safari. Happy hunting!graphic: Sebastiaan de With[via MacDailyNews]
Apple TV gets RSS plugin, game emulation and $1000 bounty for external media drive support
Oh it's on now. Engadget posted some more juicy bits for those thirsty to hack their Apple TV to do everything from read RSS to solving the holy grail of complaints: support for using an external USB drive as the media drive, thereby circumventing the limit of the device's pathetic 40GB drive.First up is a slick RSS plugin for the Apple TV (pictured) that allows you to download and read news and blogs via RSS. Created by twenty08, the installation sounds fairly simple, as is editing the actual RSS file to add whatever feeds you like. Plenty more is on the way for this plugin, however, including extracting images from feeds and playing embedded videos right in the RSS item itself. Since the Apple TV and the very hackable technology that runs it are still shiny and new to everyone, twenty08 reminds us that hacks like this merely need a little time to develop and mature.Another more bizarre hack is support for Apple TV game emulation, with YouTube user WildRoosterFilms posting a video of Super Mario Brothers running on the device with a hack that enables an N64 controller to drive the game. Check out the AwkwardTV wiki for more details on how to get this up and running.Last but in no way least is Apple TV Hacks' announcement of a $1000 bounty to whoever can enable support for using an external USB drive for the Apple TV's media storage. While plenty of Apple TV users are happy to stream some of their content that the device's puny drive can't hold, this bounty clearly shows an interest from plenty of other users who are excited to have more on-device space for storing everything locally on the Apple TV itself. There are a number of criteria that must be met before the cash is handed over, however, so check out the rules if you think you have a shot at answering the prayers of claustrophobic Apple TV owners.
New Bounty Hounds screens revealed, ships Sept. 12
IGN has just posted nearly 40 new screens of Namco's upcoming Bounty Hounds. The screens show some nice levels and more mouth-watering battles that we've come to expect from this game.From these screens, Bounty Hounds is shaping up to the best-looking PSP game to date, with maybe the exception of Killzone. And with the recent news of infrastructure multi-player support, this game just keeps getting better and better.What makes this all even better is the game comes out in a few days come Sept. 12, and you can bet I'll be there picking up my copy first thing in the morning.(Via IGN)
