countermeasures
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Paragon Studios introduces MARTy to City of Heroes for Issue 21
There's someone special for players to meet with the newest update to City of Heroes -- MARTy. From the name you might think that MARTy is a Clockwork NPC, or a Freakshow, or maybe even a new developer. But MARTy is none of the above. MARTy is an acronym for Metric Activated Reward Throttle (plus a "y"), and it's a new system being put into place to help ensure that the game remains free of exploits for free players and paying players alike. So what does MARTy do? Scan for exploitative behavior and cut it short. The system monitors player activity for exploitative experience, influence, or reward gains, and people who trip the system stop receiving rewards for a short time. The official FAQ on the system makes it clear, however, that even players aggressively leveling with experience boosters shouldn't hit MARTy's radar. The only way to hit it is by exploiting the game engine for overly accelerated gains, at which point you get shut down. And with City of Heroes Freedom opening the door to everyone, it might be good to have an anti-exploit gatekeeper in place.
Are other game studios taking countermeasures against RIFT? [Updated]
If you didn't know, today is the head start launch of RIFT and the beginning of many strained household relationships as players finally dive into Telara for real. While we've known for some time that Trion Worlds' creation was going to be a major player in the MMO field, it seems as though RIFT's release has caused other MMO studios to step up and take countermeasures. In the past 24 hours, there have been a few significant developments that seem suspicious in regard to timing, at least. The first is that Blizzard dropped World of Warcraft's next content update, Patch 4.1, on to the public test server in the middle of the night. Mortal Online's announced that its free 14-day trial program is now active for any interested parties. We've also received numerous tips that EA Mythic disabled the cancel subscription option for Warhammer Online. Although we obviously can't be certain that all of these events are due to RIFT, timing, as they say, is everything. Have you seen any other MMO studios stepping up their game today as a distraction from the new shiny? [Update: The Warhammer subscription option was a bug that should be resolved today, according to the devs.]
U of M laser mimics helicopter heat signatures to thwart missiles
Researchers at the University of Michigan have developed a new laser-based countermeasure for aircraft, and unlike others we've seen (and we've seen a few) this technology aims to "blind" missiles rather than knock 'em out of the sky. The system uses a mid-infrared supercontinuum laser to mimic the heat signature of a helicopter, and it has no moving parts -- making it rugged enough to last a long time on rotor-based aircraft. The school has even spun off a company, Omni Sciences, to develop the thing, and has received some $1 million in grants from the Army and DARPA to build a second-generation prototype. Of course, questions remain: is it really a wargadget if you can't blow something up with it? And even if it is, where's the fun in that?
