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Behind the scenes at Sony's network operations center
If keeping just one computer running and up-to-date is a hassle, imagine keeping six to seven thousand of them going, 24/7, with any unexpected downtime sure to draw the anger of extremely vocal gamers. That's the challenge faced every day by SOE's Director of Technology Operations, Mark Rizzo. Rizzo cut his teeth running the back-end for MMO legend Ultima Online. Back then, he and his team were building things by hand and learning as they went. Now, things are a lot more complicated. With eight games already and more coming online all the time, handling all the users and simultaneous transactions is more like working in the data center for a stock exchange rather than your typical web-hosting service.Says Rizzo, "We did an April Fools' prank in one of the games and we had to have some server code updated to pull the prank off. Change management allowed us to know who approved it, and know where it's from, and where it's going." It's said that if you like sausage or law, you should never see it being made. This peek behind the curtain at the code and hardware that keeps swords flashing and spells weaving just deepens our appreciation of this difficult task.[Via Slashdot]
A brief history of botting
Botting -- the act of using a program (a 'bot') to kill mobs, perform quests, harvest nodes and so on -- usually is explicitly banned by a game's EULA, and at least ethically gray even where it wasn't directly ruled out. Right or wrong, botting has been with us since the very dawn of massively multiplayer games, in MUDs -- text-based Multi-User Dungeons. Raph Koster -- Ultima Online developer, Star Wars Galaxies architect and CEO of game-development-for-the-masses Areae -- brings us back to the days of yore when MUDs first met botters -- and how they dealt with it. It's a stirring tale of autohunters, deathtrap rooms, trigger phrases, healbots and the devs who loved them.
Metaverse U conversation: Raph Koster, Cory Ondrejka, Howard Rheingold
We headed to the Metaverse U event at Stanford University this weekend to hear a smorgasboard of prominent thinkers and workers in the fields of virtual worlds and online gaming have a meeting of the minds. Below is a recap (caveat: some paraphrasing involved!) of one of our favorite sessions featuring a conversation with Metaplace's Raph Koster, former Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka, and social media and online community guru Howard Rheingold. Henrik Bennetsen (moderator): (Introduces 3 panelists and asks Raph to kick off with his thoughts on virtual worlds) Raph: From the beginning, virtual communities has never been about the "virtual." All the oddities come from the mediation, not from human nature. We build trellises, and communities are plants growing on them... you get to shape them a little bit, and sometimes in very bad ways if you're not careful. We tend to think we have more power than we do when architecting these things. I wince at the title "community manager" ("relations" would be better) because it perpetuates the myth that we have power to control what users do. Mediation gives us a window into things that in the real world can be hard to see. Virtual communities are an opportunity to see how people tick. Cory: Having spent 7 years building Second Life, the interactions and collisions with the real world are what make it interesting. We had only 400 users at launch and we were ecstatic! Can you imagine that today (especially for companies with big name investors)? I think about virtual worlds as communication technology. I agree there's a need for customer service and arguments about the declaration of avatar rights are important but yet I feel there's something off in these arguments... (he's referring to earlier conversation about declarations of avatar rights) %Gallery-16285%
EA Mythic picks up a new Director of Community Relations
EA Mythic has filled the top-spot in their community ranks by inviting Robert Mull to lead the way as their new Community Relations Director. Mull's new duties revolve around everything community, especially overseeing the Community Coordinators for Warhammer Online, Dark Age of Camelot, and the recently absorbed Ultima Online. What grates on my nerves are community personnel that don't really play MMOs, which isn't as uncommon as one might think, any player can definitely tell when that big-head community rep replies on the forums doesn't even bother responding to important posts because they don't know jack about the game, and is instead jollying around in off-topic talking about the latest CSI episode. Well, according to his personal welcoming address on the Warhammer Herald, Mull is a long-time MMOG player and his past roots include working for Wizards of the Coast supporting Avalon Hill, Axis & Allies, Dreamblade, Duel Masters, and other products. Nice, roots. We here at Massively, would like to extend a welcoming hand to our new EA Mythic community overlords. (I am attempting to gain faction for beta invites for our readers when the time comes – if it comes!) If you have been out of the Warhammer loop for the past week, please be sure to check out all our recent Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning coverage.
Live at the Independent Game Conference: Richard Garriott keynote
This morning your cheerful (only because we've had enough caffeine) Massively staffers are reporting to you live from the Independent Game Conference in Austin, Texas where Richard Garriott is about to deliver the morning's keynote address. For those of you who aren't sure why you should care, let me give you a mini-bio: Richard Garriott helped pioneer the MMO industry with the launch of Ultima Online a decade ago. If that that doesn't ring any bells, all I can say is that you could trace the heritage of most massively multiplayer games today directly back to UO. This morning, Garriott is going to be speaking on good game design through research. Curious to hear his thoughts on the subject? Keep reading for our live coverage of his keynote.
EA celebrates ten years of Ultima Online
By today's lofty standards Ultima Online seems terribly archaic, yet when first released back in 1997, the game, which celebrated its tenth anniversary earlier this week, was the bee's knees. Along with other early MMOs such as 3D0's Meridian 59, Ultima Online helped shape what we now know as the MMO genre, and laid the foundation for more modern efforts like EverQuest and World of Warcraft. To commemorate this milestone, Electronic Arts is trying to win back former residents of Britannia who since have moved on to bigger and better things to retry Ultima Online using the game's recently launched "Kingdom Reborn" update, which will be free to download for past subscribers through October 9 by way of their old, most likely misplaced username and password. Calling the event its "Return to Brittania" campaign, EA will welcome players with a monster hunt and prizes including an ankh pendant necklace, map of Brittania, Ultima Online commemorative sculpture and virtue armor set. Characters will also be given a wand of fireworks and 10 décor tokens, though we haven't a clue what those might be. Happy Birthday, UO. Try not to break your hip fighting ogres.
