Been Getting Hit by Content Theft

Posted on 2010 February 11 by Ed Park — 9 Comments

If you are reading this article on a site that is not http://taugrim.com, you’re reading it from a spam scraping site, so please click here to read the article on my blog. Thanks, Taugrim.

Scraping sites have been stealing my content by posting it verbatim on their sites; it’s annoying that they are trying to benefit from my content. So I’m posting this article as a test to see which of those scraping sites are automatically copying whatever I post on my blog (taugrim.com), or if they have humans actually making a decision in terms of what to post.

To anyone who is posting my articles here on another site: you do not have my permission to do so, all of the content here is copyrighted by me all rights reserved.

Posted in Blog Musings

Allods Online and gPotato Registration Name

Posted on 2010 February 10 by Ed Park

Allods Online (AO) Open Beta (OB) starts Feb 16th, and it’s really “live” on that day because OB characters won’t be deleted.

AO is a F2P game, so a lot of people will be playing without paying. If you think you might buy items from the cash shop, be aware that

  • the Full Name (see circled red field below) you provide when creating your gPotato account must match the name on your payment accounts  (e.g. credit card, PayPal, etc) otherwise your payments will be rejected, and
  • gPotato does not support Full Name changes. Here is the text from their site
Can I change the name on my gPotato account?

We no longer allow name changes to gPotato accounts.  If you registered with a false name and would like to make a payment via PayPal, credit card, or Google Checkout you can send in a Payment Consent Form to authorize payments.  The form can be found here (https://billing.gpotato.com/FillUp/ConsentFrm.asp).  It must be filled out by the owner of the funding source and mailed or faxed to us along with proof of identification.  This can either be a copy of photo ID or the signature on the form can be notarized at the bottom.  We cannot accept the form via email or efax.  Our address and fax number are listed at the bottom of the form.

Since OB hasn’t started yet and I ran into this issue, so I just went ahead and created a new gPotato account. I don’t know whether I’ll buy items down the road, but I want to leave the option open.

P.S. a clueless poster on a guild forum said in response to my article that you can change the Full Name and Birthday. That’s incorrect. If you click EDIT ACCOUNT INFO on gPotato, you are prompted to enter your Full Name and birth year as a security check before you get to the account info page but you can’t change them. If you don’t believe me, go read gPotato’s link above or try for yourself. I’m just pointing the registration name issue to save people potential headache down the road.

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Posted in Allods Online, Technical Help

HOWTO Fix a Corrupted Version of Allods Online

Posted on 2010 February 8 by Ed Park — 227 Comments

This HOWTO guide explains how to easily fix the “corrupted version” error when installing / upgrading Allods Online without having to download files manually or from sources you’re not sure are safe.

WHAT THE BROKEN INSTALLATION PROCESS LOOKS LIKE

I tried installing Allods Online (AO) this weekend and ran into a corrupted version problem. Here is what the install process with the corrupted version looks like:

  1. you run the game downloader and install the game
  2. you run AO game launcher and you get a notification that you need to upgrade to the latest patch:
  3. the launcher downloads the patches (~450 MB in my case)
  4. the launcher installs the patches
  5. the launcher reports that the “Version is corrupted. Do you want to repair it now?”
  6. the launcher’s attempt to repair the corrupted version fails, and you see this message:

Unfortunately, the repair page mentioned in the error panel doesn’t help this problem. So what’s wrong with the installation process? You can see from the picture above that the launcher itself (bin/Launcher.exe) is broken, so you need to get the launcher to download a working version of itself.

HOW TO FIX THE CORRUPTED VERSION

Disclaimer: the instructions below worked for me and for other people – but use them at your own risk! I’m not gpotato tech support LOL :)

In a nutshell, the fix for this problem is to rename the launcher program and then run the renamed launcher, so it downloads a working version of itself.

Here’s the process:

  1. follow steps 1-6 above, but do not try the repair page as suggested. It won’t fix the problem
  2. go to the game installation’s bin directory (by default, it’s C:\gpotato.com\Allods Online\bin) and rename Launcher.exe to Launcher-broken.exe:Please note that Windows on your computer may be configured to hide the file extension (.exe), so if you simply see “Launcher” rename it to “Launcher-broken”
  3. double-click Launcher-broken.exe to run it, and when you see the following script error panel, click Yes:
  4. the launcher will run and automatically attempt to fix the corrupted version:
  5. wait while the launcher runs. What the launcher program (Launcher-broken.exe) will do is download a new version of itself (Launcher.exe) that actually works:
  6. once the fixed version of Launcher.exe has been downloaded, you will see the following message box, and you want to click the circled “x” to close it:
  7. now click the Allods Online icon on your desktop, and you should see the following panel, which means your game installation is all good :)

I wasted enough of my time researching this problem and seeing other players stuck on it on the AO forums, so I hope this guide helps you. Thanks to the players who posted the rename fix – all I tried to do was make the process clearer for folks who are struggling with this.

Tagged with: ,
Posted in Allods Online, Technical Help

I’m Done with Aion

Posted on 2010 February 6 by Ed Park — 17 Comments

I finally got back from a 3-week business trip overseas. I played Aion very sparsely in January, and the sad thing is I didn’t really miss it.

So after only 4.5 months of playing Aion, I’ve de-subbed.

The reasons are pretty simple:

  1. the leveling was boring and very time-consuming. Fundamentally Aion felt like work to play based on its design
  2. the main PVP zone, the Abyss, was largely empty. This was nothing like WAR, WoW, or LOTRO, where it was easy to find opponents to fight

The funny thing is my Chanter is only just over a level away from 42, which was my original target level for making PVP videos – Chanters get a ranged stun at 42. But the main thing is I simply don’t believe in Aion. I would not recommend Aion to a new player who is used to “Western” MMOs (e.g. WoW/LOTRO/WAR). So I figured it didn’t make sense for me to invest the time to level up and make videos.

I think some of the good qualities of WAR really set me up for disappointment with Aion. WAR was fun from level 1 all the way to 40, aside from the game instability issues. Aion was incredibly stable but consistently boring.

A YouTube subscriber sent me a PM back in September 2009 about Aion, and he was right about the game:

Not a big fan of aion, knowing the principle is Korean mentality based, it’s going to get old fast.

I myself been hooked in so many same type mentality game design and they all ending up a disappointment.

I work in the gaming industry, and I know how Aion is build as. [Aion] makes it more efficient for people who has time to waste, then instead of people who actually has the skills to show off. Quite imbalance approach, but then again, that’s their mentality of designing video games. (The american version is based off the asian version, same set of rules will apply.)

Hope you won’t spend too much time on Aion, you might setup yourself for a disappointment in the long run.

I’ve been following Keen’s posts about Allod’s Online so I might check that out.

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Posted in Aion, PVP, Warhammer Online

Social Gaming May Kill Traditional MMORPGs

Posted on 2010 January 5 by Ed Park

The majority of the subscribers I have on my YouTube channel subscribed because of my Warhammer Online (WAR) videos. People frequently ask if / when I will come back to WAR. The answer is never, because of reasons beyond WAR itself.

EA is shifting its focus in online gaming to the social gaming sector with its acquisition of Playfish in late 2009. Around the time of the acquisition, EA laid off 40% of the staff at Mythic Entertainment, the studio that created WAR. Those layoffs have obvious implications in terms of what Mythic can do with WAR moving forward. Fewer resources = less new game content and game improvements.

It’s a shame, because WAR has gradually improved as a game, and some players think that if it had launched in its current state, WAR would have been a success instead of a colossal failure. I shared that viewpoint when I played WAR’s excellent Patch 1.3b over the summer.

That being said, I don’t think that the EA/Mythic/Playfish case is an isolated incident that had its roots strictly in the failure of WAR as a game. Rather, it’s an indicator of the shift in the online gaming industry towards social gaming. Social gaming has been experiencing wildfire growth because of potent, synergistic drivers:

  • the cost to launch, maintain, and evolve social games is (relatively) low
  • social game developers leverage analytics to customize games very quickly based on what users are actually doing. It’s a very “Agile” approach to game development – instead of massive investment up-front, you start with something and evolve it based on user behavior and feedback
  • social gaming has a huge and growing potential player base (thanks to Facebook), and the corresponding strong viral network effects
  • social games have user-friendly (i.e. simple) game mechanics. Social games in the online gaming market is analogous to the Wii in the console market – anyone can play them, and that’s how they suck you in

Contrast that with MMORPGs, which have traditionally cost a lot of money (e.g. tens of  millions of US dollars) to develop and launch and have a (relatively) steep learning curve for players.

A guy I know, who was the CEO of the company that launched a best-selling console game, told me he thinks the console gaming sector is in jeopardy. Social gaming is where it’s at, from a business perspective. And I think that the MMORPG sector, as we currently think of it (WoW, Aion, Eve Online, etc), may be in trouble for the same reason, over the medium- to long-term.

I’m a fan of traditional MMORPGs, because they provide the kind of rich and complex environment that I find challenging – especially in terms of PVP. So I hope that the market for traditional MMORPGs continues to grow, to sustain the economic drivers which enable game development and evolution. If MMORPGs become a niche market over time, there will be fewer options for us to choose from.

 

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Posted in Business Analysis, Warhammer Online
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