f13.net

I wonder if it actually pays. (http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/3695/MMO-Interview-Survival-Guide.html)

Yes, I admit to looking at that site at least once a month.

This is bad news!  For everyone!

No, not really.  Good luck to Lum!  Unfortunately, a side effect of this is that I've now got the Meow Mix song stuck in my head with the meow word replaced by "Lum".  I don't know why.  :ye_gods: 

They might be forcing him to write one weekly.

Now it's in MY head  :ye_gods:

I hate you Signe....

Fuck.

It didn't get stuck in mine. :-P

i want to make a joke about that being because there's nothing there for it to stick in, but in the end it's just because I'm jealous of your inured status.

I know.  All I have to say to that is:

I for one, clicked.

Also, it's sad to see good writing go to waste.

I didn't know Lum was a certified childcare attendant. 

I think I read that 'article' on his blog a year or two ago or so.

Frankly I wish Lum would update his blog more, but se la vie. Not going to lambast him for having proper priorities.

C'est la vie. :-)

Oops. Guess my dirty American credentials are showing.

Clint Eastwood hates the French so much he murders their language.

I love to hear people who are not French say French words.  I love how they say fillet fi-lay.  And forte for-tay.  I especially giggle at for-tay.  Now I can't stop saying for-tay!   :ye_gods:  I'll have to sing the Lum song for a while now, I guess to try and clear my head.

When I lived in Paris, I would regularly end up rescuing lost Americans (I lived near the Porte de Versailles, which is nowhere near the Palais de Versailles but it's amazing how many tourists assume otherwise). West coast Americans were usually much worse at saying French names than Easterners for some reason. Except for Porte d'Orléans which none of them could say.

Por-tay dee Orleens!

All this talk about French is giving me "Better off dead" flashbacks.

I just start with the assumption that the french pronounce everything wrong and then move on to pronouncing it as awfully american as possible. Serves them right.

Of course, living in america, I do agree with their disdain of americans, but they have one effed up language.

It's like they have a different word for everything!

</Steve>

Goddamnit, that link is slow. Who the fuck still runs a dynamic site on Cold Fucking Fusion?

Sailor V
(http://i33.tinypic.com/4sb6nd.png)

That needs to be either smaller or funnier.

Preferably both.

Eh, it's much easier to learn than English.

EAT SHIT AND DIE IRREGULAR VERBS

Mulin Roje  :awesome_for_real:

Je ne regret rien!

Maybe on paper, trying to speak it is another thing entirely.  I'm trying to figure out if I hate Chinese or French more.   :oh_i_see:

Isn't 'forte' Italian? Nonetheless, that reminds me of how they say 'namaste'. Hah.

Google tells me your both right!

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/forte-or-forte-cache-or-cachet/

Cache is pronounced cash.  The people that pronounce it cash-ay?  They need to stop.  Same with forte.  I've never heard it pronounced /fort/.  But, I've never been to France, either, so anything is possible.

Although the word cachet is pronounced cash-ay.

You should dash off a letter to L'Académie française (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise), I'm sure they will give it all due respect!  :oh_i_see:

(You are actually right about how cache should be pronounced, btw. No accent on the e, so it is silent.)

As the article I linked mentioned, almost everybody pronounces it /For tay/, so thats pretty much become the correct way to say it now.  For tay is much more fun to say as well.  Hurray for evolution!

Incidentally this cache/forte thing is a good example of why English is so damn hard to learn for people who don't grow up with it; we take two perfectly good words from French, that both have silent trailing e's, then take one of them and start pronouncing the e for no particularly good reason! Something to think about the next time you're QQing while on hold on a support call to India about not understanding what "Steve" is telling you.

The other reason that English is so hard to learn is that part of the grammar is Latin via French, part of it is Norwegian, some of it is Old German and the rest has been made up from around 1000 years of neologisms.

And all without adding in modern terminology to scramble things further.  Post, for example.  Depending on context has like 5 different meanings?  Horrible language, English.  I'm glad I learned it from birth.  And yet, I still don't speak it proper.   :awesome_for_real:

Hm. I found English much easier to learn than German as I grew up. Even though I watched both Kommissar Rex and Derrick regularly on TV. =P

I had the same experience. English was very easy to learn compared to German; we actually had a saying in high school that went like "The #1 rule in German grammar is that there are no rules; there are a ton of exceptions, occasionally related to things that look like they're rules, but aren't." :why_so_serious:


BTW, if anyone was considering it (yeah, right) -- don't learn Hungarian. It's one of the hardest languages in the world to learn, it's not really related to anything except for Finnish -- and as an added bonus, it's completely useless!

Except they explain that the Italian version is pronounced fortay and used in music. That's where I learned it, and given the amount of musicians in the world vs the amount of french, guess which pronunciation wins? Then there's piano :)

Also, this thread is a good example of why I love f13.

Still, the Italian (and musical) "forte" is something between 'for-tay' and 'for-teh'. I'm not criticising, my English pronunciation is pure comedy anyway.

I did not see this derail coming.  Well done.

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
- James D. Nicoll

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
- James D. Nicoll
[/quote]

I love that quote.

That's why I said 'no particularly good reason' instead of 'no reason'.  :-P I'm a musician myself, it is hard to stop oneself from saying the other word wrong, it's true.

Good to see that the concept that languages are living things whose primary purpose is to allow communication between two or more entities continues to be very hard to grasp for people who seemingly know a great deal about language.

In other words, if everyone says "for-tay" to communicate the concept of "something at which you're particularly adept" the snobbery of where the word came from and how they originally pronounce it is... yeah, fucking worthless.

I hope angry.bob adds you all to his list.

wat

I find it hard to believe that most people first come across the word "forte" when they learn to read music.  That just sounds strange.  I don't even believe that it's why most people say it wrong.  And I'm not implying that people have to say all words the same or even correctly.  I'm fine with people saying for-tay or fillet (as opposed to fil-lay) or whatever.  I've become used to nearly everyone pronouncing all my names incorrectly and I don't even bother correcting them.   The music excuse just sounds silly to me. 

As I tell many people who feel their English isn't good enough, "Your English is better than my [Italian]".  German is the only language where someone might have been able to dispute this at one time, and that was so long ago that it's certainly not true anymore.

I pronounced 'forte' as 'for-tah' because I had no idea of its origins and while I know what the written word stands for, my pronounciations are terrible.  I say a lot of words incorrectly, and even with help, continue to do so.  Teachers were frustrated with me to no end.

The weirdest mispronunciation of an English word by a native English speaker was from a guy I used to work with at Hotpoint who insisted that the word 'misled' was pronounced 'miss-uld'. He honestly thought we were winding him up when we corrected him.

a teacher I had in college (an Indian woman) used to always pronounce ambiguity as "ambigwihtee."

after awhile, i came to agree with her that that would be a much better way to pronounce it.

A friend of mine's father is a political science professor at a very famous local university, and he made the same (more or less - he was pronouncing it mize-uld) mistake for years himself - he'd never connected the spoken word 'misled' with what he heard in his head when he saw it written, apparently. So, I guess it is a pretty easy mistake to make.

Late to this thread, missed awesome derail much better than the original topic.

1) Yes, it pays, no, it's not a full time job.
2) Yes, they expect something once a week (I'm finishing up one on bugs right now which I'm sure LC will enjoy to DEATH) which I manage to file in between fielding job offers for cities I can never move to. I may accept something soon which will make everyone lol.
3) Yes, I should update my blog more but I've been fairly busy.
4) English is the linguistic mutt of the world - has no particular lineage, is looked down upon by pseudointellectual snobs and is everywhere.

Congrats on having options!  Also, make sure it has space combat.

and permadeath!



I kid

And no grinding of any kind, but it needs to feel like an accomplishment to reach the endgame and it has to be HARD.

Hard, but casual too.

Box cover has to have hot Asian chicks, that are also European.

Don't forget crafting.  Must be able to craft to max_level without also engaging in combat.

Only you can save WAR!  :why_so_serious:

Five bucks says UO.

You all missed the part where I can't move.

(Plus, Mythic hiring someone after laying off half the studio would be in poor taste even for EA.)

Oh you can move.. you just have to accept that you'll be in a financial black hole because you've sold your house for 1/2 of what you bought it for.  :awesome_for_real:


So you're going to work on WWI online, eh.  (Wait, no.. you're in Austin not Dallas.) Hrm.

WWI Online would be  :awesome_for_real:

Raids would be pretty short, and everyone would bitch about the Machine Gunner class being OP.

British Asians. Ooooo.

I also found English way easier to learn than German. Having said that Swiss french people and Swiss german people have a little hate affair going against each other and that might explain why everyone hates the opposite language, even tho we have to learn it at school during many years.

I'm also 'trying' to learn Bulgarian, because my GF is from there and it's not that easy, learning a new alphabet does not help either.

So you're going to work for SOE Austin? Or Bioware Austin?

This would suggest SoE, perhaps?

I certainly won't lol.  Having a job in these economic times is a good thing. 

McQuaid?

That was my thought as well.  So tell us all the news on what's going on with SWG Lum!

I'm betting on Hello Kitty Online's Austin office.

I hope that's it!  That would be awesome.  (for real)

(http://photos-a.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs007.snc3/11432_172529884265_595784265_2705527_1620808_n.jpg)

They sell those at Toy Joy in Austin. So hes set for his lunchbox!  :awesome_for_real:

There is no shame in being Richard Garriott's major domo as long as the benefits are good.

Heh, close. Now that I actually accepted: it's with NCsoft, working as a data analyst to help quash RMT/botting in Aion.

The irony of not needing to ask directions to the office for the interview did not fail to escape me.

congrats on a return to liquidity

hang in there on the AION stuff

Grats on the new position!  No laughter from the Jackalope. 

That is amazing considering the state of the nation and game industry. Guess all the that bad karma fro the LTM days hasn't followed you.  ;D

Grats oh guru of the MMO blog

I think it's mostly that he learned not to burn bridges somewhere along the way.   Grats again, Scott.

Good news!  I  hope you love it and it loves you back.  (http://www.democraticwarrior.com/forum/images/smilies/stars.gif)

Now THAT'S a growth industry! Congrats Lum.  :grin:

And I was so hoping for a "Lum Joins The Darkfall Team" post...

Congrats!

Heh, I thought it was going to be about casual or social games. I am lol'ing, but more like a "muahahahaha."

Can you fix the Gold spam email problem in CoH/CoV as well? Shouldn't be hard to fix.

By this time next year, that will be 60% of the player base. Good luck with that one.

Goddamnit, don't take away my reasons for quitting Aion please.

Job security might involve not entirely quashing the bots / one's reason for being there.

Once you get rid of the spam and botting, datamining remains incredibly useful to facilitate gameplay improvements by simply watching how players behave in the real game. You can tell which content players like and why, watch the economy to eliminate exploits and properly place goldsinks, balance PvP by looking at data aggregated over thousands of matches, and so on. Why do players take so long to finish this quest? Maybe an item icon looks like a healing potion rather than a club? All that data is in there somewhere, you just need someone with the free time and inclination to dig around and try to draw conclusions from it.

Bot/RMT czar... that doesn't make me lol, it makes a lot of sense. I was astounded at the extent of RMT/Bots in Aion and even more astounded at the poor response by NCSoft. So, a nod and a "good on you NCSoft, though you're still idiots for not addressing it many moons ago." Wishful thinking, but if NCSoft are sensible they would use Lum for more than data analysis, they need some consultation on the overall direction for that project.

Grats Lum. :)


To be fair to NCSoft, botting is a thing that's pretty impossible to stop till the game goes live. Botting companies will actually use Beta to perfect their programs and get ready for launch, to see what woks and what dosen't. They will only do it with one or 2 accounts to minimise the risk of detection. In effect they are beta besting their botting programs. They will only unleash their bots and RMT when the game goes live, when they know there will be the max amount of new players desperate to get ahead. And that's really only when you can start anti-botting measures, when you have something to detect. Botters and RMT are running a business and that's what I would be doing in their situation.

And in the chaos of launch there's little time to be thinking of anti-botting measures anyway, and admitting that their could be a problem is the last thing that the PR side want to do. "AION ADMITS THERE WILL BE HUGE BOTTING PROBLEM" are not the headlines you want.

It's a 'lol' because not too long ago NCSoft let Lum go from another project.

Grats though, Scott.  Glad you found something so quickly.  So do we post botters here or send you a PM? ;)

Grats Lum!   :awesome_for_real:

Congrats Lum :)

Just as a side note, if anyone ever fancies creating a covert, international strike-force for hunting down and putting a halt to gold-farming operations around the world, I'll gladly join. As long as I get a free hat.

May I be the first to call you a failure and rage at you like a retarded manchild?

Hold on a minute. I certainly get how language is a living thing but I typically rail against that in conversation because a lot of time gets wasted deciphering another person's interpretation of a word. Just last week a conversation stalled for 10 minutes because we wouldn't agree on what the word Christian means.

Don't you agree it would be preferable to try and maintain the definition of words instead of allowing our interactions to twist the meanings into something new?

But the game went live what? A year ago? This was just the launch of a regional version.

I really hope your first report begins with "Botting in Aion is so prevalent because of the insanely boring PVE level grind, you miserable jackalopes."

You can now disable your email or only enable it for people in your SG and friends list. I'm not sure how that setting starts out, though.

I realize that doesn't stop the sellers, but they've been flushed out of global tells, and they don't seem to have gotten that people aren't getting their emails anymore.

Oh thanks, that'll help. I haven't played in over a month cause I've been busy lately so I didn't know they changed that.

Yes.


No.

A minimum wage human can easily, from the moment servers open, monitor the common chat channels and put anyone they see doing it on a global ignore list in real time. Give players a "Filter using global ignore list" checkbox if you want to make the two people happy who want to see the spam. With decent tools for just this purpose, you could rpobably have one guy monitor a few servers not just 1:1.

They should do that while they are figuring out a better automated solution which does take more time. But they could have nixed spam from the beginning from a players POV if thy had done somethign simple like the above.

Ignoring solutions that an average Joe can see blindfolded tends to make a Company look rather stupid.

Actually you could probably staff up in gangbangalore at around US$4k/year per hire. They speak english well enough to differentiate spam from non-spam.

Or just datamine and instantiate automated systems to do the same thing, which makes a lot more sense. For example, the WoW addon "badboy" is maintained by a single part-time developer and catches 95%+ of the spam in WoW, hiding it from view and automatically reporting it, all based upon a very simple set of paired blacklists, phraselists, and filters. It's maybe 100 lines of code.

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/bad-boy.aspx

It's amazing the amount of genius talent we have on this forum, able to solve industry problems in a single post!

Is daffy duck jerking off in your avatar pic?

where have you been? 

I'm going to guess that he's been living with an Amish family for the last year or so.

I guess I don't keep up on the f13 memes, such as they are. You bitches should keep the wiki updated.

These guys look suspicious.
http://na.aiononline.com/board/notices/view?articleID=155

"This new lifestyle has grown into an overwhelming passion that transcends nationality, religion, or race. We’ve been amazed to see the creation of truly international communities and to hear player feedback in so many different languages"

They really do recognize there is a RMT/Bot problem !!

Wat.

and were off!   :why_so_serious:

No, I think it's doomed to failure at the starting gate because someone is always going to make a mistake about the meaning or pronunciation of a word and pass it on to others and pretty soon, the mistaken meaning has become the real meaning.  Take the word "forte (http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-for1.htm)", for instance.

At some point you just have to say, "ok, whatever" and move on.  Especially in the case of a word like forte, which if pronounced like "fort" may cause more confusion when being used in the spoken word (rather then the written word, where it is clearer).

Clearly I'm not a linguist or English scholar so my opinion means all of jack and squat.

So, you are saying its not you're forte?

I cannot decide if this is intentional.

You've just been bloodworthed.

 :lol:

(http://img262.imageshack.us/img262/3093/fail24.jpg)

(http://img262.imageshack.us/img262/3093/fail24.jpg)

:facepalm:

Exactly.  And I pronounce it for-tay with a certain amount of belligerence.

Grats on the job Lum, sorry for the derail.

I am sure Lum would rather us talk about grammar than his employment situation.

Well, he started this whole discussion when he went and got a new job.  Way to make yourself the center of attention.

Ya, I noticed Lum is a lot like Sarah Palin in that regard.

you're

your

oar

it

You win.  I'm out. 

Heh.

it's

You betcha!

I'm just going to stop posting in letters, and use only symbols.

I hear @ is a good one to use.

/thread

 :awesome_for_real:

Grats, btw.

Congrats on the contracting work with NCSoft, too.  I hope it turns into a full-time position (if that's what you want with them).  Thank god they seem to be taking the bots/RMT stuff seriously.  I don't know if games have changed, or I have changed over the years...but what seemed to once be rather a minor annoyance is starting to seem to me to be a real threat to MMOs in terms of affecting player retention, impacting game economies, and generally compromising folks' enjoyment of the game overall.

Go get 'em!

Ive never seen BOTs as bad in Aion in any other game.  They are in every tier and they take all the best XP farming spots and the best money making spots in every zone.  Ive used up my 10 bot reports per day every day since about the third week the game came out which is about 350 BOT reports from just me alone.  Ironically, most of the BOTS I report have been the same ones for weeks. 

Why would there be a limit to reporting bots?  Or a limit to an ignore list, for that matter, so nevermind. :oh_i_see:

In this case, maybe because so many people would report so many bots the database would asplode?   :rimshot:

I'd say that the degree of botting seen in Aion probably surprised NCsoft West quite a bit.

But it could be the start of a trend - if NCsoft (or others) transition MMOs with sub fees from Korea to NA / EU, it provides both a test market to optimise botting (iirc, Korean players don't use unofficial RMT to the same extent because they are more likely to use official RMT channels and are more used to the idea) and then the main market to launch at full strength.

I don't think that's it, I'm not aware of any games that allow legal RMT. Microtransactions are not the same thing. And botting and gold selling is rampant in most Korean games I've heard of. I think it's more likely that the culture of Korean gaming got transplanted with the game. And NCsoft has a rep for poor enforcement of anti-bot and goldselling.

I could swear I've read that there are some (many?) MMOs in China that have literal RMT.

EDIT: Mind you that really has nothing to do with Korea so I think your point stands.

Entropia Universe is one, depending on your definition of 'game' then Second Life would be another.

Doesn't EVE still have RMT via the timecards?

Not in the way where you can convert ingame money/items to real cash legally. You can turn real cash into pretend money but not vice versa.

I've always wondered about Eve, how many people actually do that other than to get a character started. It seemed appealing to not have to worry about grinding money to get a few ships in the hangar, but in the long term, buying and losing ships with real money seemed kind of pathetic and not really impacting anyone except as a pvp loot pinata.

I've sold timecards when I needed a fast infusion of ingame cash for some reason. A lot of people do it the other way because they make enough money ingame that they'd be dumb if they weren't using it to pay for their sub. The market is pretty busy so I guess the answer to the question is 'a lot'.

Log into Lineage2 sometime and I don't think you'd say that.  I suppose if NCSoft West had zero communication with Korean HQ and zero direct experience with Lineage2, they might be surprised...but a lot of us who know about the bot insanity in L2 were afraid from the start that it would translate straight into Aion.

I am interested in exactly why they're suddenly so concerned.  I'm glad they are, but I'd still like to know what resulted in the sudden shift in approach.

Because Aion actually sold well in the west.

Im sure they look at the Western market and want to have successful games here which means they have to deal with issues like this and cant continue to ignore them.  Granted they should of saw this coming a mile away and took steps before launch and not 2 months later. 

Should have seen.

Taken.

Also, have some apostrophes: ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' ' 

There's also a report on how many petitions one can submit.  Once you go over that limit (which is called a daily limit, but it's apparently lifetime), you can no longer submit petitions.

One gets the feeling that NCSoft doesn't want people reporting bots, ignoring spam, or submitting petitions.

I did use the terms interchangeably to some degree - official vs unofficial RMT, or internal vs external - since I think the overall offering (receiving in-game items / rewards / benefits for RL money) is the same. F2P is more familiar in Korean markets, so I think it probably isn't considered a factor to the same extent. It's obviously not frowned on or seen as a major problem, or else Aion would have arrived at NCsoft West full of anti-gold farming systems.

The one system they did have is disabled in the western version. And now "click to block" is disabled.

what?  They won't let you mute spammers?  Or what exactly was disabled?

Oh, and it seems as if the comments portion of Lum's blog has been assimilated by GeldonYetich, so by all means check out what Lum says on the main page, but click into the comments page at your own risk!

There are a whole bunch of painfully clueless commentators on Lum's blog who make me roll my eyes every time I see their names. Geldon isn't even the worst of them, the guy who posts gigantic walls of text about his ongoing struggle with the evil moderators of MMORPG.com and the various high-school libertarians are a whole lot worse.

The "right click to block" was broken by a recent patch, I believe it still is. The anti-RMT feature of reporting bots and having automatic penalties to the account in question is disabled in the western version, but functional in the Korean.

That sound you hear is Lum banging his forehead against a wall of ineptitude.

The thing I miss most about EQ was the East Commons tunnel, which was where everyone sold their loot on 7th Hammer before SoL.  More so than anything, that fostered a lot of the community on 7th Hammer, which died out when they put in the bartering doodad in SoL.  Then WoW came along, and drove the final stake through the heart of that with the AH, and the mail system.

Yeah, they're more convenient, and all, but I think from a server community standpoint, the game suffers.  Outside of my guild in WoW, I don't know anyone's name, there's no "stars" on the server.  Whereas in EQ, a lot of people really built reputations and while maybe not everyone knew them, there was certainly a high percentage of people who did.