f13.net

Pretty simple, ready?

Click This:
http://www.metaplace.com/

At the top (in the box next to where it says: "Redeem your invite key here!")  use the key:

F13BETA

The first 50 people will get in immediately.

Those after the first 50 should be added to a waiting list. Enjoy!

Neat. I'm in.

That reminds me.

I did it and your well laid trap totally froze my computer. 

Later....

I went to Raph's World.  It was also a trap.  Bhodi tried to stalk me, too.

Signe, I'm going to make you a KMMO in Meatplace.

Thank you!  What is that?

A Korean MMO! You know, the kind of game that you love more than any other.

Raph, if you're reading this, I need a physics engine for hair.












BONUS POST CONTENT:

:vv:

Cool. His registration page was a little borked in IE7 - one of the password fields was randomly off on its own, but I eventually sorted it out.

Oh, and aparently despite me trying to pick male in the registration (it also was lined up wierd), the game has decided I have boobs.

it's cool, the store allows you to change your gender as well as your hair and clothes.

Regarding the registration page - we'll get that fixed ASAP. Thank you for letting us know.

About having boobs - well, we give you a random avatar when you first log in.   You can change it :)  Can you guys make sure to report bugs on the Metaplace forum rather than here so that we don't miss them?  I want to make sure nothing slips through the cracks and we get issues resolved ASAP.  Thanks guys, and welcome new folks :)

Ain't nothin' to it.

Gangsta rap made me do it.

can't register, didn't get into beta, can't register

What do you mean you can't register?  Did you get an error? 

Sweet! Will play with it when I get home.

I'm in.  And mucking things up quite nicely.

Is there simple way to get the default world back?

I am in.

Rup3t is my username.

The hub world? Click on the metaplace image on the top left of the page. That brings you to your home world, which is mphub by default.

Wooties. I'm in.

Thanks, that is a useful tip.  I meant the tiles though.  I resized my world to something smaller, then to something larger, so it wiped out a large chunk of it.  It doesn't matter that much since I'm going to muck with things, but I'm curious.

In before the lock

I'm in, but I gotta work late tonight.  :uhrr:  My avatar name is Slyfeind.

Just make a new one.

BTW, everyone send me friend requests, that way I can see when you're on and can meep you.  :awesome_for_real:

Ok so you only need to add the Beta Key?  I registered again to test and am waiting on email. 

No! It's a plague that needs to be eradicated!

Didn't follow the instructions, did ya Soln?  :awesome_for_real:

I'm on there as a secret name which is in no way exactly identical to my F13 name.

Send me an invite!

I'll look at this later. The editor let me move things around, then I got seriously annoyed at right clicking bringing up the flash menu, and decided to get back to work.

not user error, just timed out.  Tried twice.  Tried later (now) and we're in.  Thx.

I think I won, but I don't have java and flash here, so only the future really knows.

What is a meep?  Just a shout out (and a small furry creature which resembles a fry-guy)?

So sad. I just saw this thread  :ye_gods:




I blame any user error on the fact I've had only about 4 hrs sleep in the last 36 hrs (ok, it's not really a fact, more like a lie, but it could be true, and that's all that matters).

This isn't really a bug.  My handle is already registered and I am not quite sure how to go about logging in without doing the registration piece that I was linked to in my email.  I'll putter with it as I have time today.

EDIT: I'm a doofus, just going to the main page and logging in seems to have done it.  I have had a long week.

Me too.  But don't dispair.  Even at your doofiest, we love you to bits!  Here is a cow on a pogo stick to make you smile.  (http://www.thecatarena.com/forum/images/smilies/cow.gif)

I'm in, fortunately I got an invite in e-mail since I saw this thread far to late to take advantage of the F13 keys.

Got mine, but the main problem now is that I am genuinely stupid and have no idea what to do with it.  Also, I've only had about 10 minutes of free time to play with it.  I'm thinking of selling my login on ebay for 10 grand.

So no waiting list?  :sad_panda:

Sure there is.  Go to www.metaplace.com and apply for beta :) 

Now that was just mean. I approve.  :drill:

Hey, that actually worked a little bit.  Maybe I should make my MeatWorld a silly fru-fru place.

Seems like I have been blocked from their server for some reason. I can connect to any SOE website with the exception of metaplace. This might be a record for me. Usually I don't get banned until 3 months into release.

Metaplace isn't SOE. FWIW.

That's strange because ARIN says the IP of their website is part of a block assigned to SOE. A traceroute shows that the server is definitely hosted at SOE's datacenter in San Diego.  I also find it strange that their domain registration information is hidden. I guess someone signed a publishing deal, or they got bought out.

And you wonder why they block you.

Yes I do.

We are not SOE. No publishing deal, no buying out.

However, SOE does happen to have the largest datacenter hosting in the area, staffed with people who know virtual worlds and their network demands. Very convenient. :)

DAM! I missed this, and i spent a ton of time in furcadia too, the world building attracted me, and i learned the basics of scripting there. DAM! I wanted to remake my furry juicer in MEATSPACE!


GAH!

Ohh damn, it all makes sense now.

Well, I applied through the proletariat link. You folks have piqued my interest with all your blocking tiles and so on.

Error: The supplied key has been used.

Sadness.

 :-P

 :heartbreak:

You guys don't read my blog often enough -- we gave away another 200 there starting yesterday.

There will be more, never fear.

I have to admit that I am not seeing the famous f13 snark showing up on the beta forums yet. :)

Blame WAR.

"War! What is it good for?"

Oh, never mind.

Well, having no access to the beta, there's not much for me to talk about ^^

I'm still interested in knowing if you're considering other platforms besides flash (particularly mobile or embedded), if the protocol is at all open or extensible, etc. 

We are not working on other clients right now (though it works OK under Skyfire on mobile btw). But yes, the protocol is open and documented.

I missed this, and now I am sad.   :heartbreak:

I'm in as jwiv.   Will play with this later.

Keys on TechCrunch and GigaOM right now.

TechCrunch one is out already, the GigaOM one worked for me though.

On Massively too.

All gone :(  Further heartbreak and sadness imminent.   :heartbreak:

Raph is evil, and wants to purposely keep dedicated testers from getting into the Alpha/Beta.

No, no, see the other thread. I am nice.  :oh_i_see:

I have no friends among any forum I visit to beg a key from, sir.

Devs included.

Hell, I STILL can't even get a Metaplace newsletter, and I gave my email to the owner of the company directly.

I don't understand why you're not getting the newsletter. :(

Can you check your inbox now and see if the thing I just sent got through?

Maybe my email considers you a spammer.

No email.

I am IM'ing you yet again.

Meep!  :why_so_serious:

Make a gmail address and try that.

Oh, he's in, we solved that over a week ago.

Meep.  :awesome_for_real:

Hay lookit those dates. I've been sleeping a week, my bad.

Raph- you have 24 hours to get me into the beta.

Or else.

Sheesh, do you people need more keys or what?

I have to admit, you guys have kinda been slackers -- few f13ers seem to be regulars, compared other sources. I don't know if I should waste my infinite invites on you guys... ;)

Send me a PM with email addy, I can hook ya up.

Hey man, I built my forest retreat, I'm done. I WIN! At least until I can make it so you can pick berries off the bushes. They make door noises right now. Crazy shrubs!

I really wanted to do more, but it took me 3 weeks to figure out what was causing my Firefox to chug and now I'm into crunch time at college. Forgive me Raph!

By the way, you should note that Ubiquity can cause some FF clients to chug when using programs within the browser.

Hmm, not sure what we can do about that -- sounds like Ubiquity's problem to me. ;)

Invites were sent -- check your spam folders if you didn't get them.

I'm sorry, Raph.  I haven't felt very creative lately, and there's all these games to play...

I guess it's a good thing I didn't take the name of your new community person, Amethyst, when I signed up.  I'd feel bad for not logging in much but blocking her from it.  Tell her it's an awesome name though.

Ironically enough, Amethyst is the main reason I am not messing with Metaplace anymore.

I submitted something like 25 bug reports from my first 2-4 hours, from which I received a single email response from her. I was unable to reply directly to it, and then when I expounded on 2 or 3 things, giving more details, she was nice enough to inform me via email that someone (ME !) had submitted that already.

I'm pretty sure that me doing QA is a wasted endeavor unless I am talking directly to someone, plus I am too poor and time starved to do this without getting paid. I guess sending messages to people personally is something game companies are unable or unwilling to do. I can already get my ideas ignored at the job I'm paid for.

Thanks, but no thanks Raph.

 :heartbreak:

I don't understand... were you expecting 25 email responses or followups? Most bug reports don't get an email at all, if they have enough info with them. They go into a bug DB to get verified by QA and then given to programmers, and so on. Amethyst just gathers info.

It would be nice to send emails to every bug reporter for every bug report, but we're a small company, and there's a lot of bugs given where we are in development. I suppose we could do an automated one... but I get the sense you want personal attention.

Or did you expect her to remember which of the many bugs are submitted by which person? (We're currently not tracking that -- but it's a nice idea! Not much work, really). Honestly, quite a lot of bugs just get reported in live global chat right now too. Or on the forums -- and every forum one does get a reply post, that's policy.

All in all, I am unsure what to do with your feedback because I am unsure what you were expecting of us.

Maybe I missed it but I couldn't find any docs on the wiki about make games that aren't based the tween-run-round thing.

I am a little confused on the eula one says the I have ownership right over my content and another says the everything I do is opensource.

Communicating is a double edged sword.

It wasn't that I was wanting personal attention, but it is true that testers want to feel like they have an active role, and their bug submissions are meaningful... So the responses are something that helps in a sense.

For me, it also was equally negative, because the one response was saying that I had already submitted something and it was directed to the proper people (when I was adding additional information about other places I saw the same issue). This response also came while 20 other things might not get fully looked at, be addressed, or possibly just didn't merit a reply.

I did get responses, but not on everything (like personal messages /bonkRaph), and what it did reveal was the inability to directly communicate with someone if I wanted to further troubleshoot or include more details about the same issue.


It wasn't her forgetting I submitted something, because in fact she did remember it was my submission, but it seemed my additional information might not get submitted because it had already been brought to the correct person/dev/department.

It would be cool to track who submitted or squashed what bugs, and could even be an achievement of some sort, but that's another idea/improvement that I get exactly nothing (or pay a monthly subscription fee) for happily posting as feedback or a forum post.

I have given away far too ideas as bug submissions or forum posts, and even stopped posting in development forums because my ideas end up not being mine anymore (for instance I have a solution to the "no loot" thread in the mmo forum that I can never post because it's that good).


It was less me giving you feedback and more me venting some about my jaded beta tester history, combined with my letting you know that I really need (and could thrive) with direct input. I've done enough of beta testing and bug submission that it's a lot of time I don't have, that doesn't feel rewarding enough for me anymore.

Mostly my post was to let you know that I can't spend much time devoted to helping you, especially when I would want to communicate directly with you (or someone) to feel my input was worthwhile.

I don't really have any expectations anymore as a beta tester, because I would never be earning credits toward my subscription fee for every bug submission, like beta testers maybe should get. (<--look another free idea)

For a small pittance I will do this! I don't need to pay attention in class anyway :awesome_for_real:

You do have ownership rights over your content. However, right now we have not turned on the ability to mark modules as closed source. (Your world is closed source by definition, but if you put something on the market right now, the source will be visible when imported).

Taolurker,

I hear you, more feedback is a good thing. I'll see what we can do about that.

Sending me bug reports via personal message -- I forward 'em on myself! :) Of course, it is easier for me to bitch when something isn't fixed when I want it.

I do have to tell you -- ideas are cheap and largely worthless. Implementations have value, though. So if I were you I would post my loot idea. :)

Once there's more middleware out there (i.e. import grid movement with a few clicks, import a basic zelda/mario/metroid/whatever style combat system with a few clicks), I'll give it more of a go.

Unless you have chance of profiting from the idea, I don't see how it's relevant whether you hide it or not. So do you?

Personally, I stop typing up my ideas because it's just not worth doing it for something no one is going to read.

I bet you don't.

Edit: Before you assume it was a dick thing and respond like a hurt puppy, I bet you don't simply because your definition of loot is probably a lot more narrow than mine and you assume that your "solution" has no loot. Whereas my definition of loot in that thread was as a basic building block in any game, as in everything has loot. In other words, I'd like you to prove my definition wrong with your "lootless" mmo. As in, I bet you don't.

See? It's implementations that have value. ;)

Can you implement me a beta invite please?  :grin:

I was building the 'standard' hedge maze and while I was dinking around with one of the object settings all the jedge objects got moved to new (seemingly random) positions and I haven't felt like going back to try something else.  Maybe after Thanksgiving I'll give it another shot.  Mostly I'm a player not a builder and it seems like it's still a little early for the likes of me to be involved.

I bet you changed the anchor spot for the hedge.

Yup that was it.  Couldn't find a simple way to undo it and I kind of wandered off and forgot about it. 

It's always nice to get some automated chatter from the bug system when something is actually acted on.  Though that does usually mean more effort, because most people don't want to publish their internal state -- so you end up having internal/external status and sometimes commentary.  Many companies never bother with the extra effort for all that.

Tracking the submitter does have use if you ever want to request more information on the issue.  Depends on how often this is likely to be useful in a given environment...

Public bug tracking works:

http://jira.secondlife.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa
http://bugs.adobe.com/

Sounds like you have some testing abilities.

Testing that involves talking is highly inefficient.  Many places do that as common practice.  If it cannot be communicate in text or screenshots then the environment or problem is not understood clearly enough which means the tester needs to learn more.

We still have keys for distribution?  I've misplaced my original e-mail and am still looking to browse the building tools.

 :awesome_for_real:

I somehow missed getting into this.  Is it too late?

Try IWEEK, it was a key giveaway last week that hasn't been all used up.

I can't tell if there are keys left or not.  I tried to register, and got "can not open socket" as a response after putting in the code.

Btw, Raph, that captcha on the registration page is the worst one I've ever seen.

Cannot open socket? Like, on the web page? Or the client?

I'll ask if we can use the pretty, legible captchas instead. ;) But I think the one we are using is that one that helps decipher unscannable text or whatever.

Only if you install a plug in, that resets the page.

Not sure what you mean. I meant, we use reCaptcha: http://recaptcha.net/

No plugin is needed... it's just that the captcha text is used to help decipher scans of old books and newspapers being added to archives.

Yes, click on the audio, or "say it for me" button on the reCaptcha thingy.

Jesus christ it's the music of Erich Zann.

Heh, I have never even used the audio button... it's an extra perk, you don't need the plugin to use the captcha.

Yeah, well, just making you aware. Odd thing is, at work it asked me to install quicktime, and i have it already. At home, it said Real player  :ye_gods: I will never install real player.

I put in the code, then was sent to a registration page.  Then, once I put in the captcha thing, I got a
Cannot open socket
message on a blank page.  I think it was trying to open something on Iweek but I'm not positive.

At any rate, a more helpful error message would have been nice - I wasn't sure if I left a field blank, had incorrect information entered somewhere, put in the captcha wrong, or if its out of keys.

Hmm, no, shouldn't have needed to open anything, and we have had others register.

PM your email, I'll send you an invite direct.

Raph still really needs a schill..


BTW they had some kind of giveaway of keys yesterday, The info was on Raph's blog for anyone who missed it.