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Author Topic: Next up!!!!  (Read 10893 times)
Furiously
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on: December 13, 2009, 07:16:21 PM

The gaming graveyard?

Trippy
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Reply #1 on: December 13, 2009, 09:08:01 PM

Is there some news?
Rendakor
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Reply #2 on: December 13, 2009, 10:32:48 PM

I think someone was bored, maybe?

"i can't be a star citizen. they won't even give me a star green card"
schild
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Reply #3 on: December 13, 2009, 10:35:31 PM

What
Rasix
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I am the harbinger of your doom!


Reply #4 on: December 13, 2009, 10:41:34 PM

 swamp poop

-Rasix
schild
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Reply #5 on: December 21, 2009, 04:10:23 PM

Well played, Furiously. Well played.

Quote
metaplace.com is closing on january 1, 2010

Today we have unfortunate news to share with the Metaplace community.  We will be closing down our service on January 1, 2010 at 11:59pm Pacific.  The official announcement is here and copied below, and you can read a FAQ guide here.  We will be having a goodbye celebration party on January 1st at 12:00noon Pacific Time.

Over the last several years, we here at Metaplace Inc. have been working very hard to create an open platform allowing anyone to come to a website and create a virtual world of their own.
 
Unfortunately, over the last few months it has become apparent that Metaplace as a consumer UGC service is not gaining enough traction to be a viable product, requiring a strategic shift for our company.
 
We’re sorry to announce today that Metaplace.com will be closing to the public at 11:59pm on January 1st, 2010.
 
This is a bittersweet moment for us. Metaplace Inc the company will be continuing on – in fact, we have big plans – but what you the users have known as Metaplace will be going away. We are also losing some friends and colleagues here as part of this strategic shift.
 
We’d rather dwell on the good than the sad. You, the users, have done amazing work here, and we want to celebrate it. We may not have managed to reach our goals with Metaplace.com and Metaplace Central, but we still had a lot of fun, watched creativity flower, visited amazing places, and made a lot of friends. We’ve had amazing guest speakers, more parties than we can count, live concerts, movie premieres and art shows; we’ve seen you make adventures and schools and churches and games and countless other sorts of worlds that would otherwise never have been created.
 
In that spirit, we want to treat these next two weeks more as a celebration of the good times. We invite you all to come back to see all of the amazing worlds that you have made. Registration will remain open, so you can show off to your friends. Remote embeds will remain active until the last day as well.
 
We’ll be turning off billing immediately, and refunding everyone for all purchases in the month of December as well as subscription payments that apply to December and future months. This month is on us. We are suspending regular customer service, but the support site will remain open for now in case there are any critical billing issues.
 
We know many of you have done work here that you would like to preserve. Please do use this time to capture screenshots, data, scripts, movies, and assets. We have a FAQ that explains how to retrieve assets from the service.
 
When other worlds have reached a sunset point, people have lost touch with each other. We’ve made a lot of friends here and we’re sure that you have too, so we don’t want that to happen. We have created a forum site athttp://www.metaplaceveterans.com that will be operational soon, so that you can all keep in touch with one another.
 
Finally: we want to treat the 1st of January as a celebration, rather than a sad moment. Please join us on that day for a party, starting at noon Pacific time. If Metaplace.com has to go, we want to go out with style, with joy, and with the same sense of fun that we have always had. Let’s celebrate the journey, not the ending. There will be meeps – count on it.
 
We’re sure you have many questions about all of this – and there’s a detailed FAQ that we hope answers them. Click here to read it.
 
In the meantime, we want to thank you all for your support, your effort, your creativity, and your loyalty. We know that many of you will be disappointed by this outcome. We are too. We are embarking on a new and exciting direction, and it feels strange not to have you all along for the ride.
 
It has been a privilege to have had you here with us on this great adventure, and we hope that this community – this wonderful, engaged, passionate, friendly community – lives on and on.
 
We’ll miss you -- and we hope to see you again.

Metaplace Team
Fordel
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Reply #6 on: December 21, 2009, 04:26:31 PM

I still have no idea what Metaplace was supposed to be.

and the gate is like I TOO AM CAPABLE OF SPEECH
taolurker
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Reply #7 on: December 21, 2009, 04:42:19 PM

Quote
Unfortunately, over the last few months it has become apparent that Metaplace as a consumer UGC service is not gaining enough traction to be a viable product, requiring a strategic shift for our company.

Always had a problem seeing how this kind of service would make money.


I used to write for extinct gaming sites
details available here (unused blog about page)
naum
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Reply #8 on: December 21, 2009, 07:18:49 PM

Feel bad for Raph and crew…

Gave it a whirl but it ran poorly on my machine (MacBook Pro), even tinkered a bit and was plagued still with login problems and performance issues…

Plus, I just loathe Flash… …not impossible to craft a decent game with it, but a framework platform I dunno.


"Should the batman kill Joker because it would save more lives?" is a fundamentally different question from "should the batman have a bunch of machineguns that go BATBATBATBATBAT because its totally cool?". ~Goumindong
UnSub
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Reply #9 on: December 21, 2009, 09:41:38 PM

Like many, I logged in once or twice, looked around, played in a few other worlds, got stuck, logged off, never went back.

Sorry that Metaplace didn't work out and it was classy to provide refunds for those December payments.

schild
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Reply #10 on: December 21, 2009, 10:13:01 PM

They're not closing, the UGC is just getting shut down. I mean, this was A LITTLE expected from anyone who thinks UGC is just bad.

That said, I'm glad he can still move forward with a game (I hope).
Numtini
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Reply #11 on: December 22, 2009, 06:28:18 AM

Sorry to hear it for Raph's sake and I had a couple of friends from SL who made a home there, but there never seemed to really be a there there and I think that market is split between Second Life and IMVU.
« Last Edit: December 22, 2009, 06:47:39 AM by Numtini »

If you can read this, you're on a board populated by misogynist assholes.
Mrbloodworth
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Reply #12 on: December 22, 2009, 10:10:24 AM

I spent quite a bit of time in it. I created a good deal of content for a friend, and we used it rather well, got some of the highest rates there. Sadly this was the problem I think, attracting talent in the user base. I spent many hours making content, but with no way to monetize my efforts (Including externally, as we were trying to use it), I moved on to paying activities.

I thought the concept was great, the tools were awesome (no matter how much guff I gave you Raph). I think, you just missed the time frame people would have been interested in this, and there really was zero reason for any talent to stay with it. Chicken and the egg, but there was little to attract the chickens.


For anyone who wants to check it out, here it is.

Anyway, I you had some great people on your staff and i know you will take care of them. Here is to future successes!

Today's How-To: Scrambling a Thread to the Point of Incoherence in Only One Post with MrBloodworth . - schild
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Obo
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Reply #13 on: December 22, 2009, 10:31:41 AM

I made a whole range of different stuff; worlds, modules, chat plugins etc. My tetris clone was probably the best of it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z8O25ktp9Y

Not sure what to do with my time now! I'll probably go back to trying flash.
Kageru
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Reply #14 on: December 22, 2009, 06:35:50 PM


Thanks for those videos. Watching something like metacrawl really remind me how poor it all ended up looking. The client, in an effort to be user friendly, had far too many inherent assumptions and limitations. And having to walk around an isometric world to try and find flash games makes little sense when running an IM client and opening a web page can do pretty much everything metaplace claimed in a more convenient format.

If there is ever going to be a universal framework for virtual worlds it is going to be an API and design authored by a neutral body and a lot of vendors writing real applications. It's not going to be created using drop down menus in a glorified flash engine.

Is a man not entitled to the hurf of his durf?
- Simond
naum
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Reply #15 on: December 22, 2009, 11:56:10 PM

Metafuckers

Quote
The question I had for Raph Koster and Tami Baribeau, the forward-facing people behind Metaplace, was this:

“Where’s your export function?”

Actually, that’s not big enough.

“WHERE THE FUCK IS YOUR EXPORT FUNCTION?”

Don’t waste my time apologizing for them. Don’t tell me I’m being too harsh. Maybe I should be giving them some big ol’ hugs here, a few days before Christmas, that they are closing up shop during the holidays and expecting people to go through the insane manual procedures they’ve blown in to get your stuff off. It’s a nightmare maze of manual URL grabbing, save-as lists, and weird commands that give you even more work. At the end of it, your data is a jumbled mess, subject to however you downloaded and classified it yourself, and prone to error because you were fucking trying to do all this during the holidays.

If your thing that takes in user content doesn’t have an export function, that is, a big button with a few selection boxes for exactly how much of your shit you want to take down, with one of the options being “all of my shit”, then they are stealing your shit from you.

Oh, sure, we have gigabytes of record of Koster bloviating about player rights and the meaning of games and what it’s all about in the process of building community around a virtual world, but here we have the real story: make no preparations for the end, assume all the stuff made with you is yours yours yours, and make it difficult for people to go elsewhere. Guess what, kids – it’s 2009. The days when it was this amazing crazy-ass thing that a server on a computer out there on the Internet could hold data for you and still be there when your browsed back… well, that was probably 13 years ago and counting. It’s not amazing anymore. It’s not something that lets you get away with acting like you just strapped together 400 milk jugs and put a wooden door down and miraculously floated down the fucking river. It’s basic shit. And along with something becoming basic shit is the idea of an open platform, of letting your company’s skills and interaction with customers define why they should keep their data, and not locking them up behind what they call a “walled garden” but which fails to make clear your users did all the gardening. Excuse time is over. It shouldn’t be the way it is now.

But it is. So Metaplace will die, as they all die, with a pathetic message blown out like it was all a big fun old time, and with a few mumbled incoherencies about being able to “manually save” some jigsaw pieces of your work, and a few articles and then a long black space where it used to be. A few people will mention it in the same breath as other failed virtual spaces, a punchline, an insider or industry reference, a few years down the line. Koster walks the Earth free. Baribeau becomes “community manager” of another unsuspecting chicken coop of suckers, unaware the flamethrower might be turned on at any moment.

I am saying, basically, that this is bullshit. It has to stop.

Raph announced this closure letting people know that even though he was shitcanning metaplace, there were still “exciting plans” afoot.  To this I say no, you shitheel, you don’t get to have “exciting plans”. You get to desperately scramble to come up with some solid reasons why metaplace imploded, and why anybody should trust you with a fucking three-byte string anytime in the next few years. You get to grovel, and explain why there was no warning, and why the best lifeboat you can muster up for the people who trusted you with their creation and data is a Do-It-Yoo-Seff(tm) notepad-and-right-click combo, repeated endlessly, throughout Christmas.

Otherwise, O wise god of gaming theory, you are a fuck.

"Should the batman kill Joker because it would save more lives?" is a fundamentally different question from "should the batman have a bunch of machineguns that go BATBATBATBATBAT because its totally cool?". ~Goumindong
schild
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Reply #16 on: December 23, 2009, 01:13:24 AM

Raph responded in the comments you know, post both:

Quote
Grimmtooth, Metaplace uses standard image formats. We offer hosting for them, but users who made their own generally uploaded them. (So most users would have them, we think, but we offered a way to get an HTML file with the links to every image in your world).

Scripts are in Lua, which is the “cut and paste in Notepad” that he’s referring to in the post. We didn’t offer a way to grab a ZIP of all the script files with a button press to retrieve them all, that is true.

I’m sorry that Jason feels this way, but quite a lot of services never let you get anything at all, or leave the content locked in a proprietary format. I think we could certainly do better — a one button solution would have been lovely –, but honestly I feel he is being a bit unfair as regards the issue of asset retrieval. I doubt I will change his mind, though. :)

BTW, if users can’t manage to get their assets before the time runs out — we’re still here as a company, and arrangements can be made. The support site and contact forms are still there and regular users know how to reach us, and that we will answer.

That said, I think Jason is over the line in accusing us of ignorant viciousness. We made metaplaceveterans.com so that users could stay in touch with *each other*. Doubt I will change his mind on that either, and I don’t mind if he heaps scorn on us here at Metaplace… but I don’t appreciate his calling Metaplace users stupid or gullible.

That said, I'm not the biggest UGC fan. I've said my piece about the Android market and the quality that generally comes with the public making stuff.

Which is, to say, it's bad.

But the Android market lets you charge for things and has a HUGE install base. Raph wanted these people before the install base.

That was the mistake here. If you want to rant about something, rant about putting the cart before the horse. Rant about not seeing the forest for the trees.

Rant about putting the creation of entertainment in the hands of the enemy.

But don't rant about having to copy and paste some fucking text and images.
Obo
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Reply #17 on: December 23, 2009, 05:13:05 AM


Thanks for those videos. Watching something like metacrawl really remind me how poor it all ended up looking.
Well to be fair the obvious stuff wrong in that video was all my fault  Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?. Avatars not looking in the right direction, sprites not being pre-loaded, stupid AI was all stuff I was going to get back to and fix. Guess I left it too late to start working on that world.
Mrbloodworth
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Reply #18 on: December 23, 2009, 06:18:39 AM


I am sorry, who gives a shit about this guy. Not to mention, in his frothing, he is wrong in a good number of cases, and speaking hyperbole.

I on the other hand, have already retrieved all our custom items from the servers, all it takes, is having actually used the system. That guy is an ass hat.

Seems like that blog post was a long, drawn out, childish-internet way of asking for a zip file utility. Seems flames are they way to ask a questions on the Internets anymore.
« Last Edit: December 23, 2009, 06:28:02 AM by Mrbloodworth »

Today's How-To: Scrambling a Thread to the Point of Incoherence in Only One Post with MrBloodworth . - schild
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naum
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Reply #19 on: December 23, 2009, 08:36:05 AM

Raph responded in the comments you know, post both:

Quote
Grimmtooth, Metaplace uses standard image formats. We offer hosting for them, but users who made their own generally uploaded them. (So most users would have them, we think, but we offered a way to get an HTML file with the links to every image in your world).

Scripts are in Lua, which is the “cut and paste in Notepad” that he’s referring to in the post. We didn’t offer a way to grab a ZIP of all the script files with a button press to retrieve them all, that is true.

I’m sorry that Jason feels this way, but quite a lot of services never let you get anything at all, or leave the content locked in a proprietary format. I think we could certainly do better — a one button solution would have been lovely –, but honestly I feel he is being a bit unfair as regards the issue of asset retrieval. I doubt I will change his mind, though. :)

BTW, if users can’t manage to get their assets before the time runs out — we’re still here as a company, and arrangements can be made. The support site and contact forms are still there and regular users know how to reach us, and that we will answer.

That said, I think Jason is over the line in accusing us of ignorant viciousness. We made metaplaceveterans.com so that users could stay in touch with *each other*. Doubt I will change his mind on that either, and I don’t mind if he heaps scorn on us here at Metaplace… but I don’t appreciate his calling Metaplace users stupid or gullible.

That said, I'm not the biggest UGC fan. I've said my piece about the Android market and the quality that generally comes with the public making stuff.

Which is, to say, it's bad.

But the Android market lets you charge for things and has a HUGE install base. Raph wanted these people before the install base.

That was the mistake here. If you want to rant about something, rant about putting the cart before the horse. Rant about not seeing the forest for the trees.

Rant about putting the creation of entertainment in the hands of the enemy.

But don't rant about having to copy and paste some fucking text and images.

Well this is the same dude that embarked upon a project to save all the Geocities content before Yahoo shuttered it… …Jason is an original internet hippie, attempting to save and preserve all the cyber-digitally posted matter (including BBS data) no matter the quality

Would have posted Raph's comments if I had saw them before posting… …don't always examine the comments on stories I read (lots of places like youtube, my local newspaper, etc.… are just repositories of irrational hate and hopeless stupid)

"Should the batman kill Joker because it would save more lives?" is a fundamentally different question from "should the batman have a bunch of machineguns that go BATBATBATBATBAT because its totally cool?". ~Goumindong
Soln
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the opportunity for evil is just delicious


Reply #20 on: December 23, 2009, 09:45:00 AM

and as the world turns, check out the FoH thread

my take: sad this happened
Furiously
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Reply #21 on: December 23, 2009, 04:54:23 PM

I need to be more careful with my new-found powers I see.

Righ
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Teaching the world Google-fu one broken dream at a time.


Reply #22 on: December 24, 2009, 08:32:16 PM

Well this is the same dude that embarked upon a project to save all the Geocities content before Yahoo shuttered it… …Jason is an original internet hippie, attempting to save and preserve all the cyber-digitally posted matter (including BBS data) no matter the quality


Compulsive hoarding
. He probably lives in a a cluttered home which contains every possession he's ever had, along with several years of his feces, urine and mucus.

The camera adds a thousand barrels. - Steven Colbert
textfiles
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Reply #23 on: December 24, 2009, 10:27:23 PM


Compulsive hoarding
. He probably lives in a a cluttered home which contains every possession he's ever had, along with several years of his feces, urine and mucus.

I would appreciate, Internet Hero, your not speculating on my lifestyle, living conditions, or sanity.

However, it's the internet and I can expect little more than drive-by opinions; that said, I'm quite happy to do the work I do.
WindupAtheist
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Badicalthon


Reply #24 on: December 24, 2009, 10:34:50 PM

And having to walk around an isometric world to try and find flash games makes little sense when running an IM client and opening a web page can do pretty much everything metaplace claimed in a more convenient format.

Avatar-as-interface is a ridiculous idea, spawned by people who read too many cyberpunk stories 20 years ago, and it needs to die the fuck off. Whenever I hear about something like this, I just have to scratch my head. I don't want to walk my virtual guy to a virtual arcade and walk up to a virtual pinball machine and click it. I just want to play fucking pinball. That should be totally obvious to anyone who didn't just fall out of a time machine from a symposium on "cyberspace" in 1992.

(Obviously this doesn't apply to systems where the avatar is the focal point, rather than just the interface. Systems such as, you know, the actual real games themselves.)

Insert comment about how Second Life isn't a tiny bullshit furfuck irrelevancy JUST because the graphics and interface suck ass, but because only a tiny segment of tech-wankers will ever give a fuck about "virtual" or "meta" anything.

"You're just a dick who quotes himself in his sig."  --  Schild
"Yeah, it's pretty awesome."  --  Me
schild
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Reply #25 on: December 24, 2009, 10:49:58 PM


Compulsive hoarding
. He probably lives in a a cluttered home which contains every possession he's ever had, along with several years of his feces, urine and mucus.
I'm quite happy to do the work I do.
Ranting poorly?
Lantyssa
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Reply #26 on: December 25, 2009, 08:52:04 AM

Stalking the internet.

Hahahaha!  I'm really good at this!
Fordel
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Reply #27 on: December 26, 2009, 05:52:04 PM

So Metaplace let you make little flash games?

and the gate is like I TOO AM CAPABLE OF SPEECH
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