Are MMOs Time-Release Vaporware? 193
KKnDz0r writes "Australian technology and gaming site 'Atomic' raises an interesting question about the dangers of MMOs that go bust. Are they part of a new breed of games that render themselves completely useless and without value if the parent company goes belly-up? It certainly seems that way in some cases, with Fury and now Hellgate: London both going to software heaven, leaving a player base holding relatively useless client software."
While it's certainly not an issue for the large, continuously successful MMOs, we've lately seen a huge influx of companies trying to grab a slice of the MMO pie, some of which will inevitably fail. It would be great to see a dying company at least open up the server software, but how can we give them incentive to do so?
I think... (Score:5, Informative)
...I should point out that Hellgate: London was not actually an MMORPG, and it includes a single-player mode so it can indeed be played even if the servers are no longer available.
Re:Correction (Score:5, Informative)
What rubbish, some of the first MMOs ever made, gemstone, Ultima Online, Meridian 59 (the first 3d mmo) are still going strong.
Everquest is almost 10 years old (1999) and that's still going strong.
Back up your baseless claims.
Re:Incentive? (Score:2, Informative)
not vaporware, it's abandonware (Score:5, Informative)
And you people claim to be geeks. Here's the crux: Vaporware gets announced, but never released. Abandonware gets released and then abandoned.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware [wikipedia.org]
Ranting about character support on Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
BTW, what is it with /. and the rendering of apostrophes? Is it just me, or Firefox, or what?
If you type on a non QWERTY keyboard, such as most of those in Europe, there's a good chance you're using the "wrong" apostrophe. On my German keyboard here for example, there's the "real" apostrophe on shift # (just left of the enter key), as well as the backtick/foretick key beside ß (which also doesn't display correctly, like this - ÃY). Slashdot doesn't handle a great deal of characters that aren't standard ASCII, which includes the foretick (renders as Â). Oddly enough, the backtick renders fine - `. It's pretty common for people in Europe to type the foretick rather than an apostrophe character, because it's easier to reach and you don't have to press shift on most layouts, whereas for an apostrophe you do. It's still wrong though, and looks hideous in a lot of fonts, even when it does display correctly, so I'd advise training yourself against it. In the case of copy/paste (I noticed it happens for you when quoting), be careful that the characters you're pasting in are correct, as the simple act of copying from a webpage may mess things up depending on the clipboard system in use (I seem to have no problems here using English language MacOS X 10.4 with Firefox 3.0.3, but potentially different combinations may be an issue)
I notice the foretick I've typed here doesn't render the same as your "apostrophe" however, so I wonder if you're typing yet another different character. As you can see from this post, I've used a fair few "real" apostrophes and they all show fine.
Despite my claims about the foretick/whatever-else not looking right and that you shouldn't use them as apostrophe, I ALSO think Slashdot needs to hurry up and actually support all of these characters (I mean come on... Unicode is NOT hard), because it's REALLY annoying to have to type things like Köln, when I'd rather just type Köln (which renders here as as KÃln). There's a LOT of characters that don't show correctly:
And many many more...
(note that some of these characters are required to correctly spell ENGLISH words also... æ in Encyclopædia or loanwords that we don't really have any alternative for, such as façade... so it's not even a decent excuse for them to say that Slashdot is primarily English speaking.)