I’ve played a couple of MMOGs in my time, but never have I played one that was in the process of collapsing. Until Planetside.

A lot of the MMOGs I’ve played were free browser-based ones, so they don’t exactly count, but I’ve played three of the honest-to-goodness “pay us monthly fees and download this game client” games. None of them were World of Warcraft because I can’t be bothered to roleplay an orc. Eve Online is by far the biggest of the three, with a subscriber base of over 100,000 and a rough average of 15,000 people online at any one time (not including the China-based server, which is separate). While Eve has had its share of scandals, by and large it’s still a fairly enjoyable game for the hardcore empire-builder, and somewhat less so for the solo player. Eve is enormously complex, the sci-fi spaceship motif is more to my tastes and a refreshing change from Elfmania, and there are plenty of ways to keep yourself entertained and make money.

By contrast, A Tale in the Desert is astoundingly small; there are perhaps 2,000 people playing the game, if even that. It’s also completely lacking in violence and a centralized economy. And yet it’s also a very complex game, involving all sorts of disciplines including exploration, social leadership, crafting and puzzle creation. ATITD also has its share of problems; the small player base is relatively stagnant, and because the dev team is very small the game is subject to the team’s whims. For example, the main developer spent a great deal of time last October coding a minigame based on Mafia, at the expense of nearly everything else, including new content and storyline events. But you get the sense that the dev team truly cares about the game, even if it doesn’t go in the direction the players would want; name another lead developer who would freely give out his personal cell phone as a personal guarantee that he won’t use your e-mail address for spam.

Having left ATITD a while back (perhaps for good) and finding Eve wanting for the third time, I decided to try something new. Planetside is an MMOFPS, a big change from most MMOGs; it basically drops you into the middle of a raging, persistent interplanetary war with a gun and tells you to fight until you can take no more. You take the side of one of three empires and attack by land, sea and air to take bases away from the other two empires. Tanks, planes, giant mecha—Planetside is basically Battlefield 2142 writ large, with battles encompassing entire continents and holding as many as 450 people.

At least, that was the party line three years ago, when the game was first release by Sony Online Entertainment. Since then the game’s fortunes have dimmed significantly; after a predicted high of about 60,000 subscribers, those numbers took a massive nosedive last year, and today the game’s forums are filled with portents of doom. It’s a very bad sign when an offer of a free month to lapsed subscribers is met with vitriol:

I’ll tell my friends to come back to planetside when I have proof that the monthly subscriptions people pay for this garbage go towards something more than doughnuts. All development over the past six months has gone towards a batch of tiny jpegs, many of which are just a single color.

And those 450-person battles? I just left a battle after three hours of trying to reclaim a single base from a small team attempting to steal a continent full of bases while no one was looking. We failed, despite the fact that there were only a dozen of them at most. Why? Because we only had about that many ourselves, and our population represented about a quarter of the total online population for our empire. That number increases once you get into prime-time, but rarely do you see more than 300-400 people online at any given time—and that’s across all planets on a single server. What’s worse is that many of those people are playing for free via a year-long trial program, and that program is set to finish at the end of March.

Sony appears to have all but given up on the game. The player base that remains is resigned to the game’s fate, believing that once the free trial accounts stop working, Planetside will die. It’s such a shame, too; the concept had a lot of promise. But it seems there’s no real market for epic infantry firefights and tank battles raging across huge continents. Rest in peace, Planetside.

Update: A day after I posted this, Sony announced they were increasing the Planetside monthly fee $2 to $14.99 USD as of April 2nd. This does not seem like a good business move.

Man, I really like David Miller and I’m rooting for the One Cent Now campaign to work, but I just don’t see it happening:

“We’re going to where the power is, which is with the people,” Miller said in an interview with CBC Radio’s Here and Now, explaining he hopes citizens will help him pressure the federal government.

That’s great, except the people of Toronto elected you because they thought the power to pressure the federal government lay with you. The Conservatives sure as hell aren’t going to listen to “the people,” since no one in the GTA elected a Conservative candidate; even with one GTA MP switching his allegiance, it’s still pretty clear that the Conservatives aren’t interested in Toronto or any of the other urban centres that overwhelmingly voted against a Conservative government.

This campaign is a tacit admission by Miller that he can’t pressure higher levels of government effectively where it counts: funding. Not that we needed any more evidence:

In his re-election victory speech last November, Miller called on the federal and provincial government to give Toronto one cent of the sales tax collected in the city, saying he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Both levels of government said no.

Dear EA,

If this is the direction you’re planning to take Wing Commander, we’d rather the franchise stay dead, thanks. Even watching the cutscenes from Wing Commander 3 is an order of magnitude less painful than the hackneyed arcade shooter that is Wing Commander Arena. Stop fucking with us; we can only take so much heartbreak.

Yours truly,
everyone who’s ever played a proper Wing Commander game

Meet the Redneck Rollercoaster, an old Chevy Cavalier that’s been heavily modified to move the driver’s controls to an elevated spot over the front bumper. Why? So you can do this:

In the second video the owner explains how the whole contraption works. He’s even mounted the license plate (though I imagine he’d have a hard time convincing the cops it’s road-legal), which is where we learn that the Redneck Rollercoaster is a made-in-Ontario innovation. The car, converted in 2000, has starred in internet videos for a while, but it’s apparently the recent YouTube videos that’s garnered the attention of a Country Music Television film crew. Check out the guy’s new bling!

CS geeks who love Minesweeper will be pleased to learn that Minesweeper is an NP-complete problem.

The rest of you… well, um, I can beat Expert in under five minutes! Once in a while, even!

Hilariously, I just posted the image to a message board I’m on, but somehow I’ve managed to find myself on a Wired blog. I guess this means I should post the video at some point, eh?

P.S. BBC World is my new favourite channel.

The New Yorker takes on the politics of 24.

He said he regretted what had happened and felt ‘compelled to step down, effective immediately, in recognition of the gravity of the situation that occurred under my watch.’

Let’s back up a bit. Normally I’m not a big supporter of any of the major media conglomerates, Turner included. I’m also not a huge supporter of keeping high-priced CEOs in their cushy jobs whenever something bad happens to the company they run. I’m not a big fan of guerilla advertising, mainly because it’s just another example of corporations co-opting the language of subcultures and subverting it to sell product.

And yet this whole Boston fiasco has made me side with all of the above camps, because Boston epitomizes two things I hate even more: knee-jerk terrorism fright and rank stupidity. Even your own fucking citizens are embarassed for the city. JUST STOP ALREADY.

Back in 2004, EFF fellow Cory Doctorow gave a speech to the Microsoft Research Group about why they should steer clear of DRM technologies. In it, he offered a challenge to Microsoft:

American film studios didn’t want the Japanese electronics
companies to get a piece of the movie pie, so they fought the
VCR. Today, everyone who makes movies agrees that they don’t want
to let you guys get between them and their customers.

Sony didn’t get permission. Neither should you. Go build the
record player that can play everyone’s records.

Because if you don’t do it, someone else will.

It’s a reasonable response to an implicit question: why are technology corporations so gung ho about DRMs, when previously they’ve fought lawsuits for the right to produce similar technologies like VCRs? Doctorow’s answer is that they shouldn’t be at all; the people who make MP3 players and DVD players should be on the side of the consumers, not the studios and record labels. (more…)

It turns out playing dumb can be very lucrative indeed. Turner Broadcasting has agreed to pay the state of Massachusetts $2 million as restitution for the atrocities of 1/31 (nevar forget). Turner avoids a lawsuit while gaining tons of publicity for the upcoming ATHF movie, and Massachusetts gets lots of money and a misplaced sense of vindication. Everyone else in this story loses: the two artists who are still up on felony charges; the residents of Boston, who have to deal with their city being the current laughingstock of the nation; and finally, common sense.

Somehow it has still escaped everyone’s notice that ten other cities did not panic upon seeing strange circuit boards with lights on them all over the place; somehow it has still escaped everyone’s notice that Boston did not panic for three weeks while the boards were up in the city. And yet Boston and Massachusetts officials get to walk away with a smug sense of superiority and self-righteousness:

Coakley and Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino said the settlement and statement show that police did not overreact.

“So I just have to say the folks who second-guessed us because we did go out there and do our work, shame on them, because it’s important that we did it,” Menino said.

“Shame on them”? Yes, because exposing institutional stupidity is worthy of shame. All this talk of a “post-9/11 world” has people knowingly afraid of their own shadows, and proud of the fact that they’re so vigilant against such an obvious threat to national security. But obviously it’s a tactic that works; after all, wouldn’t you want to get paid for being scared too?