- Nighthawk

02.25.08

Best Tag EVAR

I have long been proud to have WTFMAN as my car tag. It gets many raised eyebrows and questions from both co-workers and police officers regarding its meaning. Good stuff. Joe's tag isn't terrible either after having taken Ally's and my suggestion to get GG NEWB. However, we have both been horribly trumped by the greatest tag of all time :

Don't know how he got that tag as one would think that would immediately throw up some red flags... but that fucking owns.

Discuss

- Nighthawk

02.19.08

The Real Developers

Well I am alive but I haven't posted too much lately because, well, let's face it - UO Divinity is filled with players like you and I so there's nothing to rant about. I could go on about WoW, but I feel dirty because I'm pretty sure it would be the worst case of beating a dead horse in history.

I would like to take this time to commend the WTFGTA team and make everyone realize the importance of work like this. This is a large part of the future of gaming, in my opinion. With the advent of Xbox Live, Sony's Home service, and the rampant ability to modify things like GTA on the PC, the possibilities are endless. Some of the best gems you will ever find come out of this sort of development. It's amazing what people can accomplish without publishers looming overhead and demands to make 100 million bucks on a game. At times I feel the community has a better grasp than the developers, and when the community becomes the developers you get things like WTFGTA.

In a time when so many games follow cookie-cutter styles and formats, I encourage anyone to push custom mods. This drives innovation and recently we've seen some cases where the big names like Sony pick up these projects for their online services. Don't get me wrong, I'd like to stick a big rubber dick in Sony's ass then break it off and beat them with the rest of it, but the exposure they can give to people who take on independent projects is motivation in my opinion.

I encourage all of you reading to look into WTFGTA and be reminded that for all the bitching we do, this is an angle that can be taken to get rid of all the bullshit and put in what we really want and have some fun. Yes, fun, you know that thing we play games for but in many cases seems to be elusive in 90% of the online world today?

Discuss

- Risks

We're Number 1!

On September 8th 2007 WTFGTA officially opened its doors to the public. About a month prior to that I took my first steps into San Andreas, on WTFGTA, before any of you really knew it. I stood there in my clown suit, which at that time was the beginning skin, with a few friends I had at time and thought to myself, “I’m making a terrible mistake.” I was afraid I was about to embark on a phenomenal waste of time. I knew nothing about the coding behind this game; I had a script with over 25,000 lines of code that somehow barely managed to be playable. To top it off I hadn’t even played the single player game past the first half of the first mission. I didn’t like riding a bike so I shut it off and uninstalled it. Stupid eh?

The whole thing started because I was bored and digging around my old game collection looking for something fun to network and play. I stumbled across GTA2 and fired it up. That quickly lead into Vice City then right into San Andreas. We coasted into an MMORPG styled server and quickly fell in love with it. A week or two into it this was found to be very short lived. All the servers I tried went through a couple hour honeymoon period of fun and then some very game crushing problems came to light. For the most part, all the scripting was fine, but the people involved were just destroying the game.

Some servers had legions of staff members, to the point where 1 in every 4 people you encountered was an administrator. All the positions of authority and power were gobbled up by the staff and I quickly came to the realization that I was always just going to be there to entertain another. My skull bounced off the glass ceiling so many times it was unbearable. Some servers had silly rules established to govern the players such as “Don’t fight back.”, and “No driving car X.” with no coded measures to prevent people from doing so.

I felt like I was just out of reach of a phenomenal game and apparently I was pretty spoiled by the game models established by the Ultima Online freeshards of the past and present (IPY, UO Divinity). Jumping forward again to me standing there in a clown suit, despite my doubts of this ever being a success, I started to think. What can I do here? How can I make a place I would like to play? How do I get there? I dove into the code and started studying and reading everything I could fine. For hours I would read over the script and draw out on graph paper how the code worked and what it did.

I thought about it all day, while I dressed in the morning, while I stared blankly at the television, and every free moment I could drive off. As I’m sure most of you can tell I’m a real stubborn bastard sometimes, well I’m the exact same way when I code. I would lay out a plan with absolutely no regard as to how to do it or if it was possible and I wouldn’t stop until I made it happen. Eventually a lot of the critical problems were fleshed out and I started working on the gang code with the idea in mind that I would be able to further the underlying theme of this server, empowering the players.

As I’m standing one day at the newbie spawn point my screen freezes. I attempt to reboot the computer and I can’t get it to power on. I was on an open connection to the server for editing purposes at the time so you all knew when my motherboard fried because the whole server came down with it thanks to that open connection. After pulling apart the computer I had to acknowledge the worst, my computer was out of commission and I had nowhere near enough money to get it fixed.

The gang code was put on hold and I continued trying to develop the code to maintain forward progress but it was difficult. I was programming on notepad and passing along untested snippets via IM for debugging and implementations while coaching the debuggers what to test and how to fix problems that were occurring. This went on for around a month until thankfully; the donations accumulated enough to get me back into the game.

A few minor patches later I knew I had to get the gang code out the door. I told my wife to get the hell out of the house for the weekend and I barricaded myself in front of the computer. I drafted a few unlucky players to start doing some grunt work while I grinded out over 7000 lines of code in a weekend. Sunday night rolled around and I collapsed into bed feeling like I had just run a marathon. That following week the patch was released and the first Ganglord’s stormed onto the scene taking San Andreas by storm.

I was very happy with the gang code and it seemed to go over very well. Under the assumption that the Ganglord’s would cause a surge in population and then we’d slip back to normal numbers I took a bit of a break from coding. That backwards slip never ended up coming. New patches continued to come out providing one of the most robust cheat detection systems in SAMP claiming over 5600+ souls, profession revamps, and a new breed of law enforcement unlike any other. We continue to provide content and an environment no one else can.

Our forums offer so much content I’m pissed at myself I don’t have the time to read everything as I once did. The GTA server itself has seen over 80,000 registered characters. On Feburary 16, 2008, exactly 163 days after launch, WTFGTA reached number 1 in the world out of over 122000 ranked servers across 36 different games. I don’t care if this only lasts a moment because right now we’ve achieved what a very few have. This is an especially large victory for wtfman.com, which is the site responsible for not one but now two world renowned servers.

I’ve always said we have the best server, now it’s nice to have something to point to and prove it. This server’s success was the collaboration of a lot of things, in my opinion it has a whole lot to do with the players. Now I’m not going to lie to you, sometimes I really want to kill some of your bastards, but I haven’t forgotten that you guys are the bread and butter of this server. You can give yourselves a big round of applause. Another huge factor is the tireless staff I have supporting me, without those guys putting up with me being annoyingly particular with everything, this server wouldn’t operate.

Despite what the doomday rumors may say and the best efforts of many to prevent us from succeeding we still continue to move forward. You can rest assured that neither myself, the coding team, or game staff have any plans of stopping or relenting. What you see here is only one of many good things you will see come of this. Thanks everyone!

Discuss and gloat

- Violent Dave

02.05.08

Death and Dishonor

PVP:Player versus player, or PvP, is competitive interaction within a game between two live participants. This is in contrast to games where players compete against computer controlled opponent, which is similarly referred to as Player versus environment (PvE) or player versus monster (PvM). PvP is a type of combat in MMORPGs, MUDs and other computer role-playing games (CRPGs), pitting one player's 'skill' against another's.

PK: Player killing, or PKing, is non-consensual PvP resulting in a character's death. Some games offer "open PvP" (also sometimes called "world PvP"), where one player can attack another without warning anywhere in the game world. An aggressor attacks an opponent without agreement to any set of rules of engagement or combat.

Gank: verb (Online, MMORPG usage) 1. To kill another player using a group of players 2. To kill another player using any means that places the played to be killed at a substantial disadvantage.

As some of you know, I've recently returned to Asheron's Call with several old JoV members and several more wtfman readers. Now for those of you who remember Darktide and how it was (how we ran it) you know that we took what we wanted when we wanted it with brutal and efficient methods. Apparently somewhere in my absence the sport we called PvP has fallen into the carebear pit of despair with every other modern MMO concept

Recently while Irem (Shai, Veng) and I were chasing someone down on DT, who was 90 levels higher than me and 20 higher then Irem a question was brought up....

"2v1" says the high level, still running

"Always" I reply "Unless I have 3"

"Pussy" he says then insta recalls away

This happens daily, multiple times a day actually; People running away, generally higher level, calling me a pussy because I was smart enough to bring help. Now here's my question: When did PvP become about dueling? If you want to duel play pokemon and summon your little monsters, I'm sure the name "Ashe" or whatever is taken though, so you may have to go with XxXAsheXxX.....carebear.... I even see shit like this in DoTA, a team game, where we take a 5 man in to kill 2 people then push a tower.... people complaining about "5v2"

So what I'd really like to know, what are everyone's thoughts on the direction PvP is heading in. In 5 years do you see everyone playing Hello Kitty Island adventure(WoW) still? In short I'm thoroughly unimpressed with the masses, we here at Wtfman and especially in JoV are pks.... honor pks but still pks, we just don't cheat

Discuss

- Neverborn