No, they aren't.
-
Hail Guest! We're looking for Community Content Contribuitors to Stratics. If you would like to write articles, fan fiction, do guild or shard event recaps, it's simple. Find out how in this thread: Community Contributions
-
Greetings Guest, Having Login Issues? Check this thread!
-
Hail Guest!, Please take a moment to read this post reminding you all of the importance of Account Security.
-
Hail Guest! Please read the new announcement concerning the upcoming addition to Stratics. You can find the announcement Here!
Does it really matter? The correction was correct in saying EMs are paid rather than volunteers.
Next week we will once again put Shadow Strike on Clubs for all the Stealth Macers out there < ---- thank god.
Probably goes live in 4 months.
For tax and benefit purposes, it's very important for a U.S. employer to correctly classify individuals as employees versus as independent contractors.
I'm not sure whether or not you live in the U.S., so I thought it might help explain things a little bit better if you could look at something from the Internal Revenue Service ("IRS"), the federal agency that handles U.S. tax law issues. This page from their website explains some of the tax issues surrounding the issue of whether individuals are classified as employees or independent contractors and points you to other pages if you want more detailed information: http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small...ndent-Contractor-(Self-Employed)-or-Employee? . There's also some good information here on the U.S. Small Business Administration website: http://www.sba.gov/content/independent-contractors-vs-employees .
It does actually. There is a huge difference between being an employee and an independent contractor.
Actually, for comparable things, video game prices have increased very little, and their quality in terms of production values have increased. However, the point sort of remains that the $12.99 subscription fee is a bit high for a game with a limited support team. Of course, SWG ran for years with a limited team and cost $2.00 more. Still, they had quarterly publishes that added a great deal of content, not single "revamped" dungeons and minor stuff.
Well, to be honest, yes, that's about it. The EMs are severely underpaid for the grief they take from the community or the actual time they put into their events -- but let's be honest, most EMs are doing this for the love of the game and its world, not the money.
GMs? I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I mean, I guess if you consider multiple-hour response times for emergency situations "support," I suppose, but trutfully, this game hasn't had real GM support in at least half a decade.
Customer Support (aka "other support) -- Yeah... I've been dealing with the Outsourced From India "customer support," and it is neither support nor customer friendly.
And while I appreciate the work the DevTeam does, five people severely limits what can be done with the game. Of course, Cal lied to us for years about the actual size of the team, so it's been this way for awhile. (Yes, there were more than 5 people, but it wasn't as large as Cal often implied.)
I don't think "the sky is falling," but I do think that when small teams lose even a single person, it becomes more difficult to achieve the things on the list. No offense to Mesanna, because she's doing what she can with the resources she has, and I know she cares greatly for the game, but the list she just provided is largely the same list we saw the last time we saw the list.
We can all pretend the state of UO is great, or we can discuss it from a standpoint that reflects its current state. But we should all understand that major undertakings will be forever in the making, and features will be pushed aside occasionally offer booster packs and theme packs and whatever because they still need to make additional money from time to time. All of these things resting on the back of a small team makes UO's future look a bit barren. Not, mind you, that I'm worried about Shroud of Richard Garriot's Gaming Past conquering UO. But I would like to see EA invest some real money into UO -- and then have that money spent wisely -- or sell it to someone who will. Because presently, it's wheezing and coughing, and many of us are pretending that those wheezes and coughs are just a cold that will eventually go away.
I live in the US and have dealt with many of these types of contracts for 21 years. This is from one of your links and proves that in fact that EMs are employees.
UO controls what an EM can and can not do, end of subject. TY for proving my point. If you notice it says generally not subject to and this is where the contract between the two parities comes into play as to how this will be handled.
Sorry, but that proves nothing. They are not employees and I am speaking as someone with intimate knowledge on the subject.
Also, if they were, EA's legal wouldn't let us have them.
Last edited:
directly employed or contract is simply muddying the waters and nit picking. Shakkara said:
Which ever way it happens, they DO cost money, and are included in the game's budget. That is the only relevant fact.
All right, how about this post from Mesanna where she says the EM position is "a paid contract position"?
http://stratics.com/community/threads/event-moderators.206551/#post-1716259 (See post #4 in that thread.)
Last edited:
Good grief man... It won't make a bit of difference... I have no idea if they will include cross-shard searches and I could care less... If you want something bad enough, all you have to do is make a char on every shard and search that shard with that char.. So having the ability to cross-shard search won't make a bit of difference...
Yes I know people cross shard trade. I know how to cross shard trade without even transfering (common with holiday gifts etc.). What people are asking for with search feature is to sit on Pac, view Atl, and order tthe item while still on Pac. Which is simply the worst idea ever. If you want to see what is available on another shard in-game, log into that shard. If you want an item from there, buy it and bring it back or enlist one of many merchants to transfer it over for you on one of their rounds.
Hopefully that clarifies what i meant.
Sure I could make a char on Baja and search the items, but I would still need to PAY for a token to transfer it home, or pay a merchant to transfer it for me, and wait until they make their rounds. People are wanting to "cross shard buy" without the need for transfers, that is what i am against.
I guess I didnt speak plainly enough for people to understand me.
Where did anyone write that? I've never seen such a posting and that would be a stupid idea which would only reduce revenue to the game. They have already destroyed single shard sales with the shard shields but this idea would be even worse.
I haven't heard anything from the dev's that would suggest that they have even considered cross shard PURCHASES... I seriously doubt that they have or would take that step... After all, that would remove the very lucrative sales of the transfer tokens... Think about it.
And what part of my response to this do you not understand? You take a second look...
Make clubs "alterable". Not garg/human, but Stealth/Crushing Blow special moves.
So if hes against people wanting to cross shard buy without using tokens....
Maybe I misunderstand and you were agreeing?
Last edited:
Yes yes it does.... and I have to agree with you I don't like that idea at all either.
Trying reading a little closer. I did not say allow people to BUY across shards - I said SEARCH across shards,
One of the most useful features of the current search sites is that I can search across shards to find out what things are selling for. Sometimes there is no 120 mage scroll or no davies locker for sale on GL. However, if I see a 120 mage for 18m on Atlantic, 16m on Chessy and 15m on Asuka - I have a good idea what to price mine at on GL.
If they implement vendor search I do NOT want to have to log into 30 diff shards to price check.
Sometimes there is only 1 or 2 of an item across all shards available on a vendor and this feature is INCREDIBLY useful. If EA only allows you to search on the shard you are on - this will be an epic fail and people will still use the web based version.
This explanation makes a little more sense.
I've almost always priced stuff on Napa with the idea that some cross shard trader could buy it to sell for a higher mark on ATL. I think that has allowed me to sell stuff faster and with less vendor charges. I've never been sure if the buyers do this or not and if they make money doing it but this has been my plan all the same.
While I understand it would be convenient, it's not really realistic to expect a real-time search system to be implemented into the game that spans shards. You should be happy to get one that focuses on your shard, and log into the few shards you're actually willing to travel to in order to search for something you can't find on your own shard.
Keep in mind that "the sites that can't be named" don't have real-time inventories, even if Plague does log in every fifteen to fourty-five minutes and search Luna. First, the sites not named don't actually search the whole shard. They have a very limited area that they search. Second, they load that info into a database.
Personally, I'm unwilling to sacrifice game performance to have the game upload its database of available vendor items every five minutes, much less keep it in real-time just for the sake of searches. Searching what exists in-game is going to be quite enough.
Even with being "in the cloud" (*wipes away a little vomit everytime he says "in the cloud"), it's not going to be enough to make a multishard search engine doable. They don't store each shard's items in a database with every other shard's items. Keep in mind, the current search sites do one thing: allow you to search.
Personally, I'll be quite happy with single-shard searching. If I want to see what the price is on Atlantic, I'll log in on Atlantic. Or open another account in another window and log in on Atlantic. At some point, we do have to have realistic expectations for the game.
Now first you have to assume that vendor data information is stored in a RDBMS somewhere. If it is not then it should be loaded in one. Of course, you can still do this against files but it would be slower/more annoying.
From each shards DB you run some simple change data capture (CDC) against it and load the chagns into a data warehouse and make it searchable. When things are bought they are removed from the DB. With a well built CDC system it would not impact any performance and only changes are pushed - not full refreshes of data. I know the current sites do it by scripting and putting it into a DB now because they dont' have direct access to UO's data storage so they reverse engineer it out of the game. It is only updated since the last time their character/script walked around that shard so it is out of date. Given EA/Mythic has full access to wherever they store the data - this can easily be achieved with CDC and the master DB would never be more than a few seconds out of date with production shards. This would be a completely acceptable SLA.
And yes - this is technology that my company sells worldwide and we do this for about every major company in the world with financial data, stock transactions, point of sale systems and many many things way more mission critical and data heavy compared to pidly UO. This is easily achievable and I could build something in probably a week or two of work and then another week to interface it into UO. A little bit of web services calls from each shard into the master data warehouse and you are set. There isn't enough traffic/players in UO to even put a load on the system. I could run this EDW DB on my laptop.
I suppose I should clarify my answer a bit...
I totally get, agree, and understand that the technology to do this exists in the world... though I think you might be a little oversimplifying the nature of combining all of the shards into one database -- for vendor items only, I understand, but knowing a bit about databases myself, the more concurrent connections, the slower something runs; additionally, there's the gameplay load on the servers that is combined with the database load (shopping carts, banks, et cetera are more specific in overall function). However, for sake of argument, I also agree that the database isn't being that severely hit because UO has a lot less traffic now than it did then.
However, my response was really aimed at the more realistic situation that surrounds UO. The shards are all "running in the cloud," and since the move from the internet to the internet, service to the shards has been noticably destabilized for many players. I presume that some of that is coming from the server/infrastructure side of things. This suggests that plugging in a new tool that holds stuff centrally might slow the game further.
To whit, the housing server has enough hiccups, and it is, by all accounts, mulit-shard in some form. Thing about the housing server is that it's relatively non-volatile. Houses aren't placed and removed and placed and removed with great frequency, so there's a bit less traffic to it, I would presume -- though, not knowing what all it houses (pun aside), I suppose it's possible that the housing server not only holds the houses but the items inside the house (I'm betting it doesn't though... I'm betting it only holds house references, which means performance issues are a bit silly for it). Ah, to have my hands on UO for a few weeks... but with layoffs, I guess it gets less and less likely I'll make it to developer someday... *sigh* But I digress...
I guess it comes to this: Yes, I totally agree with you that it could be done. And if UO were in a better state, I'd say it should be done. But given the resources, I'll be happy with a single-shard search. I think that in the present environment, hoping for more might just be wasted prayer.
Last edited:
You don't even have to go this far, just go to your local chain auto parts store/Lowes/Home Depot and they can get on hands stock from any other store. This would put no more load than anything else in UO, the biggest load they have is tracking players/mobs in real time. Even at a 5 min update this is nothing. Vendor info is updated in real time everytime you stock/buy anything.
Well, I guess there's a certain truth to this, but they also have a better infrastructure for it, and... they're not hosting an MMO at the same time. *chuckles* Still, I digress... yes, it could be done. Just not on UO's present architecture, at least in my belief of their present situation.
Last September, Mesanna implied that MrsTroublemaker had already started working on the vendor search project and she recently said she expected it to be ready to publish by October. Do you think it's possible that some of the performance issues we've been seeing could be because MrsTroublemaker already has something programmed and it's already running now, not yet in final form? Because the last two publishes both included some changes related to putting duped items on vendors, it's made me wonder if there's already some sort of rudimentary database started for this project.
YES.
I have been saying this for years: The main benefit of a veteran reward should be the veteran's ability to do whatever they want with it, be that selecting it and keeping it forever, selecting it and selling it to someone else, or making a selection for a specific sale to another individual. By having veteran rewards be age restricted, you limit the possible customer base for your selection, thus limiting the power of the selection itself.
Admittedly, this was a much bigger issue, say, 10 years ago, when the pool of accounts that were blocked from most veteran rewards was much larger (and the rules for veteran reward use were a little stricter, if I recall correctly). However, it it is still nice to see this finally make it in.
It's possible... though without knowing exactly how Mrs.Troublemaker is approaching the project, it would be hard to conjecture. There's a couple of ways this could be done... simply searching the items and/or vendor tables that I suspect already exist in the game's data structure, which would simply run in real-time off of the existing information. If that's the approach, it'll be single-shard search, and it's unlikely that there's anything that's affecting performance from that end.
It would be nice to think that it's approach #2, which would be what Theo, Frodo, and I have been discussing, which is an external database that would allow game-wide searches to be conducted. If that's the approach, then, potentially, yes, they could be hammering out issues with the data transfer between the databases.
However, given the timing of all of the issues, and having the "hardware issue" announcements after the move "to the cloud," I suspect performance issues there are simply a result of a new server paradigm that UO wasn't exactly designed for, and so they've had to make some changes both in code and infrastructure to stabilize the game.
We can always hope though.