Usually you don’t need to spend any money on such games just to play them and that’s in the first place an attractive model for getting a huge amount of players participating. However, there is paid content available to those who don’t mind to spend some money on a game they play frequently and of course finally the commercial success of the publishing company depends strongly on how many players actually get their hands on that content. So, let’s assume the company is up to make money (it’s a company, isn’t it?) or even make the maximum money possible with their product (that’s free for a reason) – what could they do?

Question: What could a publisher do to make players WANT additional and optional payed content?

The obvious:

1. If a player is disappointed by his own progress thoughout the game, e.g. the pace leveling up, give him payed oportunities to level up quicker.
2. Create some bonus content available for players who like to stand out from the masses / like to show off their pretended skill.

Less obvious:

1. When introducing new content, make it more powerful than the existing so that players dedicated to winning most games (for whatever personal reason) consider getting that content.
2. Make existing content less powerful over time.

So far, so good. Now, in most of the free games there is also the possibility to obtain some kind of play points just through playing and it’s usually possible to unlock some additional content with these. As motivating as such a model might be to play more often, let’s assume that it also includes a commercial opportunity for the publishing company. Assuming this, the company would have an interest in creating a shortage of that freely available points in the long term to make players spend money to get more of them.

Question: What could a publisher do to make a player lack play points and WANT more?

1. Make fresh / additional content expensive.
2. Frequently release more content (i.e. more frequent than a player can afford)
3. Provide various little bonuses along the road to spend, if not waste, play points on (e.g. boosts or little gameplay improvements)
4. When swtiching to fresh content, make a player require more and new little bonuses.

I guess to this point the business model is still clear and somewhat acceptable. However, let’s assume that the publishing company is still anxious to make the most of their commercial product and, of course, that I am just asking rhetorical questions here.

Question: How could gameplay be “commercially optimized” to achive a better outcome of the above?

1. Make a player win more often for a while after he has acquired fresh content.
2. Make a player lose more often if he had not acquired fresh content for a while to make him WANT new one

Sounds evil, doesn’t it? Remember, I am just asking questions to myself. So let’s assume that the company thought about it and therefore tries to hide such a process from the player.

Question: How could a company make players not presume such evil things going on?

1. Construct games based on a non-transparent matchmaking process (i.e. not showing any statistical information it’s based on)
2. Make a second “not commercially optimized” matchmaking process available later (i.e. after the player has been milked) to establish a base of trusted non-believers.
3. Reduce the influence of commercial optimization depending on if the player is presumed to spend (more) money or not (i.e. based on frequency, amounts, point in time of purchases)

Sounds too hypothetical? So, well…

Question: Would Facebook do it if they were a games company?

Remember, I don’t say that any company around there is actually doing it that way. I only say that a company making millions with a free product will at least have thought about optimizing it much the same way as I did here.

Game on! :)

Wir sehen das schwarze Loch nur als Loch, weil kein Licht mehr heraus dringt. Um hinein zu sehen, müssen wir uns ihm jedoch eigentlich nur nähern. Denn: Relativistisch verschiebt sich dadurch die Grenze des sichtbaren Lichtes, heißt: Wir bewegen uns schneller auf das Innere zu, dadurch verändert sich relativ gesehen auch das Delta der beiden ausschlaggebenden relativen Lichtgeschwindigkeiten. Lapidar: Wir können immer ein Stückchen weiter hinein sehen, je näher wir kommen. Genau genommen immer bis dort, wo die Differenz der Lichtgeschwindigkeiten an unserem und am betrachteten Standort gleich der Lichtgeschwindigkeit ist.

Genau so verhält es sich jedoch auch, wenn wir einmal drin sind, jedenfalls theoretisch: Hinter uns bildet sich irgendwann ein “schwarzes Loch”, und zwar genau dann, wenn das Licht unseres Startpunktes nicht mehr schnell genug zu uns kommen kann. Zuerst bewegen wir uns also in einen Trichter hinein und später auch wieder hinaus – wobei uns das gar nicht bewusst ist, weil am jeweils aktuellen Standort alles ganz normal aussieht. Es scheint nur so, als würde ein Teil des Universums, das hinter uns liegt, in einem schwarzen Loch kollabieren. Trotzdem: Die Theorie eines Wurmlochs. Dabei nicht bedacht ist jedoch, dass sich Raum und Zeit im Inneren verändern. So einfach ist es dann doch nicht.

Verknüpft man das nun also mit dem Wissen, dass sich im Inneren eines schwarzen Lochs Raum und Zeit krümmen, könnte man die kühne Theorie aufstellen, dass bei der Entstehung des schwarzen Lochs eine Art “Urknall” in dessen Zentrum stattgefunden hat. Von außen sehen wir nur eine Art Loch, doch im Inneren bildet sich ein neues Gefüge aus Raum und Zeit, das mit dem, was wir sehen (wir erinnern uns: Wir sehen nichts), nichts mehr gemein hat.

Ich behaupte daher: Das ganze Universum ist eine Art Wurmgebilde und auch wir selbst befinden uns, aus einer anderen, sehr weit entfernten Perspektive (z.B. innerhalb aller schwarzen Löcher, die wir sehen) heraus betrachtet, in einem schwarzen Loch, das wir Menschen meist naiv mit einem singulären Urknall erklären. Aber genau das, das der Urknall nichts einmaliges sondern etwas natürlich stattfindendes ist, ist es, was das Universum unendlich macht.

Heißt auch: Man kann nicht durch ein schwarzes Loch reisen. Man kann sich ihm nähern und mit jeder Näherung sieht das Universum um uns herum ein kleines Stückchen anders aus. Sterne kommen Näher, Sterne entfernen sich. Raum und Zeit an unserem Standort verändern sich – relativ. Vermutlich “reisen” wir sogar im Moment durch ein schwarzes Loch, das sich durch ein schwarzes Loch bewegt, das sich durch ein weiteres schwarzes Loch bewegt (…infinit…), ohne dass wir es mitbekommen :)

Ergo: Wer sich durch ein schwarzes Loch bewegt, merkt es nicht einmal. Er sieht nur irgendwo anders andere schwarze Löcher.

Und Zeitreisen macht das alles nicht möglich, weil das, was “im schwarzen Loch” ist, ja auch nur ein weiterer Teil unseres Universums ist.

Nett. :)

Und da ich gerade so schön dabei war:

Vielleicht gefällt es ja dem ein oder anderen :)

Es handelt sich um Derivate des Logos der Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg: ©; Verwendung unter Bedingungen der H-BRS; Verwendung der Derivate (Logos*) unter Namensnennung

Our first approach to handle this was to block the TurkTelekom network by a simple reverse dns lookup, but unfortunately, the spammers are now using IP address spaces without reverse dns delegation that are sill residing in the TurkTelekom network according to RIPE. I am not a fan of blocking whole providers out of our community sites but since our abuse requests went unnoticed and there is not really a big chance to hit a real user, I am currently taking into account to use the RIPE database for this job. At ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/dbase/split/ RIPE makes available recent snapshots of their database, so this should not be too hard. If you are experiencing similar activities while not aiming at the turkish market, this might also be an option for you.

Let’s see how this hare and the hedgehog game will end. If it will at all.

as some of you may have already noticed, I am currently participating in the CreepTD open source towerdefense project I stumbled upon months ago. At the moment I am preparing version 1.0 which will include a traversable path tree, animated graphics and new game modes. It will still take some time to complete 1.0, but if you are also interested in getting involved, I have created the Developer Central covering all neccessary information (including a PHP library for map parsing, validation and compilation) to get you started once the new version has been released.

I am currently planning to make CreepTD 1.0 and further development my Bachelor Thesis. I would be very excited if this would be possible, because it would provide me with the optimal time frame dedicated to the game.

Creep on! :-)

Facebook keeps growing while implementing more stuff that has previously been available elsewhere.

The german antagonist to Facebook is one of the biggest losers.

The same as StudiVZ but targeted at elementary students.

We all know: MySpace is out.

Wer-Kennt-Wen is fading away.

Jappy.de did well for a while, however it’s also weakening slightly since 2011.

Kwick, a southern germany community.

Lokalisten, another german social network – even pushed by big television channels.

And last but not least: Google Plus.

Da frag’ ich mich doch, was schlimmer ist: ISDN oder soetwas.
Diverse Support-Tickets und 3 Monate später: Immer noch keine Verbesserung.

Da geht einem das Herz auf!

Howevery, I am still looking around to get some backlinks.  While roaming around the web I stumbled upon several (50+) much smaller web directories and added our community there. Most of them accepted the entry, some bugged me for a backlink, others seem to be dead and a few do not even allow new links to be added. The problem seems to be, that Google does not care of this webdirectories and the links listed there – I assume they filtered them out already. I basically agree with Google’s decision but this becomes another factor for us: We do not have the same chances today like our competitors had in the past.

Another reason why there are so few links to our sites is that our community is its own litte ecosystem (with blogs, profile etc.), so that there is hardly a reason for someone to link to it from an external ressource. Members find anything they need inside and the only noteworthy intersection are “people finders” where links unfortunately cannot be seen by search robots because they are “login only” or do not even convert URLs to links. This efficiently prevents us from getting the rank we deserve.

In addition Microsoft’s Bing crowns it all by neigher understanding our sitemap files that are a perfect implementation of the sitemaps standards nor crawling our sites adequately. There are about 200 pages listed in Bing for “rockz.com” of about 1.000.000, for “schlach.com” there even seem to be some hundreds of sitemap files mistakenly indexed as real content instead of any content. This is so ridiculous and prevents us from being found by customers at all.

To cut the long story short: It seems that SEOs overwrought the search engine operators for years and caused a total overregulation so that today’s websites do not have the ghost of a chance to catch up to others that already exploited the possibilities in the past. The only factors for getting a good rank today are having a cash cow or friends somewhere in the press business.

Knowing this you can skip all the unnessecary parts I have been through. Go and invest your time into something valuable, go and find the cow, good luck!

However, this script is using the FTP protocol and ftp.exe integrated into Windows, so that I’m very sure, security comes short.

While installing new servers the last few days, I decided to doom the FTP servers from our brand new debian boxes and came up with my own VBScript that is using PSCP.exe (file copy over SSH, capable of private key authentication) from the Putty package instead:

Installation instructions:

1. Get the script (and PSCP if you do not have it yet)
   
2. Save the script to “C:\Documents\YourWindowsLoginName\SendTo” (XP) or “C:\Users\UserWindowsLoginName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo” (Vista)
3. Open it, edit the configuration section at the beginning and save
4. Make sure the local and the remote directory exist, then switch to the local directory, create or select a file, click right and select “Upload”.

That’s it! The file will be silently uploaded in the background. For creating directories you will still need to do so in the old fashioned way or you add the “-r” parameter in front of “-i” or “-pw” – but I’d not recommend that (may take a long time when accidentally clicking on a big directory). Of course you can install several copies of the script at once.

Happy coding!

Nothing exotic so far. However, MySQL (5.0, Debian Lenny) comes with a default InnoDB whatsoever with empty InnoDB data and it is now the second time for me, that the InnoDB engine was silently disabled by the MySQL daemon after changing the configuration to something usable. The only way to solve this issue is, to delete all the empty default InnoDB files from /var/lib/mysql and restart the database server. From then on, InnoDB shows up in “SHOW ENGINES” again.

But the clue is: When importing InnoDB tables, there is no error, no warning, no notice that InnoDB is disabled and all tables silently fall back to MyISAM while killing every single foreign key and not using the tweaked InnoDB settings (because there is none) at all. What a mess.

As you can guess, I will have much fun for the next few days switching hundreds of tables back to InnoDB and recreating every single foreign key after tidying up the unreferenced mess. Hooray!