Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Is the gaming community oppressive?

Is the gaming community oppressive?



   The internet may be known for its trolls, heated debates about religion and politics, but gamers also use the internet, even if in a different way. Here’s what I think gamers, me included, do wrong in the world we are building. They may be wrong, so feel free to judge.

   With game developers and server owners limiting the control and creating non-existent rules on the internet, it is quite surprising how so many of gamers still think that they are the cool rule breakers and the dangerous ones on the web. Nowadays, a lot of gamers know a little bit of coding, or they can just have a cheat engine, and think hacking in-game can also make them the top elite of the gaming community, when in fact, admins can just ban them and these “hackers” won’t work their way back with the same username. 

  On the contrary, I’ve seen a lot of people kissing up to sys admins and in-game admins to the point of slavery just so they can get perks like own a land close to spawn or get to use military grade weapons, secure a place in a tournament or even (not saying names) work their way up in the hall of fame for no reason. That’s lame. Sure, admins should get some thank-yous for their long hours of coding (I’ve once had to take care of two servers for a week) and trying to juggle all the problems in real-time, but some admins just buy a server from a hosting service that does all that for you. Maybe at the beginning of time admins were nerds who wanted total power over something, but now they are social animals like us too and do not need to be worshipped.

   Then there are the people who like to play with a twist: mods everywhere and all these complicated registration rules on servers. I’d rather study calculus than know the history of your father’s father’s father, and how in 1888 there was a guy who changed your life forever that’s why I need to change my skin to enter this lobby. Really, thank you for making matchmaking possible, and for having a good playerbase, but make it easy and quick for me to go anywhere! Also, I do not like the “wait for admin” button that people use when they are angry at my attitude.



  Now onto developers, and their three new discriminations: region, internet speed, game rep. They hate and love people based on these three factors more than they should hate cheaters, or how we hate griefers.
   
Region restriction is the new racism, and not just for games: for any downloads. In a world where it’s easy to travel anywhere, and where anime such as Log horizon portray gamers as people who don’t like classification, how ironic is it that we cannot download certain software simply because of our IP. It’s really turning down a lot of potential customers to anything and extremely frustrating for travelers or people with friends in different countries that can’t all use the same service at once.

so much real time


  The game reputation is probably the only way developers recognize and eliminate griefers and bad sports. It started out entirely based on the community so it does require people who report are unbiased, and gladly, it works miraculously. However, it does kind of mean that if in GTA 5 you are a “bad” person and then went to the “jail” servers for two weeks, you are more likely to friend “bad” people (seriously who is “bad” and “good” in criminal game) from the bad people’s servers then when you can go back to ordinary lobbies you will end up going back to the bad sport lobbies a lot more frequently because even if you want to start a new life, you kind of can’t. It’s worse than fearing to put your real name online because now your game name that you cannot change since you paid a lot of money for all the virtual game library you own -cannot start over - are now stuck with these labels. Permanent ban from Minecraft servers are kind of the same thing. Your name is now something you must protect, which kind of reduces the fun of hearing people rage. 

 no can do


   Then the last type of “discrimination” which is a silent suffering, and that is internet speed and lag. You’ve probably suffered lag before, been kicked from a lobby once, but believe me some people have it way worse. Servers with anti-cheating code kick people with significant lag for suspected teleportation. If people are around, you may get reported and eventually banned forever.

from otakudaydreams.wordpress.com


  “I’m scared to make friends and promises on skyblock servers because I can’t use the internet.” My friend, who only plays skyblock, once told me I never understood what she meant until I joined a skyblock server with her. She takes the emeralds and then can’t buy with them because the villager’s trading HUD doesn’t open.

  Apparently, Microsoft hates people with bad internet speed. If you’ve played the console version of Happy Wars, you’ll see an entire team rush out to build towers and completely annihilate the enemy with epic meteor showers while one guy with the speed of a snail is going to build a ballista in the main tower. Even though this is under the excuse that other players don’t lag, but occasionally the game suddenly ends or does these PC version bugs like towers not responding thing. Most people would think that this is a claptrap argument, and that other players don’t have to deal with this, but losing league points because your DSL doesn’t connect is too much. Penalties are good motivators, but they should be smarter in their penalty system.

 who's happy now?


   Going to the title, is the gaming community oppressive? We only pretend there is no rules when there is too many? We pretend there is no kingship when we are participating in making people look more important than us? I don’t know, and this is kind of why I only join servers for minigames in Minecraft. With the exception of Watch dogs’ online feature (you’re all notoriety points thieves anyway), most online games do have worrying issues like griefers and cheaters, but does this really mean that all of our gameplay is affected and all of us suspected of being bad people just because of a high internet traffic on a few days? Tell me your opinion in the comments.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Top 3 Underrated Tech Gadgets of all Time

Top 3 Underrated Tech Gadgets of all Time

   Remember when, as a kid, you wanted to become a spy? When you hoarded a huge amount of sunglasses and walkie-talkie looking plastic objects? Those were the days, man.

   So now, when sending a file via Bluetooth no longer fascinates us, is there something out there to spark our excitement, as a tech geek and/or a child? I hope these three I found can fascinate you as I did.

 #1: Android phones with T9 keyboards

  Okay, so T9 keyboards are the best keyboard ever, and android is the best mobile software ever, so why not combine both and feel the shiny awesomeness? Samsung has already done that for you stuck-in-the-past ‘90s kids. Twice, actually. And nobody knows that! It’s like Samsung whispered it to China’s ears the second time and I have no idea what happened to the first. If you can get your hands on one, and you can speak Mandarin, then root that device to English already and duplicate it with your magic wand or something. How did you get it from the start unless you had a magic wand, right?


  On a side note, this probably isn’t the first android T9 phone of all time, just is for Samsung.

First, the SCH-W999 . The first T9 Samsung device that has entered the realm of internet and runs native android 2.3. If that’s not awesome, then I don’t know what is. Take a look.

from technave.



  The second one is the one released in 2013 which led to all the rumors about a Samsung Galaxy Folder (?) just because the phone can flip (??) seriously people, where are you all copy-pasting this from? Just because Samsung patented a dual-screen phone with mechanics doesn’t mean that China is their experimental grounds. China, home to more than 1 billion people, is a great market for large numbers and more accurate statistics, but more importantly, it’s a market! The customers are real people, not experimental bots, ok?

from Sammyhub.


   Pretty cool phone right? You can read more about it from here, since, this post isn’t about it entirely anyway.

#2: Audio jack adapters

  I don’t even know why in 2014 we still have 2.5mm audio jacks around. My Xbox controller has it, Nokia phones have it (well, not in all phones), and I have no idea who even has working 2.5mm headset that doesn’t buzz if it goes to a different manufacturer’s device, or one in a different year of production. 



  We just have to thank these little adapters for existing, because they can let us use our expensive apple headsets on a GPS lacking device, so the NSA couldn’t track us down, and also because it’s an extinct beauty. 

  Like the 2.5mm jacks, their adapters are obviously and eventually going for a really close death. But until then, they deserve a salute.


#3: Kreyos smartwatch



It looks geeky, it was there before the Sony Smartwatches AND it’s multiplatform. I would’ve bought it first except that the only way to get it was online. I seriously think it should be more popular than the qualcomm toq.


So what electronic device that you think is very useful or cool that wasn’t mentioned in this short list? Comment below what you feel.