I’m going to take time out of my busy schedule to tell you about something that’s going on: everyone is being hacked. Everything, everyone, every company, and they’re all going down one by one. Some companies are actually leaking information, whereas some are just being associated with collected information. For instance, gmail was “hacked” but the reality is that they weren’t, hackers just took a huge list of hacked accounts with gmail email addresses and created a list.

However, here is the deal, hacking is becoming a big deal. It’s super easy right now for hackers to exploit major corporations and steal things like usernames, passwords, and credit card information. For most companies, the threat of the password being leaked is small. Passwords are salted and generally the information used to generate the security keys and all that is kept in cold storage, as in not connected to the Internet. However, some companies / organizations don’t follow best protocols and some that do still suffer at the hands of these ner’do’wells.

So if you could, please, use a different password for everything. Even small tiny additions of numbers, symbols, and letters are enough to keep you from losing everything online. If your password is normally password, adding in 12 for one site, 13 for another, etc. is good enough to keep the auto-login bots from farming your account.

I’ve talked a little bit about passwords before, but generally speaking if they let you type in a phrase, any phrase, that’s more secure than trying a combination of 5 or 10 random letters, numbers, and symbols just because it’s longer and harder to guess. In addition, you have to use different passwords for everything now. Big names like DropBox have been allegedly hacked.

Firefly MMO

This screenshot is old.

Do you think this MMO is gonna be good? They've shown some gameplay footage that looks like it's out of Alien. Do you think it's gonna be Firefly enough for Firefly fans? Lemme know in the comments below.

Stop With the Beta Access BS

So, MMO companies learned that welp, people don’t like paying for a game that goes free-to-play. It’s exploitive to go we will milk everyone for ALL of this money, then offer it for free when no one wants to buy in anymore in order to sell in-game items. So what they’ve done is started this beta access thing.

So it’s a free-to-play game, but if you want to play right now, you need to pay. Generally there is a few months of super rarity in access, then it opens up more and more, and as fewer sales come in, the developer is more interested in bigger key giveaways.

Until you reach this point where it’s pretty much an open beta, but only fools pay the premium. When sales are at all time low and stagnation set in, they remove the box copy price and voila now it’s free-to-play.

No.

Stop it.

It’s stupid.

Let me tell you why, it’s stupid because you’re ultimately doing the same thing, just wording it differently. Games are still out for a year or two then go F2P, they just call it beta access now. We need games to start just building their monetization platform from the ground up and have some damn transparency for once.

I just seen a giveaway for 20,000 keys for a semi-closed buy-in beta. That’s awesome! Thanks, but uh, that’s a lot of keys and a lot of players that are getting a free ride. Not cool! Why pay $99.99 when you can roll in to some giveaway where if 30,000 people enter, you’ve got a 2 in 3 chance of winning.

Whatever. Maybe at some point people will listen to folks like Lewis or just you know, stare at ArenaNet who are the only people in the last decade almost to produce two successful MMOs that are cash flow positive. I think Jagex and Runescape technically count, I think Blizzard counts if you mush the word MMO around, and uh… Asheron’s Call? I don’t know.

You know what post a roadmap. Just, post a roadmap. Say this is what the game is going to cost now, this is the estimated time it’s going to cost this, and at this point we will go F2P. Just use quarters. Make each phase’s “buy-in” worthwhile so that you have enough materials, items, swag, loot, whatever to feel as if none of your money went to waste.

Because at the end of the day, we’re all consumers, and one thing I don’t like is people taking advantage of people’s desires to profit. It’s one thing to provide the desires to someone at an appropriate fee, but it’s another to build some emotional bond to branding and try to min/max taking money from people who will give it and taking money from people who won’t.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about WoW since I’m playing that again thanks to the Iron Horde. I’m going to keep Destiny up on my profile though because, meh, I’m playing both.