News

Don’t pay Newegg for fast shipping

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I recently wrote that I ordered a power supply from Newegg, and that I paid a little extra for it to arrive early. Unfortunately it hasn’t arrived yet, though I can’t say that I’m entirely surprised. Ever since Newegg was sold off to the Chinese market they just haven’t been the same quality. One of the largest complaints that I read about was paying for fast delivery and still getting it later, late enough that they should of just stuck with the cheap or free shipping. At the same time I also heard other people claim that they’ve gotten their packages on time, sometimes earlier than expected… so it’s more of a gamble if you think about it, which isn’t exactly a great business model to have when your competition offers better shipping service.

I’m pissed to have paid for the additional service and not get my item on time, but at least I’m more privy to how Newegg conducts their business, and will be less likely to use their website anymore. it looks like from now on if I need to order an emergency item I’ll have to depend on Amazon Prime or a really good Ebay seller. I used to use Newegg constantly when ordering parts, now I’ll only use them if they have the cheapest deal and I’m not in any hurry to get it.

The Blue Whale Challenge is a great Red Herring for banning video games

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I read an article today about two children in Saudi Arabia committing suicide due to a game called “The Blue Whale Challenge”, and as a result their government banned 47 different games including The Witcher 3, Bayonetta 2, Okami, Life is Strange, etc etc. This sounds like quite the over-reaction more so than one might realize considering the game itself is social media based, the challenge has become infamous enough to have been given its own Wikipedia article. Basically the Blue Whale Challenge is a list of 50 challenges that a person has to complete with proof of doing so, and each challenge or task is given to someone calling themselves a “administrator” or “whale”. These challenges start off innocently enough (if you call following stupid instructions from a random person on the internet innocent) such as drawing a picture or waking up at 4:20am, but then it gets darker when they start telling you to carve sentences and words into your arm or leg, poke yourself with a needle, among other acts of self harm all the way up to telling the person to off themselves. The whole process is designed to break the person down, to manipulate them into doing whatever they want, and sadly it seems quite a few children have fallen victim to these sick assholes.

Now, how does this relate to the 47 games that have been banned as a result of these two suicides? Nothing really, a good portion of the games on the list aren’t even multiplayer… and why is Okami on the list? That’s like one of the most calming games I’ve ever played. O_o I’m actually surprised that out of all of the games on the list Dishonored isn’t included, it still would be just as stupid to ban but it DOES have things pertaining to whales. 😛 At least there would be some form of an attempt to tie things together.

This reaction makes about as much sense as banning commemorative dinner plates because people masturbate. Why go after video games over an act that took place on social media? Wouldn’t it make more sense to, I don’t know… ban social media instead? That’s still an extreme measure and that’s clearly not the best answer either, but it would at least relate more to the offending act itself. In some ways this reminds me of our government in the states trying to relate violent video games because of gun violence, which went up in smoke. Our government is not as religious however, at least not yet. They’re working on it…

GameStop needs to stop this

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I’m glad I don’t work at a gamestop… This new policy they’re enforcing is total bullshit that makes both the customer and employee suffer greatly.

The program, called “Circle of Life,” gives each GameStop store different percentage quotas for 1) pre-orders; 2) reward card subscriptions; 3) used game sales; and 4) game trade-ins. Each of these quotas is based on the store’s total transactions. Pre-orders and reward cards subscriptions are based on the number of transactions, while used game sales and trade-ins are based on the total dollar value of transactions. If a store’s quota for used game sales is 30%, and the store sells $1,000 worth of merchandise, GameStop expects at least $300 of that merchandise to be pre-owned.

I could see this Circle of Life thing being about as effective as the red ring of death if they decide to keep this policy.

The more new games an employee sells, the more used games they’ll have to sell to make up for it. In other words, according to salespeople speaking to Kotaku and elsewhere on the internet, GameStop is incentivizing employees to stop people from buying new games and hardware. GameStop staff say the company has threatened to fire people who don’t hit these quotas, which is leading to all sorts of scuzzy tactics.

If a customer wants a new console, or a new game, and an employee gives them what they want, they either have to make up for it by selling a certain percentage of used game wares, or be terminated. Or the employee has to lie to the customer to keep their job, forcing the customer to shop elsewhere. Which in this day and age with the internet isn’t very hard, is it? This will lead to pissed off customers and a high turnover rate for employees. I’m sure the gamestop execs aren’t too happy about the news circulating teh interwebz right now.

I feel sorry for anyone who works there, reading the comments to the article are quite illuminating.

Having worked at Gamestop for a short time, I am in no way surprised by any of this. Thanks for the heads up. I’ll never shop there again.

Worked for Gamestop for 3 years as a store manager. I was fired for paying my employees out of pocket to help me out off the clock because corporate pulled all my hours during Christmas time so I was soloing a fucking store by myself. I doubt none of this.

As one of the unfortunate Gamestop employess, my first reaction is ‘love my job, hate the company. Been working for the company since 2005 and the circle of life is the biggest crock of shit ive ever dealt with. My district Manager, sorry Leader (were not supposed to use the words Manager or customer any more) has directly told me to lie to customers about stock in the past. I would like to say more but this is already enough to get me fired.

RIP Duckduckgo

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Yahoo and Duckduckgo have partnered together.

Our partnership with Yahoo helps us give you the best search experience possible.

Of course, in accordance with our strict privacy policy, we do not share personal information with any partners, including Yahoo. To make this crystal clear, Yahoo has also published a privacy statement to the same effect. We’re proud to work closely with a partner who is willing to work with us to protect your privacy.

In addition to the existing Yahoo technology we had been using, our latest partnership with Yahoo enables DuckDuckGo to get access to features you’ve been requesting for years:

Date filters let you filter results from the last day, week and month.
Site links help you quickly get to subsections of sites.

All of this functionality is not fully rolled out yet, but will be soon!

I’m hoping Yahoo ruin them, like they did with Altavista. They were nice until Yahoo came along with the same guidelines and it slowly turned to shit. I hope this isn’t another repeat, but I’m not too confident. Duckduckgo became my favorite search engine after Yahoo put the final nail in Altavista’s coffin, time to look at other search engines just in case.

Valve speaks out about the Winter Sale breach

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Some say that it took too long getting back to everyone about it, people like myself say they responded in Valve Time. 😛

Link.

Dear Steam User,

As you may know, for a brief period on December 25th, a configuration error resulted in some Steam users seeing incorrectly cached Steam Store pages generated for other Steam users. If you are not familiar with the issue, an overview of what happened is available at http://store.steampowered.com/news/19852/.

If you accessed the Steam Store between 11:50 PST and 13:20 PST on December 25th, your account could have been affected by this issue. If you did not use the Steam Store during that time, your account was not affected.

Between the times above, a requested web page for information about your Steam account may have been incorrectly displayed to another Steam user in your local area. This page may have included your email address, country, purchase history and last 4 digits of your phone number if one was associated with your account. It may have also included the last two digits of a credit card number or a PayPal email address, if previously saved for future purchases. It did not include full credit card numbers, Steam account passwords, or other information that would allow another user to complete a transaction with your billing information.

We are contacting you because an IP address previously used by your account to access Steam made a web page request as described above. Because IP addresses are commonly shared for home networks, mobile devices and by internet providers, we are unable to verify that your account was actually the one that made this request. For example one affected IP address was previously used by over 1,700 Steam accounts. Consequently we are notifying all users who have previously used this IP address.

This event did not make it possible to compromise your Steam account or make a fraudulent transaction from your account, but we want you to be aware of what information could have been seen by another Steam user.

We’re sorry this happened and have taken steps to prevent this problem from occurring in the future.

If you used the store between 11:50 PST and 13:20 PST on December 25th and you have questions please email cachingissue@steampowered.com.

– Valve

They responded on March 3rd… 3/3 Half Life 3 Confirmed.

In other news: Microsoft is still as clueless about PC Gaming as ever

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Microsoft doesn’t have much in terms of games on their App store, but if anyone is contemplating buying either their version or the Steam version it’s pretty much a no brainer.

You can buy Rise of the Tomb Raider from Steam, or you can buy it from Microsoft. The price is the same, but as How-To Geek recently explained, the games themselves are not. The Windows Store version does not allow vsync to be disabled, and it always runs in “borderless fullscreen” mode, which can potentially limit performance. Even more problematic, because Microsoft Store games are built on the new “Universal Windows Platform” rather than as conventional executable files, modding isn’t possible, nor can it be added to your Steam library, which means you can’t play it with the Steam controller.

Not that I would have much of a reason to mod a Tomb Raider game (since most of them don’t offer much other than graphical changes if even that), nor would I want to buy anything from Microsoft’s store. As far as I’m concerned Microsoft turned a blind eye to PC Gaming a long time ago. I’m sure they’re still kicking themselves for not taking Gabe’s idea for Steam back when it was just a concept.

If you have an Origin Account you might want to read this.

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Tons of account names and passwords were leaked to Pastebin according to this source.

At about 3:00 p.m. on Thursday, a gamer who has asked that his name be withheld, got a password reset notification for an old Skype account. A few moments later, there were five additional password reset requests from Dropbox.

Soon after, the gamer got an email from someone who spends their time sending notifications to people who have had PII exposed online in data dumps. The message, from “urhack.com” contained his EA password in plain text and a link to the Pastebin post.

I don’t have an Origin account myself, but have let my friends know on Steam about it via the status page. Now I’m posting it here just in case anyone reading this trips across it.

More news on the microtransaction front

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Yesterday I was reading my activity feed on Steam as I usually do when I’m not reading my RSS subscription to the internet, and found quite a few people complaining about Payday 2 joining the “Lets do micro transactions on top of DLC” club. I’m not entirely sure if it’s terrible or not or if it’s something like CS:GO, but if I played copious amounts of Payday 2 I imagine I’d be a little ticked off right about now, especially if you take into consideration that the developers said they would never introduce microtransactions on multiple occasions.

Developer Overkill has added microtransactions to Payday 2, after stating, on multiple occasions, that it wouldn’t. They’re part of the Black Market update, which allows players to crack open safes to claim random loot drops. You’ll need to microtransact £1.60 of real money, to buy consumable drills that will be able to bust them open.

I own the game, but haven’t invested any time into it so I really don’t have a dog in this fight. I kinda got discouraged after they kept introducing DLC after DLC after DLC etc etc, that and I hear it’s a game best played with friends, and I’m usually on at odd hours anyway. This kind of microtransaction though doesn’t sound too horrible though since it’s just cosmetics for the most part.

Now, onto Steam themselves. Despite the fiasco that took place when Skyrim had a paywall for mods, Steam wants to take another jab at it. They seem to want to take a more careful approach this time though as they really screwed up last time.

As I’ve said before I don’t mind modders being paid for their work, at the same time though you can’t do what Steam/Bethesda did the last time around and introduce a paywall on a game that has an established community. To compare buying mods and buying hats and skins from other games is like comparing an apple to Cthulhu. Yes someone took their time and passion to make something great to share with their community, but hats and skins don’t require dependencies and won’t break a game later on if there are any patches and updates, whereas with modding (especially in a game like Skyrim) you have some mods that depend on other mods to work properly, or might break your game/stopped being supported. If Valve or some other game company want their idea of helping modders to make money to become a reality then they can’t do it with an already established game community.

They need to do something new, or find a friendlier way of presenting their idea to a currently existing game.