Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed a vast uptick in lag recently?  It takes much longer to jack in, and it's taking up to ten minutes for all the details of people and landscape to appear.

 I don't have other resource-hog software running, and haven't changed anything in the game configuration recently.  In fact, after lowering world detail and getting rid of stuff like shadows, I'm still getting lag that I can only describe as severely aggravating.  And I haven't noticed this with anything else I run.

But maybe it's just me.  Has anyone else noticed this?  Should I be posting this somewhere else?

I've had a Machine reputation of 120 for as long as I can remember.  More to the point, two recent critical mishes for the Machines each concluded with me being told I'd get +1 Machine rep, and -1 for Zion and/or Merovingian.  But afterwards my rep was still 120!

So here're my questions:

1.  Has anyone else has this problem?

2.  Is there any solution?

Thanks in advance for any insight.

 
It's so easy to get jaded.  You have your Flaming Eye Trench, your Awakening Jacket, your Beta loot, and you feel like you've been everywhere and done everything.  But MxO continues to surprise me, years after the first time I hit 50.  And as I contemplate yet another evening of trying to max my rep or watch duels, or farming for teal pills, I started to think of everything I had done and everything I had not done.  There's still such wealth in MxO that we all take for granted: the textures, the characters, the loot, the world.  I thought I'd make a list of the things you should definitely do for yourself before crying out "There's no content!". 
 
So, here is my list of things you should do in MxO, in no special order; please add onto it!
 
            1.  All the Pandora's Box mishes, and gotten all the maxed items.
            2.  Role up and build up an alt, unbeknownst to anyone.
            3.  Done all the neighborhood contact missions.
            4.  Maxed your reputation.
            5.  Worked on something for QA.
            6.  Won an argument with wit rather than sixth-grade scatology.
            7.  Understand the rational for every organization.
            8.  Found and reported a bug.  
            9.  Found and kept to yourself a couple of secret places where you like to hang out by yourself.
            10.  Worked on a player-run event, like Pilot's Olympics or Sattakan's sexiest red pill contests.
            11. Wandered downtown as a noob, running for your life constantly.
            12.  Stood on the edge of the world, watching the lives that lie forever beyond your reach, until someone calls you for dinner. 
            13.  Had Rarebit or Walrus answer an email of yours.
            14.  Been meatwadded by a dev. 
            15.  Done something for your clan.
            16.  Gone to the White Room.
            17.  Shaken Agent Gray's hand.
            18.  Successfully decompiled a level-50 item.
            19.  Successfully compiled a level50 item.
            20.  Gotten an area K coat.
            21.  Watched the setting sun in Chinatown.
            22.  Made your own clothes.
            23.  Eaten some cake alone, and some socially.
            24.  Fought to within 5 hp, and survived.
            25.  Argued with a principal (Agent, Gray, Niobe, etc.).
            26.  Gotten something from a principal (cookie, gun, mask, etc.).
            27.  Done something in character you would never have thought of doing IRL.
            28.  Done all the missions for the competing organizations.
            29.  Made your own sig.
            30.  Gotten the Union Hill access node key.
            31.  Spent substantial time in every construct, and gotten to know them.
            32.  Been Player of the Week.
            33.  Done the Stat Hack Mish solo.
            34.  Re-done your whole appearance.
            35.  Helped your clan survive a split or drama-storm.  

            36.  Done a good job as an organizational liaison (not for the faint of heart!).
 
I haven't done all these yet myself, but not for want of trying.

Anyone else?

This post and dozens of other posts related to MxO may be found at manifoldmischief.blogspot.com. 

Way back in beta, inventory was a source of agony.  We had just as many tabs as now, but each was only half as big.  Incredible but true!  A long campaign was waged, with yours truly one of those at the forefront, to allot more space.  It was intoxicating when it was finally doubled.  And definitely things have been better since then.
 
At the same time, the relentless drive for acquisition has quickly overwhelmed even this marginally generous allotment.  Sure, many things like guns and clothes and boosters can be decompiled and recreated on demand.  But in the years since beta, we have seen a torrent of items which cannot:
 
·       PB arc materials.  And man, are there a lot!: feathers, tissue samples, countersigns, etc. 
·       Story arc items
·       Stat hack kits
·       Teal pills 
·       Seasonal items, like the snowflakes, gifts, corrupted codes, Oracle cookies and brownies, etc. 
·       One off items like Burning Eye Coats and Awakening Glasses 
·       Stuff from the constructs like Widow's Moor lenses.  Since you can't go back, you tend to stock up while you are there.
·       Blue frags 
·       Fortune cookie fortunes- stuff like the "thoughts of Neo" 
·       Collector stuff like Greywolf Coats
·       Fly in Amber rings
 
Players have responded to this with ingenuity unlikely to have been anticipated by the devs:
 
·       Dedicated alts solely for use as mules; I have a couple, and so do many people. 
·       Use of ingame email to store items
 
The disappointing thing is that the suitability of these to accommodate inventory is likely to have been a pure accident.  In any case, even these have been challenged by the large number of items which are "singleton" and thus not eligible for emailing or decompiling.  You know what I mean here, the Pandora Box materials, the Seraphic Feathers, the Awakening Coats, etc.  As a result, here in the middle of 2007, we have a collision of two things: the immovable stone of fixed inventory, and the irresistible, beautiful force of player magpieism. 
 
Many people have discussed this; what solutions have been suggested?   

1.     Expand inventory yet again.  This is apparently non-trivial, since one dev has posted that expanding this could trash the whole database of inventory. The dev 9mmfu sagely wrote in May:

"This issue unfortunately is the Database and character persistence, not our desire to give the community more storage.
"The upshot is that every character as a fixed allotted number of bits in the data base. These bits for the most part are all allocated to something at this time. Meaning it would be a huge and potentially catastrophic disaster if we monkied with the DB to try an accomidate a significate change.
"We are very aware of the limited space player's have some of that is intended and some of it isn't."

I'm thinking that MxO cannot be the only game or the only software product in the universe which needed to revise a database after it went into production.  So, presumably this would not be like inventing the wheel or something?    Fortunately this is not the only option.   
 
2.     Expand the code archive.   I mean, 500 items was okay 2-3 years ago.  But this is 2007!   This is only a very partial solution to one part of the issue though.  However, it has the merit of leading to my next point.
 
3.     Allow currently non-decompileable items to be decompiled, with the code serving as singleton code items, only compileable into a single item.  This would keep the sad, dull singleton restriction but free up space in inventory.  Naturally this would work best with an expanded code archive.  Otherwise it merely alleviates one problem at the expense of aggravating another.  For singleton items, it should also be ordained that they cannot be lost when being decompiled.  Otherwise this would not be elegant, to say the least. 
 
4.   Allow an additional mule character to store junk.  Of course, being able to access the inventory from an alt while logged on with your main character would be a cool thing too.   This would be tough, but possible, it seems to me.  Related to this is:
 
5.   Allow us to mail singleton items to alts on the same server.  This would also reduce some of the pressure.  I have a strong suspicion this is technically possible, since I know of at least one ostensibly singleton item which has been placed in email.
 
6.   Bags of Holding.  Quite common to many games.  Incorporating this would not be like inventing the wheel or something.
 
7.   Off-Character storage, as with banks, rentable storage depots, "hovercraft walk-in closets", etc.  Not exactly a revolutionary idea, I know.  But obviously doable in many other games. 
 
8.  Permit the mail system to scan all the way down.  How tough would that be?  Currently the mail window can only allow about 50  number of items to be viewed.  To see anything beyond this you have to delete existing items from the 50.  Good luck trying to find anything from last year; you have to a major overhaul to achieve something as seemingly simple as seeing how many snowflakes you have.  I have several blue frags.  I can't remember the last time I saw them, since doing so would involve effort on a par with spring-cleaning my house! 
 
9.  Allow us to append multiple items to email.  If we could attach 10 or 20 items per email, we could live within the current constraints of viewing.
 
Of all these I am guessing that Option 1 is the best from the point of view of the players. When I watch my son play WoW and I see the huge inventory he has, I want to cry.  However, from the point of view of devly convenience, I suspect that Options 8 and 9 are the least technically daunting.
 
Some people object to this, on the grounds that we should live within our inventory budgets.  No one is saying people have to fill up their inventories.  But since acquisitiveness is such a fundamental, simple human pleasure, frustrating it seems unreasonable. 
 
Some people might think, "If you've filled up already, then even if inventory were doubled, you'd be back in a year wailing for more".  However, the current inventory limit was set more than two years ago, before we had anniversary t-shirts, blue frags, Neo's thoughts, Oracle cookies, non-stackable corrupted stuff, and the slew of Pandora's Box items, to mention but a few.  That was then and this is now; such a request is quite reasonable considering the world we live in.
 
Let the devs review people's suggestions, here and in the Development Roundtable, where many of the suggestions above have parallels.  They have been so successful with so many things; I am sure they could be successful with this as well.
 
This and dozens of other writings relevant to MxO may be found in my blog, manifoldmischief.blogspot.com.  Thanks to Walrus for the first doubling of inventory, ages and ages ago.

This afternoon I was all by my lonesome, datamining.  Sure enough, a slew of Data Sentries appeared and took me under fire.  One interlocked me.  I fought on autopilot, and took a quick call.  When I came back, all the datasentries were dead, the last one being killed by a Level-100 Agent!

Apparently, someone else's Level-100 Agent (there was another team datamining near me) had gone off-mission to come over and help!  It's at times like this that I love being a machinist...

And then I got the data-cluster opened, too! 

In MxO, there are ephemeral clans that come and go in a month or so, and others that have endured for years- ones like Furious Angels, Dark Mavericks, Tetragrammaton, and Fallen Horizon are merely the first ones that come to my mind.  

In your experience, what are the things that help a clan last for a long time?  I'm curious about this because I think MxO is better off with many long-lived clans than with a few, and if there are predictable factors that help clans last, we would all benefit from wider knowledge of how to make our own groups last.  I'd like to think it is more than luck.  I'm sure there is a lot we can all learn from each other.

Mostly I'm thinking about what has worked for the long-term successes in MxO, but if people have noticed patterns of success from other games, please feel free to share them.

Towards the end of The Diamond Age, Hackworth (architect/developer for an immersive training/entertainment simulation) comments to Nell (who acquired and completed the simulation) that once she understood how it all qworked, it lost most of its interest, and the only satisfaction came from building something new and exciting on top of it.

So here's what I'm curious about:     Do you _enjoy_ time spent in MxO?  Are there things in the game which surprise/delight you?  Does it ever seem like more than the sum of its parts?

I'm posting this here (as opposed to PMing it), esteemed mods, because I think any response would be of interest to the forum community.

Love the winter season, love the snow, the snowflakes, and the clothes.  Love the feeling of delivering gifts rather than death and destruction.

So when's it starting this year?

Another year has come and gone!  For many of us, 2008 was a colossal bummer from beginning to end.  My life was marred by death in the family, financial trauma, new responsibilities, and my son preparing to leave us for college.  Off the top of my head, I can hardly think of anything from 2008 I will ever savor or look back on with a smile, at least publicly.  Amidst this seething chaos, the nightly forays into MegaCity were a blessed relief, where the worst that could happen was dying.  For redpills 2008 was eventful: lots of new content and constructs, reforms, decommissions, and controversy.  Here’s what I remember most vividly.

Data-Mine

The first major content of the year was Datamine, whose innovation evolved in stages: great wealth, fidgety security, tragic backstory, daunting boss fights, and paranoid plundering in a massive free-for-all free-fire zone.  The latter was not as much fun as I expected it to be, and I had not expected it to be fun.  I soon lost track of how many times FH pwned me; around the time I lost count, it stopped annoying me.  I liked the variety of venue, the convenience of cash, and the cramped coziness of architecture and encounters.   

Besides this, I savored the awesome new items, particularly the SSR glasses and the SSR gum.  Along with this, I liked the seemingly inadvertent recycling of very old content, such as the Hyperjump Beta and the Mobius Code, since it opens the possibility for recycling more old items, such as blue frags or (please!  how I hope!) translocation programs.  Still, most people seemed to wail about this, and it has not been repeated.  However, the great idea of creating a new construct persisted, as we soon saw. 

Sati’s Playground

Unlike most of MxO, which displays such a somber, edgy style and tenor, Sati’s Playground seems more whimsical.  It’s small and cozy, with toy boxes, rippling ninja scarves, and even a pink gi.  I have yet to score a single one of the Playground items, but enjoyed the great times helping others farm and design strategies for overcoming the sleepwalker menace.    Often I stood at the edges gazing out across the misty void, wondering what might lie in the island skyscrapers, cars, and trees.  Once I thought I glimpsed a tree whose fruit consisted exclusively of FM-1500 pistols.    Definitely fun.

Valkyrie Mishes

The great downtown venue got some serious love this past year, for instance with the Valkyrie mishes, deriving from a rich blonde bombshell who loiters near Pillsen North, tormenting the nearby wisps and horrors with her frosty demeanor.  There are enticing hints of backstory (reminiscent in this respect of the great Pandora’s Box arc) and the history of Pace here; if they are true, then make sure you stay on Pace’s good side.  The outfits and eye effects pleased, as did the items.  Besides some good clothes, there were spectacular spectacles, some of which easily rival the epically hard to get SSR glasses.    And on top of that, there were some great non-buffed items too, namely the lush, buttery gold-colored spurs and plumage.  This is a great, worthy money sponge. 

Story Developments

Others in my clan follow the story more closely than I do, and I accede to their judgment on this.  Most interesting to me was gradual emergence over the year of a world larger than the one we have known for years.    The overrides and the wireframe invaders all hint of a vaster world, with its own culture, motivation, and politics.  And at the same time this larger world beckons to a future, I felt myself drawn to the past with the seeming return from the dead of Trinity or some semblance of who she was.    It’s promising.  I’ll wager on her making her way to the Westview apparition of Neo’s body at some point.

Promising too is the use of our great backbench of characters, ranging from new a mission for the Chessman to Rose and Hypatia wandering the streets, to expanded use of the neighborhood contacts in story-related missions.  There are dozens of them, and many who it would be great to see in expanded use, like Mr. Po, Lotus, the Chef and the Jeweler: NPCs with distinct personality, style, and language.  Along with features such as pills for gang leaders’ RSIs, this is a good example of leveraging the existing character base.  Great to see. 

New Approach

The new approach to organizing story, events, and critical missions excited enthusiasm and opprobrium late last year, along with significant high-end content and the toughest set of encounters since the wasteland corruptors.  Not everyone who plays posts on DN1, and not everyone who posts on DN1 posts about this, but there’s been no shortage of heated discussion, with occasional insight.  LESIG has been, as they say, “re-engineered” to a less central role in advancing the story.  Since the less savvy,  less mature set at MxO has always enjoyed frustrating what others create, the LESIG program was plagued with leaks (I remember reading on one site’s forum smug posts about how much fun it was to gin up controversy), and was for its leader(s) more hassle than it was worth.  Thus the curve of ROI curled against it.  Props to all the players who put their 50s on the backburner to start over with new, unknown characters to make a better world.    But I digress.  The new approach, in essence, lets us run the “critical missions” as often as we want, and adds stuff to farm.  This I kind of like.  On the other hand, the missions are currently only available to those of level 30 or higher, and the end-missions are definitely not soloable.    That being said, during the recent Winter Holiday, I was able to grind through the 30s in less than a week, so this should not be regarded as so major an issue as some may think.

Greatest of All:  Email

For me, the email system enhancement early in the year was the greatest, most influential, most satisfying change of 2008.  We received a massive, glorious overhaul that allowed is to scroll through everything (I’d forgotten I had blue code frags!) and to append up to 12 items to a single email!!  The great benefit of this is that it gives a definitive solution to the problem of inventory space, which has bedeviled players and devs since the days of beta.    Now, with up to 300 emails, each with a maximum of 12 items, even shopaholics and clothes-horses like me have been satisfied.  This must be the greatest thing to come out of 2008, by far! 

This is not say there is no room for improving a good thing.  At some point I would like to see this enhanced with the following:

-          I’d like to be able to email stuff to myself on different servers.  I’d be willing to pay for this as a service.

-          I’d like to be able to set up email folders.

-          I’d like to be able to email singletons to myself or other characters of mine.

By the way, if we could email stuff to ourselves on different servers, this would lighten the demand for server merges, since we could start over with new characters and not have to obsessively farm Taskmaster Berets all over again.  Just a thought.

Puzzling, Odd New Stuff

Updates included major additions of content, such as the two constructs, as well as dozens of relatively minor ones.  Some of them were significant, whereas others seemed less so: the sheen on the floor at Peg’s Diner, typos in mission texts, and a new mission from the Chessman.  Some were surprising: emotes for “confused”, “deafened”, and “pickupdesk” in Update 53, for example.  The new emotes were certainly welcome, yet the selection was baffling.  After all, over the past five years there have been several lists of desired moods, including couples-dancing and smoking.  The recent ones must have come from some other source, since I do not remember anyone ever clamoring for the ability to emote deafenedness.  It may be that these are left-overs from some years-old to-do list that is only now receiving attention.    Similarly, can it really be that the dev team has time to worry about things like adding pants to women’s Gis?    One can only speculate how devly priorities are established.

There was drama too, with religious slurs and community rip-offs, but they just don’t make the list, any more than vomiting dogs do.

So, in contrast to the unimaginable catastrophes which, irl, came in swarms like sizzling hornets, ingame there was a lot to enjoy and a lot to appreciate in 2008.  My confidence in the talents of our devs and their commitment gives me hope for the future, for our future. 

This review and many others may be found at manifoldmischief.blogspot.com, along with other writings relevant to MxO.

Has anyone seen any job postings in gaming or developer publications that might suggest what sort of person might be under search for a new lead dev role?

Has anyone applied for any such position?

It might be this will be a case of internal recruitment, but you never know.  Brewko's written as a dev; what if.....

Looking forward to the next event a lot...  I can't fnd a list of the items from last year, and their cost.    Does anyone have this infiormation?  Thanks in advance!

Back at the end of beta, someone made a video of it, with the music from “The End” by The Doors.  The same video is currently on YouTube, but with some much lesser sound track.  Does anyone know where we could get the original?

Over on my blog, at manifoldmischief.blogspot.com, I've written some thoughts about where we are and how we got this way.  My own feelings on the subject, at least.  They're not here for several reasons, only one of which is their length. 

In the brief time remaining to us, what are some must-dos that come to mind?  I have a few:

1.  Learn FRAPS to make some videos to run as background on my Vista Ultimate computer.

2.  Get the music backgrounds used in the game.

3.  Get many screenshots of sunsets, when the slight reddish timbre adds such moody beauty to scenes downtown and in Chinatown.  Datamine, too.

4.  Run a few, very selected Neighborhood Contact missions (Mr. Po immediately comes to mind, followed by Rose and The Chef) to get screenshots of the great text.

5.  Try (and record) a few new emotes.

6.  Commiserate with Omega.

I'd like to save some of the great threads (like Rarebit's screenshot and ask-a-dev ones), but without doing it page by page.

Is there a way to do this?

Zeroone emailed me to say he is trying to re-sub, but is getting error messages.

Could someone who has recently and successfully re-subbed email him ASAP at johannesw5069@yahoo.de?

Don't waste a minute!  He's desperate, and would likely do anything for anyone who could help him get back in!