Landmark – Alpha EQNL (04/03)

Autosave is one of those dangerous features that is better to not have at all than to have work even slightly imperfectly. Otherwise, players might put too much reliance upon it and then it might eventually fail, ballooning up into a huge mess.

If we don't implement an autosave template system, then players will assume (correctly) that there's no fallback and any action they take in the world might not be there in the event of a zone crash. If that zone crash caused the autosave template to also become corrupted, then when a player selects that template to revert their claim back to a "known good state", it would further compound the failure, resulting in more than just a few voxels being misplaced and a customer service ticket competing with ones from every other player who might be equally affected (or worse).

Sometimes the best solution is the least complex one... at least until sufficient testing is done.

"Microvoxels" work via a pretty crazy consequence of some smoothing code. One could call it a bug, but it's not really one in the classical sense; it's more of a "unintentional behavior".

I don't think there's a plan to change how the code currently works, but if there's an actual bug filed on a related part of the code that handles this, then the fix might break how "microvoxels" currently function.

Think of them like turning on the TV to channel 81 and causing puppies and kittens in shelters to be adopted at a higher rate, but not by any intention of the TV station, the shelters, or the TV maker. Nobody wants puppies and kittens to not be adopted, but it's obviously an odd behavior of your television to do that.

The "rubber banding" is the system doing its utmost in an attempt to save your character from falling under the world geometry. The "gears" show when your computer doesn't have enough information to properly display the world (or handle the collision physics of the world and the character).

At one time, I made a serious effort to smooth out the "rubber banding" using a series of guesstimation calculations and it occurred to me that I was supplementing a system that shouldn't exist in the first place.

We're still working on the actual problem (physics getting confused as to where your character actually is), but smoothing out the symptoms of the "medication" (for lack of a better term) is pretty low on the list of priorities.

Hey folks,

I just got off the phone with our legal team. As others have indicated, the sticking point ends up being with International tax laws and contest/compliance laws in each individual country. In fact, in some cases, we can't even open these types of contests to all 50 states (it depends on the prizing amount).

As far as this contest goes, since it's already been opened and the rules posted, it has to continue as-is with the current legal restrictions. I will update the initial post and the forum thread title so it makes it clear this one is US-only.

We do want to be able to include all of our players, so we are looking into how we may be able to update these (rules/contests/etc.) in the future.

Thanks,
Dexella