ViNull, Off the Record - All Comments

re: ASP.NET: Cannot use a leading .. to exit above the top directory

Harsha Vardhan — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 18:13:00 GMT

You are brilliant. It took me many hours to find this solution, (your article in Google).

You helped me a lot. God bless :)

re: Microsoft Silent as Xbox Indies Marketplace Exploited

Mike Gambino — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 21:46:41 GMT

Here's what xbox should do. They should change the site to where when a person has created an account, they get only silver membership. Since they are silver, they don't have the right to rate unless they are on the xbox 360 and downloaded it personally and played it. Should keep personal history of when played. If the game isn't played but downloaded, they can't rate at all. Also, if they just went on the site, they can't rate unless they do have a preview of the game itself before knowing for a fact on how good or bad the game is.

Simple fact to be taken. And since a web designer myself, I can easily change that. Getting database settings set right, modifying the xbox settings to send information on "When Played" in the database to let the site know that the game has, indeed, has been played. Should categorize the database to know wither the member is gold of silver. Silver won't count but gold members who bought, downloaded, and play the game.

If Microsoft hires me as their problem solver on thing would be glad to help..... Besides, I have been looking for a job for 4 years. It's time to show me that someone will hire someone who hasn't had a job yet.

re: Microsoft Silent as Xbox Indies Marketplace Exploited

RDRush — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 21:29:08 GMT

Why can't MS limit ratings to the actually game licensees as a previous entry states. Good question. In my experience the trivial oversights like this in any commercial environment makes an entity suspect on a competency level that sickens an individual. This process is so pathetic in nature as for magnitude but, the impact is shattering. It dumb founds me that these mini concerns are so merely oversight with these "professionals" and it keeps happening. Where the hell do all of these morons come from.

re: Microsoft Silent as Xbox Indies Marketplace Exploited

Nate — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 21:24:16 GMT

Wouldn't a relatively easy fix be to require that in order to rate you have to give a review (like Amazon). This coupled with standard community feedback such as "mark as spam" should sufficiently increase the "cost" of voting to the point that votes would have value.

re: Microsoft Silent as Xbox Indies Marketplace Exploited

Scott Beeson — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 20:25:20 GMT

"Indie developers should target WP7 instead of Xbox"...

Okay, if my only goal was to make money, sure. But they're two completely different things. I don't want to develop games on a phone, I want to develop games on a TV. This is the only way. It's sad if they are truly letting it die. They should fix it, instead. Just mimic the iOS/Android Market instead of giving up. Pathetic.

re: Microsoft Silent as Xbox Indies Marketplace Exploited

Dale — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:46:04 GMT

Interesting story, and it's amazing after all these years a big company like Microsoft can screw up a relatively easy ratings feature, like allow only one rating per game per email address, and not verify the email address is ligit. I know there are some other tricks to pull this off, but at least prevent the easy stuff from happening.

Too bad MS is not giving the indie developer a fair shot, giving 'publishers' preferential treatment. Perhaps you start a 'publishing company' for indies to collectively submit their offerings?

re: Microsoft Silent as Xbox Indies Marketplace Exploited

pwnurmom — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:28:12 GMT

yeah

re: Microsoft Silent as Xbox Indies Marketplace Exploited

Jon — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:10:09 GMT

Why don't they change the way rating works to something like the Android Market:

-You can only rate if you actually have the app

-You can only have one rating (you can change the rating, but rating it multiple times does nothing)

That seems like it would solve the problem of just getting fans to vote for a game without actually playing it and keep people from voting over and over

re: Microsoft Silent as Xbox Indies Marketplace Exploited

Kris — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 18:27:05 GMT

I'm not convinced WP7 is a bad market to pursue (especially if you're just porting existing XNA games). While sales of games have been bad, I'm seeing many doing very, very well on ad revenue. Yes the user base is smaller but so is the pool of competition. I also believe that unlike XBLIG, Microsoft is seriously pushing WP7 (at least for now).

It's hard for me to see XBLIG suddenly going away, many would miss it. I'm not seeing it as a very viable revenue source though and I definitely feel MS has neglected it. I hope this changes but I'm not expecting it to, which is why I'll looking at other platforms once I finish my current slate of games.

re: Microsoft Silent as Xbox Indies Marketplace Exploited

Oscar — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 17:36:33 GMT

I agree that indie developers should target mobile, but I think I'll give Android a shot before WP7. Maybe in the near future, WP7 will be a better option.

re: Microsoft Silent as Xbox Indies Marketplace Exploited

LKD — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 14:49:54 GMT

ok, where to begin. I used to work on the XNA team. If you know the history of who was there at the beginning, you can figure out my name. There's a few things that need clarification. Remember: What I say is an observation of past events as a team member. I don't work on that team anymore, but I can make some broader statements that I'm sure are true, or close to the truth

1) Gaming the scores was always a concern, and a great deal of time was spent making sure that those kind of abuses would not negatively impact how games were rated. This was back before ratings were allowed to be done by actual game players. With that change, there were several considerations of how users could rate the game -- must they play all the way through to determine it sucked? Must there be a minimal time? In the end, it _appears_ that they even removed the requirement that you actually launch the game before you can rate it. I can only (reasonably) speculate that there was a collision of priorities. Xbox.com is a big deal, and they have a LOT of things on their plate to do. It's doable, but priorities are almost always revenue-driven, so they simply stopped at the ability to rate a game, regardless of whether you actually looked at it

2) The whole "community games" thing was a financial failure for the Xbox org (closer to a nuclear meltdown, actually) and what you are observing is a de-prioritization of the indie game venue. The divestiture of the XNA "brand" (and it was definitely a true brand, gained at very significant expense and legal work), the shifting of focus from Xbox to Windows Phone 7, and the currently-observed "gaming" of the ratings system points to how broken things have truly become. While it's true that there may be team members (or "member") working on the problem, this is akin to assigning a person to shovel dirt into the Grand Canyon to fill it up.

3) Fixing Xbox.com isn't as easy as you might think. It's generally a six-month cycle to get changes made, even important ones. If it's causing publishers to bleed money, you'll see a change very quickly. But indies? Lulz.

4) The rather significant "brain drain" of the former XNA team and the sudden shoveling under the Microsoft Game Studios ("Where Good Ideas Go To Die") is a pretty strong indicator that this problem will not only not really be solved, it is likely on a "decommissioning" path (on Xbox, not WP7). Given that indies also realize that XBLIG is a great way to spend thousands of dollars of personal time for the remote chance of making tens of dollars, the fact that the shutdown hasn't happened yet is both stunning and disappointing

Indie developers are likely wasting their time by targeting the Xbox. It's hard enough as it is to get decent revenue from Xbox Live Arcade. Indies should be targeting mobile. While I personally wouldn't touch WP7 with a 10 foot debugger, each developer has to carefully consider the game concept, the audience, the distribution channel, and the ability to at least _recover_ their development investment so they can go on to building The Next Great Game. When an indie asks these questions honestly, none of the answers involve the word "Xbox."

re: Microsoft Silent as Xbox Indies Marketplace Exploited

Daniel — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 14:38:15 GMT

Now that Microsoft has thrown their lot in with facebook and there are no "Dislike" buttons out there (to balance out all the "Like" buttons), things are only going to get worse. I suggest that all independent developers create iOS or Android apps and let WP7 slip into obscurity on its own.

re: Microsoft Silent as Xbox Indies Marketplace Exploited

ThatOtherGuy — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 13:09:49 GMT

Prime case of Microsoft's fickleness. They need to decide what stuff they're going to drop and what stuff they're going to support without making their freaking customers play this guessing game. I could go into a programmer rant about LINQ to SQL, Silverlight, among others, but I digress.

re: Microsoft Silent as Xbox Indies Marketplace Exploited

david — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 11:27:29 GMT

damn right about "if Microsoft cannot manage a small group of Xbox Indie games, why would I ever get involved in the larger WP7 Marketplace..."

[ gotta admit, i was starting to wonder "so what..." until i read that (probably cos i'm not so smart). but the dude's certainly got a point ]

re: Microsoft Silent as Xbox Indies Marketplace Exploited

Wonder — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 11:06:28 GMT

As always Micro$oft way rule ! lulz.