And the Metaplace Hype Cycle Begins
by Alphaville Herald on 22/03/09 at 4:09 pm
BBC in the pool early with fanboi hype
Special to the Herald, from Urizenus Sklar on the Herald Yacht
Now the BBC has joined the Metaplace hype with this story. One wishes that traditional media would leaven their hype with a bit of critical discussion at the outset. That might help save them from feeling the need to pour on the Haterade two years from now. We've seen this before with Second Life. Everyone needs to calm down. Metaplace is interesting and promising, but mostly promising. If you get off on promissory notes I have a trillion in toxic assets to sell you. The yacht is for sale too.
chris
Mar 22nd, 2009
buy my stoxs.
can I haz newz?
Raph
Mar 23rd, 2009
FWIW, we didn’t even know they were doing this story.
chris
Mar 23rd, 2009
lol,
why expect the perversion of the “newz” to ever fact check again?
we dont care, so they dont care.
max headroom wins!
mootykips
Mar 29th, 2009
trip report: retarded Habbo V2
the interface is stale, cluttered, and unresponsive, building walls is not intuitive (several times i tried to make one, an error would pop up behuind the creating walls dialog that was unreadable, and resulting walls would all inherit the slope patterns of other walls despite their being flat), there is no wall rotate command meaning users have to repeatedly move their mouse around 10px until the game decides it wants to make the right orientation for single tiles, the forced isometric view with no object-see through means building is a pain and was present even in Sim City 2000, screen real-estate is poorly used with a place objects dialogue on top of the chat window with a toolkit on the same side, the camera is oddly not zoomable at all despite there being buttons making building large structures difficult, the camera is not reset when playing from build meaning if you had the camera far down the right side of the screen your character will be off screen while moving. forcing a different view in a “world” shows the autogenerated walls are facing the wrong way. scripting possibilities are nil, most scripts don’t work, the extent of interactivity is making something follow you or playing a youtube video. that’s about it to criticise, considering the rest of it is a chat box.
i’d say even second life is better than this, they’re just as terrible but at least you can do inventive things in it
Satan
Mar 30th, 2009
Scripting is not nil at all, you’re referring to behaviors. Behaviors and scripting are two different things. You should visit the wiki to see just how much you can do with this. You can actually do way more in MP with scripting than in SL.
Additionally, you can zoom and you can change the view from an isometric view as well. Go to advanced and place settings to change both of those. Zoom lock is on in the precreated worlds. The chat windows can be changed too. It’s actually an optional plugin. It can be reprogrammed to occupy a different position or removed altogether.
Your review is premature and inaccurate, as are the majority of negative reviews. As far as your complaint about graphics go, those are going to change. MP will be going 3d eventually and that has been announced publicly.
There are some shortcomings with the interface, I’ll agree with that for now but this is still a pretty early beta. Some of the difficulties you are experiencing may be related to your resolution and whatever browsers, browser plugins, etc,etc. you’re using as well as your version of flash.
Remember what it was like when you first used SL. It takes time to familiarize with something like this.
mootykips
Mar 31st, 2009
if I (and I consider myself a power-user) can’t differentiate between these things, find these controls or navigate the interface, I’m not sure anyone else including a beginner will be able to do so either. i know you can change the view (despite the fact that doing so destroys any existing isometric view rather than repositioning each tile) and zoom. you’re an advanced SL scripter, you know your shit, we both know that, but 99% of the internet is not you.
these inanely basic interface problems should be sorted out in internal alphas, not released to the public, beta testing is not for overhauling the entire application, it is for fixing bugs that require more users than your team. my version of flash is current, as is my browser (3.0.8) and my resolution is 1440×900, the standard resolution for most people using a LCD monitor.
sorry, but from what I have seen (and again, I’m not going to crystal ball and say WELL MAYBE IT’LL GET BETTER because I am not reviewing the future) this is a dud. at least in Habbo you can pick things up. if metaplace wants to not suck, they need to work on doing so before presenting their product as beta, or else shitting on the game as present is completely justified
mootykips
Mar 31st, 2009
also addendum: SL’s _interface_ isn’t bad, what’s bad is its _responsiveness_. the game is laggy, button responsiveness is poor, often doing things won’t result in actions because of latency and server issues as well as a horribly buggy client. this game suffers from the same issues but its interface design is much poorer. it seems nobody at Metaplace has ever taken a basic web design class, which would tell them for example that default stacking toolbars on the left side of the screen is a poor idea, especially when there’s a giant open right side that does not contain a vital window (chat). another hilariously glaring issue is the fact mentioned above that any build mode camera changes lock the camera in that position. this sort of thing doesn’t get out of internal.
also, never trust a developer who says a feature is “coming soon”/in the future