Forums these days are riddled with individuals who just can’t spell or use proper grammar within their sentences. This prompted Facepunch Studios to modify their forum and introduce ‘smartness‘ ratings.

These ratings are determined by scanning your post for common spelling and grammar mistakes, then docking ‘points’ relative to the amount of mistakes you made in your post. If your smartness rating goes below a certain level you are banned from the forums teaching you to spell and grammaticize well (and I’m quite sure ‘grammaticize‘ is correct :p).

If you can spot the three mistakes in the picture below (two grammatical, one spelling) then reply to this post with a comment stating “I can spell and grammaticize” and let the world know of your smartness

Not a bad idea Facepunch, should be introduced as compulsory for every Internet forum installation

Steam had some connection and networking issues today after about 750,000 users were disconnected and over 1 million users lost access to the friends services provided by Steam Community.

The connection went down at 2:15 am (GMT -8) with no reports or updates until after the issue had been resolved, about 2 hours later. The following is taken from the Steam forum thread describing the downtime issue:

Sorry for the inconvenience, we had a networking issue that was affecting about 1/8th of our users. The problem should be resolved now.

The problem wasn’t detected and fixed as quickly as it should have been due to some monitoring systems failing, we’ll be taking steps to ensure that doesn’t happen in the future.

- jmccaskey: Steam Issues: Connection to Steam cannot be Made

The interesting this is that ‘jmccaskey’ says the issue only affected 1/8th users however the stats graph on Valve’s/Steam’s website says otherwise. The screenshot above clearly shows that no users whatsoever were online during the downtime.

Either way, its back online now and connection has been restored. Game time!

This utility will allow you to fetch and decrypt VNC passwords on a local computer system with VNC Server configured with a password.

It works by fetching the encrypted password in the registry then decrypting it using the DES algorithm.

The utlity has two sections, Automatic Password Decrpytion and Custom Password Decryption. The automatic section will retrieve the encrypted password from the registry and decrypt it, the custom section will allow you to decrypt an encrypted password found on another computer through accesing the registry keys.

Download the VNC Password Decryptor

Today I decided to set-up a test email account with hotmail for various reasons but discovered something interesting about Hotmail’s description on the live.com search engine. Both products/services are by the same company so I was curious as to why Hotmail was described as having a whole 2MB Storage, Signatures and HTML.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t use live.com at all. Google wins the search engine wars. Just by coincidence I searched on live to find such interesting conent.

While looking for something else to do during Team Fortress’s hype period I was watching tv and it seems Channel 7 have introduced their version of ‘Next Top Model’, Make me a Supermodel.

During the advertisement on TV I noticed something a little odd, the logo as seen in the picture below is a replica of the Aperture Laboratories logo from Valve’s Portal. I know apertures + photography + models makes sense but I thought it was an interesting coincidence that both companies represented ‘Aperture’ with the same design.

I’m not announcing a conspiracy or anything, although I should really warn any contestants on their show – they may be in for a enrichment centre special. I knew GLaDOS was behind Channel 7. It made me laugh =D.

– Shadow

You would think they would have learnt the first time.

I dislike being nasty towards Valve, especially when they did originally create Team Fortress and the Orange Box to be a milestone in gaming history. However, you would expect them to put some thought into how releasing their ‘Team Fortress Achievement Packs’ may affect game play for the rest of the world.

As posted previously I described how the Medic achievement pack affected game play on all servers, influencing the player’s choice of class to create, saturating a team with Medics unbalancing the game and creating strategy problems. The exact same has happened with the Pyro achievement pack. Since its release, players are choosing to be Pyro over any other class regardless of the 10 that are already distributed throughout the same server.

This is just one problem. Many other factors contribute to and amplify it. This is something Valve failed to take into consideration when releasing achievement packs. One significant factor is the release new ‘weapons’ for just a single class. This just creates an unbalanced game. Why should someone who ‘grinded’ the achievements and obtain all the new weaponry (in most cases considerably stronger than its predecessors) always dominate and win against those who prefer to gain achievements genuinely? It is an unfair advantage that should have been noticed by Valve after they released the Medic’s achievement packs.

You would think that the choices Valve have made for Team Fortress 2 have already affected the game enough however they also decided a ‘Free Team Fortress 2 Weekend’. Oh, this just makes my day. Now the servers are full of Pyros with overpowered weapons, and with all newbie’s controlling them. Thank god I will only have to endure the newbie problem for a weekend.

The Solution: I’m not going to say how stupid Valve’s decisions are and then not provide any plausible solutions to this madness. To begin, it’s not like Team Fortress 2 Achievements have never existed before, just take the example of when the game was first released. There were 17 achievements which did not affect game balancing. The achievements although requiring you to be a certain class in some situations, all had something in common. There was an achievement for all classes. Not a pack of about 30 achievements for one class. That is the point that Valve missed completely when designing these new achievements packs. The achievements should be released progressively for all classes. This creates an even distribution of classes throughout servers keeping the game in balance and experienced players happy at the same time.

As for the new weapons, it would be more appropriate to ensure that all players are on an even footing. New weapons should be released progressively like the achievements. If for example, five achievements were released at one time for each class and then rewarded with a weapon unlock at the end of each five achievement milestone, it would ensure a much more even game play. Each weapon of course would need to be balanced in strengths and weaknesses to maintain equilibrium between the experienced and the not so experienced. Previously Team Fortress 2 exemplified this quality before the achievement pack updates.

Hopefully Valve will see the problems they are creating after this latest release. Meanwhile, the Pyro ‘achievement hype’ will continue for a few weeks – I will need to find another game in the meantime.

– Shadow

This utility created by Shadow Productions will encrypt or decrypt a password key that is found within RoyalTS. The default encryption key and algorithm will provide you with instant access to any lost Royal TS passwords.

Decrypting RoyalTS Passwords
If you, for example forget your Royal TS password, simply open the configuration file in notepad and look for the password ‘hash’ within the relevant nodes. It should appear to be a jumble of letters and numbers however this will soon change. Place the found string in the ‘Decrypt’ section of the Shadow Productions: Royal TS Password Encryptor and Decryptor then simply press ‘Go’.

Encrypting RoyalTS Passwords
Open the program to the ‘Encrypt’ section. Place the plain text string into the text box then press ‘Go’. Using the default algorithm and key a what appears to be a jumble of letters and numbers will now uniqluly represent the original plain text. Be careful! Placing the encrypted string into the decryptor will immediatley reveal the RoyalTS password!

Download the RoyalTS Password Encryptor and Decryptor