The Mana World Forums

I think the development weekly summary is too much on that page. Maybe a development news page that includes it would be useful though.

Nard wrote: I think the development weekly summary is too much on that page. Maybe a development news page that includes it would be useful though.

I agree that the Weekly Summary might be too detailed, especially for people who aren't familiar with the game. But I think it'd be good to post the news entries about content releases there, the same that are in the news that are displayed while the client fetches the updates.
That would show that there are regular updates happening and would hopefully make people curious enough try out the game.

If the website maintainer is overwhelmed, I am sure that Derpella and I could help. The task doesn't seem too heavy.
And if Ablu and content dev. team feel it... let's make web sailors drop their anchor in our small Tulimshar harbour.

Crush wrote:Some years ago I suggested to turn the news section on the main website into a development blog where every developer has post rights. The Development Weekly Summary would then be posted on the front page, for example. But there wasn't much feedback from the developers.

+1

It seems like something is happening. Someone started re-posting the update news of the last few months on the frontpage.

I dumped all the entries from game news into the sourceforge feed.

I have a halfway-working script (with features such as output-dependent color, links, and even adding and removing a news entry based on start/end dates when you rerun the script ...) to generate both the mainpage feed and the in-game news.txt, but I'm not sure what format is best for the mainpage. Currently it's using PHP to parse RSS: https://github.com/themanaworld/themana ... s/news.php

Have I mentioned that I hate XML? My gripe of the moment is that it's impossible to append to an XML file, due to the restriction that there be only one toplevel tag.

I do think that potential developers are interested by a game played by a lot of gamers, as much as they areby an active and friendly development team. Development activity can have a place beside game news and on sourceforge page. Weekly Dev summary seems a good activity index, and content could be attractive enough.
Btw, thank you mr webmaster for updating the site. (My offer holds anyway.)


Nard


Note:I worry a lot about that:http://forums.themanaworld.org/viewtopi ... 12&t=15846

On invertika.org some players in theory have the permission to post news on the front page. Since invertika does not have that many players this only happened rarly. But i guess you will be able to find some writers who are interested in writing articles from time to time.

On invertika you have a singe sign on system btw. Wiki, Forums and main page share the same accounts. Only the actual game accounts are seperated from it (but were planned to merge as well (iirc)).

Ablu wrote:On invertika you have a single sign on system btw. Wiki, Forums and main page share the same accounts. Only the actual game accounts are seperated from it (but were planned to merge as well (iirc)).

I would like to point out that sharing accounts between website and game is much easier on Manaserv, because it uses an SQL database which can easily be made accessible by both gameserver and web applications.

Crush wrote:I would like to point out that sharing accounts between website and game is much easier on Manaserv, because it uses an SQL database which can easily be made accessible by both gameserver and web applications.

Doesnt TMW have a db for the web registration with all accounts too?

Why isn't TMW protected by reCaptcha? I noticed when it was briefly cracked that was a news on the first site of most popular polish news website, which sounds like cracking it is a hard achievement :) Is it because it isn't GPL?

TMW forums are protected by recaptcha.
TMW in-game is not, because recaptcha doesn't (easily?) work for anything but http(|s) (admittedly, it's an interesting idea)
TMW news feed itself is generated from sourceforge, but actually syncing it requires ssh access (just *try* to break RSA, I dare you.).

FWIW, I'm researching SQL possibilities for TMWA, it looks like PostgreSQL is the only one with enough features, and its documentation is written by a programmer, not whoever usually writes documentation (a suit?).

o11c, afaik in-game registration was closed a looong ago?
Oh, I see site-registration already has recaptcha. It's weird then so many fake accounts are made. Well, there are other methods of cheating recaptcha, like setting up a site telling people to solve one from the other site...

About forums, they aren't... I just made a fake account using browser without javascript, and succeeded.

So people are starting to guess why/when newcomers are leaving the game.

My data collection is found here:
[not yet available]
It contains the online list of characters sampled approximately every 5 minutes.
Also there is a script called statistics.py, which is able to calculate the duration of a player seen online.
(whereas duration is just the difference of the first and last point in time in which that char has been seen online.)


Just taking a quick glance at the data:
./statistics.py > tmwdurations.py # produce a file containing the online durations times.
start octave/matlab:
a=dlmread("tmwdurations.txt") # read that file and store it into the variable a
median(a) # yields 74160 which is about 24 hours, so the average character has spent less than a day in tmw
hist(a,10000) # histogram with 10000 bars to get a fine grained resolution in the first bars. (more than 33k samples)

Around 50 percent of the chars have online times in the first bar, which is about 400 seconds, so they leave the game within the first 7 minutes.
Then there are waves which describe the days, but there is no significant drop rate after certain hours/days any more.
The huge drop is in the first 7 minutes.

EDIT:
As github only allows 300MB of free hosting, I need to check where I can upload the samples. I'll upload them tommorow. The total size is about ~1G of text files, most likely these can be compressed very good.

EDIT2:
As of personal requests I will not upload the data.

Please don't post detailed logs. It's bad enough that some people "follow me around the game" using the online list. This would be a wonderful tool for certain stalker types.

I would honestly consider leaving the game if I thought that other people could track my game play as closely as you have.

I know some browser based games have a recaptcha by picking a picture. An example is the one on fresh hotel.

You can check the website for an example.

http://fresh-hotel.org/