EVE going strong despite controversy
For two years, serious players of the popular, massively multiplayer online video game EVE Online have accused the company behind the game of orchestrating events to benefit “favorite” teams and participants.
CCP Games, based in Iceland and the creator of the popular science fiction fantasy game, has denied allegations it allowed one of its developers to assist friends gain points and the equivalent value in actual dollars that those points create.
Despite calls for the developer’s firing, CCP says the worker has not been disciplined, while the whistle-blower who made the accusation was permanently banned.
Despite the controversy, EVE Online continues to grow and recently added a Chinese-language version.
The virtual world of Second Life has its own share of supposed scams. Boise attorney Ben Duranske, who writes about “virtual law,” has identified a widespread Second Life fraud based on the game’s bank, called “Ginko,” that offered 40 percent to 150 percent interest a year for game players who invested their “Linden dollars” with it.
Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life, is investigating the claim that the person who created the Ginko bank may have disappeared with as much as $700,000 in actual U.S. currency through game fraud.
Wal-Mart closes video service
After one year, mammoth U.S. retailer Wal-Mart has shut down its online video download service with no warning to customers. A message on the site says the service shut down on Dec. 21.
Via e-mail, a Wal-Mart spokesperson told Reuters the company was shuttering the service because Hewlett-Packard had discontinued the technology driving the service, and Hewlett-Packard has said it has ceased its download-only merchant services because the market for downloaded media “did not perform as expected.”
Wal-Mart says customers who purchased media through the store will be able to play the content as many times as they like on the computer they used to download the files; however, customers will not be able to transfer the content to other computers, although in some cases customers may be able to transfer the content to portable players.
Wikia Search to debut
Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia, says taking the online encyclopedia’s collaborative approach into the field of search won’t dethrone Google or another major search engine – at least not soon.
After months of talk and a few weeks of invitation-only testing, Wikia Search at search.wikia.com, will open to the general public later this week, according to the Associated Press.
Wales says its goal is to let volunteers improve search technology collectively, the way Wikipedia lets anyone add or change entries, regardless of expertise. “That reduces the sort of bottleneck of two or three firms really controlling the flow of search traffic,” said Wales, chairman of Wikia Inc., the for-profit venture behind the search project.
Engineers at Google and other search companies continually tweak their complex software algorithms to improve results and fight spammers — those who try to artificially boost the rankings of their own sites. Search companies have not disclosed many details to avoid tipping off competitors and spammers.