Category: General

Bungie awards exclusive Recon armor to famous Halo 3 suiciders

Paul

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Bungie Weekly Update: 10/26/07

Posted by Frankie at 10/26/2007 4:40 PM PDT

Banhammery

We’ve mentioned before that we have implemented lots of security and anti-cheating systems in Halo 3. We’ll never have it perfect because we cannot stop people being idiots, but it’s already significantly better than ever before. We’re about to activate a part of it that required a few weeks of folks playing in the wild before we’d gathered enough data to activate it. Well, we’re just about ready to swing the mighty mallet of justice and it should make a couple of types of cheating extinct very shortly.

Halo 3 has been available for precisely one month and we’re going to be working harder than ever to make sure it stays a safe and fair place to play for the next few years. So please bear with us and remember we’re always watching and more importantly, acting on the information we receive, whether it’s immediately visible or not.

Rank Amateurs

I’ve had a lot of mails from skilled Halo players saying things like, “Hey, I am stuck at level 41 skill level and I am not going up, so your skill system must be broken.” Actually, what you’re seeing is that it works. What the system is telling you, is that relative to the other players currently playing Halo 3, you are a level 41. You should not be going up in skill level until you become appreciably and significantly better.

If you suddenly developed a whole new level of headshot ability, for example you’d find that your skill level would rise commensurately. It is not, like your rank, supposed to climb inexorably based on experience, but rather to judge and determine your relative skill and match you with players of like skill. My experience is that games are closer, tighter and more fairly balanced than ever before. The spikes happen at the low end, as you mix it up with folks who haven’t played enough to determine a steady skill level. As you get better, progress will slow and eventually halt as the system determines your overall ability and uses that to find matches.

It’s important to note that it is an increasingly accurate estimate, designed to become more accurate over the long term. So don’t worry about dips in your performance, or unexpected sprees, those dips and spikes are not given much precedence by the system.

In theory, it is trying to put you in the most competitive matches. It is not some goal or trophy – it’s a tool.

Hmm to bad I don’t have a Xbox 360!!! Go check out the videos!!

Leopard hacked for Intel PC consumption

Paul

We’ve come to expect our Apple-related hacks early and user friendly these days, but we’ve still got mad respect for the folks at OSx86 Scene who’ve managed to get Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard up and running on Intel PCs on launch day — the day before if you felt like being a bit less upright about it. The hack requires a minimum of trickery on your part: just a burnable DVD, USB thumb drive and a bit of luck. Not everything’s super tested just yet, and OSx86 Scene will be expanding support and simplifying the process as time goes on, but this is sure a promising start.

[Via dailyApps, image courtesy of mac.nub]

Hmm, Wonder if that will work on a Dual Core system? Might try it later!!

Canada’s Rogers Network to Get iPhone by December?

Paul

The guys at BGR have spotted this advertisement floating around the Internet, which supposedly shows the iPhone being made available on Canada’s Rogers network. The flier stipulates the iPhone shall be made available, by December 7th, for $499CAD on a three-year contract. Pre-orders for the device are shown to be starting on 20th November. The above information does not seem to be too far fetched, but this could easily be a PS hoax. You have been warned—don’t book a day off work just yet. [BGR]

I’d figured it was bound to happen to prevent people from unlocking the IPHONE!!

Brando Adapts eSATA Drives to USB with a Simple Adapter

Paul

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We’ve already seen a clever way to conveniently adapt eSATA hard drives to USB, and now here’s an even easier and cheaper way to do that from Brando. It’s a $15 adapter, and sure, you’ll have to add $10 to that ticket to get a power supply to fire up that drive, but the money saved by using a bare drive instead of buying an enclosure will make up for that. So do the math: You get one of these and a power supply for $25, a Hitachi Deskstar 1TB drive for $300, and you have a TB for $325. Good deal. Or you can get a slower but arguably prettier Western Digital My Book 1TB external drive for around $350. Either way, that’s a heap of storage, ain’t it? [Brando]

Hmm a nice little setup, but I’d still buy my own Enclosure for sure!!

Sprint Nextel agrees to start unlocking phones

Paul

An under-the-radar class action lawsuit against Sprint Nextel is winding its way towards a settlement this week, and it contains a pretty huge concession by Sprint: the company will unlock phones for both current and former customers, and will begin training its customer service reps on how to connect non-Sprint phones to its network. The settlement was tentatively approved by a California judge on October 2, but hasn’t had a final approval hearing yet, according to Sprint — but it’s still a huge win for US consumers, who haven’t been able to buy mainstream unlocked phones from any of the major carriers. Of course, since Sprint’s network is CDMA, unlocked phones will only work on other CDMA carriers like Verizon — and there’s no guarantees those companies will be happy about it — but at this point we’ll take whatever we can get.

Nice, Now to see what ATT does!!