Diaspora Interview at MPOGD

Back when I was the News Editor at MPOGD, I did the following Interview with Phil of the Diaspora team.  This interview is no longer up at the MPOGD website, so here is a blast from the past for Diaspora fans:



Chuck: (8:19 AM) Great. Thanks. Are you the creator
of Diaspora?

Diaspora: (8:19 AM) yeah

Diaspora: (8:20 AM) sorry about the delay getting in
touch. The other person you talked to is in Australia
and there was a bit of a communication problem

Chuck: (8:21 AM) Why did you create Daspora as a stand
alone downloadable game as opposed to a text-based
game that is run off servers without any downloads
needed?

Diaspora: (8:23 AM) There are a lot of elements to
Diaspora that work better in a graphical environment.
It also enhances the user experience. We have tried to
keep this to a minimum though so that the download
does not get too big

Chuck: (8:25 AM) The reason why I asked is that in a
non-download game, you can make changes to it fairly
easily & quickly while in a download game, you have to
wait until you’ve got enough changes made to warrant
issuing a new patch which delays things a bit.

Diaspora: (8:27 AM) A lot of game changes can be made
server side without having to release a new patch. Our
patches are usually to add whole new elements to the
game which take time to write anyway

Chuck: (8:28 AM) Speaking of the patch, is there a set
date for its release & what specifically will be in
it?

Diaspora: (8:29 AM) We are currently working out how
long it will take to finish off the changes we are
making and test them so we don’t have a date yet. It
should be fairly soon though

Diaspora: (8:30 AM) We also need to test some things
before we can give a complete list of new features

Diaspora: (8:31 AM) One of the major things should be
the addition of a lot of new ai characters

Chuck: (8:33 AM) How about cheat-prevention & will
there be a reset with the release of the new patch to
negate the advantages that were gained by unscrupulous
players?

Diaspora: (8:34 AM) We are using some new code that
will hopefully sort out any hacks or cheats going
about and stop them in the future. Again we are in the
process of testing this out at the moment. A lot of
the new changes have been made specifically for this

Diaspora: (8:34 AM) There will not be a reset but
other methods are being looked at to remove any unfair
money

Diaspora: (8:35 AM) We feel that a reset is never the
fairest way and will always try to avoid them if at
all possible

Chuck: (8:37 AM) On the new Altitude website, it says
that there are “BladeRunneresque sponsorships”
available. What are these & is the game generating
any revenue from this method?

Diaspora: (8:39 AM) The idea with these is that we can
offer advertisers places to put adverts without them
being distracting to the gameplay (so no annoying
advert breaks or other disruptive advertising
methods). For example companies could plac adverts in
bars images or other locations on planets or sponsor
some ai.

Diaspora: (8:40 AM) Due to the work on the patch we
have not really started looking for sponsors but will
start soon

Chuck: (8:41 AM) Is Altitude generating enough revenue
from its other projects to be profitable despite what
must be significant losses from Diaspora?

Diaspora: (8:43 AM) Yes our other projects help us to
fund Diaspora

Chuck: (8:45 AM) Lately, the website, particularly the
Forum, has has some problems. Are these getting
fixed?

Diaspora: (8:46 AM) yes we have someone working on it
and it should be completely fixed in the next day or
two

Chuck: (8:48 AM) As it happens, I’m a Diaspora player
myself & one problem that players have with the game
is that the bounties for killing bots in the game
don’t give you much reward beyond your repair costs.

Diaspora: (8:49 AM) do you mean the guild rewards or
their individual rewards?

Chuck: (8:50 AM) Their individual rewards. I haven’t
tried killing bots myself, just going from what I’ve
heard.

Diaspora: (8:51 AM) Yes this is one of the things we
will be changing. We are looking into all our stats
for things like this and ships stats etc. using
feedback and our own experience so hopefully will get
all of these values to a better level

Chuck: (8:54 AM) regarding cheating, there used to be
an “Investigator” & an “Investigator’s Forum.” What
happened to that?

Diaspora: (8:56 AM) We now have a full time community
manager for the game that handles all these things.
With the amount of feedback we get from Diaspora it
was necesary to take someone on.

Chuck: (8:58 AM) As it happens, I’ve only played the
game since March, but one thing that I’ve often heard
is that before the last patch, Diaspora was a truely
fantastic game, but the last patch wrecked it by
adding excessively powerful ships. What’s your
reaction to that?

Diaspora: (9:02 AM) I think there was a mixed
reaction. All new ship stats were based on a huge poll
of our players to try and get them correct and a lot
of testing. It is however always hard to get
statistics exactly right until they have been in play
for a significant period of time. Based on feedback
this patch will see some changes to the ship stats
that should hopefully make everyone happy

Diaspora: (9:04 AM) One of the major changes will
probably be to the current helimoth stats

Diaspora: (9:04 AM) I mean helios not helimoth

Chuck: (9:05 AM) Will the patch add some more
planets/trade routes/missions?

Diaspora: (9:07 AM) There should be some changes to
the universe but I have not come up with the final
plans for this so can’t really say about the addition
of new planets. There will definitely be new missions
added and this will be an ongoing process even after
the patch has come out with new ones being added more
regularly (they do not need a patch to add them)

Chuck: (9:10 AM) Are there any long-term plans for
Diaspora such as eventually making it into a game sold
in stores as a CD-ROM game?

Diaspora: (9:13 AM) We will always try to keep
Diaspora itself free to play if we can and look for
other ways to bring in revenue. We have been looking
into a boxed version of the game and what we can offer

Chuck: (9:17 AM) Currently, Diaspora is a 2-D game.
Are there any plans for eventually making it into a 3D
game?

Diaspora: (9:23 AM) When designing Diaspora I thought
about 3d but feel that due to the nature of the game
this would actually detract from the game. One of the
main features of Diaspora is the interaction with
other players. This is essential in all elements of
the game from simple trade chat to full blown guild
war tactics and politics. I felt that if it became a
3d game a lot of this would be lost as communicating
on this level whilst also trying to pilot a 3d ship
would be impossible. I felt then and still do that
with communication being the most important thing in
the game this would just spoil it. I believe it is the
content and gameplay that is much more important than
the aesthetics of a game

Diaspora: (9:25 AM) excuse me one sec.. phone

Diaspora: (9:28 AM) back again.. sorry about that

Chuck: (9:28 AM) According to the Altitude website,
Diaspora now has over 70,000 players & there are over
60 guild & fan sites about the game. Why do you
thhink that the game has gotten this kind of audience?

Chuck: (9:28 AM) no problem.

Diaspora: (9:35 AM) I think the draw of Diaspora is
its community elements. Being able to play against and
interact to a high level with other players from
around the world. Rather than any linear gameplay the
gameplay is defined by the players themselves and how
they interact with others. This really draws people in
to a game and makes it much more unpredictable and
interesting. It is a credit to the players themselves
that the game has grown in such a great way. Also some
very good press and reviews have helped :)

Chuck: (9:37 AM) I’ve noticed that unlike many other
games, the Forum is pretty near uncensored, so that if
a player wants to accuse you of being the antichrist,
they can. You guys must have pretty thick skins.

Diaspora: (9:38 AM) Yeah you get used to it.. I guess
it’s just something you have to expect when people are
so involved in a game. And the nice comments more than
make up for it

Chuck: (9:42 AM) About what size do you expect the
patch to be? 2-3 MB?

Diaspora: (9:44 AM) Hopefully less.. and if we release
any new ships we will keep them as an optional patch
like the Helios.. again to keep size down

Chuck: (9:47 AM) Well, I’ve run out of questions.
Thank you very much for your time.

Aaron Swartz was a Scumbag

Hacking is the same thing as breaking and entering one's home. As Declan McCullough wrote back in the late 1990's, there is no such thing as "hacktivism", only vandalism.

What gets me about this case is the way that his father has been acting. He talks as if MIT committed a great sin by alerting law enforcement to his son's crimes. 

He was recently the subject of an article in the Chicago Sun-Times as saying that MIT needed to apologize for its actions and to do what his son wanted them to do: make journal articles and academic journals free of charge. Given the fact that academic journals are pretty expensive to publish, if they were made free, pretty soon there would be no more academic journals around.

Aaron Swartz was a scumbag no different than kidnappers and other kinds of violent hoodlums.

House Forsaken in Diaspora

A little known fact in the history of Diaspora is that there was a limited House Forsaken presence it.  I was an active player in it as did DracoLichB.  PresBMK also downloaded it, but could not get it to work.Unfortunately, the game died before I could persuade anyone else to try it.

House Forsaken is Dead

In the early days of Solar Empre, June-October, 1999 House Forsaken was the mightiest clan in the game.  At least that is until the likes of the Evil Empire, TalkHouse & the Trex Mercenaries showed up.  Even then, HF's position was strong enough that in January 2000 SE creator/developer/operator Bryan Livingston awarded them their own SE game that was admined by HF members.  HF was also a multi-game outfit that also had strong clans in other major online games such as at Battle.net and in Everquest.

However, HF succumbed to hubris and became too big for its britches.  This happened in March, 2003 in the game of  TDZK that was created/developed/operated by HF members Jerle & Hotaru.  In that game 2 HF members, one of whom named Hyperion had played SE under the name of HY and who had originally  been a HF recruit in SE (and if a certain story is true played SE with HF back in late 1999 under the name of -=WindKull=-), were caught brazenly cheating.  In a related incident in the same month, Hyperion committed treason by destroying a HF planet (Planet OMGN).

Since HF prided itself as being a clan that claimed to have honor at the very core of its being and repeatedly used the idea that it was a honorable outfit in its recruiting that was firmly opposed to cheating, one have thought that the HF leadership would have come down hard on the cheaters.  Instead the opposite happened.  The leadership acted as if nothing bad happened and that, if anything, the real culprits were those who brought the cheating to the attention of the clan.  Additionally, the leadership failed to provide even the slightest discipline to Hyperion for his SE treason.

The end result of all this was the mass resignation of almost every member of the HF Browser-Based Gaming Realm (about half of the membership of ) and with that the single most active unit within HF ceased to exist.  From that point on, HF went into a state of decline and fall and after years of being little more than a glorified "forum clan" has ceased to exist.

My Question to Project Diaspora

Just posted to Facebook:

Charles Rectorposted toProject Diaspora

2 seconds ago

Is Project Diaspora an actual up and running game or is just another dead project?

Like · 

The Reunion

http://www.thereunion.de/forum/

The Reunion was a Diaspora clone created by its players.  However, while the forum is still up and running, the game itself appears to be kaput.

Diaspora on Wikipedia

From:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(video_game)#Altitude_Productions_Ltd


Diaspora (video game)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Question book-new.svg
This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged andremoved. (May 2012)
Diaspora
Diaspora endymoth.jpg
Developer(s) "Altitude Productions"
Publisher(s) Altitude Productions
Platform(s) PC (Windows)
Release date(s) Beta: 18 October 1999
Public release: June 2000
Genre(s) MMO, Point and click
Mode(s) Multiplayer
Distribution Download
Diaspora was a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game created by Altitude Productions. Released from beta in June 2000. By the Christmas of 2000, the game boasted over 35,000 registered user accounts. By April the following year, it peaked at around 70,000 registrations. The game went offline in August 2001.
Contents  [hide]
1 Altitude Productions Ltd
2 Gameplay
3 Awards and accomplishments
4 References
Altitude Productions Ltd[edit source | editbeta]

Altitude was a London-based web design and game production company. Their previous work included:
QuizOasis - a "proprietary Multiplayer Quiz Engine" that featured on various websites, including nme.com, eurosport.com, and skysports.com.
Various interactive television projects for companies such as NTL and Telewest.
Gameplay[edit source | editbeta]

Diaspora was a 2D point and click shooter, written in the Java programming language. Players were immersed in an ever-changing player-driven universe. Various guilds struggled to attain power, and control key planets. Other players preferred to take a more peaceful route and trade their way to financial supremacy.
Diaspora had nine ship classes split into eight types. To gain access to new classes, players had to travel to distant worlds to purchase additional plans. All players started with Zephyr plans, and 20,000 Diaspora Credits (DCs) to buy a ship. The other available classes were: Arachne, Nisus, Talos, Nereid, Endymion, Nisus II, Talos II, and Helios. The types of ship were: seeker, fighter, carrier, hunter, freighter, attacker, destroyer, and behemoth.
Each major planet outside of the "Gen Zone", the newbie protection zone, hosted a satellite. Satellites served mainly as a trophy for a guild. Guild members could land on satellites, repair them, and upgrade their systems. A fully upgraded satellite proved nearly impossible for a single person to destroy as one would need to repair one's ship so many times so as to render the attempt cost-ineffective.

Awards and accomplishments[edit source | editbeta]

In September 2000 Diaspora won game of the month on MPOGD.[1]
References[edit source | editbeta]

^ "MPOGD's GAME OF THE MONTH September 2000". Multiplayer Online Game Directory. Retrieved 1 June 2013.

No higher resolution available.

Diaspora_endymoth.jpg ‎(100 × 100 pixels, file size: 4 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)

Diaspora Won the MPOGD Game of the Month Award for September, 2000

MPOGD's GAME OF THE MONTH SEPTEMBER 2000





Game Name: Diaspora(Dead)
Description:Space trading game that features a persistent universe in which players can buy their fully customisable ships and travel from planet to planet, trading, pirating, exploring or creating guilds.

Initial Point of Entry

For a few too short years, 1999-2001 this download space strategy game shown like a bright star in the heavens.  Here's a chance to put it all into perspective.