I haven't played GTA Online.

I guess more generally I was thinking yesterday about the hoopla surrounding the server troubles that accompanied the launch of GTAO and how uninterested I was in their ramifications. I've been through numerous poor launches of online titles, including but not limited to World of Warcraft (all but unplayable for the first week of its release), Half-Life 2 (the first major test for Steam; it hung up on authentication for a large proportion of people trying to unlock it at midnight), and more recent launch day (or week) failures of Diablo III, SimCity, and FFXIV. As I've gotten older, though, these things just seem to be less and less worthy of comment from my end. My inability to play WoW when it came out was a matter of genuine distress; nowadays I just kind of shrug and assume that I'll be able to get into the game a week later.

It's difficult to say whether this sangfroid is a good thing or a bad thing. Generally speaking I don't find myself getting all that upset at anything anymore; if I find something annoying or frustrating I usually just ignore it or remove it from my life rather than give it more time than it's due or write angry forum posts about it, and I don't really buy anything unless I'm pretty sure I'm going to like it. Specifically, though, I generally assume that highly-anticipated games with an online requirement are going to be kinda busted for the first few days of their release. That doesn't reflect well on the competence of major publishers, who really should've learned from any of the dozens of teachable moments that have come down the pipe over the last decade, and maybe I should exercise my right as a consumer to loudly berate companies that fail at seemingly simple tasks, but I just have a hard time getting up in arms about things like launch-day server issues nowadays. It's easier to sit back and unwindulax than fret about this kind of stuff, or play some other game that's currently functioning rather than worry about the one that isn't. These things tend to work themselves out with time.

It is somewhat interesting to think about why this stuff keeps happening, though. I assume that most publishers have their spreadsheets about anticipated server loads over time and simply do some math like that of the narrator in Fight Club, something along the lines of: the server load on launch day will be twice as big as it ever will be in the future. We can EITHER spend twice as much money to ensure a smooth launch, and buy excess infrastructure that we won't wind up using OR we can launch with the infrastructure that we assume we'll need permanently and absorb whatever damage to our reputation that'll come from a less-than-functional launch. I assume that the math usually winds up going in favor of the latter option.

But maybe I'm completely off about all this stuff and it's simply really difficult to judge how many people are going to be using an online service the day it launches. Who knows?

Alas, my PS3 is officially no more. My attempt at a repair on my Playstation 3 YLOD, courtesy of the iFixit repair kit, was an ignominious failure. I didn’t have too many problems with the actual process of working through the instructions, even though it took almost one and a half episodes of Foyle’s War to get through all the steps. I’m pretty familiar working with the interiors of PCs, but I have to say that the interior of a PS3 is certainly one of the most complicated bits of electronics I’ve ever worked with, at least from a construction standpoint. Everything’s bolted up so tightly that it’s kind of a wonder this thing didn’t overheat years ago.

In the end, getting into the insides of the machine led me to realize that I’ll probably never run a gaming console in a vertical formulation again. Maybe that’s a bit of an overreaction, since the machine was working fine for many years while being vertically oriented, but just looking at all of the heatsinks and thermal pads makes me suspect that the machine would’ve made it to the PS4 launch if it didn’t have the added sideways stress of having the processors and pads effectively hanging in space. Laying horizontally, gravity would seem to naturally keep the thermal pads in better contact with the chips.

But what do I know? I’m the guy who managed to disassemble his PS3, apply new thermal pads, and then reassemble it with only two screws mysteriously left over. Maybe that had something to do with the system’s continued non-functionality. At any rate, I did manage to eke out a minor improvement in that the system stays on for around five seconds now before the fans blow out to their maximum speed and the YLOD repeats itself. Long enough for me to pop my GTAV disc out of the blu-ray player, at any rate.

At least I got a heatgun and screwdriver kit out of all this, though; unfortunately the attempt at self-repair, while noble and manly, probably prevented me from exchanging the system with Sony, since I had to rip off the no-tamper sticker from the side to get to the screw that allows you access to the machine’s guts. That’s a shame, but oh well.

So now I’m looking into my options regarding continued Playstation 3 usage, mostly just because I still have a copy of GTAV for that platform. Common sense would dictate just trying to get a copy of the game for the 360 and playing that, but I’d still like to have a Blu-Ray player to match up with my new television, especially since I don’t know when I’ll be able to pick up a PS4. Borrow one from the office? Borrow my girlfriend’s for a week or two? Buy a new one?

I’ve been tempted to just plunk down for a new one, since I suppose I’ll probably want to play one of the PS3 games that I own at some point in the future, even after the PS4 comes out. What’s curious to me right now is the odd range of Playstation 3 SKUs on the market. Here’s a look at the bundles and the price ranges from Best Buy and Amazon:

It is, as far as I can tell, impossible to just get a regular old Slim PS3 without a game getting packed in, aside from some odd deals from third-party sellers on Amazon and refurbished systems at GameStop, with neither option really appealing to me.

All of these options are interesting, but it’s curious to see the pricing disparity between the new 12GB flash console and the Grand Theft Auto V bundle; you pay effectively an extra ten bucks (discounting the cost of the game) for a 500GB hard drive. I suppose a lot of that is Sony attempting to shift inventory before launching the PS4, but I'm sure they'll be manufacturing PS3s for a while yet. That makes the 12GB option largely pointless unless you're really on the razor's edge of being able to afford a console at all. Anyone who’s attempted to install a game or two to the PS3 should know that a 12GB hard drive is wholly unsuited to the demands of modern gaming. A 12GB PS3 is more a fine Blu-Ray player with occasional opportunities to play games than a gaming console, really.

Still, tough to justify shelling out $300 for a console that’s about to get obfuscated and a game that I already own, even if I could turn the game into a gift for someone or a site giveaway. My options are apparently limited, though. I wouldn’t be stressing if GTAV hadn’t just come out and the PS4 wasn’t around the corner. Damn you, planned obsolescence!

I don’t get misty-eyed over technology very often, but it’s hard not to lament the passing of my Playstation 3. I’ve had this bad boy for quite a while now, having bought it on the first vacation that I took back home to Virginia after joining GameSpot back in 2004. So, that would place the purchase in the summer of 2007 or so. As I recall, Best Buy was running some kind of crazy $50 or $100-off deal that summer, and, having avoided the rather crazy original purchase price of the console, I decided to lay down my money and finally join the Blu-Ray Revolution.

All good things come to an end, though, and it looks like whatever crazy stuff that running GTAV does to a PS3 was finally the bullet in the head of my little workhorse. My girlfriend’s out of town, so I bought GTAV yesterday in the hopes of having some free time to spend on it this weekend, but unfortunately fate intervened. No more than half an hour after starting the game (I was getting into Franklin’s car after delivering the repossessed cars to the dealership), everything died rather violently, with the red LED on the system flashing over and over. I thought at first that something had just overheated, but nope: attempting to turn the system back on simply resulted in the infamous green light - yellow light of death - flashing red light sequence. My system’s gone on to the next world.

It’s hard for me to guess whether I’ve used my PS3 or my X360 more this generation. Certainly both of them have lagged pretty far behind my PC, but they both still have their uses. I prefer the 360’s controller slightly, but the PS3 had the advantage of being a better media center, especially since it ran so quiet and had a Blu-Ray drive. Honestly, I’ve probably used it more for playing Blu-Ray movies than I have for running exclusive games on it, but it’s still been a great device for checking out the inFamouses and Uncharteds of the last decade.

Unfortunately its death leaves me without a Blu-Ray player for the moment, and since I prefer to get my Netflix discs in that format, I’m suddenly faced with a rather depressing lack of HD disciness in my life for the next couple of months, and possibly longer: I wasn’t exactly intending to nab either of the new consoles at launch.

So, what does an idiot like me? Order an ifixit repair kit, of course! I would’ve just bought a new PS3, but, you know - $50 versus $230. Pretty easy decision to at least try the repair kit first and see if it helps before plunging all the way into purchasing a brand new console that’s only going to get used for a couple of months. I guess I could’ve always just bought a Blu-Ray player, but still, that wouldn’t fix the goddamn copy of GTAV sitting around, taunting me. Like a...like a dirty taunter.

Anyway, apparently these things take something like three hours to open up, apply new thermal paste stuff, and reseal, so that should be an interesting use of my weekend. Will update with pictures later if I don’t wind up throwing the whole damn thing out the window. I probably will, given that I just now looked at one of the guides for repairing one of these things, and it’s 50 goddamn steps long. Should be fun to grow a few more gray hairs this weekend.

Hey, I've seen a lot of people in various threads lately mentioning wiki/forum bugs/features that disappeared with the redesign, often without being as specific as I'd need to have them to file an actual bug for them. Since we have a couple of engineers back on the site working on various stuff, feel to just reply to this thread with stuff that's been bugging you as a forum user or wiki editor and I'll try to double-check and see if we have it filed somewhere. If not, I can file it. Thanks!

People often ask me what I do around here, and it's a valid question, since so much of what I do is not publicly visible. Needless to say, there's a lot of weird stuff that Giant Bomb has going on in the background that other sites in the CBSi family don't have to deal with, largely because many of them don't feature subscription services, nor do they have storefronts through which they sell merchandise. So I figured I'd start writing the occasional blog about what keeps me busy on a day to day basis.

Lately it's been monitoring our store. You may have used the store in the past to get a t-shirt or poster or something, and if you did, then thanks! We don’t make a huge amount of money from the store, since we generally try to offer merchandise of a decent level of quality without making the prices too crazy, which means our costs are pretty close to the list price of most of the items we offer. We make some money on each order, but no one’s taking baths in Cristal or anything.

Normally, that’s all fine and good, except when we start getting people trying to make fraudulent orders, as has been happening with increasing frequency of late. Our store is run through Shopify, which automatically takes a look at each order and pops up various flags based on suspicious activity, such as billing address not matching where the credit card’s registered and CVVs not matching.

EDIT: To be clear, none of the below should be taken as an indicator that Giant Bomb has any kind of security issue with its store. We don't even have access to your credit card numbers; everything we do is through third-party vendors that keep all that stuff locked up good and tight. People are using credit card numbers they've stolen elsewhere; felt like a good idea to make that clear.

Those are both pretty good indicators that someone’s using a stolen credit card to place an order, especially the mismatched CVV. The CVV’s the little three-digit code on the back of the card that you’re usually asked to enter when placing an order online; the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard prevents it from being stored, so when credit card records are breached, hackers usually just get the card number but have to make a guess at the CVV. It’s pretty rare that anyone using a valid card won’t know or be able to access their CVV, since it’s right there on the back of the card, so mismatched CVVs are usually an excellent indicator that an order is fraudulent.

(As an aside, I’m also the guy who has to report on our PCI compliance, which involves wonderful things like payment data flow diagrams and something called a PCI DSS SAQ. It’s pretty thrilling stuff.)

Anyhow, there are enough steps in our ordering chain that sometimes a fraudulent order will slip through, which will generally lead to a chargeback later on down the line. Since we keep records of where we ship, we can supply those to Paypal to prove that an order was shipped and signed for, which usually result in Paypal contesting the chargeback with the credit card company, after which I have no idea what happens. I presume that credit card companies simply eat a certain number of fraudulent charges as part of the cost of doing business.

Recently, though, there’s been a bit of an uptick in fraudulent orders to the store, mostly being placed from Venezuela with shipping addresses in southern Florida. From what I can tell, it looks like there’s some kind of well-organized credit card scamming gang that rip off tons of credit card numbers and convert them into physical goods before the numbers are shut down. That might sound paranoid, but googling some of the shipping addresses have led to things like Yelp listings for the businesses there, which in turn lead to plenty of reports of other merchants reporting the addresses being associated with stolen CC numbers. I guess someone in Venezuela or Miami really likes Giant Bomb, because they’ve been ordering plenty of merchandise over the past few months. Or they just use it to smuggle cocaine, or something. Edit: Someone on Twitter suggested that they might just be trying to place small orders to see which credit card numbers were still active before using them for large purchases elsewhere, which makes sense.

So, I’ve been trying to keep track of all the orders that are coming in and have been manually cancelling anything that looks suspicious. That hasn’t stopped the orders from coming in, of course, even though I make sure to send emails back indicating that the orders were cancelled because they’re suspected to be fraudulent. Not that anyone’s reading them; I’m pretty sure the email addresses are as fake as the orders themselves.

What’s interesting is that the orders from southern Florida have mostly subsided (with a few exceptions) in favor of orders from places like Lithuania, Tunisia, Albania, and other exotic locales. It’s interesting to see the purchasing habits of people who’re playing with other people’s money. One order was for a single t-shirt and a hoodie, but still managed to be $236 thanks to a mammoth $181 shipping charge. (If you’re ordering from eastern Europe, you might want to opt for something cheaper than overnight shipping.) What’s curious is that a lot of these new orders are passing the CVV checks. Presumably this means that these orders are being placed from credit cards that were actually physically stolen, or perhaps issued by legitimate vendors based on fraudulent applications.

I’ve been refreshing the orders page pretty regularly lately, examining all of the orders coming in, and cancelling all the fraudulent ones; at this point I'm pretty sure that I've pissed someone off, because the frequency has increased to the point where over half of all orders coming in are fraudulent, with over $1200 in fraudulent orders in the last couple of days alone. I’m not going to go into the criteria I use to detect suspicious orders, but suffice to say that the “is this order legitimate” game is pretty fun sometimes, especially since I rarely play actual games at work nowadays. Undoubtedly there’ll be a legitimate order that I accidentally cancel at some point, so if you wind up getting an order cancelled mysteriously, let me know and I’ll look into it. I'm looking into some Shopify apps that add a second level of protection against fraudulent orders in the meantime.

And that’s one of the things that I've been up to. So there!

So, been playing a bit of FFXIV on Lamia server the past few nights. (Frail Gesture, if you want to friend me.) I haven't gotten too far (level 11 as a Gladiator), but I figured I'd throw out a few initial thoughts/quibbles. Overall, I’m enjoying the game, but it’s not hard to see some areas for improvement in the early game.

A Slow Start: The first few levels that you gain are...kinda boring, unfortunately. Starting you in a city (the gladiator starts this way, not sure about every class) is a bad idea that I thought most MMOs (Rift, WoW, GW2) had gotten away from. Most of the above games start players off in small starting areas with just a questgiver or two, letting people get familiar with the basics of combat--you know, that thing you’re going to be spending most of your time doing--before shoving them off into an overwhelming city. (To its credit, Ul’Dah isn’t as bad a starting city as some of the massive cities in other MMOs. But I should probably stop before I go off on a never-ending tangent about city design in MMOs - a subject for another blog, perhaps.)

I don’t necessarily mind town-time in MMOs, but I do generally dislike questing in them, with some rare exceptions. FFXIV doesn’t do any favors to its early game here by making the first few dozen quests you encounter mindless fetch-and-deliver stuff. Now, delivery quests are never, ever going to be eliminated from MMOs, and there’s a good reason for that: they’re a great way to lead new players towards areas that they need to explore. Unfortunately, that’s not really the case in FFXIV; many of the fetch-and-deliver quests here lead you to various guilds around the city...which you can’t join until you’ve completed the level 10 quest for your class. It’s handy to get the teleport markers early on, but apart from that, there’s pretty much no reason to visit these guilds at the beginning of the game. I would’ve ditched most of these fetch quests until you can actually join the guilds and sent players out into the outside world much earlier on, or just allow players to join guilds right off the bat.

Lightly Interactive Combat: Again, this might be a complaint exclusive to Gladiators, but I’m level 11 as a gladiator and there are precisely two combat actions I use in any given fight: Fast Blade and Savage Blade. I got Savage Blade at level 4, so I’ve spent seven levels, or the majority of my character’s life, mashing the same two buttons over and over again in every fight. (I do have some other skills, but they’re either relevant only in dungeons, which I can’t enter yet, or are damage/armor boosts that are useful but not very exciting.)

Compare that with the life of a Warrior in World of Warcraft. By level 11 as a Warrior, I would’ve had Heroic Strike, Throw, Charge, Victory Rush, and Execute to use in combat. Battles, even in the early game, feel dynamic and exciting, whereas here I basically hit Fast Blade, wait for the global cooldown to end, and hit Savage Blade. Repeat ad nauseum. It’s not a great way to spend five or six hours of game time, and it seems like someone should’ve figured that out while playtesting, although perhaps this is a problem that’s specific to Gladiator; I’ll try some other classes eventually to figure it out.

Speaking of, the global cooldown here feels just a tad too long; 2.5 seconds feels somewhat punitively long when Rift, WoW, TOR, etc. mostly stick with a 1.5 GCD. This is especially true when I only have two buttons to hit. Would’ve been nice to reduce the damage on some of these skills and let you hit the buttons more often, just to give combat more interactivity, but I’m sure that might’ve interfered with skill chains and such later on. I’ll hold off judgement for now.

Disregard Everything I Just Said: Overall, the game seems fun, but this stuff does cut into my enjoyment of soloing at the moment. And yeah, I know that it’s a bit passe to compare an MMO to WoW, but that’s my reference point, and a lot of the stuff I mention above doesn’t exactly require heavy lifting or years of research to suss out. Not every game has to be or should attempt to ape WoW, but there’s enough of FFXIV that seems to draw heavily from that well that it’s a bit surprising to see them stumble in some of the most important stuff, i.e. the introduction to the game. If players don’t enjoy their first five or six hours of the game, you’re putting yourself in a position where you have to win them back towards a subscription rather than getting them excited to pay for more content. I’m not necessarily saying that I had a bad time in my journey to level 10, but I’m pretty neutral on the experience so far.

Anyway, a few initial thoughts; obviously criticizing the game's first few hours won't mean much if the rest of the game is a superblast. I’m looking forward to trying out some tanking, for sure. I played a bit of FFXI when it came out, but didn’t progress very far due to the lack of viable solo play for most classes. They seem to have fixed some of those issues here, at least, and it’ll be interesting to finally be able to get into a dungeon or two. It’s pretty goddamn annoying to hear that you need to form a party before entering a dungeon and that they’re attuned to quest chains; both of these are things that WoW got rid of a long, long time ago, to its credit. But we suffer where we must.

Hey guys,

I'll be heading up to PAX Prime this weekend and roaming the hallways and gaming rooms. If you're traveling along, be sure to look for me and flag me down, as I'll be bringing along plenty of stuff to give away. I asked our warehouse guys to dig up some of the last remaining copies of some shirts that have been discontinued or not restocked in a while, and they managed to find a few copies of the Giant Bomb Throwback Logo hoodie, the GLHB shirt, and a few other things that I'm shipping up there to give away.

They also seem to have found a bunch of posters that the crew signed and were shoved away and forgotten somewhere, so those are going to be up for grabs, as well; bring a poster tube, because you won't want to be carrying one of these around all day! (And don't worry if you can't make it, as I'm going to be bringing some of this stuff back to the office for future giveaways.)

I'm also going to have plenty of codes for things like free premium access (mostly monthlies, but probably a few yearlies, too), discounts on T-Shirts, and other weird stuff. If you see me wandering around, feel free to say hi and I'll give you something. Don't be surprised if I challenge you to a game of something, though. I'm bringing a couple of Magic decks, Cards Against Humanity, and I'll see what else I can whip up. Worst comes to worst we can rock-paper-scissors for supremacy.

I'll also be tweeting my location from time to time, so be sure to follow my personal twitter and the GB twitter account if you want to figure out where I'll be hanging out.

So I finally got one o dem new fangled Nexus 7's after fooling around with it for a bit in an Office Max. Pretty slick little device, and it's super responsive to input, which was my big problem with the original-generation Kindle Fire, which had pretty laggy performance.

So far I'm mostly just intending to use it for some bedtime browsing and Netflix, but I figure that since I can actually probably play some games on it, I'd ask for some references for good Android games. I worked my way through all the Angry Birds games, of course, but I'm not really up on much beyond that - I bought some Final Fantasy game for like 20 bucks for my phone that I never played, so maybe I'll give that a whirl. But since this thing can apparently actually run some 3D stuff, anyone have any recommendations along those lines?

Edit: Thanks for all the recommendations! I'll update the blog when I get a chance to try some of this stuff out.

Hope you're doing alright. It's been a trying week for everyone, I suspect. I wish I had been around on the site a bit more than I have been. It doesn't help that I've been a bit sick.

Anyway, I wanted to say thanks for the outpouring of kind words and thoughts this week. I've been doing my best to get back to as many PMs and tweets as I could, although the amount of tweets that were coming my way Monday and Tuesday were pretty crazy!

I saw plenty of people who were saying that it was a bit odd that they had no one to talk to about this, since Ryan was someone they only knew online and none of their friends could relate. Hopefully you've been able to get whatever's on your chest off of it via the boards, but if you still feel like you have something to say, feel free to PM me and I'll be sure to get back to you. I might not be able to reply until Sunday, but I'll definitely reply.

It's time for a little spring cleaning in anticipation of the upcoming consoles. As such, I'm going to be running some contests to start giving away some of games from my library that I don't really want or play anymore. I can't guarantee that all of these are going to be great games, necessarily, of course. Heck, some of them might be downright bad. But they'll be free, at least.

If any of you were around for the old days at Screened, you'll recall that we used to run a contest called Box Office Winners League when we got the feeling to do so. It's a simple premise: guess how much money a movie is going to make in a given weekend, and if you're the closest guess, you win! There's a bit of skill in it, since box office is roughly predictable, and there are tracking companies that are paid quite a bit to do so, but there's also a lot of luck, since almost no one is able to consistently guess a box office weekend with any degree of accuracy or precision.

So, we'll try to do these weekly until I run out of things to get rid of. The rules this week are pretty simple, but we're going to expand the game to multiple films this weekend, since it has a pretty good shot at being the biggest box office weekend of the year.

1. Guess how much money The Man of Steel's second weekend, World War Z, and Monsters University will gross. Make guesses for each of them, but be sure to add all of those guesses together on a separate line. Feel free to go down to the hundreds of thousands of dollars. We're guessing American box office grosses only. Here's what your prediction should look like, roughly.

• Man of Steel: $55.5 million
• Monsters University: $65.0 milliion
• World War Z: $40.5 million
• Total: $161 million

2. Make your guesses as a reply to this thread, and make sure that they're in by Thursday 6/20 at noon PST/3 PM EST/whatever crazy clock time you have in your crazy timezone. I won't count anything after that. Any post that has been edited at any time will be disqualified, and likewise if anyone attempts to delete a post and try again later. (We can see that stuff!)

3. The winners will be determined next Monday or Tuesday, when actual box office figures are released at boxofficemojo.com. Weekend estimates are often released on Sunday afternoon, but we'll wait for the real numbers to determine a winner. I'll add up the total gross of the three movies listed above and compare them to your total numbers to see who's closest; over or under doesn't matter. (I won't judge you based on individual movies, but I'm still curious as to your guesses, so don't neglect to put all of the movies in there.) In case of any ties, I'll decide between the entries with either a coin flip or some other randomized method.

4. There'll be two winners. The closest Premium member will win a copy of The Last Of Us. The closest non-Premium member will get a month of Premium access. I wound up with two copies of The Last Of Us; I pre-ordered from Amazon, but it wound up not arriving on Friday, so I just bought the download. This is a brand-new copy; it's been opened, but only because I heard the disc rattling around inside the case and wanted to make sure that it was mounted properly before I sent it out. But it hasn't even been put into a PS3! It's a virgin disc!

That's pretty much it! Go forth and prosper, or something. I'll reserve the right to change any of these rules as I see fit before the deadline, but I doubt that'll be necessary. (Don't be a dick and make it necessary, in other words.)

UPDATE WITH WINNERS:

According to Box Office Mojo, the numbers were:

For a total of $190,128,509. A lot of people were really, really close on this one, within a million or two dollars. But as far as accuracy goes, I'm showing that our premium winner was ThosePosers with an astoundingly close guess of $190.2 million. (And yes, I verified that this was his original guess by looking at my screenshot of the page from Thursday afternoon!) Our non-premium winner was Rudeboy217 with a guess of $190 million even.

Before I declare these results official, feel free to check my work and see if I missed anyone. (I have screencaps of all the guesses from Thursday, so don't try to get sneaky with edits or anything.) But if not, then congrats!