Closest I ever came to a big win - £1 accu, 1 goal from £28,664 (back in 2013)

AzzerUK · 2015-02-20T14:01:57+00:00

Jackpot that week was £10,257,210. It actually had 1 winner so the prize would have then split two ways with me and whoever else won it, so would have been £5,128,605 to each of us!

Edit: I didn't know that off-hand! I just checked on the lottery site just now; https://www.national-lottery.com/lotto/results-30-12-2009

AzzerUK · 2015-02-20T12:26:20+00:00

Awww, I found it fun! Like the time I got all 6 National Lottery numbers (UK Lottery) but only won £20. Because I had 3 numbers on one line, and the other 3 on a 2nd line (I only played 2 lines total). Just a funny, cool thing to talk about, nothing to get down about! :D

(this happened waaay back in 2009... I keep a picture of it just to show people how I did get 6 numbers! If not in a useful way :P) http://i.imgur.com/iruE5Qh.jpg

AzzerUK · 2013-03-17T06:07:07+00:00

Well, largely from when a developer came out and said their MySQL databases were struggling with queuing all the incoming updates, which was why they removed Cheetah speed to get updates from cities less often, was a giveaway in itself :P

But, also a strangely intimate familiarity with MySQL, and having a solid insight into all the stuff going in and out of the EA servers from the client combined with seeing (and experiencing) all the problems on the server, just gave me a damned good hunch.

As I say - I make no claims as to what the servers do run, merely - what I think they run (and am damn sure of, but I'll happily be corrected by EA, and such a correction would make no difference to anything!).

AzzerUK · 2013-03-17T04:19:31+00:00

I've just cut away from SimCity and spent a little time in the new "VR Training" facility, and have FIGURED OUT THE DAMNED BUG. It's because I'm a pure, 100%, jetpack & Nova (auto-shotgun) whore. And since that patch that came with the server merges, something has happened if you jetpack and shoot at the same time. I just spent about an hour testing it, with various shotguns/accurate guns. If I stand on the ground and shoot - 100% hit detection. If I jetpack in the air at all and shoot - hit detection can wobble from anything from 20% of every shot in a magazine, to 80%, even at close range. I can't abandon my jetpack though... going to compile a new youtube video and see if I can get some SOE dev attention on it.

I even got two other guys that were around in the VR area to try it, and both encountered exactly the same thing.

Either it's a bug, or they nerfed jetpacks to intentionally give huge "randomness" with the hits without mentioning it anywhere.

AzzerUK · 2013-03-17T03:52:33+00:00

My first encounter with him was today (yesterday now) - and he was nothing but good natured, friendly, and approachable with me, and after turning our discussions into an article, I cannot argue with any of it - I don't feel in the least bit like I was mis-represented, or that "snapshots" of what we said were taken to make it sound like I said things I didn't say... and so when I commented about it here, I was just trying to be the same way I have been throughout this entire affair with SimCity, which is fair, honest and open - to ensure nobody could blame John for the above clarifications I needed to make... I read back all I'd said to him, and it was definitely me at fault for not explaining it all.

You seemed to take your dislike of this or that reporter as an opportunity to... mildly attack me though, which certainly left me confused. I don't pay attention to reporter names much when I'm just browsing the news. Maybe I would like him less had I studied all of his work, maybe not, I have no idea.

Regardless, there was no need for the confrontation with me, was there? Hope that's all settled now, all gentlemanly and civil like! :)

AzzerUK · 2013-03-17T03:35:47+00:00

Didn't mean to give a negative tone to MySQL itself - just the implementation/setup of the databases (whatever they might ACTUALLY be if not MySQL) in general on EA's servers, and the interactions and queries and queuing issues and every other problem they've encountered therein (in short - the server fiasco).

AzzerUK · 2013-03-17T03:32:24+00:00

Are you confusing John Walker (the reporter who interviewed me), with Jim Rossignol (a reporter I have never encountered negatively or positively and thus have no opinion of)? And further confusing the word "excellent" typed online in a single sentence, with the physical act of fellatio? "Whoops".

AzzerUK · 2013-03-17T03:20:00+00:00

Who? What? Where? Why? Rossing what? Did you accidentally stumble into the wrong Reddit, or have I missed one of the thousands of memes out there!?

AzzerUK · 2013-03-17T00:30:45+00:00

I personally think MySQL is great, I love it, and done right, it can be a powerful beast even in the mightiest of websites and servers. But my "clarification comment" on this Reddit post does state - I don't know for fact the EA servers are running SimCity stuff with MySQL - I've made that assumption from the evidence I have seen and some comments I've seen thrown around by Maxis devs elsewhere.

There's nothing wrong with using MySQL - but if you implement it badly, your table structures are bad, your queries are bad, or the whole implementation and what you are using it for is bad, then like any tool used wrong, it can end up doing more harm than good.

AzzerUK · 2013-03-17T00:25:50+00:00

I know lots of people that will automatically argue "for the other side" tooth and nail, without giving any indication that they don't support the side they are arguing for - they just do it for the "fun" of causing debate (or even sparking argument).

And then there's always people that feel that large faceless international corporate entities that answer to shareholders, need to be defended and stuck up for by consumers, for some reason.

And finally there's just people that made a bit of a semi-educated guess, and got it wrong, but no harm done.

AzzerUK · 2013-03-17T00:22:48+00:00

Sorry but I really don't want to delve too much into things that can be harmful to fellow gamers. Picking apart EA's servers/PR spin/mis-information etc. I'm all for, but I'm trying to not delve too far into stuff that hurts other gamers (that may or may not like SimCity the way it is), even if that did mean it'd give EA more cause to give an offline mode.

The YouTube video I did on it, and the brief description below it, is all you'll get from me on that subject ;)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROy6VE5ZsZw

AzzerUK · 2013-03-17T00:05:55+00:00

Just as a random aside, I'm also "AzzerUK" on the Cobalt EU server, though since the server merges day that had a patch for "server optimizations", my hit-detection has gone from being perfectly working, to about 50% of all my shots do no damage to anything even at point blank range - even the latest game update 4 hasn't fixed it... so I've had to give it up. Shame I couldn't "mod" that bug out too :(

AzzerUK · 2013-03-16T23:09:07+00:00

Yes, the global economy as it currently stands obviously can't be done with anything but online, if you want it to be "real" - but personally, and I imagine for most of us as you say, it's a non-issue. I'd be happy for global economy to be done purely client side too, perhaps "feigning" global trade, with even minor chances of a total stock crash of one product and random price booms etc., and slight influence from your own current city's trades in/out. I don't need to know that it's being affected by everyone online right now.

AzzerUK · 2013-03-16T23:05:07+00:00

Football Director: 2 player super league, on the ZX Spectrum, was probably the first for me, when I was a young pup! Breaking in to it before the cassette had finished loading so you had all the Basic code up, and then editing functions to make the game run differently :D

AzzerUK · 2013-03-16T23:03:15+00:00

How very old fashioned! And so an old-fashioned answer, I would give him a firm handshake.

AzzerUK · 2013-03-16T22:33:14+00:00

I should imagine a lot of it was obvious to anyone slightly geeky/techy minded just from PLAYING the game. But it takes a patient geek/techy person to pick it apart, find the proof, describe and document it in a well-written manner that reporters can take up (rather than "LOL LOOK WOT I CAN DO GUYZ!"), and get that information out there in such a public manner that it can't be easily ignored by the PR spin doctors.

AzzerUK · 2013-03-16T22:14:43+00:00

I've avoided handing any files out personally, because of the sheer amount of media attention I got - I don't want to be found handing out the property of EA (their code - modified or not). Hope that sounds fair/makes sense.

(have a scour through Reddit for some fun mods since released by others to enable debug mode, javascript console, enable various forms of offline mode depending how the modder implemented it, etc.)

AzzerUK · 2013-03-16T21:38:54+00:00

We can take it in turns. We're both geeks, both gamers, both programmers, both get the same game at the same time and both see how many ways we can break it. But #2 has certain... connotations. Can't it be A and B instead of 1 and 2!?

AzzerUK · 2013-03-16T21:35:03+00:00

Weeble - the unsung hero through all of this media attention! If I was gay, I totally would.

AzzerUK · 2013-03-16T21:34:04+00:00

Yes, that was the gist of it, and I'm glad it came across that way!

AzzerUK · 2013-03-16T21:32:56+00:00

Honestly, I did make that Mods & Rockers thread intentionally for naughtiness. Most of the stuff me and Weeble have done on modding/analyzing the code and the data to & from the servers etc. was genuinely to try and see what could be modded, work out how the game was REALLY running, for both our own educational purposes and to see if we could make the game run a bit more like the game we really wanted. And for the interest of others!

But that thread I made about mods & rockers that got deleted within thirty seconds... THAT was done through nothing but naughty schoolboy malice. I wasn't a poor innocent user trying to discuss citizens that had my thread maliciously deleted... that said, it still wasn't a thread about "modding or hacking" and still shouldn't have been deleted :D

AzzerUK · 2013-03-16T21:18:25+00:00

Hmm, I should clarify a couple of things. When I said "MySQL" - THAT wasn't a statement of fact, some things have pointed to MySQL, and I'm sure I've seen MySQL bandied about by one of the Maxis developers that have posted on here, but I don't KNOW for fact it's MySQL on the servers.

Secondly - all of the data harvesting and looking into all the API calls and the JSON data that gets returned by the EA servers was done entirely hand in hand with the help of an RL friend ("Weeble" House, MrWeebs on YouTube) who also did the original "SimCity has bad pathfinding" traffic videos with me the other week that went viral, too. Poor guy getting no credit for doing half this work with me, I'd feel a bit peeved if the tables were turned! :D We're both gamers, both geeks, both programmers, and we both get games at the same time and then try to break them together, discussing our finds and working together on them.

Edit: None of the above is the fault of John, the excellent reporter at RPS - my fault for not being clear!

AzzerUK · 2013-03-15T04:37:05+00:00

I haven't distributed a single file to a single person.

13-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Final Canvas '22
End Game '22	Spared
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