Yesterday, what with all the site issues, I forgot to provide a pointer to the excellent Appelcline & Allen article on Collective Choice: Experimenting with Ratings article over at Life With Alacrity. It’s a really really good breakdown on how rating systems work and how to address common problems with them (such as the “Lake Wobegon problem” where “everyone is above average”). It even includes algorithms.

Rating systems are something that aren’t much used in online worlds today, but should be. Yet another thing where the games have stuff to learn from the web.

PlayNoEvil has more on the Vietnamese restrictions that just went into effect. Apparently, game servers players are already moving to offshore servers. We used to have a Vietnamese game operator hanging out on the blog — maybe he will post again and bring us up to date!

So there’s this site called World-Check. It basically runs a business related to managing risk for well-heeled institutions. From its site:

World-Check’s proprietary database and tools have direct uses in financial compliance, anti-money laundering (AML), Know-Your-Customer (KYC), Politically Exposed Person (PEP) screening, enhanced due diligence (EDD), fraud prevention, government intelligence and enforcement, and other identity authentication, background screening and risk-prevention practices.

In addition to the financial industry other client sectors include, insurance, legal, gaming, aviation, real estate, consultancy, natural resources and accounting to name but a few.

Well, today they have an article entitled Virtual money laundering now available on the world wide web.

Read More “The risk community noticed virtual money laundering”

Hmm, not what I would pick as a good setting for an online world. Confined to ships? Destructoid has the scoop. Given it’s on the 360, I am guessing it’ll be more of a shooter game, in space or squad-based FPS or something.

Go here…