New York -- April 19, 2004 -- Freeverse today announced that its online game matching service, GameSmith, has logged the creation of over 50,000 user accounts. With its concentration on the casual Mac game market, GameSmith provides a friendly meeting place for gamers from around the globe.
Ian Lynch Smith, President of Freeverse has said, "Of all the kinds of stones that one can pass, this milestone feels pretty good! We're thrilled with the quality of the community we've been able to build. It is playful but not childish, and the level of conversation on GameSmith is unlike any other online gaming experience. Our users, from teachers to students, from grandmothers to teenagers, are simply some of the greatest people on the net."
Predominantly serving Freeverse's own highly acclaimed card and board games such as Spades, Chess, Bridge and Hearts, GameSmith has been the Mac's destination of choice for classic games since 1999.
GameSmith is a free service, accessed from within any of the games that support it. Demos of these games may be downloaded from http://gamesmith.biz/
The tutorial for opening your router for use with GameSmith has been updated to contain port numbers from many of our newly released and upcoming games.
A new version of the GameSmith Server has been made live. Users do not need to modify anything on their machines to use the new server.
The major change to this server revision is to squash the "bot bashing" bug which allowed users to abuse single-player bot games to raise their ranks. On the new servers, games will only be ranked if there are two or more human players, and in a team game, only if there is at least one human on each team.
The new server also fixes ranking for 3D Crazy Eights (to be released soon) and adds support for 3D Gin Rummy.
Click the Read More link for a note from server programmer Randy Thompson regarding handling another ranking related issue.
Randy writes:
- Note: Someone wanting to cheat badly enough could switch his strategy over to "Guest Bashing" by launching multiple copies of a game, signing on as a guest, and then purposely letting the player(s) with the account(s) win. The only way to close THAT hole would be to revert back to only ranking games in which all players had accounts. Even so, a player that REALLY is determined to cheat can simply set up several accounts for which he doesn't care about their ranks and then bash them too! A way to close THAT hole would be to charge for all accounts, which isn't going to happen. (Anyone still determined to cheat and willing to pay extra to elevate his/her rank has serious personality issues that I don't care to deal with in code.)
Version 3.4 of the GameSmith library has been released. This is a recommended upgrade for all GameSmith-enabled games.
New features include local or global TCP/IP support, parental lock-out, enhanced game info, significant speedups, and numerous bug fixes. You can learn about what's new, or you can update your games today!