[Cooper]

Hello there everyone, it's been a long time since I've written anything for Operation Burnout as I've been very busy with other things and just don't have the time anymore. In the quite time before Easter, I've decided to spend a little time bringing you up to date with what's going on with the world of Burnout Paradise and Operation Burnout.

Playstation 3 Downloadable Content Offer

First off, an offer for those who haven't taken the plunge for the DLC available for Burnout Paradise. Available until March 31st, Criterion are selling all the downloadable content for Paradise for a mere $19.99/£15.99/€19.99. The pack includes every bit of DLC for Paradise:

• Big Surf Island
• Party Pack - Details
• Time Savers - (Unlocks all cars)
• Legendary Cars Collection - Details
• Toys Collection - Details
• Cops and Robbers - Details
• Boost Specials - Details

If you've yet to purchase the game you can get it now, with all the content for the lower price of $29.99 / £23.99 / €29.99

Paradise is Dead

Back in January Criterion announced through their Twitter Feed that no more DLC will be coming to Burnout Paradise. Development for the game, which was announced way back in August 2006(!), has finally come to an end. 4 years of Burnout Paradise, it's time to turn off the ignition.

What's next for the Burnout franchise? Who knows? EA games have confirmed Burnout 6 as a project which they are producing, however, details on exactly what the "sixth" Burnout will be are non-existent. It could be a soft-sequel (Like Burnout Dominator), a full sequel, different platform game. Your guess is as good as mine. Feel free to speculate in the new "Future Burnout" forum.

Operation Burnout Still Alive

Finally, expect Operation Burnout to go a little quite until a new Burnout is announced. This doesn't mean the site has been abandoned though! Be sure to hang out in the forums and check the main site until then.

Attached File(s)

•  cmplete-ed.jpg (51.2K)
  Number of downloads: 2
•  goodbye-paradise.jpg (47.95K)
  Number of downloads: 1
•  op6_hed.jpg (59.51K)
  Number of downloads: 1

[razorsharp]

I don't think Burnout will be dead for a few months yet, there was up to 100 rooms today.

Anyway, before you do anything else repairing your reputation would be the best thing to do as you've had quite a hammering since you've left mainly at Rogue Burners...

This post has been edited by razorsharp: 16 April 2010 - 01:16 PM

[*Max_Traitor*]

razorsharp, on 28 March 2010 - 09:02 PM, said:

I don't think Burnout will be dead for a few months yet, there was up to 100 rooms today.

Anyway, before you do anything else repairing your reputation would be the best thing to do as you've had quite a hammering since you've left mainly at Rouge Burners...

May you post a link, I haven't seen such a thing over there.

[razorsharp]

*Max_Traitor*, on 29 March 2010 - 02:16 AM, said:

razorsharp, on 28 March 2010 - 09:02 PM, said:

I don't think Burnout will be dead for a few months yet, there was up to 100 rooms today.

Anyway, before you do anything else repairing your reputation would be the best thing to do as you've had quite a hammering since you've left mainly at Rouge Burners...

May you post a link, I haven't seen such a thing over there.

Hmm... I would only you would call them a bunch of fags wouldn't you. And anyway, they posted it randomly meaning that I can't remember which topics these comments were in. Feel free scan the forums yourself, however.

[Cooper]

razorsharp, on 28 March 2010 - 09:02 PM, said:

Anyway, before you do anything else repairing your reputation would be the best thing to do as you've had quite a hammering since you've left mainly at Rouge Burners...

Rogue Burners is nothing more than a small bunch of pissed off ex-OB members and the 20ish new members which have joined that site in the last 6 months. If people are annoyed with me or OB then I'm sure I'll get over it and I can't see this site suffering in any major way.

With the exception of that tiny minority, OB has a pretty good reputation in the Burnout community.

[razorsharp]

Oh and there's the matter of new admins... I am not the guy for the job, however, I do have a good line of contact with someone who applied. That person is LeMansRacer. I will notify him about your return and ask if he is still interested in the job. I know that he would do the job well if he took up the role.

P.S If you need a moderator any time soon then I would be happy to take up the role if you want.

[Cooper]

razorsharp, on 29 March 2010 - 05:15 PM, said:

Oh and there's the matter of new admins... I am not the guy for the job, however, I do have a good line of contact with someone who applied. That person is LeMansRacer. I will notify him about your return and ask if he is still interested in the job. I know that he would do the job well if he took up the role.

P.S If you need a moderator any time soon then I would be happy to take up the role if you want.

At the moment I'm not going to be appointing anyone purely because there's very little to do with regards to updates and moderation. When a new Burnout gets announced then I'll start to consider it.

[razorsharp]

That's cool with me

[Yabba's Turd]

Cooper, on 29 March 2010 - 01:23 PM, said:

razorsharp, on 28 March 2010 - 09:02 PM, said:

Anyway, before you do anything else repairing your reputation would be the best thing to do as you've had quite a hammering since you've left mainly at Rouge Burners...

Rogue Burners is nothing more than a small bunch of pissed off ex-OB members and the 20ish new members which have joined that site in the last 6 months. If people are annoyed with me or OB then I'm sure I'll get over it and I can't see this site suffering in any major way.

With the exception of that tiny minority, OB has a pretty good reputation in the Burnout community.

You seriously need to rethink your description of rogueburners Anton, rogueburners was created due to your complete lack of support when Prophet and I were trying to contact you regarding a script running on the main page, google had us blacklisted as spyware, it was your complete ignorance that made up our minds to create a new forum which we were in control of. If you really want to discuss why we were pissed off at the time it was your disregard for those you had given partial control of your site.

nothing more.......

This post has been edited by Yabba's Turd: 07 April 2010 - 08:04 PM

[UISProphet]

Cooper, on 29 March 2010 - 09:23 AM, said:

Rogue Burners is nothing more than a small bunch of pissed off ex-OB members and the 20ish new members which have joined that site in the last 6 months. If people are annoyed with me or OB then I'm sure I'll get over it and I can't see this site suffering in any major way.

With the exception of that tiny minority, OB has a pretty good reputation in the Burnout community.

Oh jeez... really? Is this what you've become?

Just when I think I'm out... they drag me back in!

And who is pissed off, by the way? I don't think any of us are pissed at this point. Hell, we took all the people that used to fund this place with us. Couldn't be happier, to be honest.

Story time with Prophet, folks. Once upon a time, this website was a fun place to visit. We chatted about Burnout, chatted about other games, had some laughs and occasionally fought with each other. There were even community events that really brought the people that patronized this site together. These really were great times and I really wish you could have all be there for that. At the height of the good times, Cooper decided he just didn't feel like putting forth the effort of keeping the site open any longer. The community was asked to step up and fill his place or he might be forced to close the site or sell it to another gaming site. We wouldn't have any of this, of course. Yabba and I stepped up and took the site beyond the 1000 member mark and well into the 2000 mark. Of course, most were the spam bots that still make for a large percentage of the site population.

Things continued to go well under the reign of terror that shall now be known as the Prophet_turd era. We had such high hopes for this place. Marketing galore, I tell you. Those plans, were all crushed by Cooper. It was explained that in his great many years of experience, (what are you up to now, chief? 5? 6?) he just knew that all that we were doing was a great big waste of time. It was explained that the community doesn't matter to him. Random website hits are what matters to Cooper. Random hits that generate little to no revenue, in fact. So, with little to really bo but act as custodians to a 2nd rate website as well as copy and paste the news posted on Criterion's site, we were forced to sit and fester.

Never in all my 35 years have I encountered such a bitter person who was barely old enough to shave. What happened to you in your early years that gave you such a grim outlook on society? It wasn't society that scolded you for stealing images from Criterion's private ftp, now was it? It was only later that I realized that Operation Burnout had been basically blackballed from the legitimate gaming community for questionable practices, such as these.

Now not everything was completely bad. Every once in a while, Cooper gave us a glimmer of hope by acting like a normal person. I think you have an inflated sense of importance here, Cooper. In the real world, sometimes it is necessary to "distance yourself from the help", but come on... you're running a website based on a single video game series. A game series, might I add, that has placed a great number of eggs in the proverbial multiplayer basket. Not exactly the right place for an administrator with (in my opinion) a social disorder.

Near the end, things got kind of bad around here. Cooper would wander off for months at a time. Fine by us, of course... but this happen to be a time when the discount software he was using started to gain a massive amount of security holes. He'd wander back eventually and try to clean it up with as much effort as he could muster.

But but but but Prophet... youza fucking genius, amirite? Why didn't you just fix it? Why yes, dear heart, I am... But Dad would forget to leave the kids the keys while he was off on a bender. At one point it was so bad that any modern browser wouldn't let you near the site without a condom. We were forced for a time to use twitter to communicate as a group... but the curse of the OB followed us there and a some of us had our accounts locked because we had a known "malware site" listed in our profiles.

That was pretty much the last straw. We gathered up some money, called ourselves Rogue Burners and have been living the dream ever since. Cooper...If you'd like to come back down to earth and act like a real person, there is spot reserved for you. We'll leave the light on for you, honey.

This post has been edited by UISProphet: 08 April 2010 - 02:34 PM

[Cooper]

Why didn't you just fix it?
Because the problem was beyond "just fixing". The site had a security vulnerability which was being specifically targeted. That vulnerability was in one of the core modules for the site's CMS (ironically, a file management system which no one ever used but was still essential to make the other modules run correctly). It wasn't a problem where I could open an FTP client, click around, write a couple of lines of code to fix. Fixing the site would take a lot of hours, days, which I didn't have at the time. The infected lines of code could be removed from the site pretty easily but doing so would only be a temporary fix as they'd be back pretty quickly until the door they come through was locked. I was busy with university where I was spending 35 hours a week, work 20 hours a week and a social life which consumed the remainder of my time. Operation Burnout wasn't a 'priority' to me as it once was.


Fair enough, but why not hand over the site to someone else?
Who? One of you two? Neither of you could write HTML correctly, let alone mess around with PHP or JS code. A fix WAS in the works but was delayed by IPS development of version 3 and CSS (IP Content). I chose to just wait it out and implement a big fix when the software was available. I didn't trust you guys either, truth be told. You made some big changes to the site without consultation: it's why we have a staff forum to discuss things before just going ahead and doing it. I mean a MySpace page? Are you fucking kidding me? OB is a small gaming site, not some global enterprise. No one would want to buy OB merchandise. And if they did, my god, I think I'd just loose all hope in the human race.

V6 is here now. It's secure, stable(ish) and looking pretty nice.


You don't care about the "community"
You might like to think I'm purely focused on "hits" and "unique visitors" and you'd be partially right. I care about the people which my site reaches. The forum "community" make up a tiny number of people who visit the site each week. Visitors to OB will be people who stumble across the site, through one of the many links littering message boards across the web; a Google search, for images or help with Paradise; or a bookmarked page. 40% of the traffic from the site in the last month was from people who have visited the site at least 5 times in the same period. Currently, OB's getting 9,000 unique visitors a month. Do the maths. 3,600 people regually visited the site this month, a month were not a lot has been happening in the world of Burnout. How many of these people are members? I don't know exactly but I'd imagine that at least 200 are. How many of these people regularly post on the forums? Well, under 100 (so lets say 1% of people). Operation Burnout has always been like this. Under 2% of regular visitors regularly post on the forums. We're approaching 3,000 members now, spam accounts have been deleted and blocked from registering (obviously a small amount will slip though), and we'll continue to grow at a steady pace until some new Burnout hits the shops and we'll spike again, more people will visit the site, register and post on the forums. But the conversion percentage will stay the same.

One of the reasons I was so focused on the front page news, how quickly we can get it posted up in an easy to read, well formatted way and the news link posted on sites like Digg and N4G, is because of the above reason. It's what a majority of visitors want.

I don't do it for revenue either as the site doesn't even make any money because I choose not to run in-your-face ads. And stealing images from Criterion's private FTP? I don't recall ever doing that. I do remember posting images which I found published on EA's own public website though. The images were also published in a major gaming magazine too, about a month before. Anyway I think my reply to Alex Ward sums up that whole incident perfectly.

You don't seem to understand there are a lot of people out there who just aren't interested in communicating with the website's they regular at. I'm one of them, so I understand. I visit some sites every day and have no desire to join the community. I might register to get additional benefits to my viewing but I don't post comments on articles or participate in the forum discussions. It's why I've been a member of this forums for 5 years and don't even have 1,000 posts. It's not because people like this all have "a social disorder" rather they feel that interaction is unnecessary, unsatisfactory, a waste of time, boring or some mix of the four.


Operation Burnout has nothing to offer people without the forums
Criterion Games decided to say a massive "fuck-you" to every gaming site; big or small; specialised or generic, by making CriterionGames.com the only place where people can read about the latest news on Paradise first. It made Operation Burnout seem obsolete. Before, OB used to be a good place to come to see all the consolidated news to do with Burnout. We'd collect news from 20 different sites and gather it all in one place so people didn't have to hunt the web looking for it or miss out on seeing something cool. We'd sum it up and provide a link to go to said site. Info about a new Burnout game would be slowly and steadily released though press releases and site exclusives, previews, reviews, trade shows, magazine articles ect. Now it's all bunged on CG's site which is great for people who want to find the latest info about the game but not so good for other sites, like OB, because people start begin say that the site is "2nd rate..." and all the news is "copy and paste[d... from] Criterion's site". Of cause it is because it's the only source of information! It removes opinion from the news reports. When people read about something new which has been announced for Paradise, chances are, they'll have read it on the CG website. And guess what, it sounds REALLY GOOD! Yeah, because they're trying to sell it to you. You can't drive around Paradise city without plowing into something which isn't branded with "CriterionGames.com". It's a joke.

I hope that OB will never be like that. I mean, we won't, because we're not selling anything. But you hopefully understand that what you get from OB that you won't get from CG is transparency, honesty and objectiveness.


Rogue Burners 4 Life
One of the main reasons you two aren't admin's here any more is because you didn't bother reporting on the latest news. I talked to you guys about it back in February 2009 when you were so focused on the forums that you neglected to post news about major development in the Burnout franchise. You didn't even bother to report the Ultimate Box. By doing so you neglected 90% of the people who frequent OB. You simply weren't doing what you were given the position of admin, to do. But yes, the forums were better during this time, and I believe that you two had something to do with that. It was a shame though that your talents there couldn't be extended to run the main site properly. We all could have had something real special then, darling.

[UISProphet]

I guess we all remember things differently and I supposed we'll have to agree to disagree.

I started writing in HTML right around the time you were just starting school. I had a notepad open while you had your finger-paints out. You shouldn't assume, just because someone doesn't know what html code will and will not cause your software to shit itself, that a person doesn't know html. Let us just cut through the bullshit though. You have no idea what I could or could not do... you simply chose not to give anyone a chance to improve anything because you're a complete control freak. Being a control freak about a site you would have just assumed shut down is a little silly, don't you think?

As far as not reporting the news... you may be right there. It could have been that period of time that your news software wouldn't let us post anything more than a few lines of text (remember the screen shots we had to post in lieu of actual text?) or the countless times it would randomly decide to forget we were logged in after writing an article and all the work would be lost. Or perhaps by that time we were both so jaded about the situation that we stopped caring. Especially for something like the rehashed "Ultimate box" and the abortion of a PC edition that was released.

Trust me, I'm crying inside for you about your busy schedule. You might want to slow down, or you might break a nail or something. Let me know when you have real problems.

And about your new "Version 6" looking pretty nice... you might want to have a look around the profiles. You got some real problems in there. Also you might want to really look at how the text looks in the posts... inspect the replies. You might want to consider having a separate emoticon set for your dark skin. Just like the last time I had to walk you through how to fix things on your own forum, I'd be happy to help. We can even work on your "attachments" showing up they way they are in your posts. But...I doubt you'd accept my help though, because neither you nor the 60-something guests "Viewing page: style.css" really care about such things.

I really wish you all the best, Cooper. Sadly though, I can afford you no more time on this matter.

[*Max_Traitor*]

Fuck "Rouge Bummers" Cooper!! If you need an Admin you should consider Spoilt-T , he also runs a Burnout Fansite as well

This post has been edited by *Max_Traitor*: 08 April 2010 - 05:36 PM

[razorsharp]

*Max_Traitor*, on 08 April 2010 - 05:36 PM, said:

Fuck "Rouge Bummers" Cooper!! If you need an Admin you should consider Spoilt-T , he also runs a Burnout Fansite as well

Only to be an Admin of a site like this you need a good knowledge of HTML and Java. Spoil-t, as far as I know ran a crappy little free site needing an extremely basic (or none as it turned out to be) of HTML. He's just some idiot who got banned from this site and posted porn on the CG Forums. Try and visit his forum now and it's dead. With a re-direct to some other failing site.

This post has been edited by razorsharp: 08 April 2010 - 08:26 PM

[Yabba's Turd]

How long would it have taken you to reply to the numerous emails we sent you? Less time than it took you to type that pish excuse above. That, above everything else that you think went on or want to blame us for is where your arguement falls flat on it's face. The site was broken, we tried to contact you, we got nothing, not even a 'Yes guys, but my life is kinda busy' you ignorant, ignorant fuck.