Ex-Blizzard Devs Sign With Namco, Blizzard Using BitTorrent

Thanks to Yahoo for reprinting a press release revealing the ex-Diablo creators now at Flagship Studios have signed a publishing deal with Namco, in a move that "marks Namco's official entry into the PC games publishing business" - we've previously covered Flagship Studios' formation on Slashdot Games. Elsewhere, several readers point out Blizzard's official World of Warcraft site, which has announced with regard to the upcoming WoW Beta test: "While we plan on having several ways available to distribute the files to everyone, our primary method will be through the Blizzard Downloader program, which uses BitTorrent technology." Update: 03/18 21:01 GMT by S : There's more discussion on Blizzard and other companies using BitTorrent in a recent mainpage post.

Comments

Problem with Bit Torrent

[wickedj]

Though I love bit torrent and how it provides a fast way to access different types of media on the net, it does have its problems. One of the biggest I've seen on college campuses and several ISPs is that it is being throttled down or even totally blocked off because of its use as a form of P2P sharing software. I hope this doesn't present a problem for Blizzard but I'm thinking that a lot of college student testers aren't going to be able to download the WoW beta very fast, if at all.

Re:Problem with Bit Torrent

[Gecedion]

Its not just that its P2P, BitTorrent seems to like to take all available bandwidth for itself. That's great when you're on a T3, but not so great for everyone else on the same line.

Re:Problem with Bit Torrent

[bludstone]

Or they could just download it from some other site, couldnt they?

I mean, bittorrent isnt the ONLY means of distribution available.

(i didnt read the article)

Re:Problem with Bit Torrent

[Vaevictis666]

They do mention that this will just be the primary download method, and that they will have some form of direct download for those unable (or unwilling) to use the torrent file.

Re:Problem with Bit Torrent

[trompete]

It's too bad, but then again, upload bandwidth is very expensive.

Re:Problem with Bit Torrent

[Rallion]

I know I read in some fansite chat that they'll mail it to you on a CD if you need it. And, heh, if there is no alternative download method, well, that might be faster.

Re:Problem with Bit Torrent

[Kethinov]

Only because ISPs choose to make it expensive. When you've got a monopoly or an oligopoly on a market, you can charge whatever you want. Bandwidth "cost" is entirely arbitrary. ISPs will continue to reduce custerom bandwidth while the demand continues to go up until one day, finally, there will be legislation similar to minimal wage which will regulate how the "cost" of bandwidth fairly.

Legislation demand fueled by the rise in popularity of such revolutionary P2P platforms such as bit torrent, which is gaining great inroads in legal P2P everywhere; not just games.

Re:Problem with Bit Torrent

[YomikoReadman]

While BT can monopolize all of your available bandwidth, most newer clients such as Azureus, Shadows, and TorrentStorm allow you to throttle both your upload and download speeds by setting a limit on the maximum amount used on active torrents.

Re:Problem with Bit Torrent

[realdpk]

It's not exactly a *choice*. ISPs get reduced pricing from their providers by saying they'll maintain a certain upstream/downstream ratio. If they go over that, it's very expensive - as in all contracts if you exceed usage.

ISPs get that reduced pricing to offer more services, provide better download bandwidth, and of course get more profits. They decide on the ratio based on average use. They have to charge more for upstream because if they didn't, and one month everyone decides to start uploading lots of stuff, they're stuck with a HUGE bill.

Re:Problem with Bit Torrent

[Goldberg's Pants]

I did a test of Blizzard's use of a BT, and it caps the upload to 10kbps roughly. The download does seem to use most of the bandwidth.

The thing that bugs me is this. In days of yore, you wanted a demo, you went to the companies website and downloaded it. Fair enough. Using BT though, using BT means less bandwidth usage by the company, which means saved money. It's a bit cheeky pimping THEIR product using YOUR bandwidth. Some ISP's are crappy (like mine) and have a ridiculously low upload cap. If you go over, they charge you.

Sure, it stops the "slashdot" effect on sites, but it still seems a bit off using your bandwidth to spread their advertising essentially.

Re:Problem with Bit Torrent

[Anonymous Coward]

... which in effect means the providers are overcharging the ISPs. This is the same problem, just caused by the provider, not the ISP.

Actually, where's the difference between an Internet Service Provider and a provider?

Re:Problem with Bit Torrent

[realdpk]

It just means that the providers for the ISPs (lets call them Network Service Providers for now because as you imply, there isn't a real difference except perhaps in the scale of the customers) are realizing that bandwidth is not an unlimited resource. They have to maintain peering arrangements, at best, and transit arrangements otherwise. Both of which will include bandwidth limitations on either upstream or downstream (less often in cases where companies meet at public peering points though).

Ultimately there's a limit to how much bandwidth an OC-3 or OC-12 or what have you will handle, and there are limits to what peering will do. Rather than have an unstable situation where everyone can upload and download at whatever max rate the pipe allows, ISPs and NSPs have contracts which allow them to predict capacity usage and predict when expensive (very, VERY expensive) upgrades will be necessary in the future.

Re:Problem with Bit Torrent

[YomikoReadman]

Apparently, you have absoulutely no idea of what I was saying. The actual throttling is done by the client, not the server. While some trackers will set a maximum limit on upload speeds to ensure that it doesn't utilize all of your upload, as blizzard's apparently does; 99% don't. As far as your download bandwidth goes, it's really no different than a normal download. It will simply take it as fast as it can, and is in no way different than a direct download. In both cases, the only limit is the amount of available bandwidth from your source.

Re:Problem with Bit Torrent

[Goldberg's Pants]

I was just pointing out what Blizzard's client does. I know that's a decision they made and not all clients do that.

Legit Bit (torrent)

[Kethinov]

I never got a chance to contribute in yesterday's (or was it the day before's?) article about bit torrent suddenly becoming sanctioned in games.

But I predicted this would happen in the early days of Bit Torrent (god I wish I could find my +5 on the subject from last year or so.)

Anyway, this saves companies TONS of bandwidth and if has already been proven with Linux distros. The Fedora torrent is massively successful.

It may also urge crappy ISPs to up the amount of bandwidth they give to customers when they realize that high bandwidth != piracy always.

Re:Legit Bit (torrent)

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun May 18, '03
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/05/18/1428203 .shtm l?tid=126&tid=95

No, it isn't a P2P application in the typical file sharing sense. Bit torrent is perfect for short term kinds of downloads.

Let me give you an example.

Let's say I make games and I release a patch for it once a month. If every one of my hundreds of thousands of users tried to download that patch at the same time, my bandwidth would be slashdotted so to speak. Even if I could handle the load, I'd be consuming gigs and gigs of bandwidth in just a few days.

But if I torrent that file to all my users then the bandwidth consumption spreads across the internet like a virus (for lack of a better word) and I save money. It's also better for the user because they're not relying on a central server to supply the file. If my server goes down 12 hours after the patch is released, the file is still being distributed across the net.

Obviously in 6 months the torrent won't be as reliable a downloading source because the patch is too old and not as many people are patching. After a week, the rush of people grabbing the file at the same time is over and then I release the real thing instead of the torrent on my website so the people who were too late in the patching can get it.

The beauty of torrent is timing. If you have a popular file to share at a specific time, torrent's your application.

Re:Legit Bit (torrent)

[Kethinov]

Wow, thanks. :) Here's a clickable link.

Re:Legit Bit (torrent)

[TwistedSquare]

It may also urge crappy ISPs to up the amount of bandwidth they give to customers when they realize that high bandwidth != piracy always.

Here in the UK the majority of the reason that people have poor upload bandwidth is that ADSL is of course Asymmetric hence the mismatched speeds. Do cable (or whatever there is) providers elsewhere deliberately (i.e. artificially) limit the amount of upload bandwidth people get?

Re:Legit Bit (torrent)

[macrom]

Most cable providers do provide asynchronous access here in the US, with upload speeds being a small percentage of the upload bandwidth. I am using Comcast's service and I believe the download is 3Mbit and the upload is 384Kbit (maybe 512Kbit since they just upgraded the service in my area). I know that companies try to give you enough uplink speed to play games, etc. but still discourage users from running a small-time ISP-like service. In fact, some providers even block outbound HTTP, FTP, mail, etc. requests altogether.

I am not sure about BitTorrent -- it may be too new to be noticed on the radar.

Re:Legit Bit (torrent)

[macrom]

Hmm, preview doesn't work when your brain reads what it WANTS to read. That should read :

...with upload speeds being a small percentage of the download bandwidth.

Re:Legit Bit (torrent)

[Cipster]

I have Charter cable in the US. Charter caps upload at 128 Kb at all levels of servise which absolutely blows. Up until recently it was the only provider in the area but DSL became available about a month ago. I'm seriously considering switching.

Re:Legit Bit (torrent)

[prala]

Based on the almost-crippling traffic that occurs (even with mirrors) when a distributor releases a patch and/or a mod off of the official site, this makes sense. However I'd also argue that they may want to extend to additional file sharing applications to maximize the distribution.

Slight Blip on the Irony Detector

[spudgun]

Bitware OSI License , Open software

bnetd, Open source , Sued by Blizzard under DMCA

are they having their cake and eating it too ?

Re:Slight Blip on the Irony Detector

[eht]

Very simple, the BNet protocol is not and likely never will be an open protocol, Bittorrent always has been and always will be an open protocol.

It's not the software license that is the issue, it's the protocol use.

Re:Slight Blip on the Irony Detector

[damiam]

bnetd wasn't sued because they were open source, they were taken down (never actually sued) because their software enabled the pirating of the Warcraft III beta. Blizzard has nothing against open source (although probably no great love for it either). Like all companies, their job is to make money.

Re:Slight Blip on the Irony Detector

[DAldredge]

Explain Samba.

Re:Slight Blip on the Irony Detector

[spudgun]

Well I own 2 warcraft II BNE

and those numbers just piss me off

My job is to install custom software on PC before shipping to customers ( I have to enter numbers from those stickers 8B88B-8BB8B - pure evil)

Activation keys are pure evil!

Q3 managed an auth server for 3rd party servers!
why can't blizzard,

Not that I am worried I haven't bought any of their products since they used the DMCA.

Blizzard you can **** my hairy ****s !

Re:Slight Blip on the Irony Detector

[Anonymous Coward]

Bnetd never sued?

http://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/DMCA/Blizzard_v_bnetd/

What do you call that? BTW their software didn't enable it. The fact it was open source enabled it, the bnetd project never supported pirated war3s another group added that on. Bnetd even offered to include the cdkey-checking (or link it to blizz's official one) and blizz turned them down

Re:Slight Blip on the Irony Detector

[eht]

What exactly is there to explain?

Why don't you explain CIFS?

Re:Slight Blip on the Irony Detector

[DAldredge]

SAMBA had to reverse engineer quite a lot of the way windows impliments CIFS to get SAMBA to interop with Windows (PDC/BDC/Others). Using you logic, any portion of SAMBA that impliments things not in the official CIFS spec should be illegal.

Re:dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

current story:
"While we plan on having several ways available to distribute the files to everyone, our primary method will be through the Blizzard Downloader program, which uses BitTorrent technology."

story in link:
"Recently today it was revealed that Blizzard [...] will be using BitTorrent to distribute their Beta release of their latest game, World of Warcraft. [...]"

htf is this offtopic?

Smells like an MMO

[Sylver Dragon]

Maybe its just me, but after having read through the FAQ on Flagship's site, I would swear I smell another MMORPG comming. They mention that they intend to have hundreds of hours of play, and they want to leverage the community aspect of MMOG's. I have a feeling that, what we are going to see is a game that is similar, but legally distinct from, Diablo done as an MMORPG. So, instead of just hacking your way through a dungeon, hoping the next treasure drop gives you a cooler weapon, now you will get to spend countless hours working with a practice dummy, so that you don't get hosed in the first room of the first dungeon. Then, get a slightly better weapon, and spend the next hundred hours camping a spawn point, so that you can move into the next area.
Maybe its just me, but I seem to believe that 300 hours of skill tredmilling and 5 hours of killing monsters does not equate to hundreds of hours of game play. More correctly, its hunreds of hours of setup do that you can play the game for 5 hours.

Re:Smells like an MMO

[Danse]

The problem with MMORPGs is that none of them seem to have figured out a good way to balance things and still provide entertainment for all. They all end up being leveling treadmills. If they were to try to create one that wasn't, it would probably be too much like the real world and a relative handfull of people would get very powerful very quickly and dominate the rest. I would really like to see one that was well thought-out from the beginning so that you can have fun playing at all levels, without living in too much fear of pkers (meaning there would have to be good ways to avoid them or defend against them) and without spending hours upon hours repetitively killing monsters or delivering packages from point a to point b.

Re:Smells like an MMO

[Sylver Dragon]

Agreed, the current setup of most MMORPGS leaves a lot to be desired. The problem is, how else can it be done? That's not a very easy question to answer. One of the thoughts I had, when I started considering the Diablo as an MMORPG idea was to have some randomization in the world. For example, have the main world map be roughly static, with monster spawns changing occasionally (though not drastically; heck, might go so far as to setup an actual ecology, and have the system track it; though that might be over the top), and then have players be able to find random dungeons, and tie those dungeons to the level of the character finding them. Further, only the player who found them, and anyone in thier party (assuming some sort of party system) woud be able to enter the dungeon. Along with that, the dungeon layout should be randomized, ala Diablo 2, with maybe a few puzzles and some sort of minor plot inside. The plots would have to be thin, and almost invariably combat oriented (rescue damsel in distress, eradicate monster menace, recover artifact for religious orgaization, etc.). Lastly, have the dungeon disapper after some amount of time if the character ignores it.
It would still be a level treadmill to some extent, but at least you wouldn't have to spend forever camping the exact same spawn point as every other character of about the same level.

Re:Smells like an MMO

[Synic]

I'm fairly certain that at no point in time they have ever tried to conceal the fact that it is an MMORPG. If you didn't know until know, you haven't been paying attention to game news for a loooooong time.

Blizzard and bittorrent

[IntergalacticWalrus]

Blizzard uses bittorrent, yeah, but don't hand out the .torrent file, instead you must download an executable (available only for Windows and Mac OS, of course) to download their files. This sucks.