It all depends on the viewing distance. In today's most advanced games the viewing distance is measured in miles, or close. It would be very easy to expect that in a game with 9 million subscribers (if the game was on a single world server and not split up) that 1000 players within each others' views would happen at times. In WoW I think my max viewing distance to seeing other players is maybe 1000 yards. It certainly isn't a mile. But consider this: With WoW's technology (as supposedly advanced as it is) I have seen battles with 200 or so people all in each other's view. The zone ground to a halt and latency flew. Everyone lagged and the game became unplayable.
This is pretty bad, considering WoW is a game that everyone expected (probably unrealistically) to be able to deliver battles on the scale of all-out war, and not simple skirmishes that lag everyone to death. Of course, it was never meant to be. Perhaps in WoW 2.
I saw the same thing in Star Wars Galaxies. One time the server I was on scheduled a battle royale between the Imperials and the Rebels. We chose a desolate point on one of the planets as our battleground. We lined up, at about max viewing distance from each other. There were maybe 150 players amassed ready to battle. The battle started and pretty much everyone not on a beefy connection lagged hard. You could see people just running straight with no control over their characters, off into the distance, because they were so lagged. That was when I realized that MMOGs would be a long time coming before they could really deliver the promise of epic scale battles like I wanted.
The location of all players near you or in your potential visual field must be sent to you at all times. I can flick my wrist and turn around much faster than my ping would update player positions of people behind me but in my potential view. If the server hadn't been sending the data already I would turn around and see nothing, then someone would appear before me when the network caught up. Doesn't work like that. As soon as I flick my wrist the player is in view.
As long as a player is in your potential field of view, whether 1 foot or 1 mile away, the server will need to provide up-to-date information on their position. If a player is behind a world object then the server can decide not to send that data until they approach edges of each other's FoV. This is illustrated in games where people use cheats such as aimbots. As soon as a player crosses into the cheater's available FoV (even if behind them) the aimbot spins and fires -- but no sooner.
I think in this respect this is where games differ from systems like the stock market. And I'm not sure this is relevant to the story. Or maybe it actually highlights that the story was off the mark from the start. I don't know. It certainly seems to show me that it's even tougher for games than it is for some systems... And the story may be trying to say this, to which the question becomes: So what? Games need this, nothing else really does. It's irrelevant.
Well, from my perspective the issue is that this chunking of players into shards with artificial limits is exactly the problem new technology is trying to overcome. It's the only way you can achieve certain activities, such as real-time battles, or stock trading for that matter. On some level the connection between entities in these networks has to be constant, or 'real time', enough that the system knows what each entity is doing at every point of the smallest defined unit of time to avoid discordance when the separated entities recombine into a same-level abstraction. Either that or you have to wait for validation of data, cross-checking, error checking, conflicts between the data sets, etc,when they recombine to that level. From which you lose the ability to have a fast-acting environment of multiple entity interaction, which is essential to what MMOs are really trying to accomplish. I.E. to really put the "Massive" in MMO.
The GP is correct. During certain situations where concurrent actions are at a high level, such as large battles, the required bandwidth rises linearly with the number of players on the field. To truly create a battle where thousands of players are involved at once would exceed the bandwidth available by most of today's household internet connections by a large amount.
GW doesn't allow a thousand players to engage in an epic battle across miles of terrain. Let alone a hundred thousand or a million. You get split into identical but differently numbered shards and yes, you can move between them, but if a bunch of people want to meet up and have that huge, epic, battle, it's not possible in GW.
I don't even want to think what the bandwidth requirements per CLIENT would be in a epic battle on the scale of D-Day or something similar with thousands of players moving and performing actions simultaneously.
Let's imagine each client uploads 5kb/sec of action data to the server. If there were 1000 players in the battle doing this simultaneously then each client would need to download 999*5kb/sec of data to say updated in the battle. So, close to 5 megabytes per second. I.E. you'd need to have a 40 megabit internet connection running at it's full capacity and with a good ping time to be able to even stay current with the battle.
Just drop it down to 1k/sec. You'd still need an 8mb connection running at full capacity.
This is why epic, world-sized battles aren't a reality in MMOs. GW cannot do this.
The problem with the Bilderberg group and their meetings is, at least from my perspective, they never get anything really accomplished. Do you know of a place I can find a list of world changes and effects they've caused? It seems like they just go to these meetings to inflate their egos.
For a "world government" they don't seem to do much governing.
Face it, the world IS STILL divided into little independent fiefdoms. And who is this 'we' that are acting like it's a good idea? Maybe you mean the people that recognize the nature of their power (of many types), and where it comes from? In other words, having a world government would severely hinder the "haves" in keeping themselves separate from the "nots".
I read the Metagovernment website. Pie-in-the-sky ideas. Sounds good on paper but the only thing that would ever make it even remotely possible to implement is massive, worldwide violence on a scale never before seen which somehow only killed the people who wanted to maintain their power.
Seriously, I mean, it sounds good but it's just not gonna go smoothly if it ever happens.
The attorney is either an idiot and didn't know this was illegal, or it's simply not illegal. Sure, unethical, maybe I could see that. But I don't understand why eBay is obligated by law to have auctions on their site which they don't want -- no matter what the reason they don't want the auctions. And.. 10 million bucks? Good luck.
Doesn't this mean if someone were crafty enough they could fake being Microsoft (with some nasty network hax0ring) and install whatever they wanted on pretty much ANY Windows machine connected to the intarweb?
Transferring to another server sure sounds great on paper. Here's why it hasn't worked for me: Friends.
I play (or played anyway, haven't played in a couple weeks) WoW with at least 10 people I know in real life. Most of these people have numerous alts, many of them level 70. Many of them have more than one account, allowing them to dual-box and do things no solo player could do. And we're all in a guild with a bunch of other people who are really trying to make the server (Windrunner) work. Several of the best Horde guilds on Windrunner have left us behind (example: Praetorian). We don't want to be like them. There have been many signatures on the petition on the Windrunner forums for Blizzard to do something about the population problem, such as merging us with a server with low Alliance to Horde population. Nothing has been said. If much more Horde leave Windrunner it will simply become an Alliance-only server. Then the Alliance will see there are no Horde and they will start to leave as well (they already have). And then Windrunner, my first server, which I have been on since Day 1 of WoW, will die. All good things...
But back to the point: Friends. My buddies don't want to spend the money to transfer our entire accounts to another server. Incidentally, it's 25 bucks per character, not 15. Altogether, it would be over 500 dollars collectively for us to move to a server where we might actually get more enjoyment out of WoW. I'd much rather say Fuck You to Blizzard and throw a huge raging party with that money than let those greedy assholes have it, considering how ridiculous the situation is.
World PvP sucks? They added instanced PvP. Yes, and Alterac Valley for example is so lopsided that most Horde players simply sit in the cave because the Alliance has the advantage. Furthermore, where is the WAR in Warcraft? Hi, remember the games of Warcraft? Remember the epic battles with various seige weapons and vehicles and the like? In WoW? Three years after release almost? Nope, sorry. AV is the closest we get and like I said, it's horrible.
You miss World PvP? They created world PvP "minigames". Refer to previous comment. We don't want minigames. WTF are minigames. Screw that. We want WAR. Incidentally, Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (WAR) intends to deliver where WoW failed miserably. The jury is still out on that one though.
Honour system is a joke? Scrapped, in exchange for a token system. Token system? Where have you been? You still have to grind honor points, not just tokens. And BTW, many players liked the old honor system more, even though they knew they'd never be able to achieve Grand Marshal etc. But it made those titles and achievements MEAN SOMETHING. Right now any total nub can grind out honor by sitting in the cave in AV and get the epics. (Yes, they are adding a way to prevent this, but it's a band-aid fix and not a real solution)
Unorganized instanced PvP too much of a hassle? Have short (on the order of minutes, seconds if you're up against a 'lock) 1v1 - 5v5 arena matches. Clearly you have no clue whatsoever what you are talking about. There is no 1v1 arena. There is no 4v4 arena. There is 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5. While I do like the Arenas for the most part, they are grossly inadequate and still do not make up for the lack of real WAR in WARCRAFT. You get a team together, you get teleported automagically into a locked-in arena, and you get to be owned by classes who are clearly overpowered (there's your lock reference).
Farming for the 1% elemental drops sucks? We'll split them up into more common drops (motes), so your farming doesn't suck as much. Farming still sucks. It is not fun. This is not a plus.
Crafting seems useless as a moneymaker? Epic crafted items now require a BoP drop, so you can now actually make money from your profession. Yes, you can make money from crafting. However, you can't make much. Generally on the order of 50-100g per piece (the price of the primal nether varies by server). I can make more money than that in less time farming mobs in Shadowmoon Valley. So if you are crafting to make money, and only to make money, you're doing the wrong thing.
Hybrid classes and off-specs getting the shaft? There are different versions of the new class armor sets for different specs. Yep, it only took 2 years for this to happen. Practically didn't have to wait for this at all!
Instance runs taking too long? All the new 5-mans are split up into wings a'la SM, so that you can run one in less than an hour. I have no idea which "wings" you are talking about unless you mean something like Tempest Keep: Arcatraz and Mechanar are separate wings of Tempest Keep (even though they are different instances altogether). Oh and by the way, each one of those requires more than an hour to complete. And they ALL still require clearing trash mobs which really suck and blizzard calls "pacing mechanisms". That's the worst possible thing to say to your playerbase. "We just don't want you guys to go fast, so we arbitrarily slowed you down." Gee, thanks. I feel really good about that.
Want epics in 5-mans? Okay, we'll add a heroic mode, but it'll be harder, and you can't expect to go in green quest rewards. And you'll have to grind hours upon hours to get into heroics. Oh and btw, new players, you're screwed because everyone is already in heroics and they don't want to run non-heroics anymore!
Having trouble getting a group? We'll tie entry into heroics to specific reputation grinds which can only be done in instances, so peop
I am trying to figure out if the parent makes any sense. The guy clearly was groping for words that fit his quaint little dual message. Is bolding letters within words to form a sentence that you could've just, well, typed out, supposed to be clever? Why was it modded interesting? WTF is going on here!?
I don't know how they are setting up their installations but I would _highly_ recommend they use unattended installation images and re-image the installation EVERY day. Seems only logical to me. Neh?
Let's call it "Tabula Rasa" day, or since that name is the name of an upcoming game, let's just call it "Global Reformat Day". Everyone in the world reformats their computer on that day.
Storm what? Yea, that's right, fuck you Storm, we just reformatted every computer connected to the internet today.
Yea I know, good luck getting everyone on board. I just wish it were possible because even though I don't know who operates these Botnets if I were to find out I would absolutely LOVE to kick them in the nuts.
I see a lot of bitching and moaning about loss of information, about context, etc. People, if you trust something made with pixels you are already way behind. The wise person must be a skeptic, of all things. This technology, like every other, has its place and will be suited for certain things and abused to do others. So I guess what I am saying is it surpises me that a community like Slashdot is getting so many comments point out the obvious. I thought we were progressive enough to avoid that.. guess I should've been more skeptical.
I work in Big Oil. We have SCADA systems, we have an HMI to control the facilities, and it's all ethernet based. But the network is on a completley different wire than our internet-accessible network. You can't connect to the internet from our control network -- the wire simply doesn't exist.
And it shouldn't. They should stay separate. Period.
That's the answer these days isn't it? Any doubt? Let's make it illegal! Let's protect idiots from themselves. Let's circumvent evolution and allow them to breed.
Harsh? That is just how it is and how the courts have decided it. And it is fair.
Well, Parents are to me the reasoning, logical attachment that their children need until they can fully develop those faculties for themselves. So I agree, it's probably not a bad thing that society (a group of parents) says don't let Johhny buy that game. Afterall, really it was the parents that made that choice. We just have to be careful that special interest groups and zealots and radicals don't get to lead things too far astray.
Why is it scary that they are training hardy survivors who can overrun even the greatest forces of the Imperial army and can hitch a ride on Shai'Hulud? I mean, that sounds pretty damn cool, where can I sign up?
Slashdot Mirror
It all depends on the viewing distance. In today's most advanced games the viewing distance is measured in miles, or close. It would be very easy to expect that in a game with 9 million subscribers (if the game was on a single world server and not split up) that 1000 players within each others' views would happen at times. In WoW I think my max viewing distance to seeing other players is maybe 1000 yards. It certainly isn't a mile. But consider this: With WoW's technology (as supposedly advanced as it is) I have seen battles with 200 or so people all in each other's view. The zone ground to a halt and latency flew. Everyone lagged and the game became unplayable.
This is pretty bad, considering WoW is a game that everyone expected (probably unrealistically) to be able to deliver battles on the scale of all-out war, and not simple skirmishes that lag everyone to death. Of course, it was never meant to be. Perhaps in WoW 2.
I saw the same thing in Star Wars Galaxies. One time the server I was on scheduled a battle royale between the Imperials and the Rebels. We chose a desolate point on one of the planets as our battleground. We lined up, at about max viewing distance from each other. There were maybe 150 players amassed ready to battle. The battle started and pretty much everyone not on a beefy connection lagged hard. You could see people just running straight with no control over their characters, off into the distance, because they were so lagged. That was when I realized that MMOGs would be a long time coming before they could really deliver the promise of epic scale battles like I wanted.
The location of all players near you or in your potential visual field must be sent to you at all times. I can flick my wrist and turn around much faster than my ping would update player positions of people behind me but in my potential view. If the server hadn't been sending the data already I would turn around and see nothing, then someone would appear before me when the network caught up. Doesn't work like that. As soon as I flick my wrist the player is in view.
As long as a player is in your potential field of view, whether 1 foot or 1 mile away, the server will need to provide up-to-date information on their position. If a player is behind a world object then the server can decide not to send that data until they approach edges of each other's FoV. This is illustrated in games where people use cheats such as aimbots. As soon as a player crosses into the cheater's available FoV (even if behind them) the aimbot spins and fires -- but no sooner.
I think in this respect this is where games differ from systems like the stock market. And I'm not sure this is relevant to the story. Or maybe it actually highlights that the story was off the mark from the start. I don't know. It certainly seems to show me that it's even tougher for games than it is for some systems... And the story may be trying to say this, to which the question becomes: So what? Games need this, nothing else really does. It's irrelevant.
Well, from my perspective the issue is that this chunking of players into shards with artificial limits is exactly the problem new technology is trying to overcome. It's the only way you can achieve certain activities, such as real-time battles, or stock trading for that matter. On some level the connection between entities in these networks has to be constant, or 'real time', enough that the system knows what each entity is doing at every point of the smallest defined unit of time to avoid discordance when the separated entities recombine into a same-level abstraction. Either that or you have to wait for validation of data, cross-checking, error checking, conflicts between the data sets, etc ,when they recombine to that level. From which you lose the ability to have a fast-acting environment of multiple entity interaction, which is essential to what MMOs are really trying to accomplish. I.E. to really put the "Massive" in MMO.
The GP is correct. During certain situations where concurrent actions are at a high level, such as large battles, the required bandwidth rises linearly with the number of players on the field. To truly create a battle where thousands of players are involved at once would exceed the bandwidth available by most of today's household internet connections by a large amount.
Tackled the issue my ass.
GW doesn't allow a thousand players to engage in an epic battle across miles of terrain. Let alone a hundred thousand or a million. You get split into identical but differently numbered shards and yes, you can move between them, but if a bunch of people want to meet up and have that huge, epic, battle, it's not possible in GW.
I don't even want to think what the bandwidth requirements per CLIENT would be in a epic battle on the scale of D-Day or something similar with thousands of players moving and performing actions simultaneously.
Let's imagine each client uploads 5kb/sec of action data to the server. If there were 1000 players in the battle doing this simultaneously then each client would need to download 999*5kb/sec of data to say updated in the battle. So, close to 5 megabytes per second. I.E. you'd need to have a 40 megabit internet connection running at it's full capacity and with a good ping time to be able to even stay current with the battle.
Just drop it down to 1k/sec. You'd still need an 8mb connection running at full capacity.
This is why epic, world-sized battles aren't a reality in MMOs. GW cannot do this.
The problem with the Bilderberg group and their meetings is, at least from my perspective, they never get anything really accomplished. Do you know of a place I can find a list of world changes and effects they've caused? It seems like they just go to these meetings to inflate their egos.
For a "world government" they don't seem to do much governing.
Face it, the world IS STILL divided into little independent fiefdoms. And who is this 'we' that are acting like it's a good idea? Maybe you mean the people that recognize the nature of their power (of many types), and where it comes from? In other words, having a world government would severely hinder the "haves" in keeping themselves separate from the "nots".
I read the Metagovernment website. Pie-in-the-sky ideas. Sounds good on paper but the only thing that would ever make it even remotely possible to implement is massive, worldwide violence on a scale never before seen which somehow only killed the people who wanted to maintain their power.
Seriously, I mean, it sounds good but it's just not gonna go smoothly if it ever happens.
The MPAA does not have records of all P2P filesharing transactions. Period. Take off your tin foil hat and get outdoors for some fresh air.
The attorney is either an idiot and didn't know this was illegal, or it's simply not illegal. Sure, unethical, maybe I could see that. But I don't understand why eBay is obligated by law to have auctions on their site which they don't want -- no matter what the reason they don't want the auctions. And.. 10 million bucks? Good luck.
Doesn't this mean if someone were crafty enough they could fake being Microsoft (with some nasty network hax0ring) and install whatever they wanted on pretty much ANY Windows machine connected to the intarweb?
Like I said, I could be an r-tard.. but...
Transferring to another server sure sounds great on paper. Here's why it hasn't worked for me: Friends.
I play (or played anyway, haven't played in a couple weeks) WoW with at least 10 people I know in real life. Most of these people have numerous alts, many of them level 70. Many of them have more than one account, allowing them to dual-box and do things no solo player could do. And we're all in a guild with a bunch of other people who are really trying to make the server (Windrunner) work. Several of the best Horde guilds on Windrunner have left us behind (example: Praetorian). We don't want to be like them. There have been many signatures on the petition on the Windrunner forums for Blizzard to do something about the population problem, such as merging us with a server with low Alliance to Horde population. Nothing has been said. If much more Horde leave Windrunner it will simply become an Alliance-only server. Then the Alliance will see there are no Horde and they will start to leave as well (they already have). And then Windrunner, my first server, which I have been on since Day 1 of WoW, will die. All good things...
But back to the point: Friends. My buddies don't want to spend the money to transfer our entire accounts to another server. Incidentally, it's 25 bucks per character, not 15. Altogether, it would be over 500 dollars collectively for us to move to a server where we might actually get more enjoyment out of WoW. I'd much rather say Fuck You to Blizzard and throw a huge raging party with that money than let those greedy assholes have it, considering how ridiculous the situation is.
World PvP sucks? They added instanced PvP.
Yes, and Alterac Valley for example is so lopsided that most Horde players simply sit in the cave because the Alliance has the advantage.
Furthermore, where is the WAR in Warcraft? Hi, remember the games of Warcraft? Remember the epic battles with various seige weapons and vehicles and the like? In WoW? Three years after release almost? Nope, sorry. AV is the closest we get and like I said, it's horrible.
You miss World PvP? They created world PvP "minigames".
Refer to previous comment. We don't want minigames. WTF are minigames. Screw that. We want WAR. Incidentally, Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (WAR) intends to deliver where WoW failed miserably. The jury is still out on that one though.
Honour system is a joke? Scrapped, in exchange for a token system.
Token system? Where have you been? You still have to grind honor points, not just tokens. And BTW, many players liked the old honor system more, even though they knew they'd never be able to achieve Grand Marshal etc. But it made those titles and achievements MEAN SOMETHING. Right now any total nub can grind out honor by sitting in the cave in AV and get the epics. (Yes, they are adding a way to prevent this, but it's a band-aid fix and not a real solution)
Unorganized instanced PvP too much of a hassle? Have short (on the order of minutes, seconds if you're up against a 'lock) 1v1 - 5v5 arena matches.
Clearly you have no clue whatsoever what you are talking about. There is no 1v1 arena. There is no 4v4 arena. There is 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5. While I do like the Arenas for the most part, they are grossly inadequate and still do not make up for the lack of real WAR in WARCRAFT. You get a team together, you get teleported automagically into a locked-in arena, and you get to be owned by classes who are clearly overpowered (there's your lock reference).
Farming for the 1% elemental drops sucks? We'll split them up into more common drops (motes), so your farming doesn't suck as much.
Farming still sucks. It is not fun. This is not a plus.
Crafting seems useless as a moneymaker? Epic crafted items now require a BoP drop, so you can now actually make money from your profession.
Yes, you can make money from crafting. However, you can't make much. Generally on the order of 50-100g per piece (the price of the primal nether varies by server). I can make more money than that in less time farming mobs in Shadowmoon Valley. So if you are crafting to make money, and only to make money, you're doing the wrong thing.
Hybrid classes and off-specs getting the shaft? There are different versions of the new class armor sets for different specs.
Yep, it only took 2 years for this to happen. Practically didn't have to wait for this at all!
Instance runs taking too long? All the new 5-mans are split up into wings a'la SM, so that you can run one in less than an hour.
I have no idea which "wings" you are talking about unless you mean something like Tempest Keep: Arcatraz and Mechanar are separate wings of Tempest Keep (even though they are different instances altogether). Oh and by the way, each one of those requires more than an hour to complete. And they ALL still require clearing trash mobs which really suck and blizzard calls "pacing mechanisms". That's the worst possible thing to say to your playerbase. "We just don't want you guys to go fast, so we arbitrarily slowed you down." Gee, thanks. I feel really good about that.
Want epics in 5-mans? Okay, we'll add a heroic mode, but it'll be harder, and you can't expect to go in green quest rewards.
And you'll have to grind hours upon hours to get into heroics. Oh and btw, new players, you're screwed because everyone is already in heroics and they don't want to run non-heroics anymore!
Having trouble getting a group? We'll tie entry into heroics to specific reputation grinds which can only be done in instances, so peop
How does it feel to be a dinosaur?
I kid, I kid.
I guess since we've started eating up seven digits.
You're practically an old Vet 'round these parts.
It wasn't funny. And that guy's signature is fscking stupid.
Go away AC.
You must be new here. Your UIN seems to suggest you have at least a little experience though. Strange.
I am trying to figure out if the parent makes any sense. The guy clearly was groping for words that fit his quaint little dual message. Is bolding letters within words to form a sentence that you could've just, well, typed out, supposed to be clever? Why was it modded interesting? WTF is going on here!?
I don't know how they are setting up their installations but I would _highly_ recommend they use unattended installation images and re-image the installation EVERY day. Seems only logical to me. Neh?
Let's call it "Tabula Rasa" day, or since that name is the name of an upcoming game, let's just call it "Global Reformat Day". Everyone in the world reformats their computer on that day.
Storm what? Yea, that's right, fuck you Storm, we just reformatted every computer connected to the internet today.
Yea I know, good luck getting everyone on board. I just wish it were possible because even though I don't know who operates these Botnets if I were to find out I would absolutely LOVE to kick them in the nuts.
I see a lot of bitching and moaning about loss of information, about context, etc. People, if you trust something made with pixels you are already way behind. The wise person must be a skeptic, of all things. This technology, like every other, has its place and will be suited for certain things and abused to do others. So I guess what I am saying is it surpises me that a community like Slashdot is getting so many comments point out the obvious. I thought we were progressive enough to avoid that.. guess I should've been more skeptical.
I work in Big Oil. We have SCADA systems, we have an HMI to control the facilities, and it's all ethernet based. But the network is on a completley different wire than our internet-accessible network. You can't connect to the internet from our control network -- the wire simply doesn't exist.
And it shouldn't. They should stay separate. Period.
That's the answer these days isn't it? Any doubt? Let's make it illegal! Let's protect idiots from themselves. Let's circumvent evolution and allow them to breed.
Harsh? That is just how it is and how the courts have decided it. And it is fair.
BUT LIFE ISN'T.
This is just a warning to all you wifi freeloaders in the lobby: Buy some coffee. Or else.
-The Management
Well, Parents are to me the reasoning, logical attachment that their children need until they can fully develop those faculties for themselves. So I agree, it's probably not a bad thing that society (a group of parents) says don't let Johhny buy that game. Afterall, really it was the parents that made that choice. We just have to be careful that special interest groups and zealots and radicals don't get to lead things too far astray.
Why is it scary that they are training hardy survivors who can overrun even the greatest forces of the Imperial army and can hitch a ride on Shai'Hulud? I mean, that sounds pretty damn cool, where can I sign up?