Anyone who has followed/played UO over the years knows that all kind of fraud happens all the time. This case is notable because the guy both illegally accessed the account of another person by social engineering the password (this is clearly illegal in most countries), and surprisingly *got arrested* for his stunt. I could dig you numerous stories of people being frauded out of their virtual possessions thru old fashioned tricks or outright password stealing using trojans and social engineering emails designed to lure the victimg to disclose his account details.
In previous cases these incidents have usually been ignored by law enforcement, as it's understandably hard to explain how someone 'stole' stuff from you when it's all bits on some game server. So most cases are handled by EA/Origin customer support, and while sometimes the stuff is restored by the game admins, there are plenty of cases when the thief got away scot free since the situation was 'word against word' and EA/Origin decided not to interfere.
Looks like in this case the person losing the stuff went further than EA/Origin customer support and got law enforcement onto the case - and they actually responded and arrested the guy!
Running off MS datacenters, Massive Multiplayer Online Game Asheron's Call 2 has also been more or less dead since Friday. Fun stuff include corrupted characters (lost items, lost experience/levels) and outright unplayable server performance. Heck, their own customer rep recommended players not to log on for now... oh, and the AC2 customer support people couldn't access the game either, so the players experiencing the problems couldn't reach ingame support as there was none...
Needless to say, their *cough* paying customers have been less than thrilled.
Verant ain't stupid. They've been making MMORPGs for a long time.
They *KNOW* players want to mule, they *KNOW* players want to have multiple characters on same server. Especially tradeskill junkies, who want to have their private factory who can put out any item in the game.
I play DAOC and see this every day - heck, most crafters I know have multiple crafter alts who can then do every damn single thing possible. This is remarkable considering how many hundreds of hours and how much ingame money it takes to 'skill up' a crafter.
Verant is just setting themselves up for a system where average MMORPG junkie forks up for 2-4 accounts, and powergamers pay for even more.
Just guess how 'huge' and 'big' game this will be when every damn nolife EQ junkie who *already* has multiple accounts even without this restriction jump on board. They can claim stuff like 1 million players, when in reality its something like 300K, with lots of people with 2-5 accounts.
It just remains to be seen how bad the backlash is. Currently the general consensus seems to be that most MMORPG junkies probably still will test it (it's Star Wars!), but most are expecting a total disaster of a game.
In any case, Verant/Lucas will make shitload of money. They might not make it long term, depending on how crappy the game turns out to be, but short term this decision is going to get them lot more revenue than the usual '4-8 chars/server/account'.
Same system is common here in Finland - several ISPs started 'FREE INTERNET ACCESS' plans few years back. You just paid the calls, which are charged by the minute. Naturally they profited by getting the call termination charges - basically a cut from the phonecompany's call charges.
After few years, local regulator said 'Waitaminute, you are advertising something as 'FREE' when it clearly costs money'.
So nowdays they have to advertise these things as 'Internet with no monthly fee!'. Same thing, but they can't call 'em FREE anymore. Which in my opinion is much better.
Of course every real user has migrated to cable or DSL. You can already pretty much get DSL everywhere that could be even marginally considered 'urban area'. Then again we pay thru the nose for it. I'm paying about 150 euros a month for 2Mbit down, 512Kbit up. Cheapest one (512/256) is about 50 euros a month.
It's still bullshit. Lets theorize a bit... If I'd set up it to serve some mystical files ending.r01 , r02 etc.. (guess the content yourself;) with frontend somewhere else, you'd pull the plug in less than 24 hours because all your bandwidth is saturated several times over.
There is no such thing as 'unlimited' or 'unmetered' webhosting service. If I'd purchase your package, and then put something there that saturates every pipe you have 24/7, you are going to pull the plug. Or go bankrupt.
If every related company would tell the chinese govt. "No, we will not do such blocking system. It's impossible/immoral/bad/[insert your favourite reason here].", what do you think chinese govt. would do? It would decide that they cannot control the internet, so they won't allow any internet traffic in/out of the country. They are control freaks, so they need to have the warm and fuzzy feeling of 'controlling' the net.
Cisco & friends are providing them (at an immense cost, mind ya) a 'filtering system' that gives them that warm & fuzzy feeling that they are 'controlling' their citizen's internet access. It's an illusion at best, but they seem to want it, and are willing to pay for it. You know - the saying about fool and their money...:)
We all know that there are ways around such blocks. This is nothing but your average broken censorware application with goverment approved blocklist, built into bunch of high end routers. Having somewhat crippled internet connection to the world is by far a better option than no internet at all. You can always work around the blocks, and get what you need, if you really want it.
Longer those chinese leaders are happily smiling in their ivory towers and thinking 'the citizens have their internet, but only those parts we want - we are in control', the better.
But you *CAN* do that. DAOC EULA Specifically allows sale of accounts. Basically you can sell the copy of the game you bought, it's CD key, its account and all the characters under it - AS ONE WHOLE PACKAGE. And you can ask anything you want for it.
Don't expect to be loved in the gameworld tho - many 'highbies' with bought characters are usually shunned by the community.
The point here is that you cannot make money off farming gold or items and selling them to other players, as those items are not yours to own. When selling whole account, what you are selling is the license to the game materials and the permission to play on the mythic servers (and to pay for it).
Bartering for stuff within the game is playing by the game rules. Selling stuff for real life cash is NOT. EULA states that its not allowed, so it is not. If you are caught doing it, your butt will be banned, and you lose it all. Problem is tracking the accounts of these toons. It takes tons of time and resources better spent on developing the game further.
I sure hope these morons are kicked out of the court for such stupid lawsuit. I wish all ebayers (people selling MMORPG stuff for cash) could be blacklisted and banned for all of these games pre-emptively. They harm the fun normal players have by bringing real money into equation, which leads to lot more competition on the gameworld stuff, as it has 'value' and some idiots can try to make a living that way.
Yep, I don't play much FPS-games. Some Tribes 2 from time to time (which requires major hardware to run smoothly without looking crap). I also prefer my games to look good.
Besides, with GF3 and beyond, you can run Quake 3 Arena at very high quality settings without going below 120FPS.
Basically I'm ready to pay for the hardware so it runs the games I want smoothly AND display all their glory too. Some are happy enough just to kill all the chrome and get the FPS that way even on a low end setup.
For your very first character in DAOC, if you are too stupid NOT to join a guild (who will probably take any non-retard player with open arms), yep money can be an issue. Such players are better off NOT playing DAOC.
There is a little known 'fact' on the money side; Once you hit about L30 in DAOC, the money just starts pouring in. And I mean pouring. Ask *any* level 40+ character, and he probably has 1000+ gold on him. Since the two best material types for crafting are not yet in the game, and siege equipment for RvR combat can suck your money only so much, they have ton of cash with little to spend it on. I've seen players with 5000+ gold on them. One reason for the money sales is the fact that some of these players see it as an easy way to make quick buck off clueless newbies. Blocking these sales which are basically SCAMS that work only on those too early in their DAOC career to know the fact that money becomes almost meaningless high up.
For normal, compassionate players, it's quite common to give out gold to a lowbies as a startup money. If you are given 100 gold at the start, when killing one mob nets you maybe 20 copper pieces (0.0020 gold), that will last for a LONG time. The equipment system makes using too good items pointless (they just decay faster and give no noticeable benefit over your own level stuff), so that 100 gold will buy you everything you need up to about level 25-30, at which point you become self-sufficient with no money problems.
Only persons who would ever buy money with real cash in DAOC are clueless n00bs who have their first character at about level 15-25 (the toughest range moneywise) and have no clue to join a guild and ask for assistance. Since mid-level equipment is downright useless to high levellers, you probably would be showered in gear suitable for you and get plenty of money to keep going if you just joined a guild and explained your situation (low midbie, tight on gold)
Item drops, while requiring some work, are nothing compared to EQ. So while in EQ there *was* a market for the uber gear, again in DAOC anyone who has played the game at all knows any item that is suitable to you (not too high level to cause it to decay very fast) can be obtained by building a group of 5-8 people, going to the place where it drops, and whacking away for a while. High level armor sets do take a bit of time to collect for a whole party, but at the same time, the experience is good and gameplay stays challenging. No reason to buy items in DAOC with real cash either - again, unless you are stupid n00b with EQ mindset.
I recall something about a fool and their money and separating them. Selling DAOC gold and items falls into this category, and it's in Mythic's best interest to block such sales to minimize the number of new players who feel scammed for paying real money for some ingame gold as soon as they start hitting mid-30's in the game.
You have budget GF2MX with shitty picture quality as a bonus.
GeForce 3s and (I assume) all GF4Ti-series cards have quite good 2D and 3D image quality. Dunno about GF4MX as they are low end junk based on GF2 core (regardless of their marketing name).
So if you buy a junk cheapo low end card, expect junk low end image quality. I'm quite pleased with my current Elsa Gladiac 920 GF3.
I like to play my games with Anisotropic filtering on, with antialiasing on, and with higher than 1024x768 resolution. And I don't like slideshows. 60FPS is bare minimum, constant 80+ is good.
GF3 can fit the bill barely. I still probably will replace it with a GF4Ti4600 soon.
If you are happy playing 1024x768, no AA, only trilinear filtering, and no new fancy pixel shader tricks, you prolly happy with GF2. I dumped mine over an year ago, and never regretted even if GF3 costed arm and leg.
Some of us just care more about the rendering quality. And yes, I have quite fine monitor.
Then again most people dont' even know what anisotropic filtering is, and how much better rendering result it gives, let alone how to turn it on in the driver options. And those who go and try it on their GF2s will watch the slideshow for 5 minutes and turn it off again...
There is a problem with PS2 regarding console running either copied games or original imports.
SONY THEMSELVES MADE THE CONSOLE SO THE TWO ARE LUMPED TOGETHER.
You *cannot* make an 'import/region free only'-mod to PS2. Once you do that, as a side effect, the console also plays CDR/DVDR copies.
There has been lenghty discussion about this in the related websites, and the fact is that when the modchip developers finally had the breakthru and got the imported originals to work, they got the 'copied games work without disk swap' as a free bonus.
There has been disk-swap-requiring modchips for over an year. They didn't work with originals from other regions - to get the game to work you first *had to make a copy of it* (and usually apply a patch or two to the CD image), and do an unwieldy swap trick to boot it up. Sony woke up the moment there was a modchip that ran everything with no disc swap - basically as soon as their 'detecting if the disc is original and from what region'-protection was reverse-engineered and everything could be played without disc swaps.
Reason for this is simple; There are *seriously* more people who just want to import US games to europe than those who want to pirate stuff. Why? Most of the new games releases come here 1-6 months later than US. I *CANNOT* buy Metal Gear Solid 2 for my PS2. I won't be able to until maybe sometime late february 2002. I have really no desire to get a pirated copy on a DVDR - I'm perfectly willing to buy it. I cannot. These new mods would have made it possible for me to import it from the US.
Naturally this would have harmed local Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and their country-specific distributors and their local monopoly to rip off anything they want and release as late as they want. Their options to prevent the loss of monopoly is either to match US prices & do a lot of work to make sure stuff is released simultaneously, or kill the modchip developers. Quess which one is easier to do?
Both known developers of these new modchips are in europe. Market for the chips is mainly in europe. DMCA has very little to do with the whole issue, as it is not an european law. Sony just wants to protect their ability to release stuff in europe as late as it wants and at a price it wants. Cheaper to release late than to spend money to make sure localizations of manuals etc are done by the time the game is ready and shipping.
Hey, don't badmouth MSX (or MSX2, MSX2+ or MSX TurboR). I know that the initial MSX standard was totally fuc*ed up in the US as far as marketing goes - so totally that no-one even heard about MSX2 over there, but it was *the* homecomputer standard of it's time in Japan, and also wildly popular in the Europe. Little known software house called 'Konami' (You may have heard of 'em...;) basically started on coin op arcades and MSX machines. They made tons of killer titles for the MSX and MSX2 that made best C64 titles look shitty in comparison.
I feel like ranting a bit, so let's spend a bit of time educating you all.
First... you've probably heard about this small game called 'Metal Gear Solid 2' coming out soon on PS2?
Well, the Metal Gear series started it's life as a tiny very original 2D title on the MSX2. Back then I bought the game just based on the fact that 'it was a new Konami game!' and boy I was positively surprised. Couldn't put it down for the next two weeks as I worked my way thru it for the first time. That crappy NES port everyone thinks was the first Metal Gear is just a pale shadow of the original MSX2 version, and the NES 'Snake's Revenge'-sequel was just a lame 'let's redo the levels'-cash-in-ripoff that wasn't made by Hideo Kojima at all. The 'real' Metal Gear 2 (MG2: Solid Snake) was never released for any other platform except MSX2, and most people found out about this great game series only after Metal Gear Solid was released on PSOne. MG2: Solid Snake was probably one of the best and most technologically advanced game ever made for a 8bit system - and almost no-one outside Japan ever heard about it. There was no english language version until some fans translated it for emulator use few years ago - a very respectable hack as the original game cartridge image was almost all compressed data, and all in addition to that, the text in the game was stored using space-saving techniques (keyword lists for most used words to save bytes). Making that to work with English instead of Japanese took some disassembling and hacking.
MSX2 standard itself was years ahead of it's time when it was originally introduced. When my friends were playing with their Commodore C64s (64KB RAM, 160KB 5.25" floppy), I had Sony HB-700D MSX2 that had things like total of 384KB RAM, Double Sided, 720KB 3.5" disk drive, MSX-DOS (8bit MS-DOS without directories and few other differences), and Sony-made mouse-based GUI and pretty good word processor/spreadsheet/business graph package. It had stuff like 512x384 graphics mode and 512 color palette - several years before Amiga and Atari ST, around the time 'PC' was 8086 with CGA and 4000$ pricetag.
Sadly, since it wasn't really marketed outside Japan and some european countries, most of you never even heard about it, or about it's minor upgrade of MSX2+ (slightly better graphics) or MSX Turbo R which was basically MSX2+ and it's Z80 but with additional RISC chip bolted on. MSX3 standard was also drafted, but no machines were ever built as dedicated game consoles and price drops of PCs squeezed home computers off the market.
Had some japanese companies known a bit more about marketing to US market, you'd probably have seen all this back then. Now only older japanese gamers and some european freaks know about these great systems.
Sure, they had MicroSoft Xtended Basic on ROM and MSX-DOS as floppy OS - unless you felt like using BASIC for that too, as Disk BASIC came with any disk drive. MSX standard got it's name from the BASIC, but that was just their choice for basic interpeter on system ROM. Microsoft had small part in drafting the standard itself, but it was mostly japanese design, with all the hardware was made by japanese companies.
So, bunch of japanese manufacturers were just making a Z80-based computer standard and needed a BASIC for it. MS was logical choice at the time, and MS was happy to sell them a simple BASIC and downgraded MS-DOS. MSX wasn't 'Microsoft' system any more than IBM PC is. MS pretty much just supplied software for it and helped them a bit with the standard.
So, X-Box is still Microsoft's first attempt at a full hardware system. I wish them luck, and I expect tons of fun reading as their launch will have it's bumps, and they'll be blown out of proportions, as it's Microsoft, and everyone loves to make fun of them.
RPG? What RPG? There is nothing here related to role playing. Magic: The Gathering is just a strategic collectible card game.
Sure, it has some fantasy images, but you can't call everything that has fantasy elemnents a 'role playing game'. Ornithopter is a (lame) MTG card, so this is at least borderline on-topic...
ATI MOBILITY 128 IS NOT A GAMING CHIPSET. Pretty much NO laptop chipset is. GeForce2GO is borderline, and even it is pretty slow.
By default, XP doesn't support Open GL if you try to run games using underpowered ATI mobility 128 chipset. It's outdated and pretty much maxes out with old games such as Counterstrike and UT. If it runs 'Q3A perfectly', it should then run the new Wolfenstein as both use same game engine.
Sounds like you have overpriced laptop you think you can use for serious gaming, and you resort to whining when it doesn't work.
Also, it is completely irrelevant if something works on "out of a box" operating system. Almost NO GAME runs on "out of a box" win98, as it doesn't have DirectX builtin. By this logic, win98 is not for games, as no games run on it "out of a box".
Yes it does. If you are clueless enough to run something that has anything to do with 3D graphics using Windows XP base drivers that are installed from the OS CD, you *deserve what you get*.
Nvidia card users just grab the new 21.81 refernce drivers, and it works like charm. Most other 3D-card users can use their Windows 2000 drivers. If your card is old/crappy enough that it doesn't have Windows 2000 drivers, time to donate it to some charitable use and buy a real 3D card.
This is all good and fine, until every business on this planet get around to doing what Amazon does. Then you are fucked.
So you see the flaw in your reasoning. Mindless consumer drones care too little about these things, so 'boycott' won't hurt them enough. Let them get away with it, and it becomes common practice. Once it's common practice, you start seeing nasty side-effects, like that everything you ever do or buy is known by marketers and other departments of megacorporations, and they abuse this information as they see fit. You work for Megacorporation A? And you go and buy (cheaper) alternative product that's manufactured by Megacorp B, even when there's the same thing available manufactured by Megacorp A? Next week your supervisor calls you and tells you that your pay has been lowered due to lack of your loyalty towards your workplace, as there is a company policy that employees should always favour company's own brands.
What a fun society that would be...:)
There are just far too many ways to abuse this kind of system, so it must not be allowed to happen in the first place - we are already quite far down this slipperly slope, and no regulation of what so ever is scary proposition.
So they're in California? So that explains there has been a power crisis in the state. 8000 Servers eat up plenty of power. I wonder what kind of electricity bill they have:)
Simple - no game publisher seems to want to release stuff that really taxes the hardware. They are scared shitless by the prospect that 'mainstream market' (who generally have sub-par 'major PC manufacturer'-branded machines with underpowered 3D cards) will skip their latest game, so it must run on the 'massmarket' setup.
It's commonplace to still see games that claim they run on P2-233Mhz,32MB ram and 8MB 3D accelerator. Sure, they actually need something like 400Mhz, 64MB and 16MB 3D accelerator to run well, but thats still a setup you no longer can even buy. Every 3D card nowdays tends to have at least 32MB ram, main memory is usually nowdays 128MB, and 256MB setups are becoming common. On the CPU side, it's not cost-effective to buy anything below 600-700Mhz anymore. Yet I cannot find a game that really requires a 1GHz+ setup.
Tribes 2 (just released two weeks ago) is the only one that comes close, and even that can be 'downgraded' to run acceptably on low-end setups. Anyway, it's the first game that keeled over and died using maxed-out settings on my 850Mhz Classic Athlon, 256MB Ram and GeForce 2 GTS. Few others run bit slow, but this was the first one that required major downturning of 3D graphics settings.
So right now I have one game that asks me to go get that 1.33GHz Thunderbird and a new motherboard - and I consider myself to be a serious gamer.
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Power Corrupts, but Absolute Power is Kinda Neat :)
Anyone who has followed/played UO over the years knows that all kind of fraud happens all the time. This case is notable because the guy both illegally accessed the account of another person by social engineering the password (this is clearly illegal in most countries), and surprisingly *got arrested* for his stunt. I could dig you numerous stories of people being frauded out of their virtual possessions thru old fashioned tricks or outright password stealing using trojans and social engineering emails designed to lure the victimg to disclose his account details.
In previous cases these incidents have usually been ignored by law enforcement, as it's understandably hard to explain how someone 'stole' stuff from you when it's all bits on some game server. So most cases are handled by EA/Origin customer support, and while sometimes the stuff is restored by the game admins, there are plenty of cases when the thief got away scot free since the situation was 'word against word' and EA/Origin decided not to interfere.
Looks like in this case the person losing the stuff went further than EA/Origin customer support and got law enforcement onto the case - and they actually responded and arrested the guy!
Running off MS datacenters, Massive Multiplayer Online Game Asheron's Call 2 has also been more or less dead since Friday. Fun stuff include corrupted characters (lost items, lost experience/levels) and outright unplayable server performance. Heck, their own customer rep recommended players not to log on for now... oh, and the AC2 customer support people couldn't access the game either, so the players experiencing the problems couldn't reach ingame support as there was none...
Needless to say, their *cough* paying customers have been less than thrilled.
Verant ain't stupid. They've been making MMORPGs for a long time.
They *KNOW* players want to mule, they *KNOW* players want to have multiple characters on same server. Especially tradeskill junkies, who want to have their private factory who can put out any item in the game.
I play DAOC and see this every day - heck, most crafters I know have multiple crafter alts who can then do every damn single thing possible. This is remarkable considering how many hundreds of hours and how much ingame money it takes to 'skill up' a crafter.
Verant is just setting themselves up for a system where average MMORPG junkie forks up for 2-4 accounts, and powergamers pay for even more.
Just guess how 'huge' and 'big' game this will be when every damn nolife EQ junkie who *already* has multiple accounts even without this restriction jump on board. They can claim stuff like 1 million players, when in reality its something like 300K, with lots of people with 2-5 accounts.
It just remains to be seen how bad the backlash is. Currently the general consensus seems to be that most MMORPG junkies probably still will test it (it's Star Wars!), but most are expecting a total disaster of a game.
In any case, Verant/Lucas will make shitload of money. They might not make it long term, depending on how crappy the game turns out to be, but short term this decision is going to get them lot more revenue than the usual '4-8 chars/server/account'.
Same system is common here in Finland - several ISPs started 'FREE INTERNET ACCESS' plans few years back. You just paid the calls, which are charged by the minute. Naturally they profited by getting the call termination charges - basically a cut from the phonecompany's call charges.
After few years, local regulator said 'Waitaminute, you are advertising something as 'FREE' when it clearly costs money'.
So nowdays they have to advertise these things as 'Internet with no monthly fee!'. Same thing, but they can't call 'em FREE anymore. Which in my opinion is much better.
Of course every real user has migrated to cable or DSL. You can already pretty much get DSL everywhere that could be even marginally considered 'urban area'. Then again we pay thru the nose for it. I'm paying about 150 euros a month for 2Mbit down, 512Kbit up. Cheapest one (512/256) is about 50 euros a month.
It's still bullshit. Lets theorize a bit... If I'd set up it to serve some mystical files ending .r01 , r02 etc.. (guess the content yourself ;) with frontend somewhere else, you'd pull the plug in less than 24 hours because all your bandwidth is saturated several times over.
There is no such thing as 'unlimited' or 'unmetered' webhosting service. If I'd purchase your package, and then put something there that saturates every pipe you have 24/7, you are going to pull the plug. Or go bankrupt.
Don't advertise what you cannot provide.
Cisco and Yahoo etc. are doing a good thing here!
If every related company would tell the chinese govt. "No, we will not do such blocking system. It's impossible/immoral/bad/[insert your favourite reason here].", what do you think chinese govt. would do? It would decide that they cannot control the internet, so they won't allow any internet traffic in/out of the country. They are control freaks, so they need to have the warm and fuzzy feeling of 'controlling' the net.
Cisco & friends are providing them (at an immense cost, mind ya) a 'filtering system' that gives them that warm & fuzzy feeling that they are 'controlling' their citizen's internet access. It's an illusion at best, but they seem to want it, and are willing to pay for it. You know - the saying about fool and their money... :)
We all know that there are ways around such blocks. This is nothing but your average broken censorware application with goverment approved blocklist, built into bunch of high end routers. Having somewhat crippled internet connection to the world is by far a better option than no internet at all. You can always work around the blocks, and get what you need, if you really want it.
Longer those chinese leaders are happily smiling in their ivory towers and thinking 'the citizens have their internet, but only those parts we want - we are in control', the better.
But you *CAN* do that. DAOC EULA Specifically allows sale of accounts. Basically you can sell the copy of the game you bought, it's CD key, its account and all the characters under it - AS ONE WHOLE PACKAGE. And you can ask anything you want for it.
Don't expect to be loved in the gameworld tho - many 'highbies' with bought characters are usually shunned by the community.
The point here is that you cannot make money off farming gold or items and selling them to other players, as those items are not yours to own. When selling whole account, what you are selling is the license to the game materials and the permission to play on the mythic servers (and to pay for it).
Bartering for stuff within the game is playing by the game rules. Selling stuff for real life cash is NOT. EULA states that its not allowed, so it is not. If you are caught doing it, your butt will be banned, and you lose it all. Problem is tracking the accounts of these toons. It takes tons of time and resources better spent on developing the game further.
I sure hope these morons are kicked out of the court for such stupid lawsuit. I wish all ebayers (people selling MMORPG stuff for cash) could be blacklisted and banned for all of these games pre-emptively. They harm the fun normal players have by bringing real money into equation, which leads to lot more competition on the gameworld stuff, as it has 'value' and some idiots can try to make a living that way.
Yep, I don't play much FPS-games. Some Tribes 2 from time to time (which requires major hardware to run smoothly without looking crap). I also prefer my games to look good.
Besides, with GF3 and beyond, you can run Quake 3 Arena at very high quality settings without going below 120FPS.
Basically I'm ready to pay for the hardware so it runs the games I want smoothly AND display all their glory too. Some are happy enough just to kill all the chrome and get the FPS that way even on a low end setup.
For your very first character in DAOC, if you are too stupid NOT to join a guild (who will probably take any non-retard player with open arms), yep money can be an issue. Such players are better off NOT playing DAOC.
There is a little known 'fact' on the money side; Once you hit about L30 in DAOC, the money just starts pouring in. And I mean pouring. Ask *any* level 40+ character, and he probably has 1000+ gold on him. Since the two best material types for crafting are not yet in the game, and siege equipment for RvR combat can suck your money only so much, they have ton of cash with little to spend it on. I've seen players with 5000+ gold on them. One reason for the money sales is the fact that some of these players see it as an easy way to make quick buck off clueless newbies. Blocking these sales which are basically SCAMS that work only on those too early in their DAOC career to know the fact that money becomes almost meaningless high up.
For normal, compassionate players, it's quite common to give out gold to a lowbies as a startup money. If you are given 100 gold at the start, when killing one mob nets you maybe 20 copper pieces (0.0020 gold), that will last for a LONG time. The equipment system makes using too good items pointless (they just decay faster and give no noticeable benefit over your own level stuff), so that 100 gold will buy you everything you need up to about level 25-30, at which point you become self-sufficient with no money problems.
Only persons who would ever buy money with real cash in DAOC are clueless n00bs who have their first character at about level 15-25 (the toughest range moneywise) and have no clue to join a guild and ask for assistance. Since mid-level equipment is downright useless to high levellers, you probably would be showered in gear suitable for you and get plenty of money to keep going if you just joined a guild and explained your situation (low midbie, tight on gold)
Item drops, while requiring some work, are nothing compared to EQ. So while in EQ there *was* a market for the uber gear, again in DAOC anyone who has played the game at all knows any item that is suitable to you (not too high level to cause it to decay very fast) can be obtained by building a group of 5-8 people, going to the place where it drops, and whacking away for a while. High level armor sets do take a bit of time to collect for a whole party, but at the same time, the experience is good and gameplay stays challenging. No reason to buy items in DAOC with real cash either - again, unless you are stupid n00b with EQ mindset.
I recall something about a fool and their money and separating them. Selling DAOC gold and items falls into this category, and it's in Mythic's best interest to block such sales to minimize the number of new players who feel scammed for paying real money for some ingame gold as soon as they start hitting mid-30's in the game.
They have.
You have budget GF2MX with shitty picture quality as a bonus.
GeForce 3s and (I assume) all GF4Ti-series cards have quite good 2D and 3D image quality. Dunno about GF4MX as they are low end junk based on GF2 core (regardless of their marketing name).
So if you buy a junk cheapo low end card, expect junk low end image quality. I'm quite pleased with my current Elsa Gladiac 920 GF3.
Nice theory.
I like to play my games with Anisotropic filtering on, with antialiasing on, and with higher than 1024x768 resolution. And I don't like slideshows. 60FPS is bare minimum, constant 80+ is good.
GF3 can fit the bill barely. I still probably will replace it with a GF4Ti4600 soon.
If you are happy playing 1024x768, no AA, only trilinear filtering, and no new fancy pixel shader tricks, you prolly happy with GF2. I dumped mine over an year ago, and never regretted even if GF3 costed arm and leg.
Some of us just care more about the rendering quality. And yes, I have quite fine monitor.
Then again most people dont' even know what anisotropic filtering is, and how much better rendering result it gives, let alone how to turn it on in the driver options. And those who go and try it on their GF2s will watch the slideshow for 5 minutes and turn it off again...
As usual, some people (like me) posted the story earlier, with less fluff and more content, and got rejected.
;)
Once again its completely random what gets accepted to the front page in case of 'major news' like this one. It's slashdot - what you expect?
That chip is for the old Playstation 1.
We are talking about Playstation 2 here, a completely different beast.
SONY THEMSELVES MADE THE CONSOLE SO THE TWO ARE LUMPED TOGETHER.
You *cannot* make an 'import/region free only'-mod to PS2. Once you do that, as a side effect, the console also plays CDR/DVDR copies.
There has been lenghty discussion about this in the related websites, and the fact is that when the modchip developers finally had the breakthru and got the imported originals to work, they got the 'copied games work without disk swap' as a free bonus.
There has been disk-swap-requiring modchips for over an year. They didn't work with originals from other regions - to get the game to work you first *had to make a copy of it* (and usually apply a patch or two to the CD image), and do an unwieldy swap trick to boot it up. Sony woke up the moment there was a modchip that ran everything with no disc swap - basically as soon as their 'detecting if the disc is original and from what region'-protection was reverse-engineered and everything could be played without disc swaps.
Reason for this is simple; There are *seriously* more people who just want to import US games to europe than those who want to pirate stuff. Why? Most of the new games releases come here 1-6 months later than US. I *CANNOT* buy Metal Gear Solid 2 for my PS2. I won't be able to until maybe sometime late february 2002. I have really no desire to get a pirated copy on a DVDR - I'm perfectly willing to buy it. I cannot. These new mods would have made it possible for me to import it from the US.
Naturally this would have harmed local Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and their country-specific distributors and their local monopoly to rip off anything they want and release as late as they want. Their options to prevent the loss of monopoly is either to match US prices & do a lot of work to make sure stuff is released simultaneously, or kill the modchip developers. Quess which one is easier to do?
Both known developers of these new modchips are in europe. Market for the chips is mainly in europe. DMCA has very little to do with the whole issue, as it is not an european law. Sony just wants to protect their ability to release stuff in europe as late as it wants and at a price it wants. Cheaper to release late than to spend money to make sure localizations of manuals etc are done by the time the game is ready and shipping.
Just my 0.02 euros...
I feel like ranting a bit, so let's spend a bit of time educating you all.
First... you've probably heard about this small game called 'Metal Gear Solid 2' coming out soon on PS2?
Well, the Metal Gear series started it's life as a tiny very original 2D title on the MSX2. Back then I bought the game just based on the fact that 'it was a new Konami game!' and boy I was positively surprised. Couldn't put it down for the next two weeks as I worked my way thru it for the first time. That crappy NES port everyone thinks was the first Metal Gear is just a pale shadow of the original MSX2 version, and the NES 'Snake's Revenge'-sequel was just a lame 'let's redo the levels'-cash-in-ripoff that wasn't made by Hideo Kojima at all. The 'real' Metal Gear 2 (MG2: Solid Snake) was never released for any other platform except MSX2, and most people found out about this great game series only after Metal Gear Solid was released on PSOne. MG2: Solid Snake was probably one of the best and most technologically advanced game ever made for a 8bit system - and almost no-one outside Japan ever heard about it. There was no english language version until some fans translated it for emulator use few years ago - a very respectable hack as the original game cartridge image was almost all compressed data, and all in addition to that, the text in the game was stored using space-saving techniques (keyword lists for most used words to save bytes). Making that to work with English instead of Japanese took some disassembling and hacking.
MSX2 standard itself was years ahead of it's time when it was originally introduced. When my friends were playing with their Commodore C64s (64KB RAM, 160KB 5.25" floppy), I had Sony HB-700D MSX2 that had things like total of 384KB RAM, Double Sided, 720KB 3.5" disk drive, MSX-DOS (8bit MS-DOS without directories and few other differences), and Sony-made mouse-based GUI and pretty good word processor/spreadsheet/business graph package. It had stuff like 512x384 graphics mode and 512 color palette - several years before Amiga and Atari ST, around the time 'PC' was 8086 with CGA and 4000$ pricetag.
Sadly, since it wasn't really marketed outside Japan and some european countries, most of you never even heard about it, or about it's minor upgrade of MSX2+ (slightly better graphics) or MSX Turbo R which was basically MSX2+ and it's Z80 but with additional RISC chip bolted on. MSX3 standard was also drafted, but no machines were ever built as dedicated game consoles and price drops of PCs squeezed home computers off the market.
Had some japanese companies known a bit more about marketing to US market, you'd probably have seen all this back then. Now only older japanese gamers and some european freaks know about these great systems.
Sure, they had MicroSoft Xtended Basic on ROM and MSX-DOS as floppy OS - unless you felt like using BASIC for that too, as Disk BASIC came with any disk drive. MSX standard got it's name from the BASIC, but that was just their choice for basic interpeter on system ROM. Microsoft had small part in drafting the standard itself, but it was mostly japanese design, with all the hardware was made by japanese companies.
So, bunch of japanese manufacturers were just making a Z80-based computer standard and needed a BASIC for it. MS was logical choice at the time, and MS was happy to sell them a simple BASIC and downgraded MS-DOS. MSX wasn't 'Microsoft' system any more than IBM PC is. MS pretty much just supplied software for it and helped them a bit with the standard.
So, X-Box is still Microsoft's first attempt at a full hardware system. I wish them luck, and I expect tons of fun reading as their launch will have it's bumps, and they'll be blown out of proportions, as it's Microsoft, and everyone loves to make fun of them.
RPG? What RPG? There is nothing here related to role playing. Magic: The Gathering is just a strategic collectible card game.
Sure, it has some fantasy images, but you can't call everything that has fantasy elemnents a 'role playing game'. Ornithopter is a (lame) MTG card, so this is at least borderline on-topic...
ATI MOBILITY 128 IS NOT A GAMING CHIPSET. Pretty much NO laptop chipset is. GeForce2GO is borderline, and even it is pretty slow.
By default, XP doesn't support Open GL if you try to run games using underpowered ATI mobility 128 chipset. It's outdated and pretty much maxes out with old games such as Counterstrike and UT. If it runs 'Q3A perfectly', it should then run the new Wolfenstein as both use same game engine.
Sounds like you have overpriced laptop you think you can use for serious gaming, and you resort to whining when it doesn't work.
Also, it is completely irrelevant if something works on "out of a box" operating system. Almost NO GAME runs on "out of a box" win98, as it doesn't have DirectX builtin. By this logic, win98 is not for games, as no games run on it "out of a box".
Yes it does. If you are clueless enough to run something that has anything to do with 3D graphics using Windows XP base drivers that are installed from the OS CD, you *deserve what you get*.
Nvidia card users just grab the new 21.81 refernce drivers, and it works like charm. Most other 3D-card users can use their Windows 2000 drivers. If your card is old/crappy enough that it doesn't have Windows 2000 drivers, time to donate it to some charitable use and buy a real 3D card.
Sounds like AGP drivers are missing. Without them, high end graphics games (CS or DOD isn't one) just die as the AGP card isnt using it.
if you have VIA chipset, get Via 4-in-1 drivers and install them. If you have AMD chipset (much rarer) get AMD AGP miniport driver.
And upgrade your drivers to latest nvidia reference drivers (21.81, www.nvidia.com has them)
So you see the flaw in your reasoning. Mindless consumer drones care too little about these things, so 'boycott' won't hurt them enough. Let them get away with it, and it becomes common practice. Once it's common practice, you start seeing nasty side-effects, like that everything you ever do or buy is known by marketers and other departments of megacorporations, and they abuse this information as they see fit. You work for Megacorporation A? And you go and buy (cheaper) alternative product that's manufactured by Megacorp B, even when there's the same thing available manufactured by Megacorp A? Next week your supervisor calls you and tells you that your pay has been lowered due to lack of your loyalty towards your workplace, as there is a company policy that employees should always favour company's own brands.
What a fun society that would be... :)
There are just far too many ways to abuse this kind of system, so it must not be allowed to happen in the first place - we are already quite far down this slipperly slope, and no regulation of what so ever is scary proposition.
The 'Nostradamus' quote is apparently a hoax doing rounds around the net. See www.nostradamus-repository.org for details.
So they're in California? So that explains there has been a power crisis in the state. 8000 Servers eat up plenty of power. I wonder what kind of electricity bill they have :)
Same thing as BBC in UK. Except that BBC has quality programming... :)
Simple - no game publisher seems to want to release stuff that really taxes the hardware. They are scared shitless by the prospect that 'mainstream market' (who generally have sub-par 'major PC manufacturer'-branded machines with underpowered 3D cards) will skip their latest game, so it must run on the 'massmarket' setup.
It's commonplace to still see games that claim they run on P2-233Mhz,32MB ram and 8MB 3D accelerator. Sure, they actually need something like 400Mhz, 64MB and 16MB 3D accelerator to run well, but thats still a setup you no longer can even buy. Every 3D card nowdays tends to have at least 32MB ram, main memory is usually nowdays 128MB, and 256MB setups are becoming common. On the CPU side, it's not cost-effective to buy anything below 600-700Mhz anymore. Yet I cannot find a game that really requires a 1GHz+ setup.
Tribes 2 (just released two weeks ago) is the only one that comes close, and even that can be 'downgraded' to run acceptably on low-end setups. Anyway, it's the first game that keeled over and died using maxed-out settings on my 850Mhz Classic Athlon, 256MB Ram and GeForce 2 GTS. Few others run bit slow, but this was the first one that required major downturning of 3D graphics settings.
So right now I have one game that asks me to go get that 1.33GHz Thunderbird and a new motherboard - and I consider myself to be a serious gamer.
No wonder mainstream users aren't upgrading!