As far as interactive environments go, I still look back fondly at the interactive pool tables and the arcade games. The best was the Duke Nukem cabinet- when you operated it, Duke would say: "I don't have time to play with myself." Classic.
Agreed. This was the first thing that came to mind when I read the article as well. However, if the poster is talking about standard consumer grade connections (i.e. DSL, Cable, 3G Card, Standard Satellite), his best bet would be to create IPSec or GRE tunnels across the links and use OSPF (or EIGRP) to load balance.
One of the things that amazes me most about this is how many players who bot probably wouldn't be paying their monthly Blizzard payment unless they had the bot to do the boring parts for them. Now, I don't know how many non-cheating players leave the game because of bots, but I have a feeling that it is fewer than those people who only play the game because the bots are available. So, how exactly is Blizzard losing money here? Plus, the other thing I can't figure out, is that Glider is not the only bot available, and arguably, not the best bot either. I'm curious how many subscribers Blizzard would lose if they were able to ban every single botter tomorrow...
Ultimately, I don't think that it's right for the botters to play unhindered, but I don't think that the current course of action makes much sense in the long run. I agree with other posters who said that there should be a server (or servers) where botting and other cheating is allowed. If someone is caught cheating on a regular server, than you get transferred. You could even be nice and give people one warning before sending them to Cheatsville. However, I also think Blizzard should make the grind less painful for people who just want to have fun. Personally, I wish that the instances scaled down for smaller groups. What if a friend and I want to get together and play? Well, we can... quest... or we can PvP... or we can farm mats/grind honor... or we can find more people to do an instance. But then you have to deal with the people who you find to do the instance which usually isn't that fun anymore. Why can't we go into a 5-man (or any other) instance with weaker mobs and reduced loot? Heck, why can't we go run Sunwell Plateau just to check it out, since it's doubtful we will ever be well enough geared to get into a 25-man group for it. I think that would make for a more interesting and more varying challenge anyways, probably requring different strategies for varying numbers of players... I can appreciate making each progressive instance basically require more well equipped players, but let's get rid of the whole pre-defined number of players thing, because that's just annoying... And let's fix the whole loot drop thing for instances; just drop tokens for each boss, and after I collect enough tokens, I'll go buy the items I want rather than having to do run after run getting more and more pissed each time that I don't get the loot I'm looking for... I'm sure there are traditionalists out there, so give me a way to toggle between traditional instancing and non-traditional instancing... Another thing that I wish they would change would be to make it progressively easier to level (i.e. faster) the more max level characters you have (or heck, even scaled to total number of characters based on level or based on amount of time spent in-game). Then, if I decide one day out of the blue that I want to try out , I can level it up more quickly based on how much time I've already spent in the game...
Anyways, one thing I've noticed the longer I play is that the game gets less and less fun, and more and more like work; hard work that is basically lost as soon as the next expansion comes out...
So, basically they want to use the TPM chip as a dongle integrated on your motherboard. That sounds great! So, when I replace my motherboard I have the privilege of either begging the manufacturer for another license or buying a new copy of the game. At least the dongles could be moved from computer to computer. Of course, that still seems rediculous since I'm buying a game, not a $2000+ piece of software...
What I did when I worked at a computer repair shop, is I downloaded all of the updates manually to our server, I looked up unattended installation switches for each update and put them in a text file, and then Auto-installed everything over the network with a VBScript program I wrote. Worked pretty good, I even set it up so that it would install SP2, reboot, auto-log back in, install the rest of the updates, then reboot again. It worked great b/c I could just start it and walk away. I knew it was done when I walked back by the computer and it was at the login screen after the last reboot.
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As far as interactive environments go, I still look back fondly at the interactive pool tables and the arcade games. The best was the Duke Nukem cabinet- when you operated it, Duke would say: "I don't have time to play with myself." Classic.
Agreed. This was the first thing that came to mind when I read the article as well. However, if the poster is talking about standard consumer grade connections (i.e. DSL, Cable, 3G Card, Standard Satellite), his best bet would be to create IPSec or GRE tunnels across the links and use OSPF (or EIGRP) to load balance.
One of the things that amazes me most about this is how many players who bot probably wouldn't be paying their monthly Blizzard payment unless they had the bot to do the boring parts for them. Now, I don't know how many non-cheating players leave the game because of bots, but I have a feeling that it is fewer than those people who only play the game because the bots are available. So, how exactly is Blizzard losing money here? Plus, the other thing I can't figure out, is that Glider is not the only bot available, and arguably, not the best bot either. I'm curious how many subscribers Blizzard would lose if they were able to ban every single botter tomorrow... Ultimately, I don't think that it's right for the botters to play unhindered, but I don't think that the current course of action makes much sense in the long run. I agree with other posters who said that there should be a server (or servers) where botting and other cheating is allowed. If someone is caught cheating on a regular server, than you get transferred. You could even be nice and give people one warning before sending them to Cheatsville. However, I also think Blizzard should make the grind less painful for people who just want to have fun. Personally, I wish that the instances scaled down for smaller groups. What if a friend and I want to get together and play? Well, we can... quest... or we can PvP... or we can farm mats/grind honor... or we can find more people to do an instance. But then you have to deal with the people who you find to do the instance which usually isn't that fun anymore. Why can't we go into a 5-man (or any other) instance with weaker mobs and reduced loot? Heck, why can't we go run Sunwell Plateau just to check it out, since it's doubtful we will ever be well enough geared to get into a 25-man group for it. I think that would make for a more interesting and more varying challenge anyways, probably requring different strategies for varying numbers of players... I can appreciate making each progressive instance basically require more well equipped players, but let's get rid of the whole pre-defined number of players thing, because that's just annoying... And let's fix the whole loot drop thing for instances; just drop tokens for each boss, and after I collect enough tokens, I'll go buy the items I want rather than having to do run after run getting more and more pissed each time that I don't get the loot I'm looking for... I'm sure there are traditionalists out there, so give me a way to toggle between traditional instancing and non-traditional instancing... Another thing that I wish they would change would be to make it progressively easier to level (i.e. faster) the more max level characters you have (or heck, even scaled to total number of characters based on level or based on amount of time spent in-game). Then, if I decide one day out of the blue that I want to try out , I can level it up more quickly based on how much time I've already spent in the game... Anyways, one thing I've noticed the longer I play is that the game gets less and less fun, and more and more like work; hard work that is basically lost as soon as the next expansion comes out...
So, basically they want to use the TPM chip as a dongle integrated on your motherboard. That sounds great! So, when I replace my motherboard I have the privilege of either begging the manufacturer for another license or buying a new copy of the game. At least the dongles could be moved from computer to computer. Of course, that still seems rediculous since I'm buying a game, not a $2000+ piece of software...
What I did when I worked at a computer repair shop, is I downloaded all of the updates manually to our server, I looked up unattended installation switches for each update and put them in a text file, and then Auto-installed everything over the network with a VBScript program I wrote. Worked pretty good, I even set it up so that it would install SP2, reboot, auto-log back in, install the rest of the updates, then reboot again. It worked great b/c I could just start it and walk away. I knew it was done when I walked back by the computer and it was at the login screen after the last reboot.