Apparently this company has developed time travel. They should be able to get some capital for that. On paper this doesn't sound like anything above and beyond the first MMO out there. How many years ago was that? Why, this far in, are we still doing this garbage? There are dozens of clones of this time of game with varying themes all over the world and they're all the same and people get excited and bored twice as fast each time a new one comes out.
well jeff, I'd like to tell that you set-up is almost ready for a Canadian winter. In early 2008 we hit -49 for a couple days;) If you'd like to do any environment testing for future projects, just head to Alberta in January/February.
High fantasy is again defined, but has nothing to do with quality. Its similar to sword and sorcery however high fantasy usually focuses on world changing events and not personal battles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fantasy
While a lot of novels from the Dragonlance/forgotten realms series focus on individuals, not all of them do. There are series in there which focus on world changing events like the Time of Trouble series in forgotten realms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_Troubles_(Forgotten_Realms) which would put it into the high fantasy category. While a lot of that stuff isn't particularly well written, there are certain stand-out authors like Salvatore who has written well beyond Forgotten Realms and Margaret Weiss who has written well beyond Dragonlance.
If all their users play the big games simultaneously, they're doomed. I personally don't think they'll get that kind of peak. Some people like to play at weekends, some before dinner, some after their SO has gone to bed.
Of course they are. Unfortunately they can't guess when these people want to play. Any hiccups in the service are going to translate to very bad press on a new service. So if people have to wait in line to play a game it is going to be a rather bad thing for them.
Source? I'm guessing you have no idea what they're going to charge. We don't know whether they'll charge by the hour or by the month, whether you'll buy a package or an individual game, any of that. My guess is it'll be a combination of these.
Which leads me to another thought. With pricing, you can manage demand. Not enough capacity for everyone to play Crysis? Well, Wolfenstein costs $2/month and Crysis costs $5/month. Watch the usage patterns change.
Why run 2 machines? Its going to suck if you buy 1000 machines for peggle and 1000 machines for crysis and 1500 people want to play crysis and 20 want to play peggle level games.
Since they're not going to ghost a machine to prep it for every player, i think their only logical choice is to install every game on every machine.
I can't see why anyone would want to pay a monthly fee to play a single non-mmorpg game. That's just ludicrous. A key advantage with this service would be for people who like to sample a lot of games, like a rental service. If they expect me to pay $5/month to play only crysis, forget it. Sometimes I go through periods where nothing grabs me, I 2 days on this game, 2 days on that game, being able to switch rapidly between games for the same cost would appeal to me.
I think they're going to run into far too many issues when they try and roll this out.
In short. No.
They have some serious issues here.
Likely they're going to charge $19.99 or $29.99/month for this. Anymore and they risk making it look too expensive. That means each user will pay an average of $240/$360 a year. They will get money from partners, and maybe AT&T is going to give them a deal on bandwidth on their end. No doubt AT&T will double dip on its customers.
What's the cost of a machine? Well its certainly more than $360. That's a good start on a graphics card to play crisis at 720 on full, which everyone will expect. Sure they'll get a deal for buying thousands of these machines. Here is where they run into issues.
Do they need to buy 1 machine for every person? Absolutely. If they don't, they run a risk. As a brand new service trying to establish itself and quell the naysayers, any hiccups are going under a microscope. If they only buy 50%, peak times will have wait times. People will complain, they will get bad press. Everyone will say "I told you so", the service will end up being some niche service that a few thousand people use.
Now the company also has to pay salaries, operating costs, and figure in a profit and use some cash for future growth. Maybe if they were charing $60/month, but who is going to pay that?
Not all. I don't play the MMOs, my Korean isn't good enough, but I have a very infrequently updated blog where I walk people through how to sign up and play various games that don't require much Korean. There are some there that I enjoy. FPS, and MMOs lend themselves best to the whole vanity stuff. You can't break into the RTS market with a bomb because of Star Craft. I've found 1 or 2 Korean made RTS out there, but they're not currently running, they seem to be down for revamping. There is a decent scorched clone called Taan. Its cutesy, but interesting. Raycity is a decent MMO, interesting concept, also interesting to see a good portion of seoul mapped, with actual building fronts being used (circa 2006)
Not all of the shooters are boom-headshot like counter strike. Bubble Fighter and Metal rage are two that I played which aren't that style.
probably because gaming is saturated in Korea. There are PC-rooms everywhere. I can walk to about a dozen in less than 10 minutes. They're very cheap, and people in Korea are social gamers. They don't stay home and game. They go out and do it with their friends. Also Korean PC games are free. Only microtransactions for vanity things, and the system requirements are often quite low on most of them which means you don't need an expensive PC even if you wanted to game at home. A lot of home users use wireless laptops as well since they don't game at home. This pushes up the latency and packet issues.
A city is a city. Wimax isn't country wide in Seoul. Seoul has both devices and coverage that other individual cities don't have.
As I pointed out in my follow-up post, tests showed Clear's wimax in portland to perform poorly. This isn't a judgment on why don't you have wimax in middle-of-nowhere town USA. While it might not be fair to compare the country wide implementation of fiber in a country like South Korea to the USA, comparing the implementation of wimax in one city vs another is completely fair. Clear doesn't even offer an egg-like device which means wimax is only good for your laptop. With the egg, I can carry a cell-phone sized battery operated router in my pocket/bag and give wifi to any portable device I have. offering that has nothing to do with the geographic size of the country.
You plug into your laptop? Oh..that's unfortunate. What if you don't have a laptop? What if you have an ipod touch, PSP, or other PMP? Oh.. I see. You have to actually buy one of the only wimax ready devices.. a Samsung Mondi (Korean made btw)
Failed in the parking garage? Too bad.. the egg performed like a champ in the bowels of a building I was in.
Looks like clear didn't cut it there.
failed on the above ground LRT? wow.. as I already pointed out, skype on the underground subway in Korea.
If you want to try and throw something back at someone, you might want to try reading things. Seoul, Wibro 37Mb (corrected that off the koreatimes article) @ $20 a month, includes equipment. A few random american towns, 3-6Mbs (with bursts up to 10!) for $40 a month, you need to buy or lease the equipment, plus free crappy coverage
I didn't realize Wimax was in such a sorry state in the US. Here in Korea it is absolutely terrific. The entire city of Seoul is set up and running. Its called Wibro
I pay the equivalent of about $20 a month. I get this fantastic little thing called an Egg. Its basically a battery operated wimax router. It takes in wimax and converts it to wifi. I get a 50GB/month limit for that $20.
it works anywhere in the city (and a fair distance outside the actual city itself). Seoul has over 250 subway stations that would normally be off limits but every single station has a broadcast station in it. It runs at 18Mb/second.. I've used it with my touch to make skype calls on the subway. I didn't notice any significant lag in doing that. In fact comparing what I heard in that call and at home on my 100/10 fiber, I couldn't tell any difference in quality.
Battery is good for around 5-6 hours and charges on a standard cell phone charger (they have those in korea)
it would be trivial to automate a process where machines that were affected had their accounts put into a special access list where all their traffic was redirected to a server on the ISPs network. Something separated and hardened, holding all manners of free virus/malware tools as well as the most recent definitions for all the pay products.
a few years ago I had a buddy who worked for rogers in their call center. What he told me was that they were mainly cutting off people who were sending out a truckload of email. They got warnings, and calls, and emails, and if they were still spamming after a certain point in time, they were cut off. He used to sit beside the guys who got to deal with this so he could listen in on their calls and there were apparently some very clueless people who ended up part of some botnet. He didn't mention though if they were cutting off people for other reasons.
I can remember about...hmm.. 8 years ago... some ISPs were watching common ports known for things like Netbus, if you scanned on 1234 for more than a couple minutes you'd usually get a call the next day reminding you to check and make sure everything is okay.
I took a semester in high school a lot of years ago. At that point we'd had a computer for..hmm.. 6 years. I was miles ahead of anyone else in the class, easily typing at twice their speed, and learning the proper form didn't really do anything to speed me up. It was more through a couple more years practice that I hit the 90~ WPM with 3 errors or less range. Most kids will grow up with a computer now.. they'll be using it from Grade 1 on..by the time the reach a mandatory touch typing class in juniour high or high school, they'll probably be reasonably competent.
This was done I think. I seem to recall reading a story about a cross platform FPS that ran between maybe the dreamcast and the PC. As expected PC users absolutely dominated the dreamcast users. of course google fails me and I can't find it now.
Actually Linux needs to make a serious push to get office. Macs have office, why not linux? For linux it is unfortunately a very popular piece of software and supporting it fully would go a long way towards Linux adoption. Why do you think MS hasn't made a linux version? They make a mac version because Macs have a similar cost or more to windows, so while they can get that small percentage of the market, it isn't a threat. However if they make a linux version they'd have to compete with a lower cost OS.
My whole point was that even though money involved this experience is typical of linux, and exactly why ID isn't in a hurry to make the game linux compatible, even though they've been a friend to linux for years.I promised money to get this working, but did the company do anything? I don't think so. the company relied entirely on some random user to claim that they barely got the product working, but not in a usable state, and then said that was good enough, pay up.
That's the car equivalent of you finding an abandoned car along the side of the road that doesn't start and as you start to push it away the used car lot guy shows up wanting a commission. He didn't do anything, and what you have doesn't really work, but he wants his money for it.
That's a nice pipe dream but MS just has too much market share for that to be a reality. You can't ignore interoperability and existing standards. If Linux had 30% or more of the marketshare, try it, but at its current level its just not near enough.
a few years ago I had to use project 2003 for a class. I was attempting to run only linux on my laptop at the time. It didn't support it.. I put down my pledge. 1.5 years later I get an email saying "This now works on crossover office, pay up!" I no longer needed it, but went over to check out its status. Their definition of "it works" was several users claiming "garbage won't even start" and one user claiming "I got it to run..but you can't open anything, save anything.. or pretty much do anything" and they considered that delivering on their end of the bargain.
They want to make linux appealing, they need to work just a tad bit harder than that.
certain types of controllers aren't really there for PC gaming yet.
But there is no reason they couldn't be. You can hook a wiimote up to a PC, its been done plenty. you can youtube tons of videos on it.
That isn't a valid reason as to why the PC isn't a great system. There is NOTHING holding back the PC as a platform other than the publishers who refuse to publisher certain types of games for it, or who make up bullshit excuses to justify PS2 ports. EA has been shoveling the PS2 version of NHL to the PC for several years now claiming it can't do "next gen".
yes if you ignore half the argument, its easy to dismiss it. The point was there are plenty of emergency situations in which a teacher might not be able to use their cellphone. So the students having their phones with them (but turned off) does no harm.
Should they be allowed in schools is one question, should they be allowed in class is another. The answer to the first one is yes, because it's obviously beneficial for parents and children to be able to communicate. The answer to the latter is no, because in general they serve no educational purpose, and a child who needs to call their parent can either wait until after class or ask the teacher's permission.
Or the gunman. They could also ask the earth quake to shake the debris off their locker so they could pull the cellphone out.
You're right though. There isn't a conceivable situation where a student might want access to their phone and not be able to just grab it out of their locker.
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Apparently this company has developed time travel. They should be able to get some capital for that. On paper this doesn't sound like anything above and beyond the first MMO out there. How many years ago was that? Why, this far in, are we still doing this garbage? There are dozens of clones of this time of game with varying themes all over the world and they're all the same and people get excited and bored twice as fast each time a new one comes out.
well jeff, I'd like to tell that you set-up is almost ready for a Canadian winter. In early 2008 we hit -49 for a couple days ;)
If you'd like to do any environment testing for future projects, just head to Alberta in January/February.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_fantasy
Because low fantasy is already defined as something taking place in the real world but with fantasy elements. Modern vampire stories are low fantasy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_and_sorcery
Sword and sorcery is also defined, specifically as fantasy which involves a lot of exciting combat.
High fantasy is again defined, but has nothing to do with quality. Its similar to sword and sorcery however high fantasy usually focuses on world changing events and not personal battles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fantasy
While a lot of novels from the Dragonlance/forgotten realms series focus on individuals, not all of them do. There are series in there which focus on world changing events like the Time of Trouble series in forgotten realms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_Troubles_(Forgotten_Realms) which would put it into the high fantasy category. While a lot of that stuff isn't particularly well written, there are certain stand-out authors like Salvatore who has written well beyond Forgotten Realms and Margaret Weiss who has written well beyond Dragonlance.
Of course they are. Unfortunately they can't guess when these people want to play. Any hiccups in the service are going to translate to very bad press on a new service. So if people have to wait in line to play a game it is going to be a rather bad thing for them.
Why run 2 machines? Its going to suck if you buy 1000 machines for peggle and 1000 machines for crysis and 1500 people want to play crysis and 20 want to play peggle level games.
Since they're not going to ghost a machine to prep it for every player, i think their only logical choice is to install every game on every machine.
I can't see why anyone would want to pay a monthly fee to play a single non-mmorpg game. That's just ludicrous. A key advantage with this service would be for people who like to sample a lot of games, like a rental service. If they expect me to pay $5/month to play only crysis, forget it. Sometimes I go through periods where nothing grabs me, I 2 days on this game, 2 days on that game, being able to switch rapidly between games for the same cost would appeal to me.
I think they're going to run into far too many issues when they try and roll this out.
In short. No. They have some serious issues here. Likely they're going to charge $19.99 or $29.99/month for this. Anymore and they risk making it look too expensive. That means each user will pay an average of $240/$360 a year. They will get money from partners, and maybe AT&T is going to give them a deal on bandwidth on their end. No doubt AT&T will double dip on its customers. What's the cost of a machine? Well its certainly more than $360. That's a good start on a graphics card to play crisis at 720 on full, which everyone will expect. Sure they'll get a deal for buying thousands of these machines. Here is where they run into issues. Do they need to buy 1 machine for every person? Absolutely. If they don't, they run a risk. As a brand new service trying to establish itself and quell the naysayers, any hiccups are going under a microscope. If they only buy 50%, peak times will have wait times. People will complain, they will get bad press. Everyone will say "I told you so", the service will end up being some niche service that a few thousand people use. Now the company also has to pay salaries, operating costs, and figure in a profit and use some cash for future growth. Maybe if they were charing $60/month, but who is going to pay that?
Not all. I don't play the MMOs, my Korean isn't good enough, but I have a very infrequently updated blog where I walk people through how to sign up and play various games that don't require much Korean. There are some there that I enjoy. FPS, and MMOs lend themselves best to the whole vanity stuff. You can't break into the RTS market with a bomb because of Star Craft. I've found 1 or 2 Korean made RTS out there, but they're not currently running, they seem to be down for revamping. There is a decent scorched clone called Taan. Its cutesy, but interesting. Raycity is a decent MMO, interesting concept, also interesting to see a good portion of seoul mapped, with actual building fronts being used (circa 2006)
Not all of the shooters are boom-headshot like counter strike.
Bubble Fighter and Metal rage are two that I played which aren't that style.
Yup.
Even a lot of western games don't get big here, because they cost money. Koreans are all too happy to enjoy their free games.
$29 in South Korea..
probably because gaming is saturated in Korea. There are PC-rooms everywhere. I can walk to about a dozen in less than 10 minutes. They're very cheap, and people in Korea are social gamers. They don't stay home and game. They go out and do it with their friends. Also Korean PC games are free. Only microtransactions for vanity things, and the system requirements are often quite low on most of them which means you don't need an expensive PC even if you wanted to game at home. A lot of home users use wireless laptops as well since they don't game at home. This pushes up the latency and packet issues.
Not exactly an inviting market for this service.
A city is a city. Wimax isn't country wide in Seoul. Seoul has both devices and coverage that other individual cities don't have.
As I pointed out in my follow-up post, tests showed Clear's wimax in portland to perform poorly. This isn't a judgment on why don't you have wimax in middle-of-nowhere town USA. While it might not be fair to compare the country wide implementation of fiber in a country like South Korea to the USA, comparing the implementation of wimax in one city vs another is completely fair.
Clear doesn't even offer an egg-like device which means wimax is only good for your laptop. With the egg, I can carry a cell-phone sized battery operated router in my pocket/bag and give wifi to any portable device I have. offering that has nothing to do with the geographic size of the country.
Offering 6Mb with 10Mb burst wimax vs 37Mb wimax in South Korea also has nothing to do with size, that has everything to do with your equipment.
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/04/123_43867.html
You plug into your laptop? Oh..that's unfortunate. What if you don't have a laptop? What if you have an ipod touch, PSP, or other PMP?
Oh.. I see. You have to actually buy one of the only wimax ready devices.. a Samsung Mondi (Korean made btw)
too bad, keep trying.
Coverage?
Hmm
http://news.digitaltrends.com/feature/122/testing-clear-s-wimax-internet-service
Failed in the parking garage? Too bad..
the egg performed like a champ in the bowels of a building I was in.
Looks like clear didn't cut it there.
failed on the above ground LRT? wow.. as I already pointed out, skype on the underground subway in Korea.
If you want to try and throw something back at someone, you might want to try reading things.
Seoul, Wibro 37Mb (corrected that off the koreatimes article) @ $20 a month, includes equipment.
A few random american towns, 3-6Mbs (with bursts up to 10!) for $40 a month, you need to buy or lease the equipment, plus free crappy coverage
and Clear doesn't offer any solution for other mobile devices. too bad. The egg is only slightly larger than my cellphone.
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/04/123_43867.html
Korea certainly is in sorry shape. next time do your homework champ. Shame on those people modding you up.
I didn't realize Wimax was in such a sorry state in the US. Here in Korea it is absolutely terrific.
The entire city of Seoul is set up and running. Its called Wibro
I pay the equivalent of about $20 a month. I get this fantastic little thing called an Egg. Its basically a battery operated wimax router. It takes in wimax and converts it to wifi.
I get a 50GB/month limit for that $20.
it works anywhere in the city (and a fair distance outside the actual city itself). Seoul has over 250 subway stations that would normally be off limits but every single station has a broadcast station in it.
It runs at 18Mb/second.. I've used it with my touch to make skype calls on the subway. I didn't notice any significant lag in doing that. In fact comparing what I heard in that call and at home on my 100/10 fiber, I couldn't tell any difference in quality.
Battery is good for around 5-6 hours and charges on a standard cell phone charger (they have those in korea)
it would be trivial to automate a process where machines that were affected had their accounts put into a special access list where all their traffic was redirected to a server on the ISPs network. Something separated and hardened, holding all manners of free virus/malware tools as well as the most recent definitions for all the pay products.
a few years ago I had a buddy who worked for rogers in their call center. What he told me was that they were mainly cutting off people who were sending out a truckload of email. They got warnings, and calls, and emails, and if they were still spamming after a certain point in time, they were cut off. He used to sit beside the guys who got to deal with this so he could listen in on their calls and there were apparently some very clueless people who ended up part of some botnet. He didn't mention though if they were cutting off people for other reasons.
I can remember about...hmm.. 8 years ago... some ISPs were watching common ports known for things like Netbus, if you scanned on 1234 for more than a couple minutes you'd usually get a call the next day reminding you to check and make sure everything is okay.
I took a semester in high school a lot of years ago. At that point we'd had a computer for..hmm.. 6 years. I was miles ahead of anyone else in the class, easily typing at twice their speed, and learning the proper form didn't really do anything to speed me up. It was more through a couple more years practice that I hit the 90~ WPM with 3 errors or less range. Most kids will grow up with a computer now.. they'll be using it from Grade 1 on..by the time the reach a mandatory touch typing class in juniour high or high school, they'll probably be reasonably competent.
This was done I think. I seem to recall reading a story about a cross platform FPS that ran between maybe the dreamcast and the PC. As expected PC users absolutely dominated the dreamcast users.
of course google fails me and I can't find it now.
Fantastic now they just need to do 2007...
Actually Linux needs to make a serious push to get office. Macs have office, why not linux? For linux it is unfortunately a very popular piece of software and supporting it fully would go a long way towards Linux adoption. Why do you think MS hasn't made a linux version? They make a mac version because Macs have a similar cost or more to windows, so while they can get that small percentage of the market, it isn't a threat. However if they make a linux version they'd have to compete with a lower cost OS.
My whole point was that even though money involved this experience is typical of linux, and exactly why ID isn't in a hurry to make the game linux compatible, even though they've been a friend to linux for years.I promised money to get this working, but did the company do anything? I don't think so. the company relied entirely on some random user to claim that they barely got the product working, but not in a usable state, and then said that was good enough, pay up.
That's the car equivalent of you finding an abandoned car along the side of the road that doesn't start and as you start to push it away the used car lot guy shows up wanting a commission. He didn't do anything, and what you have doesn't really work, but he wants his money for it.
That's a nice pipe dream but MS just has too much market share for that to be a reality. You can't ignore interoperability and existing standards.
If Linux had 30% or more of the marketshare, try it, but at its current level its just not near enough.
a few years ago I had to use project 2003 for a class. I was attempting to run only linux on my laptop at the time. It didn't support it.. I put down my pledge. 1.5 years later I get an email saying "This now works on crossover office, pay up!" I no longer needed it, but went over to check out its status. Their definition of "it works" was several users claiming "garbage won't even start" and one user claiming "I got it to run..but you can't open anything, save anything.. or pretty much do anything" and they considered that delivering on their end of the bargain.
They want to make linux appealing, they need to work just a tad bit harder than that.
But there is no reason they couldn't be. You can hook a wiimote up to a PC, its been done plenty. you can youtube tons of videos on it.
That isn't a valid reason as to why the PC isn't a great system.
There is NOTHING holding back the PC as a platform other than the publishers who refuse to publisher certain types of games for it, or who make up bullshit excuses to justify PS2 ports. EA has been shoveling the PS2 version of NHL to the PC for several years now claiming it can't do "next gen".
yes if you ignore half the argument, its easy to dismiss it. The point was there are plenty of emergency situations in which a teacher might not be able to use their cellphone. So the students having their phones with them (but turned off) does no harm.
Wikipedia isn't a *.* copy of the internet. What you want is the internet, its already out there, go nuts.
Or the gunman. They could also ask the earth quake to shake the debris off their locker so they could pull the cellphone out.
You're right though. There isn't a conceivable situation where a student might want access to their phone and not be able to just grab it out of their locker.
At least 4.5 years ago...