MMORPG Annoyances

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SideSwipe9th
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Re: MMORPG Annoyances

Post by SideSwipe9th » Mon Jun 10, 2013 11:39 pm

Intercity125 wrote:As much as I hate piracy etc, I sometimes have to pirate something, just because the original that I have bought just refuses to work. Latest one for me was Anno 1404. Because of a DRM issue, it would not install correctly
The last game I had to break out the torrents for was Blur. For some bizarre reason it stopped thinking my original disc was authentic. One quick download of a mini-image and disc mounting software later, and the game works more or less flawlessly again. Before that it was X2 and X3. Both games had Starforce baked in as a CD check, however due to a horrible bug the DRM would actually bork your Windows install and in some cases even render your optical drive nothing more than a paperweight. I suspect in another couple of years I'll need to do the same for Mass Effect, Command & Conquer 3/Kane's Wrath, and Spore due to their stupid activation limits, or their activation servers being removed.

Another side issue along with this I think is a lack of easily available legal alternatives for acquiring old TV shows/movies. For example, I'm unable to legally acquire (without great expense) old episodes of Doctor Who, Monty Python, Cheers, even the Animaniacs! However I can go onto almost any torrent website, and have my favourite episodes downloaded in time for dinner! Don't even get me started on classic or new anime! Now there are some improvements of late, for example every episode of Power Rangers is now available on UK Lovefilm after many years of it being not available anywhere in the UK, but the legal alternatives still have a long way to go!

Except Spotify. That rocks big time! It's cheap, I can download my favourite playlists to save bandwidth and keep a copy on my mobile device, and almost all I want is quickly and easily available (there are the odd few tracks/albums that for some reason have been made unavailable in my area, but they are quite rare). Hell, there's even stuff on there that I didn't know existed until I did a "related to" search.
Starfleet Headquarters wrote:I dunno, I just tend to look at some of this stuff, and basically you get MMOs, usually close to 20GB monstrosities, riddled with bugs even in the prime areas people use ..., at the very least fix the prime areas!
On one hand yea. Most modern games are monstrosities riddled with bugs. On the other hand, with the demand for higher fidelity graphics and sound, storage requirements must go up. Yes you could in theory improve upon compression ratios, but then you're adding increased computational complexity (or if you're using lossy compression more artifacts). With the exception of the rare times I'm at my mums house, I don't actually blink an eye at a 20gb download these days, due to the increasing ease of access to high speed net connections. In fact, it is often faster for me now to queue up a game to download through Steam than it is for me to find and install it from the disc.

P.S
STO is only 10.6GB at the moment. It's 20 if you've got the Tribble client installed :P
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F9thIntercity125
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Re: MMORPG Annoyances

Post by F9thIntercity125 » Tue Jun 11, 2013 8:14 am

Animaiacs --> go to Youtube. It's all there :D


Anime --> website called Animefreak if I remember correctly :D



Games --> The shops :P


And this has annoyed me:
PS4 is $399... that's about £250. Yet the PS4 is going to cost £349 here. WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL? :evil:
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SideSwipe9th
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Re: MMORPG Annoyances

Post by SideSwipe9th » Tue Jun 11, 2013 12:17 pm

Intercity125 wrote:Animaiacs --> go to Youtube. It's all there :D


Anime --> website called Animefreak if I remember correctly :D


And this has annoyed me:
PS4 is $399... that's about £250. Yet the PS4 is going to cost £349 here. WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL? :evil:
Animaniacs - for the longest damn time there was 20+ episodes missing as Warner hadn't bothered to release the final DVD set, though it seems they finally rectified that back in February.

Anime - Yeah, there's a strew of different websites available. It annoys me thought that I must become a pirate to watch a significant portion of it.

As for the price difference, yeah that's pretty normal. There was never going to be parity pricing, and additional transport and marketing costs do need to be factored in. Still annoying though. However the console is supposedly region free, so there may be a cheap grey market import area to exploit. :)
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Re: MMORPG Annoyances

Post by F9thIntercity125 » Tue Jun 11, 2013 12:20 pm

I didn't know that! I must say, I was a microsoft lover for ages, but since Windows 8 I have liked them less and less, and yesterday I was laughing at how GT6 + PS3 obliterated FM5 + Xbox One. Plus, I think the whole sharing policy on Xbox is pathetic.
Speaking about DRM yesterday, it looks like PS4 will not have any games that are locked in any which way! :mrgreen:
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