Re: MMORPG Annoyances
Posted: Mon Jun 10, 2013 11:39 pm
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.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
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.
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.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!
P.S
STO is only 10.6GB at the moment. It's 20 if you've got the Tribble client installed