LurkNautili

Actually, you know what. Since I don't think you're very good at presenting a cogent argument, I'll do you a solid. I've played devil's advocate for this side, now I'll present a better case from your point of view. The one cogent argument you've made, is that doing DAC versus doing a non-transferable subscription based model, is that the former will probably have a lower barrier for people to use their money to gain influence in game. That's what you should focus on if you want to convince people. Does this effect (more paying for resources) translate to more pay-to-win, and does the cost of that outweigh the benefits (devs get more money, have to spend less on policing, and so on)? Well, let's see what we've got. On the DAC side: Pros: Developers get the revenue from wealthy people buying in-game resources Developers don't have to spend resources like development time on defeating means of people using their money to gain resources As I've shown, it's not possible to completely remove this outside influence, as people can always just pay people to play for their org and legitimately create resources for them. You might say this doesn't apply to single persons, but a dictatorial org effectively is one person wielding all the resources. Cons: Even honest people with money can buy resources, which might be socially acceptable (more on this later). I'd predict at least a 2/4-fold increase in flow of real money into in-game money (might be generous, but let's just stick with that for the sake of argument) Legitimizing this mechanism might make it less frowned upon by the community (kind of the same con, but I wanted another bulletin point) On the non-transferable/non-liquifiable subscription model side: Pros: Probably reduces the amount of flow to some fraction Enables enforcement of ban on real world influence with money, based on TOS Cons: Enforcement only applies to cases that are detectable and don't exploit obvious, easy loopholes I've mentioned Creates a black market for unsanctioned trading of in-game resources outside the game -> revenue leaves the game, we get less features because devs get less money (only from subs used for playtime, not ones bought to use as currency) In summary, I think DAC overall is better, but I'll also posit that neither model completely addresses the issue of pay-to-win -- they both miss the mark. Let's examine the dynamics of what makes pay-to-win possible. The more the game is set out to be a competitive environment, the more mechanics we have that pit players against each other, the more incentive there will be to pay for in-game advantages. Conversely, the more gameplay revolves around co-operation, the less need people will have to seek an advantage over one another or pay-to-win. In other words, what do we consider "winning"? If I win by making you lose, "pay-to-win" (in the anal discomfort inducing sense) becomes possible. Also, it kind of depends on how you gain an in-game advantage. We need to promote mechanisms that are not achievable through resources that you can acquire with real money. How you actually reach these goals is a super complex topic. You could discuss things like not having a monetary system in game at all, somehow simulating a post-scarcity society a la Iain M. Banks' Culture society... But we might be too set in our ways and fixated on our money-based world view for this to be possible. Again, really tough to come up with workable models.

Even harder when your counterpart is incapable of deductive reasoning. No, it is not the point I was trying to make. The point I was trying to get across that every game that has resources, exchange and competition, will always to some extent be pay-to-win, and it is inescapable. There will always be some way of paying somebody to gain an edge. All you can do is try to minimize it, incentivize against it and provide alternatives to level the playing field. Strawman. Then I can't affirmatively comment on it, but I will say that this leads me to believe your method of determining what's pay-to-win is biased and you've failed to identify the game as such. Or alternatively, the mechanics/balance of power aren't as you assert. But again, I'm not an authority on the game and hence this branch of the conversation is a dead end. Riddle me this: what's stopping me from paying someone cash money, dolla dolla bills to give me one of those sick-ass ships? These cats knew what they were talking about. With this bullshit status quo we've got to settle with for now, it's the green that makes the world go round. And this has completely thwarted cheating, and doping isn't an actual thing and I've just dreamed up all this corruption in virtually every facet of the sporting world? Ok, cool, I guess you win then. *laughs out loud* Seriously, man? Get real xD I've never met anyone with glasses that rose tinted... Jokes aside, you probably intend something like "Oh but they get caught and the system works and punishments are dealt" etc. etc. But none of that matters. Sure, people might get caught, sometimes we figure it out soon-ish, often only several years later. Point is, people cheat, and however temporal and transient, they still PAY to WIN, even if just for a moment. And that's all that matters to them, and to this conversation.

Which is it? You've got to make up your mind. I'm not sure if you're ignoring the point on purpose or if you misread what I wrote. In either case, I won't repeat myself. I just explained to you how you can do it without getting caught, therefore this point is moot. I'll preface this by saying I haven't played ED, and I'm not very familiar with its mechanics. However, I asked around, and apparently there isn't much to be gained by paying in ED, and the progression is mostly lateral, as opposed to vertical (amassing wealth and power). A bigger ship isn't a difference in power, it's a difference in kind/style. As for your son, I haven't the slightest. Presumably, he doesn't play at a high enough level for there to be enough competitive incentive to cheat. However, if you look at a more reasonable example of professional sports with big money involved or other compelling reasons to seek an advantage, people cheat bribe and especially use illegal substances all the freaking time. Your example kind of defeats itself.

Can you give an example of a game that has resources, ownership of some kind, and a means of transfering those resources between players, and is not pay-to-win? Your pre-PLEX EvE example doesn't work. At best, disallowing real world trading (to borrow the Runescape term) is a hindrance (but there will always be ways around any detection system, report system, whatever -- it's a cat and mouse game like virus scanning, hack-antihack, etc. and it cannot be solved), and at worst it does nothing but waste developer time (you have to screen reports, comb through logs, develop fluky, heuristic detection algorithms, etc.) In the end, the best, sneakiest and most successful corporations will simply be doing it without you even knowing about it. Example: instead of buying ships offline in some obvious manner where resources trade hands in an obviously imbalanced fashion, they could just pay people to play the game under their corporation, and they'd just be regular members funneling in resources through legitimate means. And yet on the corporate level, they're buying -- to win! The model you're proposing is mathematically impossible, intractable, completely futile. It cannot be done. So long as the real world is ruled by money, you'll be able to pay someone to win at a game. This mainly applies to games with persistence, with resources, and with stats. In games like CS:GO, you won't see the problem to the same extent, because the only real resource is skill, and to a lesser degree rank. The problem still manifests in a different form, however. In CS, you can pay someone to boost your rank (completely twisted way of looking at ELO, but our world warps our psychology in many F'd up ways), or you can pay someone to make cheats for you, to essentially "buy skill". No way around it. No permanent solution. You want to get rid of pay-to-win? Get rid of money, bring about world peace, transition to a post-scarcity, egalitarian society. Basically make utopia happen, and then we can have true equality. Until then, you're chasing your tail, and wasting your breath. Sorry =/

It's kind of painful reading the docs on that tech. It's so bloated with Microsoft-speak and jargon, to a degree that doesn't seem entirely necessary (but that's MS for ya I guess). Their introductory page seems like 10% technical explanation and examples and 90% marketing spiel. Regardless, I guess the gist of it is that you break a problem down into some small components that can be replicated, like their example of thousands of user profiles or databases or whatever (in your hypothetical example, regions of space). So basically you delegate the responsibility of distributing the load evenly (and densely) on server hardware, instead of designing that by hand, which means you just have to design the server program in a more granular way (broken up into these "service" things). That's cool and all, but it leaves many questions unanswered. I'm also not too happy about how the effectively black box of the server fabric technology obscures implementation details (and hence makes the kind of estimation of efficiency and feasibility kind of difficult, as far as I can tell). Given all that, how would you design the actual inter-region communications? Do they all talk to eachother directly? Do they only talk to adjacent regions? How do you deal with network delay between regions if they're not geographically adjacent in real life? Best I can think of is a thing where you do the octree division thing to figure out which clients will be in the same region (cell as NQ calls them), figure out which of their server locations is closest to the center of the clients' geographic locations (ping-wise, in a least squares sense), and assign a node from that cluster to them. Then the avatars closest to you in the game world would have, on average, as low a ping as possible. But things then get more complicated if you want to minimize the distances between the chosen geographic locations for nodes for adjacent regions... given a completely random geographic distribution of connected clients. You seem to be much more informed on these sorts of problems in practice with typical solutions -- what would you propose? Holy shit that's actually a thing? So at least a bare-bones version of this is technically feasible? That does make me... somewhat less nervous. Time to read up on them next, I suppose.

I don't have the same kind of experience with networking architectures, but I guess you could call what I posted in the Q&A thread speculation, in the form of questions. In case we don't get official answers by the time the campaign ends, how feasible would you speculate this hypothetical architecture is in practice? I'm skeptical myself, and my gut feeling is that the project is more likely to fail than succeed, but I'm tempted to back it anyway, to some extent. I'm not sure I understand a couple parts of your post. Firstly, what kind of other overhead are you counting in for the GbE ports? 200*5KB/s only accounts for about 1% of the total throughput, right? Secondly, could you elaborate on how the Azure type system works, specifically in terms of inter-cell connectivity and optimizing geographically disperse clients' connections? The model I hypothesized in my other post would have clients in the same world-region (leaf of the space dividing tree) would be connected to the same physical hardware server, but would it be smarter if what we see in the demo video of this is just a logical division of avatars in space and they're actually connected on a client-by-client basis to physically proximal server hardware? As I said, I've no clue what I'm talking about when it comes to "smarter" networking with load balancing and such, I've never looked into it and it might just be way over my head. P.S. FYI - not a dev (by trade, anyway)

I totally understand his frustration, personally. I'm noticing a tendency on this forum of people answering questions they don't actually know the answers to. That said, I'm currently pledged under the assumption that these peoples' claim is correct (it is the done thing, and as such a reasonable interpretation), and I'm feeling more secure in that assumption than e.g. technical feasibility and some other concerns, which I'm hoping to see resolved before the campaign ends, as I'm still kind of on the fence about backing this project. But until we actually hear from devs, I'm not taking any assumption for granted.

I'm all for it. Just like fall damage, collision damage is an essential part of an immersive experience. To the naysayers: without knowing full details of their implementation, you can't say whether their system can or cannot handle the overhead, or whether they can or cannot come up with workarounds for apparent dead-ends. Take the whole single-shard model for instance. If I told you we could make a game like that before you knew about the model created by NQ, you'd have called me an idiot. I shall reserve judgement until we get further details and perhaps more dialogue with NQ. I urge you to do the same.

In no particular order, games with at least... I dunno, 50 hours? Minecraft Global Agenda ROSE Online APB Counter-Strike ArmA 3 Planetside 2 Robocraft Space Engineers DotA 2 Firefall 7 Days to Die DayZ SourceForts Dystopia America's Army Fallen Earth TA: Spring GunZ: The Duel . . . Just to name a few of the top of my head... Hard to think of some of the older ones and ones that aren't on Steam.

Yeah, apologies for the triple post. I was confused by the fact that the messages were pending approval. Not realizing it, I assumed I had a script blocked or something and made several attempts to post the message, until the last one where it dawned on me that now all of the posts were pending approval, without any means of retracting those posts. The first one is what I intended anyways, now I just need to figure out how to remove the excess ones.

<accidental triple post, please remove>

<accidental triple post, please remove>

653155€