Originally posted by Precusor
 Alienware customizations is pretty good now.

No, they're not.  They don't even tell you what power supply or motherboard they'll use, let alone allow you to choose.  Nor do they even offer the standard option of a small SSD together with a large hard drive.

Originally posted by tinywulf

I actually am running a GTX590 and have never had problems cooling it, but then again I have been self building and overclocking for years.

How do you know that you haven't had any problems cooling it?  Have you tried measuring the VRM temperatures?  That's what fried on the cards that didn't survive the review, not the GPUs.

Unless either you took off the stock cooler in favor of a waterblock, have never played anything that pushed the card very hard, or have the ambient temperature in your case far below what most would consider room temperature, you've had more trouble with cooling the card than you think.

So long as you don't get carried away with a ridiculous overclock, any single-GPU video card that you want to run should be fine with your current system.

Definitely don't get a GeForce GTX 590.  That's two GF110 chips in SLI, not a single GPU card, so synthetics that scale flawlessly with SLI will greatly exaggerate the card's gaming prowess.  It's also an awful card, as it's unsafe even at stock speeds with an excellent case and power supply.  The existence of the card was a failed publicity stunt, and several of the cards didn't even survive the review process.

Don't get a 4 GB version of a GeForce GTX 670, either.  Or at least, don't pay $450 for one.  If you want more than 2 GB of video memory, then get a 3 GB version of a Radeon HD 7950 or 7970, since you can get those without paying outlandish prices for low-volume parts.

Really, though, you could justify buying a Radeon HD 7950 or 7970 or a GeForce GTX 670 and sticking it in your current system.

Exactly what power supply do you have, and what case?

The nearest modern equivalent to a GeForce GTX 650 is perhaps a Radeon HD 7790.  I'd generally advise against upgrading unless you double the performance of your old card.  That would put you roughly into Radeon HD 7950 or GeForce GTX 670 territory, so if you're going to upgrade, you should plan on spending $300+.

Originally posted by Daranar

Originally posted by KingGator

 

For the record no one is going to make a game without a profit motive see, that is how the world works, it is why people do anything. No profit, no game, period, end of story. They don't owe you a game. They're providing a service you can compensate them for it and the service will continue, or you can not and the service will be cancelled. 

 

Reading these boards and people whining about greedy devs drives me freaking mad. Subs are the way to go. If you can't afford a sub you shouldn't be playing, you should be working a second job. :)

I would like to disagree with the first part, in particular the highlighted section.   Musicians make music without a profit motive.   I do everyday.  I spend more money in gas than I receive in payment for shows quite often because I love the art I do.  I love providing an art that some deeply enjoy.   I understand a solo musician is much different than a company developing a game.   But I disagree that profit is the only thing driving creation.   I also know and accept that my mind lives in a fantasy "perfect world", I just wish game designers would retain the artist within.

You can do something on a $1000 budget without a profit motive.  $10 million?  That's rather harder, as the only real way to pull that off is to convince people that you're a worthwhile charity or an important government project.

Originally posted by Nikbeezy

Originally posted by Quizzical
Where are you buying stuff from?  Could you give exact links?  $800 without an OS seems too high.

I posted exact links for you.

Thanks.  Fortunately, it should be easy to bring that price tag way down without giving up much--and that would make room for more good stuff.

I don't see any plausible reason to get an enterprise hard drive for consumer use.  While that's not a bad case for a bigger budget, when you're trying to cut back, you could go with something cheaper, like this combo deal:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1303961

That would save you $83 right there.  You can get an equivalent optical drive for $7 cheaper, too:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827106289

That would make room to actually buy an OS license, or perhaps an SSD if you've already got the OS covered legally.

I'd also get a better power supply, which could even save you money:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151096

Or you could spend more for something nicer:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151119

While it would be easy to have software create lines and red dots if you wanted to, if it does that when it's not supposed to, then yeah, that usually means the video card is dying.

That's too much to pay for that particular card.  That's a lot more expensive than the Radeon HD 7850 that I linked earlier:  $26.60 before rebate or $31.60 after rebate.  And the Radeon HD 7850 is a faster card, too.

If it's video memory capacity that you're looking at, then you should be aware that the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost mismatches the memory channels.  It should have been a 1.5 GB card, as if you use more than that, you lose memory bandwidth.  But AMD had a 2 GB version of the Radeon HD 7850, so Nvidia stuck an extra 512 MB on their card for reasons of marketing rather than engineering.

And if you are willing to pay more for a faster card with more video memory, then a 2 GB version of a Radeon HD 7870 is the way to go:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202025

That's a much faster card, on top of letting you use the full 2 GB of video memory.

You should realize that the only real advantage of 2 GB of video memory rather than 1 GB is that it will let you use higher resolution textures in games with a high resolution texture pack.

Originally posted by kudzukid

one last question. Ive never had a SSD, So i should install the OS and my games on the SSD or would it be better to have OS and games on different drives?

thanks

The only reason to put anything on the hard drive is to leave more free space on the SSD for other, more important things.  Also, it is desirable to leave at least about 1/4 of the space on the SSD free.  This isn't a hard rule, so don't worry that you're going to fry things if you use 80% or 90% of the SSD space, but don't put stuff on the SSD just because there's room.

You want to put anything that will do a lot of small reads and writes on the SSD.  That includes the OS, as well as any games that you play a lot.  It also includes many other programs if you use them a lot, especially web browsers.

Large data files that will generally only be accessed one at a time, such as videos, music, or pictures, do not benefit from the speed of an SSD, so you put them on the hard drive to free up space on the SSD.  Anything that you don't want to delete but rarely to never access can also go on the hard drive to free up space on the SSD.

Solid state drives are so fast that even if several things at once want to read data off of the SSD, it usually doesn't matter.  Don't worry about overwhelming an SSD with too many reads; about the only way to really push the read capabilities of an SSD is with synthetic benchmarks.  That's nearly true of writes as well, though you can wear out an SSD with excessive writes.  This isn't a serious concern with a typical consumer workload on an MLC drive, however; if you were to wipe your SSD and then completely fill it up once per day every single day, you'd probably get about 8 years of life or so before you wore it out from excessive writes.

Originally posted by TheScavenger
Can you recommend any graphics cards that are in the 150 dollar range? Mine one that looks to be dead is a Geforce 260GTX 896MB...but any out there in that price range, that are better?  Mine was like 500 when I got it, but with how fast PC hardware ages...my dad imagines I can get something better than my current one, but cheaper. If that makes sense.

The GeForce GTX 260 was something like $450 at launch, and then $300 two months later when AMD launched the Radeon HD 4870 and it was better than most people expected.  And it was under $150 a year later after AMD started a price war and Nvidia had to sell probably at a loss to clear inventory.

Anyway, the nearest modern equivalents are a GeForce GTX 650 or a Radeon HD 7750, either of which are around $100.  On a strict $150 budget, I'd go with a Radeon HD 7790:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161434

If you're willing to go a few dollars over that budget, you can get a Radeon HD 7850, which would roughly double the performance of your old card:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202004

Even implementing a feature in a single player game and then implementing the "same" feature in an MMORPG can easily be vastly harder to do in the latter.

Let's suppose that you want to implement a kill ten rats quest, for example.  In a single player game, this is easy enough to do.  You make rats spawn when a player gets moderately close, and then you count when they die.  When ten rats die, the quest is completed.

Now let's suppose that you want to do the same in an MMORPG, and in an open area of the world rather than a private instance.  You can't just have rats spawn when the player gets kind of close.  Otherwise, you could be fighting rats and then have a bunch more spawn on top of you when someone else comes by.  But you can't make it so that rats only spawn for the first player to come close, or else he could kill them all and stay there and make it impossible for anyone else to do the quest.

You know the solution to this, of course:  you make rats spawn on their own timers regardless of which players are around.  But then you have to keep track of mobs all over a server.  You get the problem of rats spawning on top of you--sometimes unexpectedly if someone had killed them and you didn't realize that they were there.  Keeping track of when to make various mobs spawn and having to track mobs all across the game world at all times rather than just the area the player is in adds some complexity.

And then there's still the question of how fast rats should respawn.  Make them respawn too fast and players can quickly get overwhelmed by being attacked by respawning rats and the quest is unreasonably difficult.  Make rats respawn too slowly and players spend a good chunk of their time standing around waiting for rats to respawn, which isn't fun.  The ideal rate at which rats respawn should depend on how densely populated your game world is.

But the population density of a given zone varies wildly.  During peak times, you have far more players online than in the middle of the night.  As a game has been out for a while, you end up with a higher proportion of your players in higher level areas, leaving lower level areas far less populated than they used to be.  If players discover that farming rats gives 5% better loot than same-level alternatives, you may end up with vastly more players in that particular area than if farming rats gave 5% worse loot than the alternatives.

In an MMORPG, there's also the issue of who killed the rats.  Surely the kill ten rats quest shouldn't be completed if you wait in town for ten rats to die somewhere on the server.  But what if you do half of the damage to kill a rat?  Should you get credit for killing it?  How about 10% of the damage?  90%?  Should it matter if you did the first hit?

What if other damage was done by someone else in your group?  If you're standing right next to him, maybe you should get credit, but what if you're halfway across the map?  Surely you don't want to make it so that five players can form a group, go quest independently, and get credit for five quests in the time they personally do only one.

And what if you're grouped with players of wildly different levels from your own?  If you go to an area where mobs could one-shot you, but group with a higher level who can kill them, should you get massive loot for it?  Should the higher level get normal loot as if he were solo, or should being in a group modify it?  What if the group is for content of the level of the lower level player?  Should having the higher level around heavily nerf the loot you get?

Furthermore, you can't just answer all of these questions with an eye toward saying, go do whatever you want and you'll get plenty of loot.  If you make it possible to get massively more loot by doing some crazy grouping scenario, players will figure it out and heavily abuse it.  In fact, players who want to just play the game will get mad at you for giving them far less loot than players who abuse the leveling system by doing something stupid and not fun.

And that's just for a kill ten rats quest, which is relatively easy to do and a staple of MMORPG design.  If you want to do something more complicated, the complexity only goes up from there.

Originally posted by Shadowguy64
People who use terms like "greedy companies" are usually college students or younger who haven't had to work for a living. They think they have all the answers and everything should cost 5 cents.

While many of the people who complain that companies are greedy are themselves greedy customers who want everything for free, that's not what the original post is about.  Rather, he's asking why newer games need so many more customers than some of the early MMORPGs did in order to make a profit.

Originally posted by Iselin

But when you're dealing with investors who could invest in anything, and the value of your company depends on that, return on investment trumps profitability. This is what leads to all kinds of counterintuitive actions when a company that made $500 mil profit last quarter makes "only" $300 mil the next quarter and their stock prices go down and they layoff workers.

If you're an investor and you think that one company is going to make $500 million in revenue per quarter in the foreseeable future and another is only going to make $300 million, then all else equal, you should think that the former company is worth a lot more than the latter.

Originally posted by Daranar

I understand what you say about expenses.  But seeing the #s and estimated revenue for Everquest, they clearly did not spend $300 million on development.   So why with significantly less budget, was Everquest able to create a much larger, in depth world capable of sustaining players for significantly longer than SWTOR?  Are developers focusing on the wrong features?  Does spending millions on VOers really pay off?  Are games simply mismanaged in development?   

 

Sure there are multiple business models, all of which should theoretically be expanded on the original model UO, AC and EQ had.   If this is the case, should these models not be more efficient?  Should they not be capable of producing large revenues from smaller customer bases?   If not, they certainly should be capable of producing more profit, or else it would be insanity to use these newer models.

Estimates are that EverQuest spent $8 million before launch, while SWTOR spent $300 million, with EA buying Bioware accounting for some portion of the latter number.  If you're comparing EverQuest today to SWTOR today, then it's not a fair comparison on content amounts, as EverQuest has had many years and a ton of expansions to add stuff later.

Game world size isn't a good measure of anything other than how big the developers thought a game world should be.  It's fairly trivial to make an enormous game world on a shoestring budget if you're willing to have the game world not have all that much variety in it.  See A Tale in the Desert, for example, where it takes about 5 hours to run from the north edge of the map to the south edge.

If you want employees to make a model, write a quest, or whatever, and then stick it in the game even if it's mediocre and move on, that's a lot cheaper per model or quest than if you want them to redo things several times to polish it.  If most models and quests are copied and pasted from another model with only a handful of changes, then that's vastly cheaper than if every model and quest has to do a lot more work from scratch.  To take an extreme example, I'll bet that Guild Wars 2 spent far more money on development per dynamic event than Pirates of the Burning Sea spent per land-based quest.

First, expenses matter as much as revenue.  SWTOR's revenue would have made the game a colossal success if the game had cost $10 million to make.  At $300 million, not so much.

Second, what matters is revenue, not player numbers.  If you charge a subscription fee of $15/month and have 200 thousand players, you get more revenue than if you have an item mall that brings in $2/month per player and have 1 million players.  Remember that in a typical "free to play" item mall game, something like 80% of players will never pay a dime.  That said, there are many wildly different business models that are marketed as "free to play", and revenue per player varies wildly from one to the next.

When you have more systems designed by more people having to interact with each other in more--and often unforeseen--ways, you have vastly more things that can possibly go wrong.  That tends to mean that more things will go wrong, which leads to the impression that the game is less polished.

So we're left with a choice between a simpler game where you can't do nearly as much versus a game that seems less polished.  Does preferring the latter mean accepting lower quality work from MMO developers?  If so, then there's your answer.

And why would any game developer want to make your game when he has ideas of his own that he likes better than yours?  Even if he loved your initial ideas and did start making your game, he'd surely soon run into many situations where he wanted to do something different from what you had in mind, and then he'd do what he wanted, not what you wanted.

If you want your game to ever be made, you have two options:

1)  Make it yourself.  This is only practical if both you're seriously talented and your game can be made on a shoestring budget.

2)  Get rich and then hire other people to make it for you.

If you want anything remotely similar to your game to be made, then the best thing to do is to get your ideas in front of as many people as you can, whether game developers or otherwise.  Maybe someone here will read it, like a few elements, and post them as his own ideas elsewhere.  Maybe a few elements of your game will be included in some others as an eventual result.  Or maybe not (okay, probably not), but that's the most that you can hope for if you're not involved in either creating or funding the game yourself.  And no, sending a proposal to a game developer doesn't count as being involved in creating the game.

If you're looking to replace the whole system, I'd wait until you are ready to buy and then come back to ask again.  Prices bounce around a lot, and I think New Egg makes a good chunk of their profit off of people who buy something based on old information because it was a good deal the day that someone linked it and is no longer a good deal when someone sees the post a month later and buys it.

If two parts are equivalent except that one costs $80 today and the other costs $100 today, then you want the $80 part.  If their prices swap by the time you're ready to buy something in two weeks, then you want the part that is $80 the day you're ready to buy, not the part that was $80 now and would cost $100 then.

Originally posted by TheScavenger

Would this power supply you linked (I'll link it again)

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151119

 

Be good for a future, modern computer? For when I eventually upgrade? My dad is curious if you linked that one for just the system I have now, or if its good for newer computers too?

 

(edit: As for price range of a up to date PC, my dad said he probably expects something around the 1500 dollar range or so. Probably something like the latest, kinda opposite of what I said earlier today.)

$1500 would get you a fairly high end gaming rig.  Something modern that is roughly equivalent to what you have now would go for about $600.

So long as you continue to use a single video card and leave everything at stock speeds, that power supply should last you for many years to come.

Seasonic actually just launched their G series recently; the basic principle of it seems to be to deliver nearly as high of end of quality as some of their previous high end power supplies (X-series, then more recently Platinum) while bringing the cost down quite a bit.  The Seasonic G series also offers lower wattages, starting as low as 360 W; being able to get a high end power supply for a low power system (e.g., an office computer) for $60 rather than having to spend $200 to get a ridiculous 1000 W unit if you want high end quality is certainly a welcome development.

Remember that power supplies are based on physical components, not microchips, so they don't scale with anything similar to Moore's Law and have no notion of die shrinks.  Thus power supplies, like cases, can last a long time.

I see no reason to replace a Core i5-660 anytime soon unless either the CPU or the motherboard is damaged.  The processor is probably fine, as they're pretty resilient especially at stock speeds.  The motherboard is more of a concern.

Meanwhile, when you do upgrade to a new high end video card, it probably won't use that much power power than the GeForce GTX 260 that you have now.  At the high end, video cards are limited more by power consumption than die space, and that's going to be true further down the chain as well in future generations.  If you wanted to double your performance by getting, say, a Radeon HD 7850, it would actually use considerably less power than your current card.