All Posts by eric_w66

Hehe, that's the problem, I'm not young anymore, and I've forgotten how to do the easy stuff LOL. I have a super fancy computer and a super fancy calculator, but I can barely remember how to do this stuff.

Originally posted by Nasica

 

Originally posted by eric_w66

On toll roads, the vehicles that make the roads more costly to maintain pay more.

If the "free" bandwidth for all thing was legit (and the business model supposed to stand up to it), businesses wouldn't need to buy business versions (which cost more for less). There's a reason why most ISP's don't want you to host websites on  your PC's, too much bandwidth.

If 95% of the people got a discount off their bill by not using "X" amount of bandwidth, and 5% had to pay more, how is that punishing the 95%?

I certainly don't hit anywhere near the bandwidth some people use, and I shouldn't have to have my rates get jacked up over and over because of a few people who *for whatever reason* use too much.

I'm not saying anything about the legalities of movie downloading, or music or whatever. Its just if you use 500 GB a month, and 19 people who use 26 GB a month, why should the 19 have to pay more for the 1?

The 19 shouldnt have to pay for the 1, but the one should also be able to pay for what he uses. If they want to create ultra-cheap plans to cater for the minimal internet user, im all for that, free markets and all that.

 

But the person who wishes to use the 500gb a month should be able to use it without being shunned by their provider.

Optusnet, an Australian provider, had an interesting solution to this problem. They used what they called the netstat method. they take the average bandwidth usage of their user base excluding the top 10% and bottom 10% and made that the daily(i believe) limit for the following day, unfortunatly the fact that they no longer support it further strengthens my argument that its all about keeping dividends up and not about the user base at all.

 EDIT as for toll roads, trucks pay more as they cause more damage to the road, nothing to do with their frequency of usage. On that same argument electrons do not damage routers or fibre.

Just remember everyone, that your ISP pays for the bandwidth it uses, so it does cost them more to have people who download a lot. Now, I'm sure in the past, that they made more than enough money to cover all their residential bandwidth costs. But with rising costs, and increased usage, that's probably not the case anymore. Those 5% of people are taking a too large a bite out of the profits to sustain the flat monthly fee thing. Sure, its all about money, but I don't think we want to go back to Soviet Russia style internet access .

The toll road comment was a relation between the "damage" (cost) to the road of the big rigs, and the "cost" (higher bandwidth bills for your ISP) of heavy bandwidth usage.

On toll roads, the vehicles that make the roads more costly to maintain pay more.

If the "free" bandwidth for all thing was legit (and the business model supposed to stand up to it), businesses wouldn't need to buy business versions (which cost more for less). There's a reason why most ISP's don't want you to host websites on  your PC's, too much bandwidth.

If 95% of the people got a discount off their bill by not using "X" amount of bandwidth, and 5% had to pay more, how is that punishing the 95%?

I certainly don't hit anywhere near the bandwidth some people use, and I shouldn't have to have my rates get jacked up over and over because of a few people who *for whatever reason* use too much.

I'm not saying anything about the legalities of movie downloading, or music or whatever. Its just if you use 500 GB a month, and 19 people who use 26 GB a month, why should the 19 have to pay more for the 1?

Sure, there's legit reasons for it, but if you're incurring more costs to the provider than 95% of the rest, shouldn't the provider be able to home in on those people? Some people might be costing more than the monthly fee in bandwidth alone.

Well, if TW does it right, I have no problem with it.

They say 5% of the people generate 50% of the bandwidth. THOSE people need to pay more, and the rest of us need to pay LESS. (TW still has to pay bandwidth bills themselves, so it isn't 'free' for them to have people downloading tons of movies).

So, if you like to download lots of illegal movies,  you might have to pay more, if you don't, you'll pay less.

Now, I know TW, so that 'pay less'  won't happen, but 'pay the same' should.

So the only thing I can really do is just check the signs of the x and y coords to find the quadrant and work it from there? Poopy, I hate inelegant solutions like that :).

I wanted some clean way to come up with the 276 :).

I'm 20ish years removed from trig, so I've forgotten most of what I knew.

I've searched the net, but can't find a "simple" answer, everything I've found deals with problems more complicated than mine...

All I need to do is to be able to find the angle to a specific point on a grid.

For instance, the angle to (5, 5) is 45 degrees. I can do that.  acos(5 / sqrt(5*5 + 5*5)) / (2pi) * 360.

And the angle to (2, 20) is acos(2 / sqrt(2 * 2 + 20 * 20)) / (2pi) * 360 = 84 degrees.

But... my problem comes in when I want to find, say, (2, -20). I still come up with 84 degrees.

What am I overlooking (something with signs I'm sure)?

Thanks in advance.

My wish is that you'd get to BE your class all the way through the levels 1-20.

Having every class be the same for 5 levels and then being a "gimped" version of your future self (not learning about your class but your archetype...) for the next 15.. meh.

I hope they've changed that.

The grief potential for WW2 is much higher than WoW or even Eve.

Having the ability to constantly make new trial accounts to grief the enemy would be crippling.  Not everyone would do it of course, but enough would.

Only a nooblet wouldn't know what a MUD is!    

Multi-User Dungeon (or Dimension). Text based games with multiple players online.

In other words, the birthplace of MMORPG's. Just without graphics and sound. And frankly, I find gameplay to trump graphics and sound, so I've played (and helped build) MUD's with better gameplay than most MMORPG's :).

There's a lot of varieties of them, MUD's being the basic. MOO's (Mud, Object Oriented), MUSH (Multi-User Shared Habitat/Hallucination/H*, MUSE (Multi-User Simulated Environment), etc. EQ1 was based off the Diku-MUD engine, the crappiest MUD engine, LPMud/MudOS engines were/are far superior.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD

One of my old favorites where I used to be a "wiz"  (coder) at is still running:

www.3k.org

Crafting, Class Removal and City Sieging

http://news.curse.com/details/5568/

Raiding, Cheetah 2 and PvP

http://news.curse.com/details/5570/

I  suspect its still up in the air. The new stuff out today mentioned something about PvP using xp when you kill and losing xp when you die  (PvP xp), and that every so often the leaders would get a small ingame prize for being at the top.

If you think about it, these games can only reward "time spent/effort" as that is the only quantifiable stat they have to work with. You could kill 20 dudes in a row in spectacular style, but the game only sees "20 kills" and compares that to someone who plays non-stop all the time with 1000 kills in that same time period. Who's the better PvPer? The guy who kills more, or the guy who kills better? Its tough for the game to determine "better", so they just go with "more".

http://www.curse.com/articles/details/5570/

"PvP will take place in several different ways in Age of Conan with not only the border kingdom, massive city sieges and tower capturing, but also in the form of instanced PvP matches between smaller numbers of players. The PvP match we took part in during the gathering was one fairly similar to World of Warcraft's Warsong Gulch, though this was stylized heavily toward Stygian architecture. The gameplay itself involves battling it out with the other team in an 8 player, 4-vs.-4 format where you have 10 minutes to win the match completely, of which involves capturing the other team's flag three times before they capture yours the same number. There will also be a Team Deathmatch type of instanced PvP, both with Ranked or Skirmish options. In Ranked matches, dying means you lose "PvP experience," as Evan Michaels put it.

Gaute Godager added that there will be multiple tiers of ranks which players can attain, though because of the PvP EXP loss for dying, only the best of the best will be able to reach the highest ranks -- making it something that is truly an accomplishment. During Funcom's internal testing of the ranking system, they've noticed that it's popular to gun for the highest ranked players to see if they can be knocked off of their pedestal. Being ranked fairly high will be quite lucrative as well, with access to unique PvP-based items being granted. "

I hope so, as if it is limited to one keep, period, a guild would have to be supremely confident in their ability to hold their BK keep or face a giant loss of resources. Makes you wonder if there is a seperate ability planned to "recall" to your guilds BK keep if they have one as well.

Yeah, I get the vista crap and video memory things too.

I can't justify buying a new video card for a minimal gain in performance for one game. Once video cards start having 2GB as normal and are 5 times as fast as now,  I'll think about upgrading.

Harvesting
- there’re 4 basic resources
- every resource is available in (6-8) different tiers (bronze, iron …)
- if you’re harvesting resources, there’s always the chance of finding rare resources of that specific resource you’re harvesting
- resources will be shown on (mini) map
- most resources will be found in the three guild city zones (only few resource spots in the rest of the world)

I'm .... worried... about this part. As someone who loves building stuff, harvesting/mining, and exploring, I have a couple of concerns:

These "guild keep zones" as the sole provider of mats, sounds like a lot of competition for them, even if they are instanced. And not very exciting either.

More worriesome though,  is this an open PvP zone? I know the borderlands with the keeps are, but is this the same ruleset as the guild keep zone? And I thought I'd read that if you wanted a BorderLand Keep, you couldn't have a guild keep elsewhere? (talk about limiting).

Heh, fancier versions of what I used to see as a "wiz" on MUD's back in the early 90's.

The logs would log kills that provided xp over a certain amount (the big tough monsters) and the time they were killed and by who, etc, plus they'd average out people's xp gain over time to look for the "oddballs".

Then you'd shadow them and watch them play...

And if they cheated, and you were an admin, you hit the banstick.  Usually with a giant wall of chat spam, often showing text pictures of a nuke explosion or something else nasty, warning the rest of the MUD what happens to cheaters. If you were only a "wiz", then you might log it to the server, or have an admin shadow them for a while too to observe them (and then the big nuke....).

http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/21046

My poor druid... sniff.. I don't want to be a snake worshipper.

Not my video, I used the link from the "Character Creation" thread.

My poor druid :(.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3PW1Ya-YuE

Note the beginning character creation class choices.

Originally posted by Terminus-Est

 

Originally posted by TedDanson

GG Funcom

 

Excuse my lack of internat savy, but what does 'GG' stand for?

"Good game", typically uttered after a map of a FPS has ended, people say "GG" to each other if the map was fun (or even if it was a lopsided slaughter...).

"Good going", typically used sarcastically, as a way of saying "Gee, thanks for smacking in the face and telling me to like it."

In this instance, I believe "GG Funcom" is a sarcastic response to the issue of the two classes being removed, kinda like an internet "golfclap".