EQ 'Next'

[Merusk]

This seems pointless, since I see no way to build a true 'gameplay ecosystem'. I can make something artistic in my little plot, sure, but you're not getting enough space to populate it with quests, factions, secrets, exploration, really building something "MMO-y".

You're not supposed to. It's for creating Points of Interest that the EQN devs will poach and use to build all that around in some fashion.  If there's dungeons, they'll be dev-created unless they allow modules like STO/ Neverwinter.

[Falconeer]

Quick overview of the crafting system. It's pretty much like any other crafting systems out there. I am just not sure about the altars, which are supposedly some randomly spawned uber crafting stations where you can craft things you can't craft in any other place. Dynamic, sure. Reasonable? We'll see.

[Stormwaltz]

System reqs announced for the Landmark beta. A 20GB install and requires a 10 MBps internet connection.

http://www.pcgamer.com/uk/2014/01/26/everquest-next-landmark-alpha-requires-beefy-net-connection-moderately-beefy-pc/

[calapine]

10Mbit/s upstream? 

[Falconeer]

I meet the requirements so I am gonna keep this civil, but 10 MBps connection? That's hardcore, and they probably should have mentioned that BEFORE selling those 59/99$ packages.

[Merusk]

Every generation needs a game that teaches you not to buy before you know the specs.

[Miasma]

That bandwidth has to be wrong, I technically meet that requirement but am completely at the mercy of a dozen different choke points/hops between me and SOE.

[palmer_eldritch]

They are offering full refunds to people who feel their PCs won't be able to run it. https://www.eqnlandmark.com/news/eqn-landmark-alpha-system-requirements-january-23-2014-eql

Presumably you can try to play even on a slower connection if you like and see what happens. I find it hard to believe the game actually won't work if your internet is slower than 10 mbit/s but who knows. Possibly the deformable world means the game streams large amounts of map/object data to clients?

[Threash]

I have zero interest in landmark, have they said anything else about the real game since the announcement?

[Venkman]

10mbit/s? The fuck? Have they given a rationale? Like, are they planning for each of us to host a chunk of the overall world? Is that common knowledge and I'm just catching up?

I'm well above that. And like Merusk said, don't buy before you know specs and all. But this is interesting. I don't want to think it's like when they thought people loved EQ enough to rush out to buy new hardware for what turned out to be a butt ugly game anyway. I figured they'd have long since learned from that.

[Falconeer]

Except you can't really buy a faster internet. In most cases, in most countries actually, 10MBps are just not an option. At all.

Way to make your game niche by default. Weird stuff.
That's too dramatic, but the point stands.

[Numtini]

The connection speed makes sense because with everyone being able to build, they can't store the locations in an art folder. They're going to have to stream all those giant penises to you.

[Stormwaltz]

My guess is that's it's a live, shared editing space, like what I worked with at ZOS, where everyone doing worldbuidling can see what everyone else is doing in real time. Except here, it's not over an internal network, it's over the internet.

If this is accurate - it may not be - it seems like a really dodgy/lazy design choice.

[Sky]

Not sure how else you could do it. Even in minecraft, you'd see people in adjacent chunks building away at stuff.

[Hawkbit]

In theory the design could have been made so if the owner is in the plot, then all modifications would happen after the owner leaves the plot, akin to instancing.  The 10mbs connection leads me to think we'll see people updating their plots on the fly.

I threw a tantrum when Oblivion came out because it released on DVD and I didn't have a player in my rig yet.  They "made" me go buy a DVD player.  :)

The 10mbs connection requirement feels like that, but on a whole new level.

[Paelos]

Elder Scrolls games have been the driving force behind 2 of my computer upgrades.

[pants]

I think Falconeer's point is appropriate.  My internet is currently 9MBps.  I can not get more - not even if I threw a million dollars per month at my local telco.  I'm too far away from the local DSLAM to get any faster than that on ADSL2+, and there are no other choices here (regional city in Australia).  If they stick to needing 10MBps, they are going to have severe problems with numbers.

[Megrim]

I was ever so vaguely interested in this, in a small and remote fashion. Then I saw the system specs. I believe the response was "ppffffffffftttttahahhahaha".

[WayAbvPar]

I have a great game idea, but you will need holodecks in your home.

What? You poors don't have holodecks? And you call yourself gamers...

[Ingmar]

They can't mean upstream, I don't think. 10 Mbps down is not completely absurd, but for upstream speed like that I would have to buy a business class connection.

[Draegan]

I have well above this with a simple fios package. I don't see the specs as too high. Maybe the high end of gamer average.

The internet requirements are kind strange though since this country Internet infrastructure is ass outside metro area.

[Ingmar]

I live in the heart of Silicon Valley. There is no FiOS here, so it isn't just non-metro areas that are a concern. Last I checked Uverse (AT&T) was 3 Mbps upstream and Xfinity (Comcast) was 5, for their top consumer packages available here. Download speeds are of course much faster, so if they only care about that, then it's not completely insane. I assume they must mean download.

[Merusk]

I have well above this with a simple fios package. I don't see the specs as too high. Maybe the high end of gamer average.

The internet requirements are kind strange though since this country Internet infrastructure is ass outside metro area.

This is the same argument that was made about D3 always on. We see how much the industry cared there.

No no. This is the new standard. Move to a "real" internet area or you need not apply.  I expect we'll continue to see more of this type of thing, possibly moving in to "free computing cycle" minimums to save the companies cash.

[Nija]

I live in the heart of Silicon Valley. There is no FiOS here, so it isn't just non-metro areas that are a concern. Last I checked Uverse (AT&T) was 3 Mbps upstream and Xfinity (Comcast) was 5, for their top consumer packages available here. Download speeds are of course much faster, so if they only care about that, then it's not completely insane. I assume they must mean download.

Comcast will give you 50/12 for ~$80/mo. (without phone or TV - cheaper if you bundle)

I have the same package, but business class (guaranteed bandwidth, no usage limit) for $110/mo.

I'm now 2 hours north of the bay area, but the same packages are available there.

Here's a 9:30pm speed test to a random shitbird ISP somewhat near me.

[Sky]

I just have the crap Time-Warner cable package, but since I upgraded to a DOCSIS 3 modem it's been fairly decent. Not FIOS, but consistently twice as fast as the creaky old modem TW gives you.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007IMPMW4/

But if I move a mile down the road, I'm on dial-up.

[CaptainNapkin]

I hope games don't start trending this way. I'm 1 mile from any real broadband service with Verizon, Comcast and ATT with all telling me there is no plan in the foreseeable future to extend service to my location. So I've been at the mercy of Clearwire, which has been decent enough for everything I do so far (streaming HD Netflix etc., gaming, Steam, Live) but I'm on living on the edge. While I might just squeak past the requirement for this, I'm sure my wife and myself playing at the same time would cripple us. Add to this the fact that future of my connection is entirely unknown since the purchase by Sprint. Luckily I don't care much about Landmark but Next does interest me and I hope it doesn't have similar requirements. I fear soon will be time to look into the pen and paper scene around here.

[PalmTrees]

I think I can get 10 up where I live. It's listed as an option on my company's terrible website, with a "Now Available" tag. No clue how much more it will cost, as their terrible website isn't listing prices. I'd have to go up  3 tiers though and I'm already at 55/mo on the lowest. I've never been constrained so any upgrade would be a de-facto subscription (proabaly much more than another 15/mo) for Landmark/Next so this is game's probably a no-go for me.

[Numtini]

Other things to contemplate. Is that 10mbps connection really being used up? If someone starts streaming a movie or dumps a big file into dropbox, will your game die? If someone else in the house plays are you really going to need that bandwidth? And what about customers that have very low data caps?

[Draegan]

All of the sudden the lots of land on the far end of the realm are my valuable. No one around you to fuck with your bandwith!

[Sky]

All of the sudden the lots of land on the far end of the realm are my valuable. No one around you to fuck with your bandwith!

Mirroring reality indeed (for cable networks, anyway).

[Signe]

My sister has the 50/25 package from Fios.  She got it for 2 years at 60-some dollars.  For a tenner more you can get 75/35 but we couldn't find a reason for that much.  Even with all the illustration and art work she uploads, it's more than enough.  I did the speed test and it came up 58/31.  How nice!  Having said that, the last place I lived (also Fios), with the package that was one notch down the speeds were usually 15/9 or less.  So as I may be fine now, but say I was moving back to Shad Thames in London... no way ever would I get anything close to even a third of that!

[palmer_eldritch]

Here's what I get in south London with BT Infinity, seeing as we're swapping numbers.

[Ingmar]

I live in the heart of Silicon Valley. There is no FiOS here, so it isn't just non-metro areas that are a concern. Last I checked Uverse (AT&T) was 3 Mbps upstream and Xfinity (Comcast) was 5, for their top consumer packages available here. Download speeds are of course much faster, so if they only care about that, then it's not completely insane. I assume they must mean download.

Comcast will give you 50/12 for ~$80/mo. (without phone or TV - cheaper if you bundle)

I have the same package, but business class (guaranteed bandwidth, no usage limit) for $110/mo.

I'm now 2 hours north of the bay area, but the same packages are available there.

Here's a 9:30pm speed test to a random shitbird ISP somewhat near me.

Yeah it looks like they upgraded the Burst! package to 10+ mid-last year. Still, I figure they must be talking downstream speed. Expecting people to have a $80+/month package would be a bit much.

[Signe]

Here's what I get in south London with BT Infinity, seeing as we're swapping numbers.

That's pretty awesome.  I did use a proxy to access American YouTube,  tv and films but even without that, my speed was abysmal.   I use a proxy now to access the BBC and other UK channels and stuff but it makes no impact at all from this direction as far as I can tell.  My biggest enemy with speed is my laptop.  For some reason it just slows up for no reason I can see.  I religiously disable processes I don't need, which helps a little, but it still slows up the longer I play a game.  Almost any game.  I just can't figure out why! 

[Venkman]

The connection speed makes sense because with everyone being able to build, they can't store the locations in an art folder.

Second Life didn't need 10mb d/l (I'll just assume SOE means download only) and that was 10 years ago.

How fast one user's build progress is visible to another user is a design choice. 10mbps assumes SOE chose realtime or nothing. Seems a pretty high bar to set. Either they'll relax it to broaden the userbase or they made some tech choices before they realized how it would impact that userbase.

Elder Scrolls games have been the driving force behind 2 of my computer upgrades.

But you likely only needed to worry about finances in those cases, not limitations in your regional infrastructure.

Bandwidth is not something a lot of people have choice over. When broadband companies talk about "choice", outside of the major metro centers, a lot of the time that "choice" is made at the municipal level (Comcast gets the west half of the city, Cox gets the east). Yay, "choice". But on paper only.

The last time I had any choice over broadband was back when I lived in Manhattan, and that was when 2mbps was considered top end. Since then it's all be "bend over and take it" with the one cable company in the area, or choose to not have broadband. And the guys at Verizon laugh at me every six months when I ask if FIOS is ever company to my area.

Thankfully in order for them to retain a lock on the lines they installed, they need to offer just good enough service for the towns in the area to not complain about their near monopoly enough for the State to take notice.