Portal 2 ... YAY YAY

[Amaron]

Filling up WEOTW's bar shaved a   FULL 50 MINUTES off the launch countdown!

 

If 8 more hours gets shaved off it might actually unlock the same time you could walk into a store and buy it!

[Quinton]

http://valvearg.com/wiki/GLaDOS@Home

Speculation on how this works:

The red bars next to each video game represent the total time people have played that game for; this fills up over time.

The number under each bar (current CPUs) shows how many people are currently playing that game, and hence the rate it's filling up. [Confirmed via consulting the Steam stats page].

The main bar at the top represents the average of the length of all the red bars. Once this is full (when every red bar is full), we get Portal 2!

The potato number at the bottom shows the total number of potatoes that everybody has found. The rate at which all the bars fill up is proportional to the number of potatoes; if we double the number of potatoes, the entire thing goes twice as fast! [Confirmed by data analysis and by Doug]. If you get all 36 potatoes by the time Portal 2 is out, you also get a special prize.

When a red bar fills up completely, it turns blue. This acts as a checkpoint of sorts, knocking off a guaranteed chunk of time from the release date. This will only matter though if we fail to fill the main bar up in time. Note that once a bar is full up, there is no longer any point playing that game; switch to another.

More popular games require more people in order to fill up at the same rate; it is the proportion of game owners playing a game that matters, not the number of people by itself. [Also confirmed by Doug].

[cironian]

If 8 more hours gets shaved off it might actually unlock the same time you could walk into a store and buy it!

The on-disc copies will most likely be encrypted and will unlock at the same time as the preloaded copies. AFAIR they already used that mechanism for the orange box.

[jakonovski]

More popular games require more people in order to fill up at the same rate; it is the proportion of game owners playing a game that matters, not the number of people by itself. [Also confirmed by Doug].

This would make the fill rate capped and every purchase of Potato Sack would make it go slower (you get 13 games, affecting all proportional fill rates, but you can only play one at a time).

[MuffinMan]

Should everyone be focus firing on one game at a time then?

[jakonovski]

It would seem so. That would max out the potato bonuses too.

fake edit: I think I shall play the Ball tonight, or Defense Grid.

[Samwise]

I did my part and played a couple of hours of Amnesia last night.

[TripleDES]

1...2...3...KickIt was worth another 40 MINUTES!!!! 

[Ironwood]

I did my part and played a couple of hours of Amnesia last night.

Does that count ?

[Quinton]

I'm spending my pre-portal-2 weekend looking into GPU upgrades.  Been meaning to replace the old GTX260 with something fancier for a while now and I figure this is the time.

On the ultra-high-end it looks like AMD is in the lead, but I'm not really looking to drop $500-700 on a GPU.  NVIDIA's GTX560Ti looks to be a nice upgrade (and lower power!) for $250ish...

[Trippy]

There's also the Radeon HD 6950 1 GB at that price point.

[Amaron]

The on-disc copies will most likely be encrypted and will unlock at the same time as the preloaded copies. AFAIR they already used that mechanism for the orange box.

No the on disc stuff unlock at midnight.  Steam doesn't unlock games normally till like 10am or something if I recall.   Regardless I've bought several steam only games at midnight and not had such a problem so I doubt it.

[TripleDES]

On the ultra-high-end it looks like AMD is in the lead, but I'm not really looking to drop $500-700 on a GPU.  NVIDIA's GTX560Ti looks to be a nice upgrade (and lower power!) for $250ish...

The 560Ti is the G92 8800GT of the Fermi cards. You can't do wrong with that one.

[eldaec]

Given that this is shifting the timeline by under an hour per game, and given that valve use a worthless -8 timezone to run their lives, isn't all this fuss irrelevant to anyone not on the west coast of north america, as the extra hours will be early morning or middle of the night?

[Quinton]

It depends if/when the potato multiplier kicks in (the email from valve linked from the bottom of the theory page implies that some event triggers the use of all those potatoes) and if all the bars hit 100%.  The active theory is unlock happens when timer hits 0 or all bars are at 100%.  Each time an individual bar hits 100% time is knocked off the timer (so there some benefit to "completing" each bar).

[Amaron]

Given that this is shifting the timeline by under an hour per game, and given that valve use a worthless -8 timezone to run their lives, isn't all this fuss irrelevant to anyone not on the west coast of north america, as the extra hours will be early morning or middle of the night?

If it just continues more of the same then yea it'll be middle of the night.   I wonder if they've thought of how mad people will be if that's how it ends up though.

[K9]

Well it looks about 40-45% done already, so maybe they will crack it early.

[Teleku]

Given that this is shifting the timeline by under an hour per game, and given that valve use a worthless -8 timezone to run their lives, isn't all this fuss irrelevant to anyone not on the west coast of north america, as the extra hours will be early morning or middle of the night?

GMT -8 is the center of civilization.  No other timezones matter!

[Malakili]

Given that this is shifting the timeline by under an hour per game, and given that valve use a worthless -8 timezone to run their lives, isn't all this fuss irrelevant to anyone not on the west coast of north america, as the extra hours will be early morning or middle of the night?

GMT -8 is the center of civilization.  No other timezones matter!

Sadly when it comes to gaming this seems accurate

[Ingmar]

Given that this is shifting the timeline by under an hour per game, and given that valve use a worthless -8 timezone to run their lives, isn't all this fuss irrelevant to anyone not on the west coast of north america, as the extra hours will be early morning or middle of the night?

GMT -8 is the center of civilization.  No other timezones matter!

Sadly when it comes to gaming this seems accurate

It makes up for all the East Coast bias in sports reporting. 

[Quinton]

Pre-Portal2-Launch Portal Replay: Complete.

o/~ I'm doing Science and I'm still alive

[Yoru]

Given that this is shifting the timeline by under an hour per game, and given that valve use a worthless -8 timezone to run their lives, isn't all this fuss irrelevant to anyone not on the west coast of north america, as the extra hours will be early morning or middle of the night?

Well, aside from Europe, where the game was going to unlock at 2PM-4PM Tuesday. Even 8 hours of launch-time-advancement is a benefit here.

I'm rather thrilled as, if people complete another ~2 bars, the game will unlock before my lunch hour instead of during or after it. 

[Nonentity]

I got my stupid golden potato. I just want this game to be out now!

[Quinton]

Assuming that at some point the total number of potatoes will trigger something or at some other trigger they will accelerate something, it can't hurt to join this Steam group and get yourself a free potato (for joining) to help the cause: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/nelipot

[K9]

Pre-Portal2-Launch Portal Replay: Complete.

o/~ I'm doing Science and I'm still alive

Assuming that at some point the total number of potatoes will trigger something or at some other trigger they will accelerate something, it can't hurt to join this Steam group and get yourself a free potato (for joining) to help the cause: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/nelipot

Where can I see my personal progress? Also, does that mean playing through Portal will help progress?

[TripleDES]

It's 2h20 earlier now. rofl

[Quinton]

Potatos show up on your profile page, but that's apparently disabled at the moment due to some potato cheat (supposed to be resolved tomorrow (Sunday?) and non-cheaters will get their legitimately earned potatoes credited).

I don't believe Portal has any impact on the ARG / GLaDoS@home stuff.  I just wanted to replay the original before Portal 2 arrives.  It was enjoyable as I remembered.

[Simond]

Given that this is shifting the timeline by under an hour per game, and given that valve use a worthless -8 timezone to run their lives, isn't all this fuss irrelevant to anyone not on the west coast of north america, as the extra hours will be early morning or middle of the night?

GMT -8 is the center of civilization.  No other timezones matter!

GMT is the centre of civilisation. That's why all other timezones are measured from us.

[caladein]

Arbitrary consensus is still arbitrary.

[TripleDES]

Three hours and some chickenshit.  

--edit: Another game bar filled, another 40 minutes. This is so fucking ridiculous.

[MuffinMan]

I don't understand the teeth gnashing. The game is unlocking earlier with no effort from me, this pleases me.

[K9]

Arbitrary consensus is still arbitrary.

I really don't get the point of time zones. Why don't we just have a single global time? Does it really matter that a person in New York gets up at 7am and works until 5pm rather than getting up at 12 UST and working until 22 UST?

[Yoru]

Arbitrary consensus is still arbitrary.

I really don't get the point of time zones. Why don't we just have a single global time? Does it really matter that a person in New York gets up at 7am and works until 5pm rather than getting up at 12 UST and working until 22 UST?

We do, but there's a few thousand years of inertia in the current system that needs to bleed off.

[TripleDES]

I don't understand the teeth gnashing. The game is unlocking earlier with no effort from me, this pleases me.

No teeth gnashing. I just find it fucking hilarious how people got tricked into paying money and playing their asses off for something that's a marginal benefit at best. And thanks to timezones, people needing to go to work and school and do other real life stuff, the marginal benefit gets trashed altogether.

To be honest, when this started, I really hoped that I had maybe the chance to start playing on Sunday, a couple of hours into Friday, I figured that this is just a coordinated thing, shrugged and continued to break Nordschleife records in Shift 2.

[Nonentity]

Arbitrary consensus is still arbitrary.

I really don't get the point of time zones. Why don't we just have a single global time? Does it really matter that a person in New York gets up at 7am and works until 5pm rather than getting up at 12 UST and working until 22 UST?

We do, but there's a few thousand years of inertia in the current system that needs to bleed off.

Clearly, we need to switch to Swatch Internet Time. Phantasy Star Online for the original Dreamcast had it right all along.