That scenario is less hypothetical then you think. ;-)
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That scenario is less hypothetical then you think. ;-)
it might seem like its as easy as just throwing calculations to the cores in turns but programs dont work like that, these caluclations come in series called threads and communication between these threads while processing is very inefficent thus you only can 100% efficently multithread operations that are completely irrevelant to eachother, the efficency drops sharply the more the revelance they bear to eachother, this why a single main purpose operation like rendering the next frame of a game is so difficult to spread out.
Firstly, great work getting rid of the credit sellers and spammers.
However, can we look also at the reasons they exist as well as just removing them? I believe the overall creds in the game needs to be reduced. Prices for items need to become more manageable as well.
As a 'Free Market' economy, ie prices are set by the forces of supply and demand (with perhaps a certain amount of manipulation by 'shop toons'), increased drop rates, even marginal, will reduce the prices of items. For example, if on average, 50 toons are looking for a CM helmet in a given week, and enough bots only drop to supply 45, then prices will be driven up to the maximum price the market can withstand. This price is determined by the amount of available cash in the economy and the ability to people to horde it.
In our example, an increase in supply of 12 percent now puts the supply side of the equation in surplus, and since there are more items for sale than can be sold, suppliers must now discount to get sales instead of demanding high prices.
Yes it does suck to pay 400mill for something only to see it being sold for 50mill the next day but we'd all survive the experience. Freddie sleeves that went from 60mill each to 10mill a pair is an example.
Until the need for massive amounts of credits is resolved, credit sellers will always have a market. And lets face it, sure if some ebays 1bill creds and sits there holding onto it you can take it back, but what if he immediately used it to legitemately buy an item? If you delete the CM helm he just bought you remove an item from the market and place more upward pressure on prices, hence increasing the need for credit sellers to allow players easier access to items.
I don't know if I missed anything but was there mention of what the new system requirements for AO-via-Dreamworld engine would be?
p.s. stop deleting my credats and banning my accounts plx!!!1
I'm expecting they'd be a bit higher than currently advertised.
However, I don't think the current AO runs reasonably at the advertised requirements at all.
The old engine wasn't designed to take advantage of modern hardware (as it didn't exist back then and probably more reasons).
This results in the game performing worse than it could on systems that are common these days.
The new engine is very likely to fix this.
Meaning, the requirements would actually drop instead of increase. (Don't expect the marketing department to work this way though :))
Not only will the game look a bit better (lighting and shadows does loads for visuals) it'll also be snappier and smoother.
This is especially true on all points. The Dreamworld engine is extremely fast. I mean impressively fast. If you are running on a computer that has a GPU (Geforce 4+ / ATI 9000+ iirc) AO should be many times faster than the current game is after implementation. The offloading of the majority of the visual drawing routines to the GPU lessens the overhead and load on the rest of your system.
Sure some older crappy laptops and desktops only suitable to run windows 95/98 will probably no longer be able to run AO at all (not a direct quote from any source just personal experience talking) due to needing a GPU for rendering, but, anyone that is expecting to play a modern good looking smooth running game on such a machine is seriously in need of a reality check :p
People constantly say "Advertise AO more!!!". This is, however, a pointless and wasted effort if the average modern gamer get's here and says "wtf is this terrible laggy mess" and leaves.. it ends up just bleeding valuable financial resources from FC's pocket leaving marginal gains. AO is currently quite well advertised within it's competative arena. If you have ever done a search for "free games" you will find Anarchy-Online gracing (thanks to alphabetizing) the top of every single list just about because of the froob program.
I currently have a Geforce 8600 GT on my PC that can run pretty much any game out there (though it stutters on AO) but I'll be buying a laptop soon, which I doubt I'll bother to spend one capable of playing Warhammer endgame mass PVP. But maybe it will be capable of playing AO, which is why I'm curious :p
i totally disagree here, the unique mobs now spawn far to often, instead of being on a timer they're just camped the old fashion way.
all their loot has dropped dramatically, if it was the stock market we'ed be seeing a lot of people jumping from buildings.. shades for example i already had about 5 pairs of and spent aprox 20ml each on them..
now they're worth about 3ml, i bought 5 pairs (their entirr inv of them) the other day from a single shop.
it's not fun to see your items loose 85% of their value.
it's cheap enough i can throw them on ever NM i own.
the story is much the same with all other unique mob loot.
i suppose you want to increase the drop rate of bots? ya lets make the best armor in teh game drop like candy from a pinata shot with a 12ga.
the best gear in the game should'nt be free flowing, it should cost a bit and not be common enough for every man woman and 12 year old on rk to acquire.
however, something did need to be done about the time spawn campers, a good fix imo would be to have dropped the spawn time to <6 hours, but at random..
example:
mob dies
random 900 21600 [15mins - 6hours](computer picks 9780)
mob spawns 2hours 43mins later.
problem solved no more time camping, to long a possibility to sit and wait for regular camp, so it leaves it as a random encounter and loot prices stay mostly where they are.