Another reason to love NCsoft
I'm a big fan of how NCsoft does things, especially their support software. If you've played a few MMORPGs, you know the frustration that sometimes regardless of how well the game is designed, the software for patch downloads, logins, etc. is often very poor, not to mention the lack of server stability. NCsoft however, excels at these things, at least in my experience.
I love NCsoft's PlayNC Launcher:
Specifically, I love the PlayNC Launcher because it runs all of the time, scooping up any patches for the games it supports while you're away from your PC. No waiting to play after you get home from work, just because it's a patch day.
Back when I was playing City of Heroes, I loved their background downloader built into the game. Unlike downloaders from other companies (*cough* Blizzard *cough*) it was unintrusive, didn't add noticable lag or performance issues to the game and most of all it meant little or no manual downloading needed for patches. It was mess-free and hands-off. Because of its robustness, Cryptic was able to patch City of Heroes in small increments to solve problems quickly, which meant almost no major bugs or issues when larger content patches were added (again, unlike other companies).
I haven't played CoH in awhile, so I'm not sure if the PlayNC Launcher / Downloader replaces the built-in patcher, but I hope it doesn't and simply integrates and augments it instead.
Extra notes on Server Stability:
I was seriously impressed with the City of Heroes servers: in the 9 months that I played, I had only once experienced unexpected downtime on the server my characters were on and even then it was very brief. In fact, I had a hard time convincing our guild to switch to WoW because it was like night and day with so many problems on launch compared to what they were used to with CoH.
City of Heroes also had a flawless launch, which is almost unheard of within MMORPG history.
Aug 28, 2007 11:35am
The NCLauncher is resident in memory, take place in memory, take bandwith and, the worst (!!!) Disallow the use of the game under Linux by the suuport of Cedega.
Yes... Thanks a lot, NCSoft...
Stupid assholes.
Aug 28, 2007 4:22pm
I'm a longtime user of BSD and Linux, but I would never assume that any game should work under Cedega and/or WINE. That's why I continue to run Windows on my game PC. I can relate, because I'm not looking forward to feeling forced to run Vista, but that's something under Microsoft's control and less the game developers.
Having worked within the industry, I have met frustrated developers who've opened up their support to Linux users and gotten bitten in the ass for it. These are very demanding users with extremely varied systems. To say they're difficult to support would be understating the issue. While it wouldn't be my choice, I think blocking an unsupported OS and abstract emulation layer is understandable.
Let's be fair, it's disappointing, but in my book it doesn't qualify calling them assholes. They're just balancing costs and risks, it's not something they've done just to spite you or to promote some other product.
Sep 11, 2007 4:12pm
I don't see Blizzard getting "bit in the ass" for enabling users to run WoW through Wine and Cedega.
Sep 11, 2007 4:32pm
If you recall, WoW + Cedega has been a rocky road, Cedaga users having been 'banned' previously. I think that qualifies as "bit in the ass". It's definitely cost Blizzard in some support dollars. Whether they've decided that's worth it is up to them, that's the point, it is their decision what OS / environment they support. You could give kudos to Blizzard on the matter, that'd be a positive way to support your choice to run the game on any OS, without flaming any other company in the process.
The problem is, people like Rey above are exactly the high maintenance users that make NCSoft and others undervalue the benefits of supporting more than one OS. Also, keep in mind that WINE and Cedega are abstract emulation layers and most exploits for online games are also accomplished via abstract layers. Like Blizzard did previously, NCSoft is probably just trying to block potential exploits and possibly weighing that against losing a few Cedega users.
Jan 26, 2008 2:21pm
To "Rog", how is it Microsoft's doing if game developers choose to side with Vista and DirectX10 over XP and DirectX9? I'm in touch with a lot of game developers from multiple companies, and they all agree that they're not wanting to even go near Vista.
Jan 27, 2008 12:00am
Lucy, this is certainly worth a topic of its own, but I'll reply here first.
Overall, I'd say it wouldn't be hard to find developers who aren't installing Vista, but those are most likely developers of console games, or perhaps casual games (I'm pretty sure Popcap is still using DX8, possibly even DX7).
I'm going to drop names here, just to prove a point: Gas Powered Games, Crytek, Epic Games, Funcom, etc. All of the PC developers with significant games just developed or on the near horizon have been working with DX10. Even if Vista itself isn't as popular as Microsoft hoped, there's no question that it's the path roadmapped for PC developers. It's considered suicide in the PC games industry not to move forward with the new videocard specs.
I don't know of a single core PC developer that hasn't pursued DX10 in some way. Even if it did fail in the long run, I cannot fathom very many gambling that it will.
There is zero doubt to me that Microsoft intended to leverage DX10 to help sell Vista.
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