Nerd Rayge

Momentum is not Always Conserved

2009-11-08T20:15:00.013-05:00

by Kirym09

This past Tuesday was Election Day. Off year elections rarely garner any significant attention, but this year was a little different. In 2009, two major governor’s seats were up for grabs in New Jersey and Virginia. Both races were won by Republican challengers, where the GoP have not been in office since 2002. The most significant victory is in New Jersey, traditionally considered a Democrat stronghold, where the election of Chris Christie (winning against John Corzine) has been a pretty big blow to the democratic establishment. In Virginia, Republican Bob Mcdonnell (winning against Creigh Deeds) turned back the clock a bit himself, undoing the Democratic swing during last year’s election (besides Obama, Virginia has not voted for a Democrat for President since LBJ). So what does all of this mean? Have the Democrats run out of steam? Are the Republicans in for a massive comeback? To answer both questions, yes and no.

Mcdonnell (R-VA) and Christie (R-NJ)

As mentioned earlier, off year elections usually aren’t that important, and it’s difficult to place exactly why this election is. One main underlying reason is media attention. In the world of 24 hour news cycles, news outlets will report on just about anything, and the story of the 2009 elections are important because they want them to be, and it turns into a self perpetuating story. But even with constant reporting, voter turnout was not high. Many have pointed out that in both elections voter turnout was lower than the previous gubernatorial elections, and that somehow as a result of this these elections really don’t represent the entire states. It is important to remember that voter turnouts are percentages, and because the 2008 election brought with it massive voter registration, the total pool over of voters has increased. Naturally voter turnout will drop. In nominal terms there also has been a decrease since the last gubernatorial elections, but the drop is not particularly indicative of anything.

It is pretty clear that Obama and the Democrats have run out of steam. They are by no means dead, but they certainly are not in the same position as they were last year. The 2008 election was supposed to initiate and awaken an entire generation of voters to politics: young, old, and of all races. A vast majority of these voters in these states have probably not been following politics this past year. Getting someone to go out and vote in an historic election is one thing, but to have them follow politics even enough just to stay informed is something completely different. Despite attempts to give both Democrat campaigns the Obama “change” bump, they still lost. This means that Obama’s policies have hurt him or that people simply aren’t coming out to vote because they aren’t voting for Obama. To what magnitude is unknown, but what is certain is that the momentum has diminished significantly.

Obama's coat-tail effect is not present in this past election.

But momentum is not always conserved. Just because the Democrats have lost voters does not mean that they are voting Republican, they just aren’t voting at all (there are instances of people turning against Obama, but not many voters). The people who are voting for the Republican candidates are the same people who voted against Obama in 2008, but Republicans have certainly gained voters this since last year. The counter movement to Obama revolution are the Tea-Party protests. Many decry the Tea-Partiers as astro-turf, manipulated by the Republicans, and are all racists, homophobes, and evangelical Christians. While some of these may be true for individual members, it is unfair to generalize the entire movement as such. People tend to forget that the Tea-Partiers are largely opposed to the established Republican party (and of course the Democrats). While many of the Tea-Partiers are conservative, a significant number are libertarian, and flexible on social issues. The only things the movement shares as a whole are an opposition to corruption and out-of-control spending. When it really comes down to it, is it really that bad to have these opinions? Let’s assume for a moment that these protests are not in any way natural phenomenon. Political parties are meant to get people excited (or angry) about politics. Aren’t these effectively the same ends and means of the Obama revolution? In the end however, both sides categorize their members of their opponent’s movements as mindless zombies. It would seem then, that Obama’s “zombies” took November 3rd off.

Another significant election to watch was the 23rd congressional district of New York. Democrat Bill Owens, Republican Dierdre Scozzafava, and Conservative Doug Hoffman (yes, a third party candidate), were embroiled in a three way tie. When the Republican nominee started to lag behind as the election drew closer, withdrew from the race and endorsed her Democratic opponent (who won). What this may be showing is that one belief of the Tea-Party movement may be true: that above all Democrats and Republicans are committed to preserving their order, and the similarities in their positions. Had Hoffman won, it may have represented a movement towards pragmatism or at the very least developments of a multi-party system, which even if you don’t agree with Hoffman’s positions, is a good thing.

A third-party candidate like Doug Hoffman receiving over 45% of the vote is significant

On a fundamental level, this election is a preview of the 2010 mid-term elections. Seeing this as a warning, the Democrats will be sure to do their best to return the public into their Obama induced state, and Republicans will attempt to build on the inertia they have gained from this election. This election hasn’t been a referendum on the Obama administration – but the next one certainly will. The ball is in Obama’s court.

Where in the World is Fermi?

2009-10-27T20:07:00.017-04:00

by grmnasasin0227

In the world of hardware, hype is a big deal. The Big 3 of silicon trash talk, get dragged to court, and are publicly scrutinized, but at the end of the day somebody always wins and somebody always loses--it really is like a soap opera to nerds, and there's a new season about every 6 months. These days in the GPU sector, nVidia and AMD are being watched carefully for openly lying to the public; there have been many rumors about "somebody said this, somebody responded to that," and even "no, we never said any of that." The biggest disappointment of GPU's scheduled 40nm architecture "tock" is nVidia.

It takes a while to make something that is smaller than the palm of your hand, especially when the transistors are made on a 40nm process. I realize this. AMD already had a 40nm card last generation, the 4770, so they have experience with the process. I realize this. However, there's something afoot with nVidia and their lack of a DX11-ready card. First off, both AMD and nVidia are getting their silicon wafers from the same place, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, so it's not like the supplier is at fault--the announced shortage of 5000-series cards from AMD was because AMD laughably placed too few orders from the foundry. No, TSMC is simply not to blame here at all.

Could it be that nVidia actually has no fucking clue what they're doing? In actuality, possibly. Up until 3 months ago, nVidia had not one card on the market that was DX10.1 compliant. There's a story that goes with that, and it's telling about nVidia. Back when Microsoft was figuring out what was to go in DX10, AMD and nVidia were helping them figure it out--this is standard procedure, the GPU companies talk about what they expect their tech to be able to do and how it should perform and the software writers make it happen. AMD wanted to put in tesselation, new lighting effects, raytracing, and more. nVidia realized their cards couldn't do it and paid MS a hefty sum in order to gimp the new standard--so much for innovation. Eventually AMD pestered MS enough so that DX10.1 came out, which is sort of what DX10 was supposed to be all along. Here we are some years later, and a new standard has been set; AMD raised the bar again. But where is nVidia? My, how history repeats itself.

In addition, simply making totally new architectures is difficult, and both the HD5000 series and GT300/Fermi are new architectures. I mean, think about it. You've got the core architecture, in which nVidia has apparently doubled their shader cores and tripled the amount of vmem that is going on the board, plus it's GDDR5, something they've never done before. All this is enough to give you some problems, and it would be amazing if nVidia actually got it right the first time. This accounts for a lot of the time that Fermi hasn't been out in the wild--nVidia had to take months to design the chip, then wait weeks to get the wafers back, then take a few more weeks to design the PCB, then some more to test it. If everything goes RIGHT, the card from start to finish would take 6 months. However we're still missing a card, so nVidia must have had to do a respin (where some plans are scratched, changed, and the card is partially redone). nVidia has never had a new architecture or die-shrink that didn't require at least 2 respins. I will hand it to nVidia for realizing 40nm was the way to go and trying to go for it, but it appears that they've hit some snags.

The biggest fiasco of all was at the GPU Technology Conference 2009, when nVidia's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, publicly revealed Fermi. Holding up the card in his hand with another card doing some impressive calculations to show its brawn on a projector, I guess nobody in the company thought people would be taking pictures. Whoops. Almost immediately, people who know what the fuck video cards look like were questioning validity of the card that Jen-Hsun was using. Quite clearly, there were several inches of PCB hacked off, wood screws used to connect the bracket and the shroud, a very useless double-layer vent system, and a backplate that partially covers the SLI port. nVidia couldn't do anything else but man up and admit to using a fake card for the conference. Some people defend nVidia with the argument "companies use models/prototypes all the time for conferences, what's the big deal?" Well, the big deal is that a company that needs to be moving millions of units sure isn't in a very good position when they can't spare a single working card for their CEO to wave around.

I will give you one guess when the GPU conference was.

nVidia needs to get their act together. Their lack of a card for the opening of a standard means they're going to get pummeled for the quarter, perhaps even to the next iteration. I can tell you one thing: if I was involved in an industry that changes every 3 months, had nothing to show for it, and my competitor had released 4 cards in the span of a month with another 2 on the way, I'd be shitting bricks.

Whose LAN is it anyway?

2009-10-27T20:00:00.004-04:00

by Kirym09

Over this past summer, Blizzard’s Vice President of game design Rob Pardo confirmed that Starcraft II would not support LAN play. As usual, the outcry from the PC community was palpable, so Blizzard went into damage-control, and came back with an interesting response:

"We are working on solutions with regard to things we can do to maintain connectivity to Battle.net in some way, but also provide a great quality connection between players," said Canessa. To clarify, Shack suggested a scenario where the game would only check in with Battle.net to authenticate the game before reverting to typical LAN behavior.

"Something like that," he replied. "Maintaining a connection with Battle.net, I don't know if it's once or periodically, but then also having a peer-to-peer connection between players to facilitate a very low-ping, high-bandwidth connection... those are the things that we're working on."

One goal here is rather obvious: to stop piracy. Blizzard of all people will know that this will be hacked in a very short time, allowing LAN to be played without activation. As long as the protocol exists somewhere in the code, it will be exploited. Blizzard has expressed that piracy is not the reason for taking away LAN, but it’s hard to argue that it isn’t an added perk, especially with popular services such as Garena, which through the use of a VPN take advantage of the LAN protocol, and are usually lag-free alternatives to Battle.net

The new Battle.net 2.0 will play a much more active role in SC II. A lot has changed since 1997 when the original Battle.net was launched, and it is safe to assume (based off of current announcements) that Blizzard’s matchmaking system has developed both in terms of properly matching players of equal skill and latency. Among its many other features that have been revealed are in inter-game integrated chat and achievements. Additionally, it totally revamps the custom map system, which is a discussion for another day.

Achievements are coming to B.net 2.0. Unnecessary, but nice to have.

There is one seriously flawed argument that LAN made Starcraft what it is today. Previously only LAN through IPX (along with modem, direct, and serial) was available in the original Starcraft, something few people were able to use or probably manage. Blizzard didn’t add UDP until patch 1.09 which wasn’t released until February of 2002, yet the game still managed to be popular enough to be entered into the World Cyber Games when it started in 2000, and begin its ascent to godhood in South Korea through its early nationally televised competitions.

Let us just grant for a moment that LAN did make Starcraft what it is today. Starcraft 2 will be just as popular at release if not more in the future, reaching a new audience of players. The primary instances of LAN are in PC Bangs in South Korea. In this case, players will be at computers that have internet access, and thus will be able to authenticate (either through a personal or public account) and play with LAN latency with friends right next to them. This certainly puts a damper on LAN parties (large or small), where the participants all do not own a copy of the game (and can’t share it to play together) or internet usage is limited, disallowing authentication. In most circumstances these days, you will have internet access at least enough to authenticate with Battle.net. Lamentably, this certainly is a major problem to areas that do not have significant broadband coverage. All of these problems are irrelevant if the aforementioned crack is developed.

It would appear a major goal of this would be to control the professional gaming scene. In World of Warcraft, the competition sponsors are forced to buy servers expressly for the purpose of arena matches, and we can safely assume that it comes at a pretty hefty price. Though competitions can duplicate server interactions, it is likely that they would face heavy legal action. The new ‘pseudo-LAN’ may invalidate the need for such servers, but that doesn’t mean Blizzard is any less committed to getting a piece of the profit made in professional gaming. Look forward to see them meddling with that in the future.

But what effect does it really have? I want to make no mistake about it, I am certainly pissed off that it’s happening, and it seems overall like an unnecessary step (especially concerning my cynicism above the haste with which a crack will come out), but for the majority of Starcraft players, and in a majority of circumstances it is not as earth shaking as the initial response to the news sounded like. Unlike an issue like dedicated servers in MW2, most people won't even notice a difference, and in the end that's what Blizzard is counting on.

Infinity Ward Strikes Back

2009-10-26T23:50:00.015-04:00

by grmnasasin0227

On October 17th, Infinity Ward and by extension Activision killed a significant section of PC gaming by announcing their new title would lack dedicated servers, modding capabilities, and free DLC. Up until this point Infinity Ward has had a stellar reputation as an FPS developer that others could only dream of, their pairing with Activision on the CoD games guaranteeing them plenty of facetime. However their dogged public defense of their new approach with upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 makes Activision's CEO Bobby Kotick look like an OK guy for merely wanting to charge $10 more for a game that people will be playing for years anyway.

The ramifications of such changes in the world of PC gaming are huge. No dedicated servers means all games will be hosted by Joe Shmoe on his home computer--it doesn't matter how good his residential connection is, it's nothing compared to a commercial T3 line. That said, you will be insanely lucky to join a game with less than 150 ping...there goes any hope of you actually being able to kill something. For reference, an East cost player would get about 100 ping with a solid broadband connection when trying to play on a British dedicated server. The server you're playing on is also only up as long as Joe Shmoe decides he wants to play; when the host leaves, the game's over, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. IW has tried to sugarcoat this by saying that they have a way to channel people's requests for server connections by always locating you to the closest game for minimal latency. Wait, since when does IW have a track record with networking? Oh right, they don't. Even if their system works FLAWLESSLY, the ping will be enough to ruin the experience.

The next thing they're taking away is modding. This is another bullet to IW's foot. Modding is what kept vanilla and UO on the charts for so long. Without modding support, the community fails to play a game after it gets "old" because there's nothing they can do to keep it interesting. Love you some Zombies? Wait, where did that come from...oh, it was a mod back in CoD. Need to play TWL/CAL rules for competition? Also a mod. The most ironic part is the only way to play competitive CoD4 was to take out certain perks, be it from Promod or another competitive mod; and IW expects the sequel to be wonderfully balanced out of the box? Yeah, no--the community picked up your goddamn slack and made the game balanced FOR YOU so they could play YOUR GAME competitively.

The last part is free DLC. I honestly don't know why they bothered to announce this as DLC was never free in the first place--large corporations have simply picked up the tab in the past to save our asses. Remember the fiasco with CoD4 when the mappack probably wasn't going to be released because PC gamers stuck to their guns and wouldn't pay for it? nVidia payed for it. CoD5's mappack? Covered by Intel's Nehalem advertising campaign. Saying "no free DLC" isn't changing anything, but people are up in arms about it anyway. To the developer, money is money, and as long as they get payed by somebody for their work they don't care. I seriously doubt anything will change on the DLC front.

393430 hours for the entire Call of Duty franchise. Retrieved 12:00 AM 10/27/09.

As of the time of this writing, every single CoD game released on PC except vanilla is in XFire's top 15 in terms of hours played on a weekly basis. That's right, THIS WEEK, people have been playing games as old as 5 years, and they're more popular than almost anything you can think of. The franchise is literally more popular than the pillar of online popularity that is World of Warcraft by virtue of hours played.

Just 3 days after IW's announcement and 100,000 signatures were logged in the petition to put dedicated servers back on, IW had to go into damage control or risk losing face. They had successfully pissed off the entire Internet, and they had to defend themselves. The result couldn't have been further from the goal. Peruse the article for your own amusement, but here is the key paragraph.

"We're just prioritizing the player experience above the modders and the tuners," says West. He points toward the mounting feedback IW has received from PC fans of Modern Warfare who couldn't find a decent server to play on between all of the cheaters, the insular communities, and huge skill level disparities that the original game's community fractured into. "We thought maybe it would be cool if the fans could play the game," he laughs.

I would like to bring to your attention to "PC fans" giving "feedback" about "huge skill level disparities." In a nutshell, the only people complaining about the state of things at all are noobs--who else would complain about people essentially being too good at a game? This is always the case, as those of us who possess enough hand eye coordination to actually play games in the first place are enjoying ourselves, because we're busy handily smiting the ones QQ'ing and ragequitting. The people who complain genuinely think that they're having a subpar experience simply because they get their asses handed to them wherever they play, then complain about cheating, and on a giant leap of logic by extension, no good servers. They then scream so loudly that they appear to be in the majority and the developer caves, screwing over the integrity of the game.

First of all, I have never had an issue with cheaters, and neither has anybody else who knows what they're doing. Contrary to popular belief, PB does its job very well... and many GUIDs are globally banned because of it. Also, wall hacks and aimbots are not perfect. I will not go into the specifics, but I will say that those who are worth jack in a game can beat a hacker; this just reinforces that those complaining are inexperienced. In addition, good players know how to properly spot a hacker versus a good player, and if they happen to have rcon, it's not a problem. If they don't, it's as simple as just playing on a server where they know the people who DO have control of their server. I'm sorry, but cheating is simply a terrible platform for removal of dedicated servers, there are so many ways to deal with it.

Flash forward to a week after the death of IW's reputation. Robert Bowling, IW's community director, uttered this little gem:

"Not only do we know the game but we know the gamer."

Robert Bowling is a douche bag.

That's right. You know us so well that you would backstab those who propped up your sorry ass when you were working on vanilla, and assume that when fed bullshit we'll think it's cake. You know us so well that at the time of this writing there are over 162k signatures on the petition for dedicated servers, and it's only been 9 days since its creation. But the sick thing is, you know us so well that you realize our numbers are too few for you to give a damn about. MW2 will be the best selling game of the year, to even argue that is pointless. CoD4 sold about 14 million copies since its release, and analysts predict its sequel will do 17-18M units in only 12 months. However, the vast majority of these sales are attributed to consoles--PC gaming when compared to ports has nearly always been in the minority as of late. Activision knows this. They realize publishing for consoles is cheaper to do (no fussing around with graphics because of the known GPU in each console, whereas practically every PC has a different configuration), and infinitely more profitable. Thus, we have fallen on the wayside. These events will show the true colors of the company, as one of 2 things will happen: Either Activision decides to eat the massive loss of sales in the PC section and cut it out entirely from any subsequent titles (they now have an excuse not to publish for it due to poor sales), or they cave and patch in dedicated servers (and by extension, mods) showing that after all money is money and they're milking the series for all it's worth. Ironically, their own greed will be PC gaming's only saving grace.