Major Canadian ISP caught throttling WoWFollow

Aren't they allowed to throttle whatever they want?

I mean, it sucks when it happens, but isn't it within their right?

in the article it actually says it was on accident. if thats the truth or not i don't know but it must have sucked for the customer i would have been pretty pissed off.

As far as I know there is not "true" unlimited Internet in Canada.

Most providers put the cap fairly high so the average user doesn't notice. A lot of the providers are "throttling" usage though to limit the p2p downloading and pirating that goes on, like it says in the article. Some, like Rogers, use that excuse at any chance they can get though, and when they get caught they will usually just say "Oops sorry about that, just trying to protect copyrights".

Either way, some day we will have "unlimited" access and some better speeds. (I'm with Shaw where I am and don't have problems with speed though, so I'm happy)

Considering that they've promised to have this fixed by June, tells me that it truly was an accident, unless they were secretly threatened with legal action behind closed doors.

As I've always said in response to this:

Yes, it sucks for the customers, but it isn't like they did it purposefully. They were targeting P2P software with this, and Blizzard/WoW just happened to be Collateral Damage (considering that WoW does make use of P2P technology).

If you want to blame someone, blame the rampant P2P pirating going on, and the people downloading gigabytes upon gigabytes of stuff they could easily buy for <$20 in stores.

ISPs want customers to be happy, customers want to do whatever they wanna do.

The sad truth of it is, though, Bandwidth is finite. If you're sitting on your computer, gaming on the internet and you're seeing pings of 300ms or more, you're probably not very happy.

Meanwhile, a couple people down the street on the same ISP and same cable line as you probably has 2-3 simultaneous P2P downloads going, eating up 99% of their downstream bandwidth.

ISPs know that P2P users are gobbling up ridiculous amounts of bandwidth and are making things worse for those who don't use P2P or those who are trying to do things like gaming.

Wanna blame someone?

Blame the people eating up your ISP's bandwidth with P2P pirating. One or two people doing it won't matter much.... however... several people on the same line doing it, will. I remember when my cousin used to live next-door and we were both on the same DSL line. You betcha I could tell anytime he was downloading Anime on his P2P -- my usual 50ms pings to Google.com suddenly became 150-250ms pings.

No. You can't spend $20 on CD's and get gigabytes upon gigabytes of music. Most albums are in the 100-200 mb mark and would cost about $10 each to buy, and 400+ for FLAC's. You can download movies that are Blue Ray rips that are ~1.4 gigs. and DVD rips are around 700mb. An HD movie from netflix is 4 gigs. So, you tell me, who's using more bandwidth, the guy using netflix or a similar service, or the guy downloading a few albums and films once a week?

Netflix is a part of it, I will admit that.

However, people who pirate, don't just pirate one or two, they tend to download several movies/albums.

And then there are computer games. Okay, so those tend to cost more like $50.... but also tend to be more like 5GB or more, too.

Direct2Drive is also somewhat guilty too; that is another bandwidth eater.

I guess, somehow, people have gotten this strange idea that a simple CD in a plastic case + a postage stamp is somehow cheaper than 5-10GB worth of bandwidth.

I suppose you bring up a good point about Netflix and Direct2Drive... meh. Can't say I really like them either.

I see the point he's trying to make though--if pc gamers consistency feel like they are being overcharged for games, they are going to be more and more open to pirating them.

Of course, it's a self-defeating prophecy. Because games cost so much to create, developers are focusing more and more on multi-platform games. As a result, fewer and fewer games are coming out that will really make use of high end pcs, and more and more games are being ported from consoles (leading to somewhat awkward design flaws) as well as being designed primarily with consoles in mind (for instance, not bothering to offer mod support).

Frankly, I expect the current trend to continue--pc games are going to often be ports of console games, or designed to make porting to consoles easy; they won't tax high-end pcs as often, many won't offer mod support, and pc sales will likely constitute the lowest percentage of profits between the two-three systems they utilize.

Realistically, there's no way to fix this in favor of pc gamers, either, without developers taking a HUGE hit to profits. They can either invest heavily in supplying a great game to a small market, or invest their money so as to give a good to very good game to all modern gamers. The answer is obvious. Even ig they WANT to provide an awesome game, it's just too much money to do so for the PC.

Plus, because of the pirating, they are investing more and more in DRM techniques. And those just **** off honest customers (increasing the population of console players over time) and rarely help in actually stopping pirating, as the game will be cracked in time. They only help in increasing the sales from people who would have pirated, but don't want to wait.

TL;DR: PC gamers are a small population, so creating games catered to them is a big dip in profit if you could port the game to consoles as well (which is difficult if designed for modern high-end games). And, as a result, people are more likely to feel short-changed and then pirate. But the most gamers lose out by them trying to focus on PCs, and many people are going to pirate even if they do.

Thus, we get games ported to the 2 systems they aren't on, and we better get used to it.

Call me weird, but I couldn't care less whether or not a PC game is ported to a Console game, nor do I care that I'm not using up 99.9% of my PC's capabilities on a game.

I just want a game that is:

1). Fun in gameplay.
2). Has a good story behind it.
3). Isn't clear-able in 10 hours.

The graphics, sound, the complexity of the game's engine? Pfft. I don't really care about those things; I'll take what I can get. That's why I still find older computer games that I'm newly discovering fun (even if they are "stone-age" as far as technology goes).

I always used the old "Console RPG" analysis here: I don't care how many FMVs or pretty pretty graphics you give me, I just want a game with an awesome story and fun gameplay. If you're trying to sell me a game that's only 10-15 hours long for the core content of the game, and packing it with lots of FMVs and such, I'm going to turn it down. However, if you try to sell me a game that has very few cutscenes/FMVs, but yet has 30+ hours of honest-to-god Content (and not just endless grindfests designed to slow you down) and DOESN'T have this weird/quirky/difficult-to-understand or master stat/battle/whatever system, I'll be all over that in a heartbeat.

But, sadly, I know that those days are long behind us except for a few shining beacons here-and-there. Dragon Age: Origins was an awesome game, even though it was newer though. They kept a fairly simple and straightforward system (Tried-and-true Baldur's Gate style play), and gave us a decent-length game (especially after all the addons). It has cutscenes and Voice-Acting (kudos to them doing Voice Acting the -right- way!), but doesn't fill the whole disc up with it.

tl;dr: They're putting too much effort in over-emphasizing technology, instead of putting that effort into Playable Content. Who cares about this game that looks so awesome it looks real if it is only 5 hours long? I'd rather the game look not-so-real and be 50 hours long.

They need to give "acceptable" technology/graphics/etc and spend some of that money hiring writers to write more story, IMO.

Edited, Apr 4th 2011 3:40pm by Lyrailis