Curse

Sirius Bsns · Aug 13, 2010, 08:13 PM // 20:13

Quote:

Originally Posted by tha walkin dude

For getting all jumped on your high horse Mr. Business Economics, you completely missed the mark. Any investment into GW is not an investment in a dead game. Selling alt. accounts, storage panes, costumes and all the happy crappy in the online store generates income. Also, keeping the GW community happy is the best way to ensure sales of GW2. The worst way to encourage GW2 sales is to alienate the player base. Beyond that, there are still people who have the job of working on GW. Without even allocating any new resources, they can improve the GW experience by simply better focusing their time.
Also, I don't know where you got your understanding of how the not-for-profit industry works, but you don't seem to have anything more than a vague understanding of it.

I hate to break it to ya, bro: No Money = No Honey. Selling costumes, name-changes, storage panes, happy-crappy, etc. is insufficient earnings compared to their general "up-keeping" bills [server(s), employees, etc.]. Also, the game's 5+ years old already. They've pumped enough content into the game by now; any more new content would only further disperse the community.

World of Warcraft's still up and running with full-blown content updates still to this day. Why? Because they charge a monthly fee! They receive money for their constant upkeep. Where's Anet's monthly fee? That's right. They don't have a monthly fee. So, to keep the community happy requires money alongside quality updates on Anet's part.

Well, how's Anet supposed to provide content if they don't make enough money to support it? Anet's history of quality updates has declined, analogous from a time-based perspective and parallel to the rate of their income [which is in steady decline if you've notice the pattern by now]. Their provisions are a direct affect of their [online store] profit. Money and provision go hand in hand, like peanut butter and jelly, like cereal and milk, like a hamburger with two buns.

In summary: No Money, No Honey!

Ka Tet · Aug 13, 2010, 10:43 PM // 22:43

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sirius Bsns

I hate to break it to ya, bro: No Money = No Honey. Selling costumes, name-changes, storage panes, happy-crappy, etc. is insufficient earnings compared to their general "up-keeping" bills [server(s), employees, etc.]. Also, the game's 5+ years old already. They've pumped enough content into the game by now; any more new content would only further disperse the community.

World of Warcraft's still up and running with full-blown content updates still to this day. Why? Because they charge a monthly fee! They receive money for their constant upkeep. Where's Anet's monthly fee? That's right. They don't have a monthly fee. So, to keep the community happy requires money alongside quality updates on Anet's part.

Well, how's Anet supposed to provide content if they don't make enough money to support it? Anet's history of quality updates has declined, analogous from a time-based perspective and parallel to the rate of their income [which is in steady decline if you've notice the pattern by now]. Their provisions are a direct affect of their [online store] profit. Money and provision go hand in hand, like peanut butter and jelly, like cereal and milk, like a hamburger with two buns.

In summary: No Money, No Honey!

I'm not talking about sweeping new content or a full overhaul. I'm talking about taking the people who are working on awful updates, and having them instead of dartboarding it with other people who do not play the game, listening to the people who have been playing the game for years and implementing the changes that they believe would be effective.
I typed what was becoming a TLDR amount of text about the business side. In essence, I stand by what I said earlier. I think you underestimate the amount of revenue coming in and overestimate their current upkeep with the shift of large amounts of staff to GW2.
And about the monthly fee, GW is not free to play. If you paid upfront for a subscription to a newspaper, you would not think that you were getting it for free when it showed up on your doorstep every morning.

mptank · Aug 14, 2010, 05:39 PM // 17:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by FinalRebel

Regina,
*snip*
BEFORE the "move" IP Address 64.25.39.58 showed a ping to the user of 200 on the high end, this IP was listed as OWNED by NC Interactive Austin Texas, this is also the HeadQuarters of NC Interactive the subsidiary to NC Soft with Arenanet being the subsidiary located in Bellvue Washington. ALL THE SAME COMPANY

Now here is where I get direct with you...
AFTER the move the IP address 64.25.39.69 (see how close those numbers are?) was tested and showed pings of over 35k for some and much higher for others. 64.25.39.69 comes back listed as OWNED by NC Interactive Austin Texas and the ping numbers are only separated by 11 digits!!

Now I don't know if you know how all this works or not so I'll share a small fact, those IP addresses are made up of 4 octets, without going further into depth there are exactly 4,294,967,296 unique values in an IP address. And yet somehow we managed to MOVE the server to another location and get almost the exact same IP ranges and yet they are all listed as being OWNED by NC Interactive in Austin Texas. And these servers are NOT running proxy by the way, that is where they are.

Are you saying that NC Interactive was going to charge ITSELF more money in rent for a server that is self owned??

So they made a decision to move the server from the NC Interactive Headquarters to the NC Interactive Headquarters and then not charge itself as much money in rent??

Can you explain this??

Just because the whois info says it belongs to them doesn't mean they *own* it. Ever hear of SWIP? You should google it.

But lets entertain the idea that they do own the block (which they probably do, I know of 2 /20 allocations). Looking at the data, this in particular is a /20 subnet allocation (that is 4096 IP addresses). Do you think that all of those addresses are BGP advertised and routed to a single location? No. They could, but no. What they've most likely done is only advertise a small chunk of their /20 subnet to the old datacenter, and another small chunk of that allocation to another. Just because they addresses are close together numerically does NOT mean they must go to the same location. The whois information of an IP address is NOT where that IP routes to, it is the address of the company who owns it.

Even if they own the IP addresses, what does that have to do at all with data center costs? Having an IP allocation from ARIN doesn't automatically come with power, cooling, bandwidth, transit, etc. The computers running the game have to be housed somewhere. What Regina said is that the location they were in before (which I believe was the LimeLight datacenter) raised the cost of having the servers run in their facility, so they relocated the servers to another facility with a cheaper monthly bill (looks like Level3's data center).

Quote:

Because right now with all the info I have and all the problems that everyone is having and your delay in giving any explanation at all makes all this really difficult for me to believe. I feel like your doing your job right now as Community Manager by giving us a political answer to calm the masses through this difficult time, but I don't feel like we are getting the whole truth here and I feel like that is what we SHOULD be getting.
*snip*

I think she is doing well, it is your [mis]understanding of how the internet works which should be questioned..