Reply to post: Re: Streaming does have its advantages

Re: Streaming does have its advantages

"There's nothing more frustrating than to play a game and be constantly picked off by someone not because of skill on their part but simply because they've got better broadband"

...streaming. If people having better broadband is a problem now, a solution in which quality of broadband is the only relevant factor really isn't going to help. If your internet is so bad that it can't keep up with the small amount of data transferred by client-side games, how is it going to cope when the entire game needs to be streamed? Your solution means that instead of people with bad internet potentially having a sub-optimal experience in some games, they won't have any experience with any games at all.

"Latency is already a fact of life for multiplayer and that's why things can suck for someone caught on a bad connection or who didn't spend a fortune on a top end PC."

Nonsense. Connection latency is a problem in keeping clients and servers properly synchronised to each other so everyone sees the same things happening at the same time. The price of your PC is utterly irrelevant to that. It's a function of your internet connection, not your GPU. However, streaming games introduce an entirely new latency between the controller and the game, and that certainly is not a fact of life as things stand. Streaming doesn't fix the connection latency because there will still be just as much lag between an event occurring and your local client knowing about it (in fact more, since as noted above there needs to be more data transferred), but it adds additional latency in places that no current games have it. It's just a terrible idea from start to finish.

"A relatively thin client software could ensure that everyone in the game gets the same graphics, the same framerates"

Fuck everyone else in the game. If I can afford a better PC that can display better graphics and higher framerates, why should I be punished just because other people can't? Do you plan on taking away my house and car as well just because not everyone can afford their own? Forcing everyone to live in tower blocks and take the bus everywhere would ensure that everyone has the same quality of living, but no-one actually thinks that's a good idea - even communist dictators who claim to advocate such things make it clear that it's only a good idea for everyone else, not themselves. What is so special about computer games that mean we should all be dragged down to the level of the lowest common denominator? It would be great if we could all live in mansions with nice cars, fast computers and good internet, but in the absence of such a utopia, taking all the nice things away from people who have them in the name of equality is not the way to do things.