Anyone know someone rich?
It occurs to me that shipping a couple Anet devs to Australia to try out their content on 300 ping or worse might do wonders for less latency-reliant content.
As much as we keep harping on this, there is no experience like actually doing it in two physical locations to -feel- the difference.
With everything else the same. Identical computer, player, characters.
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I remember the first time I felt keenly how different games played with different ping.
My old MUD relied on spam quaffing heal potions to survive fights. I was studying in the US at the time so my university connection to Canada (where the MUD was) was normally 30ms. Returning on vacation back to Singapore, my ping was 280-300ms. Same character, same player, same client, same computer.
Performance drop, distinctly noticeable. I died a number of times at home because I couldn’t spam quaff heals fast enough. I ended up letting someone else do most of the tanking and looking a lot less cool and show-off-y than I could be with 30ms ping.
Around the same period, different game. I played Team Fortress Classic and Natural Selection a lot in those days – West Coast US server communities were the best, friendly and cooperative. Ping? 30-100ms. Back in Singapore, I tried visiting the same haunts and had 300+ms latency. If not outright kicked by server for bad ping, performance was noticeably poorer. Unplayable, pretty much.
So I ended up in Singapore servers, where nearly everyone played deathmatch in team-based objective games and you got the feeling you were mostly playing against 12-14 year olds who were going to be called away to dinner at any moment.
Poor compromise: Japanese, Korean or Hong Kong servers at 120ms odd ping, where people played a little more cooperatively, but you couldn’t understand half of what they were saying since most of it turned up as square boxes or special characters.
Least sucky option: Australian servers at 200ms or so ping. Still at a reaction time disadvantage but slightly more mature community.
I badly missed my West Coast servers. Suffice to say I didn’t play as much FPSes while on vacation as when one was technically supposed to be studying. 🙂
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This isn’t my video, as I haven’t built up the determination to try out World 2 normal mode yet.
(There are multiple more interesting competing goals like building up magic find and crafting to 450.)
I suspect my experience might be similar if those fixes don’t arrive soon.
And he’s not even playing a Charr.
Maybe I should look into getting FRAPS working so you can either point and laugh or cringe and vomit. (And I know just the cage and camera angle for that one.)
Why I Game 
That’s just horrible. Given I play from Aus I’m probably going to hit that too. Really sounds like SAB missed the mark this time around. I still haven’t tried it yet due to playing NWO. 😛
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That looks horrible. My condolences =(
-Ursan
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I gave up for the moment at Piranha Bend. One hour to finish three levels of World 1, another hour trying to get past World 2-1 and only reached that point. If memory serves, there’s quite a bit more to the level after that.
Everything else went more or less smoothly, if only because I lobbed bombs like they were free and was sharp enough to pick out a secret route that avoided the first part of Piranha Bend.
Alas, after the checkpoint, just trying to get past that sequence of jumps used up the remainder of my coins, and I was doing it very slow and steady too, staying on solid rocks and bombing turtles before using minimal geysers to jump.
Pretty much similar to the video – miss a turtle slightly = river knockdown ride to hell. Too slow on a geyser and it disappear under you? Into the river you go. Slip off a rock a bit? Off into the river with you. I can’t even muster the energy to be frustrated. I’m just going to grind easy baubles, work on Mini Moto and Mini Miya, and wait for more help (fixes/guides) to arrive.
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