Mead

Well, here is what happened: ASH (assistant executive director) had said that went roughly like "there will be no offical dc hub this year nor will it be block, any dc hub will be a byoc effort" but instead there was official hub that also had a DNS entry in the local dns server dcpp.at.quakecon.org . All is good right? Well I would say not really, the dc hub had main chat window was disabled. To me and many people who have been attending quakecon for 5+ years the dc chat window has been one of the most entertaining parts of it sitting in the byoc. Yes, not whatever downloading you might be able to do, but simply the mass chaos that normally happens in a dc chat window at a lan party. Instead they were running a very locked down IRC chat server, where one mention of any type of file sharing caused a instant ban from whatever channel you it was mentioned, also cursing (among other various things) would cause a banning too. It felt like being in a elementary school computer lab and begging your hand slapped by a teacher. Also due to the new rules this year, the byoc was quiet, no yelling. Not even any Marco Polo being played. Next there was frigging steam updates that happen right before and during Quakecon, as you might guess trying to use the internet as such a huge lan is like trying to thread a needle with a hotdog. Add in the chinese like gag order on ALL file sharing, and the fact that most of the games besides quakelive that people were wanting to play it was one huge cluster fuck unless you were fortunate enough to have tethering cellphone. I could bitch some more about the byoc, networking failures, and even the complete failure after the hotel lost power 7pm Saturday Night, where it was evident many of routers and switches didn't have their running config saved to NVRAM. From the byoc guide : " You won't need a powerstrip for your computer and monitor, but may bring one if you need additional outlets. You may not bring any Uninteruptable Power Supply (UPS) equipment. While LAN parties are often famous for having power problems, QuakeCon is uncharacteristically consistent " since 2004 there have been consistent random power failures, and now in 2009 the entire hotel and I believe the city of grapevine lost power.

This year at Quakecon there is going to be a big change in the byoc. There will be NO dc hub at the NOC(s) and none of the staff is allowed to support it. If you have have been to a lan in the last few years, you must know that one of the biggest draws of a lan is the ability to connect to a Hub with a program called Direct Connect Plus Plus (or dc++ for short), this program provides easy access and search capabilities for sharing game mods, maps, patches, and etc. Another great things is that in the past years (since at least 2004 when I started attending) the chat feature of this program has been almost the life blood of the event. If you needed info or to ask a question, you did it in dc++. If you wanted to purchase something or sell something (case of bawls for example), you did it on dc++. If you wanted to find people to play a specific game (starcraft for example) you did so in DC++. So it is going to be up to byoc'ers to create and run their own dc++ hub(s), and this brings a problem. First the network geography probably will limit byoc spots to 100mb connections again, and even though each table router is connected to a gigabit link to the NOC, if you do the math, 24 people at 100mb each means that the gigabit to the router could easily become a bottle neck greatly reducing the capabilities of a hub if there is only one hub. I want to create a action plan to institute a network of dc hubs across the byoc this year in the event that a single dc hub at a byoc spot simply can't handle the traffic. I have some experience setting up and running the ynhub, but never attempted to use DC Hub-Link I need help and advice on how to create a dc hub network at this infamous lan party in the event it is needed. So far I am already have a preliminary ynhub configuration created and have a stack of cd roms to burn it to once I finalize the configuration to pass out to people to install and run hubs on their individual rows, but I really need to iron out how to link them all together. Note: The Staff at quakecon have declared talking about this subject on the quakecon msg board or irc chat against the rules and will result in a kick or ban.

I've been a PC gamer since I got a commodore 64 instead of a NES (I'm really glad about that too) and I've seen all kinds of silly methods to protect software. Originally starting as games that wouldn't copy correctly off a diskette, then to having to type in words from manuals, later funny code wheels from Lucas arts, with the advent of CD roms they started checking the discs, eventually we got keycodes, and now we have crap like this. None of that stuff ever stopped a determined pirate, piracy of software has been happening since Bill Gates was calling most of the people using his basic interpreter thieves. I do not condone piracy, I believe that if a game company creates a good game they deserve to be paid for it. But here is my arguement for why piracy happens. So Software (game) prices have been sitting around $50+ a title since I can remember, software companies use the excuse that they have to keep the prices high to because of piracy. I call BS, since if they would lower the price many people like me inclined to purchase more games. Simply put, often game companies want to see a quick turn around of profit on their games but many of them don't understand that if they make a truly epic game, it possibly could live on forever and be ported to new game systems and OS for decades. Charge less for a game, and more people will buy it. Make better games, and you will be able to keep profiting off of it for many years. Crappy games drive up piracy and directly cause it to happen. Have you ever bought a game that was so crap-tacular that it was uninstalled in less than a weeks time? Last title I bought that was like that was Defender of the Crown 2, (The old school gamer in me wanted it to be good very badly) but in the end it was very unplayable. The problem is by the time you've figured out how crappy a game is you've already installed it meaning that it is not possible to return it to get your cash back. Now if I had of downloaded Defender of the crown 2 first and played it before buying it, I would of known not to waste my money on it. Many people who pirate game are folks who have been burned by crap-tacular games one too many times. Software piracy doesn't exactly mean a lost sale! There are many aspects of this. Many games that might not have a playable demo, are a risky perchase as mentioned above. If the game is good, the pirate possibly might end up buying the game after the act of downloading it, same can be said with music and movies. Then you have folks who wouldn't of bought the game no matter what, and would of enjoyed the game if piracy didn't exist. Then you have the people who simply pirate everything and anything as a collecting hobby and seldom even play have of what they pirated more than 15 minutes just to simply check to make sure their copy works. Now you have this current gen of DRM crap. This type of action by companies is akin a spoiled child who doesn't like who he got teamed with and decides to take his ball and leave. When you get so paranoid about piracy that it begins to stop your customers who have given you their hard earned money from using your software you've got issues. If you don't trust your customers enough that you require the program to call home every time it is run, you've got issue (STEAM). If you feel that you have to install a rootkit onto your customer's system to ensure it doesn't get pirated, you've got issue. What are these issues? Not trusting your customers. You know what? If you don't want to trust a me after I've bought your product, I'm simply not going to buy it. There are plenty of game companies that treat there customers better than that, so what if I'm not going to have experienced the latest Valve release? Beyond paying for a game, there are many open source alternatives to excrement being plopped onto the shelves these days. Warsaw is the best example. In the end, I'm gonna say that piracy isn't anything new, isn't going away, and trying to battle too hard against it will alienate your paying customers and hurt your business. Instead of fighting piracy, companies should try to live with it the best they can, and give incentives to people to purchase their games instead of penalizing them with DRM and other copy protections.