Bell’s argument is that they need to throttle to make sure all their customers get a fair share of the bandwidth. They do have another option. They could improve the network so that it is capable of providing the service its customers are paying for (and capable providing the service that Bell advertises).

If an ISP decides to degrade its service instead of improving the network today, what is going to happen as internet services become more bandwidth intensive? As time goes on more people are going to be using more and more bandwitdh. Downloading media from the internet is only going to increase. Services like Hulu, iTunes and XBox Marketplace all allow for downloading of movies. Steam, Stardock, XBox, PS3 and Wii allow users to purchase and download games over the internet. All of these services will use more bandwitdh and have more customers in the future. What about VOIP and Video chat? Increasing the quality of these services will also increase their bandwidth requirements.

Throttling is like putting a band aid on a bullet hole. It is a short sighted solution that is bound to fail. The only way to provide sufficient bandwidth to a growing customer base with growing bandwidth needs is to increase the capabilities of the network.

It was not a really big deal for me, I only lost one game, and I was on the verge of destroying the enemy. It was going to be my first 1 v 1 against a hard computer AI, but whatever, it was not all that hard to defeat.

What bothers me more is that breaking old saves should not be necessary. You can always maintain the code that was used to read the old save file in the new version. If the new type of save file contains information not stored in the old version, then use intelligently selected defaults, or disable what ever that new functionality is.

I work for a software company that has been developing its main product for over 20 years. The file format we use does occasionally change, mostly when new types of data are to be stored. However we have never broken the ability of our software to read old libraries.

Perhaps there is something more going on here, but I’m not sure what it could be.

On a some what related note, one of the Sins developers wrote an interesting counter point to all the noise about piracy killing the PC gaming industry. Read it:

http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512

Again every seemed to work great. Until last night.

I had about a hour to kill before going to bed so I decided to see if I had time to squeeze a level in. I fired up CoH and was greeted, in game, with a message saying I needed to download a patch. I did not really have a choice, so I said yes and the download began. When it was done, I was told to exit the game and the patch would automatically start. So I exited and the patch did not automatically start. I re-ran the game and was told I needed to download a patch. Luckily it saw that I had already downloaded the patch, so it jumped right to the screen saying I need to exit to apply the patch. I exited and again the patch did not automatically start.

Fine, I’m a pretty computer literate guy, I can find and manually run the patch. Which I did, only to be told that the patch could not find a valid install of CoH. I was now frustrated enough that I decided to search the internet for a solution. On Planet CoH forums I found someone else complaining of the same thing. Apparently if you bought CoH through Steam, you need to update it through Steam. Unfortunately the patch was not yet available on Steam.

So, today, I am sitting at my computer downloading the patch through Steam. It is 29% done.

The big problem here is that CoH won’t let me play without the patch, but Relic (makers or CoH) had not made the patch available to me. The time between them releasing the patch to non-Steam users and the patch becoming available on Steam is how long CoH is effectively broken. Furthermore, this issue is not mentioned anywhere in the CoH automatic updater.

I think the problem is that CoH was not really designed to be a Steam game, instead it was shoe-horned into Steam. Here are a few questions:

Why does Steam CoH need to use Steam to update? Why not simply use Steam as a distribution method? CoH clearly has a built in updating system, why not use that?

If you are going to break the game until the patch is applied, then why not simply wait until the patch is available on Steam before pushing it out? Clearly Relic won’t have control over when Valve puts the patch on Steam, but they can control when they push the patch out, and thus break CoH. A little synchronization would go a long way to make this easier on the users.

I’m still pretty happy with my experiences with Steam. No tax, no boxes, cds or manuals.

Anyway, my download is almost done and I’ve got Nazis to kill.

Even cooler, is Beyond the Red Line a total conversion that is implementing a Battlestar Galactica game in the Freespace 2 engine. So far they have just released a demo, but it is pretty good.

Even though I am playing these under linux, they also appear to be available for Windows and OS X.