The Bungie Weekly Update has a new name. Featured within:

- Bungie is requiring everyone in 3v3 playlists to use Ice Breaker at the start of a match. Or maybe Invective.
- There's a couple new No-Fireteam playlists just for CruelLEGACEY.
- Bungie has implemented all of Kahzgul's net code suggestions in the form of the "Damage Referee."
- The Kings Fall Raid has been nerfed.
- And there's some Movies of the Week I haven't watched yet in my rush to post this FIRST. :)

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What will happen (again, in theory), if my connection is bad?

Paul: If your connection is bad, we'll be giving you even more reasons to improve it. Expect to lose fights a lot more often, even if you think you shot first or escaped behind cover in time. Things will get much better once you fix your connection, but at least you'll receive fewer angry messages in the meantime.

EDIT

I'm sure this is meant largely in jest, but it's pretty condescending. We'll give you more reasons to improve it. Fix your connection, Narc! Fix yours, Up North!

I hope this doesn't change how the game plays for us plebs with connections we just aren't willing to fix. If only I had some more reasons to fix my connection, I'd be able to come up with the extra $50 a month for internet. If only my friend I play with in Prague had more reasons to improve his connection, he'd move to Paris for a lower ping. Thank you, Bingle.

Not interested in rearranging the layout of my home so that I'm not playing on WiFi.

Not a huge loss, as crucible isn't fun anyway.

I mean, this surely will be the thing that convinces Narc to move back to New England, right? That will fix his connection.

The Bungie Weekly Update has a new name. Featured within:

- Bungie is requiring everyone in 3v3 playlists to use Ice Breaker at the start of a match. Or maybe Invective.
- There's a couple new No-Fireteam playlists just for CruelLEGACEY.
- Bungie has implemented all of Kahzgul's net code suggestions in the form of the "Damage Referee."
- The Kings Fall Raid has been nerfed.
- And there's some Movies of the Week I haven't watched yet in my rush to post this FIRST. :)

First of all, best DBO BWU post ever :)

2nd, these all sound like great changes! Can't wait to try it all out.

- Bungie is requiring everyone in 3v3 playlists to use Ice Breaker at the start of a match. Or maybe Invective.

No special ammo on spawn is a bad idea. You think heavies and special dominate now? They will even more.

Let's look at Trials. You keep your special ammo between rounds, but you can't grab them right away. This means that the first team to win a round can collect special, and use that to have a significant advantage next round since they will have it and the other team won't. Have fun not being able to snipe the sniper looking down at your team. This makes the first mistake much more costly.

We'll see how it plays out, but it's probably going to be like every other change they've done and create some kind of new problem. Once again they are taking the wrong approach, which should be increasing the zoom on all sniper scopes across the board.

Maybe No Land Beyond will be the new thorn in Trials.

On the other hand, everyone loves playing Crucible with people lagging through walls. Hint: Other people's experiences matter too.

No shit. I didn't say they didn't. I didn't even say I didn't like their decision or think it was reasonable. I just said I wasn't going to play Iron Banner anymore. And that they were condescending.

I think you might be right. To me, it seems like this will make those games extremely lopsided, and starving enemies of specials will become a very worthwhile tactic. That said, I'm sure it'll still be fine. It should even out the ones that are lopsided because of extreme goodness with snipers.

The Bungie Weekly Update has a new name. Featured within:

- Bungie is requiring everyone in 3v3 playlists to use Ice Breaker at the start of a match. Or maybe Invective.
- There's a couple new No-Fireteam playlists just for CruelLEGACEY.
- Bungie has implemented all of Kahzgul's net code suggestions in the form of the "Damage Referee."
- The Kings Fall Raid has been nerfed.
- And there's some Movies of the Week I haven't watched yet in my rush to post this FIRST. :)

When I read this I thought you were joking, but yes, these are all correct. Well done. ;-)

- Bungie is requiring everyone in 3v3 playlists to use Ice Breaker at the start of a match. Or maybe Invective.

No special ammo on spawn is a bad idea. You think heavies and special dominate now? They will even more.

Let's look at Trials. You keep your special ammo between rounds, but you can't grab them right away. This means that the first team to win a round can collect special, and use that to have a significant advantage next round since they will have it and the other team won't. Have fun not being able to snipe the sniper looking down at your team. This makes the first mistake much more costly.

We'll see how it plays out, but it's probably going to be like every other change they've done and create some kind of new problem. Once again they are taking the wrong approach, which should be increasing the zoom on all sniper scopes across the board.

Maybe No Land Beyond will be the new thorn in Trials.

This has been my concern ever since the Planet Destiny guys started talking about removing special ammo at spawn.

What if Bungie changed it so that you drop whatever special ammo you're carrying when you die?

No shit. I didn't say they didn't. I didn't even say I didn't like their decision or think it was reasonable. I just said I wasn't going to play Iron Banner anymore. And that they were condescending.

Yeah, your tone and word choice and thanking "Bingle" totally had me believing you supported the decision and thought it was reasonable.

Also, What the Heek.

Ignore what this used to say.

This is kind of what I was thinking. I usually run Invective anyway, so it may actually help me, but I'm not really a big fan of the special weapon ammo reduction creep. I dislike the slowdown effect it has on the game.

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I didn't even talk about the decision, just how they wrote about it. I call Bungie Bingle about 85% of the time. You're just trying to find something to be mad about. This happens here every time I say something like this. Just because I made a choice about what I will do or like doesn't mean I think Bungie is wrong, irrational, making bad design choices, or that I think my preferences are the correct ones.

This forum as a whole needs to lighten up and quit with the greedy, self-serving, expentant mindset.

I found their explanation for the Ogres teleporting interesting :

" there was an unfortunate issue where the bombs were capable of blocking the Ogre’s pathfinding. That resulted in them occasionally making a very frustrating teleport to get past the blocked path."

Sounds a lot like what was giving us trouble last week.
If you were a little slow on one Ogre, and then even a little slower on the next one, he would have enough time to try and walk but be "blocked" by a bomb.

I kinda like the idea of not being sniped first thing by a bullshit camper standing way at the edge of a map. I don't the arguement that heavies will dominate is not all that great because that's their job and stopping them even with Heavy Ammo can be very difficult as long as the Heavy user is keeping aware of sightlines and the limitations of his Heavy. Memento sure is going to play differently. :)

That and I'll just run Invective and not worry too much about it.

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Also, What the Heek.

Ask Xenos. :p

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This is kind of what I was thinking. I usually run Invective anyway, so it may actually help me, but I'm not really a big fan of the special weapon ammo reduction creep. I dislike the slowdown effect it has on the game.

To me, the place where Special ammo really needs a reduction is in the 6v6 gametypes. Even the largest crucible maps aren't THAT big. A well coordinated team of 6 can effectively shut down just about every map if they have 3 or 4 solid snipers. This isn't as much of a problem in the 3v3 gametypes, because 3 players just isn't enough to cover all sightlines and approaches.

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I understand that booting the kids off of netflix or stopping a large download of adult material can help your connection, but when your internet is as bad as shed-net there is truly no way to fix it on my end. Well I guess I could have paid for it. Penalizing players who don't have access to quad-band, fibre optical, 0 packet loss, a positive ping, seems like a harsh choice. If you are going to design an online only game then accept all internets. Im going to go feed the squirrels to make the generator run faster now.

I understand that booting the kids off of netflix or stopping a large download of adult material can help your connection, but when your internet is as bad as shed-net there is truly no way to fix it on my end. Well I guess I could have paid for it. Penalizing players who don't have access to quad-band, fibre optical, 0 packet loss, a positive ping,

They're not banning you from playing. You're just not going to be a roaming unstoppable force anymore. Why is this a bad thing?

I understand that booting the kids off of netflix or stopping a large download of adult material can help your connection, but when your internet is as bad as shed-net there is truly no way to fix it on my end. Well I guess I could have paid for it. Penalizing players who don't have access to quad-band, fibre optical, 0 packet loss, a positive ping, seems like a harsh choice. If you are going to design an online only game then accept all internets. Im going to go feed the squirrels to make the generator run faster now.

No. You design a game to give the best experience to the widest set of people reasonably possible. And then you protect that group from the extreme outliers running on Shed-Nets. Or what have you.

Might there be a case where someone's internet just isn't acting right and they have no way to fix it? Sure. And that's unfortunate and I feel for them. My own internet has had periods where it was just terrible for days or weeks at a time. But the same time, it's hardly fair to impose a bad experience on players with good connections either...

I have a theory that people with good internet, never really had a bad connection except for that time they joined people in far away lands, believe that with lag you become an unstoppable force of nature who wades through bullets and teleports worse than a taken captain. But it sucks for us as well. There are lots of times were I'll disengage when my health gets low only to die in another hallway. Other times the other person will kill you from the grave 5 seconds after his body hit the floor. My crucible K/D is 1.06. The only good K/D games I can remember is double shotty, shoulder charge titan and those were the nights I wanted to watch the world burn around me. So when Bungie comes out and says I'm now going to be penalized for living in an area with one internet provider with overpriced shitty internet it rubs me the wrong way.

Both sides think the other is at a huge advantage, without any disadvantages, despite how illogical that is.

Both sides are right, both sides are wrong, but personal bias overcomes logic for some reason. Hence the problem that I have with the wording of the article. But I'm saving judgement on implementation until after the patch hits.

I didn't even talk about the decision, just how they wrote about it. I call Bungie Bingle about 85% of the time. You're just trying to find something to be mad about. This happens here every time I say something like this. Just because I made a choice about what I will do or like doesn't mean I think Bungie is wrong, irrational, making bad design choices, or that I think my preferences are the correct ones.

This forum as a whole needs to lighten up and quit with the greedy, self-serving, expentant mindset.

When I first ready your reply to the OP, I interpreted your words much like Raga did. I was about to write something very similar to Raga's response, but I stopped and said to myself "This is Funkmon, here. I know him well enough to know he's a smart, reasonable, good-humoured guy. Maybe his post doesn't mean what I think it does".

I realized I had been reading your post with my "general internet comment" filter engaged. You know, that filter that makes you see the most negative possible interpretation of the words in front of you because that's what the Internet has trained you to do? As soon as I shut that filter off, I saw your post as it was really intended.

I know I've faced my fare share of these kinds of "worst-possible interpretations" here on these forums, even as recently as this week. I absolutely make mistakes from time to time in the way I try to communicate my thoughts, but I have also felt like some people have, on occasion, gone out of their way to find the worst possible interpretation of my words. I think that even here at DBO, where many of us are quite familiar with each other, we can still slip into Internet negativity vortexes in a way that never happens when we're playing together and talking about these same topics over voice chat.

Really, I think the best thing for all of us is to play even more Destiny together. It genuinely helps avoid these kinds of miscommunications :)

They didn't say penalized. They said:

Our goal is to give you a better experience in the Crucible when there are Internet problems outside of your control.

Maybe that means penalized? But, one alternate interpretation is things will be improved for everyone and that the game will play better even for people on Shed-Net. Maybe you'll get a lot more kills because your actions are better communicated / received despite Shed-Net? Maybe you'll also get killed more because the game handles lag better and more accurately reflects how things should have gone?

"Expect to lose fights a lot more often, even if you think you shot first or escaped behind cover in time." I interpret this as if you have a bad connection you'll be penalized. And damn we are all just arguing semantics of a paragraph and will know more next week.

"Expect to lose fights a lot more often, even if you think you shot first or escaped behind cover in time. Things will get much better once you fix your connection..."

Sounds fairly penalizing. We'll wait and see how it plays out. But yeah, when the only internet provider in the area is DSL, that does mean there is no way to fix it. Not sure what they mean by incentivizing the red bars to get (non-existent) better internet. Possibly poor choice of words? Does everyone deserve a good experience? Yes? Is everyone going to get one? No? We all take our turns I suppose, if what has been said about red bars being unstoppable forces is even partially true.

Guess I'll keep hiding in corners with my sniper.

"Expect to lose fights a lot more often, even if you think you shot first or escaped behind cover in time." I interpret this as if you have a bad connection you'll be penalized. And damn we are all just arguing semantics of a paragraph and will know more next week.

In my brain, this translates to "a laggy player doesn't have an accurate view of what's going on in the game, so don't be surprised if what you see doesn't line up with what's actually happening".

In other words, if I'm lagging, I might not see that an enemy has shot me until a split second after he has shot me. In that split second I might duck behind cover and think I'm safe, only to have the hit register and kill me. From my laggy view, it appears I just got shot through cover, but everyone else in the game could see that I actually got shot before I had moved.

Basically, it sounds to me like they are trying to make hit registration more "fair" in that hits will register based on the true game-state, not the laggy player's out-of-date view of the game state.

But you're absolutely right that we don't really know anything until we get to play with the new net code and see how it feels.

Not sure what they mean by incentivizing the red bars to get (non-existent) better internet.

I highly doubt they're blaming their players for bad internet. Probably just a joke, honestly. Extreme sarcasm of some kind...though it does come across bad.

"This is Funkmon ... he's a smart, reasonable, good-humoured guy."

Two of those are correct, at least.

I think that even here at DBO, where many of us are quite familiar with each other, we can still slip into Internet negativity vortexes in a way that never happens when we're playing together and talking about these same topics over voice chat.

I agree with you completely. I only genuinely hate maybe twelve or thirteen people on this forum, but I still play with them every week. I mean, I'm recording a Doom Let's Play with one later tonight.

Half the raids I do involve the group arguing over whether Ted Nugent is or is not totally awesome (he is) or whether Black Spindle is the best gun for everything (it is). Anyway, as far as I know we spend the vast majority of the time in raids arguing, until someone says "Hey, let's do the raid," then we shut up and do it. Then we keep doing it over and over.

So yeah, we should close the forum and only voice chat to discuss the game. We just need to get the Xbox party system to allow more than eight dudes.

Really, I think the best thing for all of us is to play even more Destiny together. It genuinely helps avoid these kinds of miscommunications :)

Y'all should switch over to the bone then.

I understand that booting the kids off of netflix or stopping a large download of adult material can help your connection, but when your internet is as bad as shed-net there is truly no way to fix it on my end. Well I guess I could have paid for it. Penalizing players who don't have access to quad-band, fibre optical, 0 packet loss, a positive ping, seems like a harsh choice. If you are going to design an online only game then accept all internets. Im going to go feed the squirrels to make the generator run faster now.

That's the problem though, there is no magic middle ground where everyone will be happy, and the community has been begging since day 1 for better latency in games, so it was bound to happen eventually. You can't make the experience better for fast connections without making it worse for slow connections and vice versa, and I highly doubt it's going to take a huge dramatic shift anyway, just slide from middle right to middle left.

What will happen (again, in theory), if my connection is bad?

Paul: If your connection is bad, we'll be giving you even more reasons to improve it. Expect to lose fights a lot more often, even if you think you shot first or escaped behind cover in time. Things will get much better once you fix your connection, but at least you'll receive fewer angry messages in the meantime.

EDIT

I'm sure this is meant largely in jest, but it's pretty condescending. We'll give you more reasons to improve it. Fix your connection, Narc! Fix yours, Up North!

I hope this doesn't change how the game plays for us plebs with connections we just aren't willing to fix. If only I had some more reasons to fix my connection, I'd be able to come up with the extra $50 a month for internet. If only my friend I play with in Prague had more reasons to improve his connection, he'd move to Paris for a lower ping. Thank you, Bingle.

Honestly I'd blame the community on this one before I'd blame Bungie. They've been begging since day one: "Bingle fix yer shit" when it comes to lag.

Oh, yeah. For sure. I'm honestly surprised they held out this long on it. They have caved much quicker for similarly asked for things in the past.

Hopefully it's much like the levels, where they did what the community loudly proclaimed for some reason, and made them experience based. This silenced those cries while doing almost nothing to actually change how it works. It's still gear-based levelling, they just pacified people. Very smart.

Also, What the Heek.

Ask Xenos. :p

When making front page posts we tagged all of the Bungie Weekly Updates with BWU. Since they changed the name, I tagged it with bwu and then somehow typoed the other new to thab. When Ragashingo asked me about it I said "This Heek At Bungie, obviously #thab"

I've definitely been on both sides of the lag in every online game I've ever played and Destiny has been, by quite a margin, the one that felt the most balanced. I got kills I perceived as valid, perhaps a few seconds later than usual. I got killed "out of the blue" a few seconds after duking it out with a lagged player and surviving with quite a hit to my health. It never felt unfair.

It was never a nothing-at-all-happens situation like Halo had when I was the one lagging and it wasn't a fuckers-teleporting-everywhere scenario when they are the ones lagging.

This.

As it currently stands, games with laggy people are lame for both the laggers and non-laggers. To me it sounds like they will be altering the net code such that games with laggy people will only suck for the laggers and not the green bars. Sounds like the fairest solution they could come up with.

This game doesn't take a ton of bandwidth, we're taking 1mbps, course if you only have 512k - 768k bps up then you'll have troubles...

Both sides think the other is at a huge advantage, without any disadvantages, despite how illogical that is.

This is also a bit of nonsense. As a lagged player I am very aware (and even if we weren't, we're constantly being told) that we are hard to hit (sometimes) and don't take damage (sometimes). And since other players appear like that to us a lot of the time, we ARE aware that it is frustrating.

We do NOT believe that being a lagged player holds NO advantage.

We believe that all other things being equal, it is better to be the non-lagged player shooting the lagged player than the other way around, because over a long enough timeline, this is how it works out.

When a non-lagged player fails to kill a lagged one, it is obvious what is going on-- a player teleports around a shot (or, rather, appears to) or walks in place and takes no damage. The non-lagged player is made instantly aware of how fighting this player is different from fighting the others. They don't get the kill, and they get no good feedback to their actions.

When a non-lagged player survives an encounter with a lagged player who got the drop on them, they just think they won.

So the cumulative perception is that when you kill a lagged player, they deserved to die, and when they survive, the lag helped them.

Both sides are right, both sides are wrong, but personal bias overcomes logic for some reason.

Yes, the straw man position that holds that being a lagged player never bothers anyone else is wrong. It's just not a position anybody I know holds. What is true is that over a long enough time, the supposed benefits are utterly outweighed by the obvious disadvantages.

Hence the problem that I have with the wording of the article. But I'm saving judgement on implementation until after the patch hits.

I may have to go back to some crucible soon just to see if any difference is discernible.

"Expect to lose fights a lot more often, even if you think you shot first or escaped behind cover in time." I interpret this as if you have a bad connection you'll be penalized. And damn we are all just arguing semantics of a paragraph and will know more next week.

In my brain, this translates to "a laggy player doesn't have an accurate view of what's going on in the game, so don't be surprised if what you see doesn't line up with what's actually happening".

In other words, if I'm lagging, I might not see that an enemy has shot me until a split second after he has shot me. In that split second I might duck behind cover and think I'm safe, only to have the hit register and kill me. From my laggy view, it appears I just got shot through cover, but everyone else in the game could see that I actually got shot before I had moved.

Basically, it sounds to me like they are trying to make hit registration more "fair" in that hits will register based on the true game-state, not the laggy player's out-of-date view of the game state.

If there's no authoritative server, there's no such thing as a "true game-state".

They are doing what some have asked for-- resolving conflicts between lagged and non-lagged players' game states in favor of the lower latency player (although since latency is a function of the delay between two points, you have to compare them to a third location, or to other players in the game. The game is already doing that somehow when it builds its green and red bars; it may be assigning red bars to players who have high latency to a significant minority or to a majority of other players, or based against a Destiny metaserver, or some other metric we're unaware of.)

I'd argue, as I have before, that the very nature of lag means that on balance, over time, the aggregate of encounters between lagged and non-lagged players already resolves in favor of the non-lagged players (excluding lagswitchers) for obvious reasons; so what Damage Referee purports to do is swing the balance further in that same direction in response to the vocal complaints of non-lagged players who feel they are being cheated of kills (and let's be fair, it's kills-- not wins, on balance) being stolen from them by lag.

I wonder if this will affect PVE encounters at all, or if it is only activated in PVP. Most of the update is in reference to crucible but it's never actually explicitly stated that DR only functions in PVP.
From the update:

Paul: If your connection is bad, we'll be giving you even more reasons to improve it. Expect to lose fights a lot more often, even if you think you shot first or escaped behind cover in time. Things will get much better once you fix your connection, but at least you'll receive fewer angry messages in the meantime.

Crap like this is why Adam Orth lost a job, and why lots of developers put some kind of editor between an engineer and the public.

Paul.. Deej... for god's sake, did nobody review this?

Lose fights more often? My k/d is around .5 and I avoid Crucible like the plague already. I went there only for certain bounties I wanted, and I don't complain about those-- I don't think any one has a right to-- because I don't feel I have the right to expect access, or easy access, to every weapon in the game just because I bought it. It's not like that.

Fix my connection? Do you mean move halfway across the world? I've got 100mbps symmetrical fiber to the premises. The problem is that Destiny just isn't popular where I happen to live. Maybe that'll change in the future, and maybe it won't. I certainly don't consider it a design flaw of Destiny, either before or after this patch, that it's hard for me to get a good game or even a fair game, but for the love of all that's holy don't go telling people they have to "fix their shit" if they don't want to "lose fights a lot more often".

Fewer angry messages? I really don't care how many I get.

How about you, Paul?

This.

As it currently stands, games with laggy people are lame for both the laggers and non-laggers. To me it sounds like they will be altering the net code such that games with laggy people will only suck for the laggers and not the green bars. Sounds like the fairest solution they could come up with.

This game doesn't take a ton of bandwidth, we're taking 1mbps, course if you only have 512k - 768k bps up then you'll have troubles...

Lag is latency, not bandwidth. I have 100Mbps symmetrical, but a ping of 200-300.

That said, if I also had low bandwidth, that would make things worse, but there are people around the world with perfectly serviceable broadband connections that in no way need "fixing"-- they are just located far from Bungie's servers and far from other players. Latency is an unavoidable consequence of that.

Resolving conflicts in game state this way based on latency under those conditions is essentially geographical discrimination. You can call it the best compromise, you can call it a technical solution, but there is one thing you can't call it, and that's "fair".

I understand that booting the kids off of netflix or stopping a large download of adult material can help your connection, but when your internet is as bad as shed-net there is truly no way to fix it on my end. Well I guess I could have paid for it. Penalizing players who don't have access to quad-band, fibre optical, 0 packet loss, a positive ping, seems like a harsh choice. If you are going to design an online only game then accept all internets. Im going to go feed the squirrels to make the generator run faster now.

That's the problem though, there is no magic middle ground where everyone will be happy, and the community has been begging since day 1 for better latency in games, so it was bound to happen eventually. You can't make the experience better for fast connections without making it worse for slow connections and vice versa, and I highly doubt it's going to take a huge dramatic shift anyway, just slide from middle right to middle left.

Where is the evidence that the current situation is "better" for those with worse connections, aside from lagswitchers? Where's the evidence that it needs to be better, aside from the complaints themselves.

People beg for "better lag" and cry "fix your s***" in just about every online game ever made, going back to when they were played on modems. Things are many, many times better than that now, but somehow the complaints go on.

How much worse can you justify making it for those who are already having a bad time in order to reduce the first world problem of being unable to get as many kills as you think you deserve against high latency players? Because I'm willing to bet it's not going to be a 1:1 ratio, AND it's not going to stop the complaints.

Unless they can make it so nobody ever sees a moonwalking player take no damage, there will be something to complain about. If you slide the bar that far over, nobody with a significantly above average ping will be able to get kills at all. They'll be dead before they see anybody. As it is, the best chance for these players is either being a shotgun camper or going on a tripmine spree; and if the Damage Referee ends up having a dramatic enough effect to please those complaining about lag, probably the tripmining will be the only way that still works.

"This is Funkmon ... he's a smart, reasonable, good-humoured guy."

Two of those are correct, at least.

I think that even here at DBO, where many of us are quite familiar with each other, we can still slip into Internet negativity vortexes in a way that never happens when we're playing together and talking about these same topics over voice chat.

I agree with you completely. I only genuinely hate maybe twelve or thirteen people on this forum, but I still play with them every week. I mean, I'm recording a Doom Let's Play with one later tonight.

Now I *definitely* don't feel bad about blowing up those barrels.

Not sure what they mean by incentivizing the red bars to get (non-existent) better internet.

I highly doubt they're blaming their players for bad internet. Probably just a joke, honestly. Extreme sarcasm of some kind...though it does come across bad.

No, I think he meant that straight up. He's just looking at it from the perspective that people must be having other problems-- cheap routers, using wifi, bad cabling, no good QoS settings, stateful packet inspection turned on... I don't know what, but he's obviously lumped in those who have problems that can be fixed with everyone who registers has having a suboptimal connection, as defined by Destiny.

Nevermind the fact that even in Destiny's prime market, the US, the average broadband connection is slower than many other places in the world, that there's much less competition between ISPs, much less consumer choice, and as a result, many consumers have a choice between MAYBE two operators, one of which is probably a cable company. And everybody loves those.

I can see an engineer writing that paragraph without trying to be a jerk. I just don't understand how a community liaison could read it and think it was OK to go out like that.

I'm sure they tested it at some point and determined it was fine. There's gotta be a reason it took them this long to change things people have been complaining about when they turn on other things like a dime. I've got faith it won't be a huge deal, but I'll also guarantee I'll be blaming this decision if I ever play Crucible again and don't do well.

deeJ is probably doing other crap, Urk too. I think Cozmo, as a veteran Redditor, may see value in pointless speculation of others' motives.

Are your prices particularly bad? I know not everywhere has fibreoptic yet, but my friends have no trouble at all on non-fibre. So I can only assume moderately good Internet is extortionate, if bad Internet connections are so common?

And now, my ignorant/trolly gut reaction - You get what you pay for. If you want a good online experience you have to be willing to pay for it. You can't expect others to suffer your bad connection on your behalf.

Edit: Hadnt considered that some folks are likely on Wifi due to the layout of their homes. Fair enough, wifi sucks.

deeJ is probably doing other crap, Urk too. I think Cozmo, as a veteran Redditor, may see value in pointless speculation of others' motives.

I thought it was a humorous-yet-gentle poke at people with bad connections in general. It's pretty stupid to read it, gasp, and use your embroidered hand fan to calm you from your indignation while you think of a way to whine about how you are being picked on. It was clearly just a quick joke that he probably didn't even think twice about because of how dumb someone would be to misinterpret it.

I honestly can't believe people are making as big a deal out of this as they are.

deeJ is probably doing other crap, Urk too. I think Cozmo, as a veteran Redditor, may see value in pointless speculation of others' motives.

I thought it was a humorous-yet-gentle poke at people with bad connections in general. It's pretty stupid to read it, gasp, and use your embroidered hand fan to calm you from your indignation while you think of a way to whine about how you are being picked on. It was clearly just a quick joke that he probably didn't even think twice about because of how dumb someone would be to misinterpret it.

What was humorous about it? Where was the joke?

There are no lines to read between here. He says that you'll be losing more often, and that that will give you incentive to "fix your connection".

If you have a good connection, it's a funny joke at the expense of those who don't. Ha ha!

If you don't, it's just a statement that people find the idea that your not so great multiplayer experience is going to get a bit worse unless you do something about it, which you probably can't because if you could have, you would have by now.

Ha ha! I'm peeing myself laughing.

I honestly can't believe people are making as big a deal out of this as they are.

If you want to play the "it's only a game card" here, feel free. Then again, you felt it important enough to come in and call people who think Bungie's being insensitive here stupid, so, yeah.

Bungie didn't think twice about this. They didn't even think once about it.

I read into the line neither malice nor condescension. It is the fact that no thought was put into it that is bothersome; the idea that if you have lag, that is your fault-- which is the converse of the complaint from the low latency players, that they are being "punished" because when players lag out and don't take damage, it is not THEIR fault.

The idea that it's funny to some people makes it worse, not better.

Are your prices particularly bad? I know not everywhere has fibreoptic yet, but my friends have no trouble at all on non-fibre. So I can only assume moderately good Internet is extortionate, if bad Internet connections are so common?

Actually, they are. Bad cable or DSL are pretty common. In areas less dense than suburbs of major cities, many times wireless is the only option. There are areas where optic is not available at all, and in some of those areas DSL is no longer being offered.

If you're lucky, you've got one DSL operator and one cable operator to choose from. If you're in an upscale market, you might get decent service from one of them, but if you don't, changing operators because of bad service-- slow speeds, unreliability, packet loss, etc-- moving to another provider for many simply is not an option, other than going wireless.

In many cases it's not necessarily extortionate, it's just that in many areas there is a lack of options and a severe lack of competition.

I've definitely been on both sides of the lag in every online game I've ever played and Destiny has been, by quite a margin, the one that felt the most balanced. I got kills I perceived as valid, perhaps a few seconds later than usual. I got killed "out of the blue" a few seconds after duking it out with a lagged player and surviving with quite a hit to my health. It never felt unfair.

It was never a nothing-at-all-happens situation like Halo had when I was the one lagging and it wasn't a fuckers-teleporting-everywhere scenario when they are the ones lagging.

Generally that has also been my experience, in both PVE and PVP. Lag is noticeable, but the game seems to degrade gracefully.

What I expect is that this means that low latency players are experiencing the effects more keenly than they do in other games, and this is troublesome to them. High latency players are getting a more robust experience than they usually do; you only have to compare a high ping coop game of Halo 3 to a Destiny raid to see the massive improvement Bungie made there.

What I fear is that the loud complaints about crucible lag is going to take away some of the improved experience that Destiny offers to high latency players, and that if this change is made at a low level it may effect more than just Crucible. The update itself is nonspecific about this even though it is all within the context of PVP discussions.

I'm sure they tested it at some point and determined it was fine. There's gotta be a reason it took them this long to change things people have been complaining about when they turn on other things like a dime. I've got faith it won't be a huge deal, but I'll also guarantee I'll be blaming this decision if I ever play Crucible again and don't do well.

Well, you've hit the nail on the head-- this is the problem with being transparent. Nobody's going to be able to be objective about the change now. Every time a low latency player sees some lag effects, they'll claim the change doesn't work or doesn't go far enough, and every time a high latency player has a problem, it'll be the changes they blame as well.

As for testing... I really don't know. I don't know if or how Bungie simulates lag internally, or if they just look at the data from the deployed game. It may be a simple calculation about the affected players, and if serving the population that is in major markets on good quality broadband makes sense, they will do that, and it will make sense to do that.

I could do without the snark when you announce it, though, as funny as everyone else seems to think it is.

I understand that booting the kids off of netflix or stopping a large download of adult material can help your connection, but when your internet is as bad as shed-net there is truly no way to fix it on my end. Well I guess I could have paid for it. Penalizing players who don't have access to quad-band, fibre optical, 0 packet loss, a positive ping, seems like a harsh choice. If you are going to design an online only game then accept all internets. Im going to go feed the squirrels to make the generator run faster now.

That's the problem though, there is no magic middle ground where everyone will be happy, and the community has been begging since day 1 for better latency in games, so it was bound to happen eventually. You can't make the experience better for fast connections without making it worse for slow connections and vice versa, and I highly doubt it's going to take a huge dramatic shift anyway, just slide from middle right to middle left.

Where is the evidence that the current situation is "better" for those with worse connections, aside from lagswitchers? Where's the evidence that it needs to be better, aside from the complaints themselves.

I never said how good it was for either, and I also don't really feel one way or the other about the decision, I'm merely stating two facts:
1. Latency in Crubile been a complaint since day one
2. If you make the situation better for either high latency players or low latency players it will generally make the experience worse for the others.

I guess I'm more spoilt that I realised

Yeah, that's actually a big part of the reason Google is putting a gigabit service in a bunch of cities. Not so much to bring fast Internet to people, but to try and bully ISPs into providing better Internet.

Yeah, that's actually a big part of the reason Google is putting a gigabit service in a bunch of cities. Not so much to bring fast Internet to people, but to try and bully ISPs into providing better Internet.

They're starting here in Nashville, but I've heard it will be another 2 years before they have it running. I live on the far outskirts, and am looking to move further out, so who knows if I'll ever get it. The only option I have now is Comcast, and it's awful. Every evening it slows to a crawl, or just stops working.

To add to what narc said, my parents live on a farm that is pretty far from any town. They only have one DSL provider in that area and barely any cell service. The DSL provider oversold their capacity, so it's just a challenge to get web pages to load, much less play games. They're looking into satellite now.

There are a lot of rural areas, especially as you head west, that don't have any options for fast internet. It's just a huge area without the population to provide incentive for the providers to build up any infrastructure.

They're starting here in Nashville, but I've heard it will be another 2 years before they have it running. I live on the far outskirts, and am looking to move further out, so who knows if I'll ever get it. The only option I have now is Comcast, and it's awful. Every evening it slows to a crawl, or just stops working.

Yeah they take quite awhile to get it going. We even already had fiber lines in Provo (that's why Google came here) and it still took almost a year and a half before I could get service. But it's been the best ISP experience I've ever had. Never waited more than 5 minutes to talk to someone, and they actually know what they're talking about, and $70 for 1Gb is awesome.

In my area I have 4 options. AT&T (no thanks), Time Warner (no thanks), Consolidated Communications, and recently Google fiber. I've considered upgrading to Google since it's $70 / month for 1Gb up and down, but we are currently paying like $30-40 / month on Consolidated for 25Mb down and 3Mb up. Seems plenty fast to me and they have great customer service. Also I'm not on contract so I can change my mind at any time.

Last year they actually bumped up our speeds for a price increase of $0 which is unheard of in the US. Usually cable providers just increase your costs at random. I think over the 5 years or so we've been using our provider our costs have actually gone down.

Last year they actually bumped up our speeds for a price increase of $0 which is unheard of in the US. Usually cable providers just increase your costs at random. I think over the 5 years or so we've been using our provider our costs have actually gone down.

Thank Google.

Fastest internet available in the north suburbs is Comcast at 75 down for $80 a month.

Luckily we have a choice of those two. I mean, famously, AT&T and Comcast are very open to competition and not monopolistic at all.

Sprint: 60 megabits down, 10 up on good nights, but it don't cost me nothing extra. And, unlike AT&T and Comcast, it has no data caps.

Going to go ahead and keep sticking with my cellnet.

We've been pretty fortunate where I am. I get cable at 50Mb down for about $50 a month. But the connection is good and the customer service is good and a couple of years ago it would have gotten me 15Mb. Free speed bumps are nice. :)

They were going down before google announced they were coming to KC. But still.

I've definitely been on both sides of the lag in every online game I've ever played and Destiny has been, by quite a margin, the one that felt the most balanced. I got kills I perceived as valid, perhaps a few seconds later than usual. I got killed "out of the blue" a few seconds after duking it out with a lagged player and surviving with quite a hit to my health. It never felt unfair.

It was never a nothing-at-all-happens situation like Halo had when I was the one lagging and it wasn't a fuckers-teleporting-everywhere scenario when they are the ones lagging.

Generally that has also been my experience, in both PVE and PVP. Lag is noticeable, but the game seems to degrade gracefully.

What I expect is that this means that low latency players are experiencing the effects more keenly than they do in other games, and this is troublesome to them. High latency players are getting a more robust experience than they usually do; you only have to compare a high ping coop game of Halo 3 to a Destiny raid to see the massive improvement Bungie made there.

What I fear is that the loud complaints about crucible lag is going to take away some of the improved experience that Destiny offers to high latency players, and that if this change is made at a low level it may effect more than just Crucible. The update itself is nonspecific about this even though it is all within the context of PVP discussions.

Why was this never a problem in the Alpha? In the Alpha, I had 3Mbps down 1Mbps up. The shittiest cable connection you could have. And I never ever not even once saw anything even remotely close to the lag I see now.

Where I live you could correlate the price drop and Google's announcement.

You mentioned things that happened in the last year like the speed increase. That was surely after the google announcement if google is available now.

It's not feasible for everyone in flyover country to move to Seattle. That paragraph really peeved me off, then i came here and realized that i wasn't the only one.

yay for "always online!!"

I wouldn't be surprised, but we have always have excellent customer service even before Google.

I've always used Wifi for my online gaming, even back in the Halo 2 & 3 days (sorry, Evil Otto & Butcher!). Hell, even back in the Combat Evolved days using that program that mimicked system link.

I could have had ethernet, but I've been lazy and cheap, which is all my fault. Paul probably was thinking of me, and I'm going to give him the benefit of a doubt that in no way did he mean to tease people who have done all they can (and all they can afford) to get the best connection possible.

i routinely use 75-100 Megabytes per hr playing destiny (even more if in party chat). Halo Reach used about 40 MB/hr. Destiny is a bandwidth hog. I keep track of this, b/c my crappy rural ISP has data caps. Sometimes i play tethered to my phone, since it has unlimited data. It will definitely be interesting to see what happens with this update.

I guess i should "fix my internet" and move to a big city. Oh wait, I don't have an HOA, I get fresh eggs everyday, can see the stars at night, and can go fishing whenever i want.

I guess i should "fix my internet" and move to a big city. Oh wait, I don't have an HOA, I get fresh eggs everyday, can see the stars at night, and can go fishing whenever i want.

I think in this case "fix your internet" means lobby your city government to increase competition in the ISP space or make data caps illegal?

What's really weird is that as far as I can tell, we are the only ones who took notice of that attitude. Lots of people saw the joke, but I haven't seen anyone else on the other Destiny communities at which I lurk say they felt condescended. Is that how to use that word?

Sometimes i play tethered to my phone, since it has unlimited data.

I get fresh eggs everyday, can see the stars at night, and can go fishing whenever i want.

This sounds like Funkmon heaven. Do you also live in a semi-arid subtropical zone that allows motorcycle use a vast majority of the days in a year, but gets just cold enough for snowfall once or twice in winter? Cause that would be ideal.

This sounds like Funkmon heaven. Do you also live in a semi-arid subtropical zone that allows motorcycle use a vast majority of the days in a year, but gets just cold enough for snowfall once or twice in winter? Cause that would be ideal.

I live in semi-humid Texas. It might snow once every 10 years, and melts by lunch time. You can ride a motorcycle pretty much anytime you want (except during a thunderstorm). It was 29 degrees when i woke up this morning, its 60 right now.

Wifi gets a bad rap for some reason among gamers, but as long as you're using at least wireless G, you're getting a 2 megabyte per second transfer rate with almost no packet loss. At the edge of your signal, it's still 1 mBps, but with a bit of packet loss, which may be some peoples' problems. A wifi range extender will fix the packet loss, but will add a few milliseconds to their ping. If you aren't playing twitch shooters at a high level, ain't no wifi from the past 10 years gonna lag you out.

I've played lag free Destiny on 400kB connections, and lag free Halo 3 on coop with a 300kB down, 75kB up.

Wifi gets a bad rap for some reason among gamers, but as long as you're using at least wireless G, you're getting a 2 megabyte per second transfer rate with almost no packet loss. At the edge of your signal, it's still 1 mBps, but with a bit of packet loss, which may be some peoples' problems. A wifi range extender will fix the packet loss, but will add a few milliseconds to their ping. If you aren't playing twitch shooters at a high level, ain't no wifi from the past 10 years gonna lag you out.

My computers and phone work fine on my Wifi, but my PS4 just chugs. I simply need to plug it in to the router or else it's horrendously slow. What could be the cause of this? The PS4 is maybe 10 feet away from the wireless point.

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Man, that sounds swell. One day I'll move to a place like that and ride my motorcycle every day until I die in a crash. And I'm going to build on observatory with a 16 inch dobsonian on a tracking platform, and put in a Pole Position machine and a Galaga machine, and have a radio that only plays 1970s Detroit rock music and sports games, and I'll have a no girls allowed sign out front, and a fridge full of Rock & Rye and the chairs will be bench seats from a van.

It's not feasible for everyone in flyover country to move to Seattle. That paragraph really peeved me off, then i came here and realized that i wasn't the only one.

yay for "always online!!"

Hey, it doesn't get anymore flyover than Kansas City, but they have fiber!

Too bad I live two hours from Kansas City and I'd bet everywhere else will get fiber before it even comes close to here.

deeJ is probably doing other crap, Urk too. I think Cozmo, as a veteran Redditor, may see value in pointless speculation of others' motives.

I thought it was a humorous-yet-gentle poke at people with bad connections in general. It's pretty stupid to read it, gasp, and use your embroidered hand fan to calm you from your indignation while you think of a way to whine about how you are being picked on. It was clearly just a quick joke that he probably didn't even think twice about because of how dumb someone would be to misinterpret it.

What was humorous about it? Where was the joke?

In the Great Big World of Comedy, that's known as "ribbing", which isn't intended to cause hearty guffaws so much as signaling affection towards another for their faults. In this case towards those with subpar connections.

There are no lines to read between here. He says that you'll be losing more often, and that that will give you incentive to "fix your connection".

Yes, that sounds perfectly fine, and people who can do something to improve their connection will indeed feel the incentive to do something about it. You can't do anything about it? Perfectly fine, his statement wasn't aimed at you.

If you have a good connection, it's a funny joke at the expense of those who don't. Ha ha!

If you don't, it's just a statement that people find the idea that your not so great multiplayer experience is going to get a bit worse unless you do something about it, which you probably can't because if you could have, you would have by now.

Ha ha! I'm peeing myself laughing.

I honestly can't believe people are making as big a deal out of this as they are.

If you want to play the "it's only a game card" here, feel free. Then again, you felt it important enough to come in and call people who think Bungie's being insensitive here stupid, so, yeah.

Bungie didn't think twice about this. They didn't even think once about it.

I read into the line neither malice nor condescension. It is the fact that no thought was put into it that is bothersome; the idea that if you have lag, that is your fault-- which is the converse of the complaint from the low latency players, that they are being "punished" because when players lag out and don't take damage, it is not THEIR fault.

But see, it kind of is your fault.
Do you have a below-average connection? That's not necessarily your fault.
Are you choosing to play an online-only game, knowing that you have a bad connection? That is your fault.
Are you knowingly going into the competitive matchmaking knowing that your bad connection will cause a negative experience for others? That is your fault.

And now Bungie is making some changes to improve the experience for the vast majority of those with a halfway decent connection at the expense of the few shed-net folks who knowingly make the experience worse for others?

I think it's disingenuous to act offended at the fact that someone dared to imply that you can get a better connection before hopping back in to the competitive portion of the game (especially in a playlist where winning is doubly important).

The idea that it's funny to some people makes it worse, not better.

The idea that folks with godawful connections feel like they should be catered to above the vast majority is a little worse than a playful jab, I think... but that's just me.

At the end of the day, it was just one guy at Bungie who made the statement as an offhand remark while discussing a bigger picture. I'm sure you'll make it through this.

Luckily, you asked the right guy! I'm Network+ Certified! Unluckily, you asked the right guy at the wrong time. I don't even remember what CompTIA stands for anymore. I forgot all that crap in like 2007.

A lot of people say this happens, though. I have never had it happen to me though, and I don't know what would cause it other than some kind of assignment error, which is unlikely.

i routinely use 75-100 Megabytes per hr playing destiny (even more if in party chat). Halo Reach used about 40 MB/hr. Destiny is a bandwidth hog. I keep track of this, b/c my crappy rural ISP has data caps. Sometimes i play tethered to my phone, since it has unlimited data. It will definitely be interesting to see what happens with this update.

I didn't take any measurements or run any calculations to come up w/ the 1mbps. I got it from Bungie here, so I assume it's 'correct'.

From those numbers it looks like you're averaging 0.222 mbps (100 MegaBytes per Hour * 8 Bits per Byte / 60 minutes per hour / 60 seconds per minute).

I guess my point with the bandwidth stuff was this: the only time bandwidth should be a problem is if you can't transmit/receive peaks around 1 mbps (probably more with chat?). Latency & connection quality are king and queen in this type of situation. DSL used to be the best in terms of latency, not sure about that anymore. If you're stuck w/ WiFi I feel for you & send my sympathies your way. I've been on it before (with aggressive throttling when you hit bandwidth caps) and it royally sucked.

I guess i should "fix my internet" and move to a big city. Oh wait, I don't have an HOA, I get fresh eggs everyday, can see the stars at night, and can go fishing whenever i want.

Rural internet certainly has its limitations, but rural life certainly has its perks. Most definitely. This statement of yours helps me really appreciate where I live. I live on the edge of a 'city' with a population of under 32,000, I've got good internet, I can be in the mountain wilderness in literally a 10 minute walk/hike and camping in 15 min. Sadly the mountain/valley geography make for some really crappy air quality in the winter with temperature inversions trapping all the smog in the valley (all the more reason to take that 15 minute drive to get out of the muck). Sadly the region is growing like crazy :(.

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My computers and phone work fine on my Wifi, but my PS4 just chugs. I simply need to plug it in to the router or else it's horrendously slow. What could be the cause of this? The PS4 is maybe 10 feet away from the wireless point.

I've always had these kinds of problems on my PS3 and my PS4. Downloading Destiny to my XB1 over Wifi, took about 30-40 minutes, on my PS4 it took 2-3 hours, and almost 5 on my PS3. But even plugged in my XB1 is noticeably faster than my PS4, so I have no idea what the deal is.

Is ethernet also expensive in America? A 15m cable set me back about £3 here in the UK. Less than a pint of (cheap) lager, or a (good) cup of coffee.

Wireless internet is the worst.

This.

As it currently stands, games with laggy people are lame for both the laggers and non-laggers. To me it sounds like they will be altering the net code such that games with laggy people will only suck for the laggers and not the green bars. Sounds like the fairest solution they could come up with.

This game doesn't take a ton of bandwidth, we're taking 1mbps, course if you only have 512k - 768k bps up then you'll have troubles...

Lag is latency, not bandwidth. I have 100Mbps symmetrical, but a ping of 200-300.

That said, if I also had low bandwidth, that would make things worse, but there are people around the world with perfectly serviceable broadband connections that in no way need "fixing"-- they are just located far from Bungie's servers and far from other players. Latency is an unavoidable consequence of that.

I certainly understand that latency (and no packet loss) are king (and queen) in interactive applications such as online gaming. My point with the bandwidth is that if you can't keep up with the 1mbps it will become lag as packets will be delayed/dropped.

Having a ping of 200-300 is a beast for online gaming. :(

Resolving conflicts in game state this way based on latency under those conditions is essentially geographical discrimination. You can call it the best compromise, you can call it a technical solution, but there is one thing you can't call it, and that's "fair".

Yeah, I think my use of the word "fair" was a poor choice. Perhaps "reasonable solution to improve things for the majority of players" would have been the better phrase. I agree, it's certainly not fair to the high ping folks, but on the flip side having someone else with a high ping ruin the experience isn't fair to those with a low ping either. In this case the best solution is one that will make the most people happy.

When wireless first came out everyone got real excited by the idea of Internet THATS WIRELESSOMG.

But in reality, there's no reason to use wifi unless a wired connection is otherwise impossible for some reason.

Which isn't to say wireless is unuseable, just that wired is so much better. Next time you have the cash spare (like ACTUALLY spare, don't put off paying the bills for it), buy a cable. Trust me.

Wifi gets a bad rap for some reason among gamers, but as long as you're using at least wireless G, you're getting a 2 megabyte per second transfer rate with almost no packet loss. At the edge of your signal, it's still 1 mBps, but with a bit of packet loss, which may be some peoples' problems. A wifi range extender will fix the packet loss, but will add a few milliseconds to their ping. If you aren't playing twitch shooters at a high level, ain't no wifi from the past 10 years gonna lag you out.

I've played lag free Destiny on 400kB connections, and lag free Halo 3 on coop with a 300kB down, 75kB up.

This will effect some people more than others, but wireless interference can wreak havoc with your gaming connections. I live in a large condo, so I'm within range of approximately 20-30 wifi routers at any given time, plus all the devices within that space. In my apartment we have a couple laptops, a couple phones, and a PS Vita all connecting over WiFi. If I try to connect my PS4 or Xbox One over Wifi, I'm lucky to maintain the connection for more than an hour without being completely disconnected.

Most games, Destiny included, don't need much bandwidth. But the need steady bandwidth. And that can be very tough to get through wifi for many people.

Don't have to trust you. I'm well experienced!

I have a wired home network I use about half the time through a gigabit switch. If I'm doing game streaming, large file transfers, or anything like that I swap to the ethernet. Otherwise, wifi is totally fine. I can stream 1080p video from my server to my tablet, and at my parents' house with real internet there is literally zero speed/latency difference to the internet plugging in versus not.

When I had my fast cable internet, I plugged in because it outfasted my wifi, but it outfasted it at 5 megabytes per second, which is way way way way faster than I need for anything other than downloading.

Yes, wifi can be bad in a crowded environment like an apartment complex. It doesn't make it inherently bad, and it is also easy to change the broadcast channel, which will fix your interference problems. So there's the difference. Wifi ain't bad, it just can be, if it's set up on the default channels.

I don't think that it would cause your PS3 to be worse than your PC, for example. If you're on a bad channel, it should be bad for all of your devices.

Yes, wifi can be bad in a crowded environment like an apartment complex. It doesn't make it inherently bad, and it is also easy to change the broadcast channel, which will fix your interference problems. So there's the difference. Wifi ain't bad, it just can be, if it's set up on the default channels.

I don't think that it would cause your PS3 to be worse than your PC, for example. If you're on a bad channel, it should be bad for all of your devices.

Yeah, it's always bad for me. I don't play games on my PC, but if I'm on a Skype call I get constant disconnects.

Is ethernet also expensive in America? A 15m cable set me back about £3 here in the UK. Less than a pint of (cheap) lager, or a (good) cup of coffee.

Wireless internet is the worst.

It's cheap, just not easy for me to implement. Don't want to run the cord through the whole house, and I'm not able to run the wire under the house myself. Labor would be expensive, though I've got friends who would probably do it for free or cheap. It's just never been that big of a problem to make it feel necessary.

What's really weird is that as far as I can tell, we are the only ones who took notice of that attitude. Lots of people saw the joke, but I haven't seen anyone else on the other Destiny communities at which I lurk say they felt condescended. Is that how to use that word?

Since you asked, no. It's a transitive verb without taking an object (or rather switching subject and object in form with the same in context.) (and missing an article). Bungie would "condescend to" you. Or, You would feel "condescended to". Or, to be less equivocal in language choice, you could use it as a noun and say you felt the condescendence.

It's peer-to-peer, right? So being in Seattle is only beneficial if more people in Seattle are playing.

Radio Data Transmission is unpredictable voodoo fueled by farie blood

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Prices and access are generally better in America. Service is generally worse for the price. (that should conflicting but it's a sort of low cost but bad value sort of thing) It's a combination of a lot of factors, but large geographical scales and government protected monopolies factor in most heavily IMO.

https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/report/soti-q3-2015-executive-review-final.pdf

I keep meaning to reply to your posts, but then I look at your profile picture and get totally distracted by my own internal Taylor fanboy vortex and completely lose my train of thought.

Seriously, it's happened to me like 6 times this week.

Man, that sounds swell. One day I'll move to a place like that and ride my motorcycle every day until I die in a crash. And I'm going to build on observatory with a 16 inch dobsonian on a tracking platform, and put in a Pole Position machine and a Galaga machine, and have a radio that only plays 1970s Detroit rock music and sports games, and I'll have a no girls allowed sign out front, and a fridge full of Rock & Rye and the chairs will be bench seats from a van.

Man, you've put some thought into this.

We have a few QuikTrips in here in Columbia.

QuikTrip is also one of the few things about Missouri that I missed when I was in California.

I keep meaning to reply to your posts, but then I look at your profile picture and get totally distracted by my own internal Taylor fanboy vortex and completely lose my train of thought.

Seriously, it's happened to me like 6 times this week.

That's the best thing I've heard all week! She makes me so happy. I was at work today and moving a car around from our back lot and "Out of the Woods" was on the radio. I cranked the volume all the way up and pulled into the shop with that blasting, basically yelling the lyrics.

I totally get that. I opt for the big, ugly, inconvenient cable that just runs through the middle of my house. I realise most are not okay with that though, on account of it being big, ugly and inconvenient.

Eh. I've done literally all my gaming on wifi. Most of it in an apartment surrounded by other wifi. Right now my Mac see's about 15 access points. But my internet can very easily maintain the 50Mb I pay for and things like voip calls or streaming movies has never been a problem.

I could order like a 1 foot ethernet cable and plug my Xbox in directly but I don't really see the point...

I keep meaning to reply to your posts, but then I look at your profile picture and get totally distracted by my own internal Taylor fanboy vortex and completely lose my train of thought.

Seriously, it's happened to me like 6 times this week.

That's the best thing I've heard all week! She makes me so happy. I was at work today and moving a car around from our back lot and "Out of the Woods" was on the radio. I cranked the volume all the way up and pulled into the shop with that blasting, basically yelling the lyrics.

I'm not the biggest fan of her music, but she is a pretty good role model for young girls, and so I gotta give her props for that.

I keep meaning to reply to your posts, but then I look at your profile picture and get totally distracted by my own internal Taylor fanboy vortex and completely lose my train of thought.

Seriously, it's happened to me like 6 times this week.

That's the best thing I've heard all week! She makes me so happy. I was at work today and moving a car around from our back lot and "Out of the Woods" was on the radio. I cranked the volume all the way up and pulled into the shop with that blasting, basically yelling the lyrics.

I'm not the biggest fan of her music, but she is a pretty good role model for young girls, and so I gotta give her props for that.

Between Swifty, Jennifer Lawrence, and Daisy Ridley, I'm beginning to feel cautiously optimistic that my daughter will grow up with at least a few strong role models in the pop culture world :)

I think it was in Springfield, actually. So not yours. :(.

QT was a highlight when I lived in Phoenix. I used to go and fill a gallon water jug full of Rooster Booster and drink it in one day then barf the whole next day. What a fantastic store. I got a QT credit card and filled my bike up at QT every day just so I could go in there.

When I drove to Texas a little while ago, I planned our trip to coincide with as many QTs as possible.

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Strong role models indeed!

Why not just run it through the walls?

Obviously not an option if you rent an apartment or something, but if you can it's a good option. I guess depending on the style of your house it could be a pain in the asst, but it was pretty painless in my single story house just running it up the wall into the attic and down into the other room.

Well, the media certainly pretends she is a great one. On the other hand, she trades in for a new boyfriend on an extremely regular basis, sings bad songs about them, and has actually written more than one about how her ideal relationship is an angry one, and that gentlemanly men aren't as desirable.

For example, The Way I Loved You

He respects my space
And never makes me wait
And he calls exactly when he says he will
He's close to my mother
Talks business with my father
He's charming and endearing
And I'm comfortable

But I miss screaming and fighting and kissing in the rain
And it's two a.m. and I'm cursing your name
You're so in love that you act insane
And that's the way I loved you
Breakin' down and coming undone
It's a roller coaster kinda rush
And I never knew I could feel that much
And that's the way I loved you

He can't see the smile I'm faking
And my heart's not breaking
Cause I'm not feeling anything at all
And you were wild and crazy
Just so frustrating intoxicating
Complicated, got away by some mistake and now

I miss screaming and fighting and kissing in the rain (and so on)

Or in one of her biggest songs, Blank Space.

Cherry lips, crystal skies
I could show you incredible things
Stolen kisses, pretty lies
You're the king baby I'm your Queen
Find out what you want
Be that girl for a month
Wait the worst is yet to come, oh no
Screaming, crying, perfect storm
I can make all the tables turn
Rose gardens filled with thorns
Keep you second guessing like
"Oh my God, who is she?"
I get drunk on jealousy
But you'll come back each time you leave
'Cause darling I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream

So it's gonna be forever
Or it's gonna go down in flames
You can tell me when it's over
If the high was worth the pain
Got a long list of ex-lovers
They'll tell you I'm insane
'Cause you know I love the players
And you love the game

This isn't the kind of stuff I would necessarily consider for a good role model. Seems like the recipe for awful teenage years. Taylor Swift, while not going around singing explicitly about sexual acts or dressing in a revealing manner, glorifies some stuff I don't think is good role model material. For every nice sentiment she sings about in her songs, like about the troubles of freshman year in Fifteen, I hear some things I find loathsome. For every Stay, Stay, Stay, there's another one being all vindictive about a breakup. In general, she does love songs and breakup songs, so that's all we can really judge her on, and with those, I don't think I can give her an endorsement.

I don't think anything she does is particularly harmful, but I wouldn't give her a pass either.

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I think it was in Springfield, actually. So not yours. :(.

QT was a highlight when I lived in Phoenix. I used to go and fill a gallon water jug full of Rooster Booster and drink it in one day then barf the whole next day. What a fantastic store. I got a QT credit card and filled my bike up at QT every day just so I could go in there.

When I drove to Texas a little while ago, I planned our trip to coincide with as many QTs as possible.

Funk, what the hell is wrong with you, man?

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Why not just run it through the walls?

Obviously not an option if you rent an apartment or something, but if you can it's a good option. I guess depending on the style of your house it could be a pain in the asst, but it was pretty painless in my single story house just running it up the wall into the attic and down into the other room.

Not to give TMI, but I'm physically incapable of going into my own attic. My crawl space doesn't actually require crawling, but wherever the wire is run, I'd need help.

heh, I think her outlook on relationships changes from song to song ;)

Granted, she writes about love and relationships with the maturity of a 20 year old (which is what she is, so I don't hold that against her), I was thinking specifically of the fact that she's a strong, independent young woman who has made it to the top of the music industry without relying on in-your-face sex appeal or a string of Madonna rip-offs to do it, which I personally find quite admirable :)

If I ever come visit I'll be sure to run a cable for ya. :)

Well, she's 26. But still. She was savvy in that she became famous through country music, which discourages that sexual stuff. The women are beautiful but cover up, and they don't do the Madonna crap. In fact, one of my favourite singers, Cassadee Pope, covers up her arms for promotional materials because they're full of tattoos, acceptable in pop/punk whence she came, but not acceptable in country music. So, once already famous, Swift sold out and started doing electronic pop junk. Her image as a country artist carried through and she can continue to act like a normal person.

However, if we're talking about female singers, there are some more consistent ones who are also famous despite no sex stuff, like Hayley Williams if you like rock music, or a lot of pop country singers. Swift may be the best of a bad bunch. What about Adele? I don't know what kind of junk she sings about, but she seems like a nice girl.

Well, she's 26. But still. She was savvy in that she became famous through country music, which discourages that sexual stuff. The women are beautiful but cover up, and they don't do the Madonna crap. In fact, one of my favourite singers, Cassadee Pope, covers up her arms for promotional materials because they're full of tattoos, acceptable in pop/punk whence she came, but not acceptable in country music. So, once already famous, Swift sold out and started doing electronic pop junk. Her image as a country artist carried through and she can continue to act like a normal person.

Taylor's switch into the pop world is a lot more impressive than it seems on the surface. Not many music acts can pull off a switch like that. Because of her start in country music, she comes off as genuine in terms of her musical abilities (she plays her own instruments & writes her own songs). But in the buildup to her switch into pop music, she and her label were very smart in how they cultivated her fan base. All her marketing and social media was about making personal connections with her fans. By the time her 1989 album came out, it could have been a collection of old-time banjo mountain music and her fans would've loved it, because they are invested in her as much as her music. In a way, she's kind of future-proofed her career. She can bounce to whatever genre she wants (or whatever genre is selling well) and as long as the tunes are catchy, and she retains her connection with her fan base, they'll eat it up. And since she began by establishing herself as a country singer/songwriter, she can always come back with stuff like this and her fans accept it:

Side note, I think Mylie Cyrus is heading along a similar path, although I suspect her "antics" over the past few years have more to do with wrestling personal demons, rather than Taylor Swift's more calculated path. But as someone who established herself doing stuff like this...

...I think we'll see her come through the garbage-pop phase intact.

I think pop princesses like Katy Perry (who I think is a fantastic singer) are going to have a much harder time continuing on in the music industry if/when people tire of her bubblegum music. She's marketed her looks and party dresses as such a huge part of "who she is" that I think people will have a tougher time accepting anything different from her.

Wow, who knew female pop singers were such a hot topic for me ;p I just really find this stuff fascinating.

However, if we're talking about female singers, there are some more consistent ones who are also famous despite no sex stuff, like Hayley Williams if you like rock music, or a lot of pop country singers. Swift may be the best of a bad bunch. What about Adele? I don't know what kind of junk she sings about, but she seems like a nice girl.

I don't know Hayley Williams... I'll have to check out her music. And good point about Adele. I'm not really familiar with her music either, but I've seen a few interviews and she comes across as unusually genuine, which is great to see.

The Bungie Weekly Update has a new name. Featured within:

- Bungie is requiring everyone in 3v3 playlists to use Ice Breaker at the start of a match. Or maybe Invective.

Sadly, this is probably true. And very sad. Starting everyone with special ammo was an even playing field, even if it did discourage primary use. Perhaps limiting the OHK-ability of specials would have been preferable?

- There's a couple new No-Fireteam playlists just for CruelLEGACEY.

Great addition +100%. Good job. BUT... will this lead to all solo players going into the no-fireteam lists and teams of 5 never finding a 6th player? Kinda rough.

- Bungie has implemented all of Kahzgul's net code suggestions in the form of the "Damage Referee."

Hell yeah! This is a good fix and should have a very positive result on gameplay in PvP modes. People with bad connections who hate me, I'm sorry, but the good of the many outweighs the bad connection you already had and didn't like PvPing with anyway.

- The Kings Fall Raid has been nerfed.

Fixed, more like it.

- And there's some Movies of the Week I haven't watched yet in my rush to post this FIRST. :)

And you did it! Good job, Guardian.

Wait, what's the weird part? The Rooster Booster jug? Sometimes you gotta just eat something that doesn't agree with you.

Even though they said it in a way that makes it sound like a big FU to people with poor connections, my guess is that the user experience on the poor connection side of things won't be too terribly different from how it already is (so from Bad to Still Bad). The improvement to people with good connections will be pretty big though (from Occasionally Rage Inducing to Seems Fair Most of the Time). We'll see how it goes once it rolls out, and while I've been a strong advocate for this kind of change, I think we should all hold off on the celebrations and/or effigy burnings until we see it in action.

Wait, what's the weird part? The Rooster Booster jug? Sometimes you gotta just eat something that doesn't agree with you.

That's what I tell myself during every post-Chipotle poop.

Uhhhhhhhh, is this security footage of someone who didn't know they were being filmed?

Wait, what's the weird part? The Rooster Booster jug? Sometimes you gotta just eat something that doesn't agree with you.

The way you wrote it, it was a regular occurrence.

Trying that once - dumb, but understandable. Doing it more than once... weird.

If you can figure out what music makes teenage daughters date the boring gentlemanly guys, you will need an extra airplane hanger to hold all of your thank you letters.

Uhhhhhhhh, is this security footage of someone who didn't know they were being filmed?

I'm pretty sure she posted that on her instagram or twitter or something.

OK. 'cause its a weird angle and quality.

She could thoroughly kick my ass without breaking a sweat!

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It was maybe once a week for a year and a half. You've gotta budget it so you've got a break on second day. My girlfriend and her sister played Mario Kart every Sunday for like 8 hours, so that was a solid Rooster Booster recovery day for me.

Anyway, it was only 79 cents or something to fill up a gallon. It was basically free. You'd have to be crazy NOT to do it.

Anyway, it was only 79 cents or something to fill up a gallon. It was basically free. You'd have to be crazy NOT to do it.

As I asked before... what the hell is wrong with you, man?

She could thoroughly kick my ass without breaking a sweat!

Indeed. That deadlift was impressive!

Anyway, it was only 79 cents or something to fill up a gallon. It was basically free. You'd have to be crazy NOT to do it.

As I asked before... what the hell is wrong with you, man?

After looking up what Rooster Booster is, I have to agree with Claude on this one. Drinking more than 2 energy drinks in a 24 hour period gives me a head ache, I think I'd die drinking a gallon.

I can't find many songs extolling the virtues of being boring, but a lot of them about monotonous stuff, like listening to mixtapes during winter. I know one that opens with "You say the sweetest things and I can't keep my heart from singing."

The problem is that songs about successful love are worryingly generic.

Maybe Das Beste by Silbermond.

It was a popular song as a power ballad since Silbermond is normally a rock band. It basically talks about how she can't believe she ended up with someone so good. Lots of creepy stuff about watching him sleep.

There's another one by Jennifer Rostock called Mein Parfüm, which is actually a bitter song, but it explains how she can't be with the guy because he's been fooled by a bad girl. But, she specifically calls him ein Kavalier, which is another word for gentleman. So there's one.

The problem: the song's woefully obscure. It's by an experimental female-fronted German electronic punk group.

As for helping them not randomly hate you, you're screwed.

Yeah, Taylor Swift is very savvy. She does unconventional things like the entrepreneur article mentioned, but she is also amazingly mainstream. For example, a while ago, some big pop artist released a record with no promotion or rumors on iTunes. Taylor Swift goes on Letterman to announce stuff, or whatever. Her albums have deluxe editions, marketing deals with target, et cetera, all the fully expected stuff. She supplements it with cool stuff.

I don't think she has future proofed herself, though. She's just in a great spot at the moment. With her next album, if it's all pop, I fully expect her old country fans to go, and she will retain her new fans. It's easy to see this kind of thing. Metallica fans loved Metallica. They liked the black album, then they quit liking their new stuff. But, all the new fans Metallica made stuck on with Load, Reload, and so on. Avril Lavigne had fans who loved her first two albums, and liked Girlfriend on her third album, which was extremely pop and viewed by some as selling out. She hit her top sales numbers with that record, and went on her biggest tours, making the most money. The fans quit caring afterwards, and she's faded largely into irrelevance.

I posit that Taylor Swift is at her biggest right now, simply because she hasn't yet chased off her country fans, and her pop fans are new. This is how I feel. I bought her debut, Fearless, Speak Now, Red, and 1989. I sold back 1989 to the record store...but I was going to go to her tour before I saw the setlist, which I don't imagine most people look at. I'm not going to buy her next album if it doesn't go back to pop country.

Hayley Williams is the singer for Paramore.

I've always used Wifi for my online gaming, even back in the Halo 2 & 3 days (sorry, Evil Otto & Butcher!). Hell, even back in the Combat Evolved days using that program that mimicked system link.

I could have had ethernet, but I've been lazy and cheap, which is all my fault. Paul probably was thinking of me, and I'm going to give him the benefit of a doubt that in no way did he mean to tease people who have done all they can (and all they can afford) to get the best connection possible.

Just being on WiFi does not break your internet for gaming. If your ping is <50 ms, you're doing fine.

When wireless first came out everyone got real excited by the idea of Internet THATS WIRELESSOMG.

But in reality, there's no reason to use wifi unless a wired connection is otherwise impossible for some reason.

Which isn't to say wireless is unuseable, just that wired is so much better. Next time you have the cash spare (like ACTUALLY spare, don't put off paying the bills for it), buy a cable. Trust me.

Sure it's cool using wired for 1 Gbps downloads, but I'm just not putting up with an ethernet cable across the floor to my XBox.

Just being on WiFi does not break your internet for gaming. If your ping is <50 ms, you're doing fine.

Until someone decides to make some popcorn in the microwave... At least that's what happened when I was on a 2.5 GHz wifi.

I kind of think I need to hear this story now! Also, you probably don't want to get a new microwave.

Kind of you to offer.

I kind of think I need to hear this story now! Also, you probably don't want to get a new microwave.

'Twas playing before christmas, when all through the house, not a packet was received, not even a...

Actually, there's not much to it. My connection would die for a bit whenever my wife made popcorn. One evening I had enough and decided it was time to cut into some drywall and use a coat hanger & some tent poles (because I'm apparently too cheap to spend $20 on a decent fiberglass cable fishing set) to run that ethernet cable over the laundry/bath into the mech room so I could physically wire up my entertainment center to the side of my house with the cable modem.

Life has been greatly improved since. Next up on my list is to wire up the kitchen, not because the microwave interferes with my wifi (I've since gotten a new micro & moved on to a 5ghz wifi), but just because I'm anti wifi. :)

I kind of think I need to hear this story now! Also, you probably don't want to get a new microwave.

'Twas playing before christmas, when all through the house, not a packet was received, not even a...

Actually, there's not much to it. My connection would die for a bit whenever my wife made popcorn. One evening I had enough and decided it was time to cut into some drywall and use a coat hanger & some tent poles (because I'm apparently too cheap to spend $20 on a decent fiberglass cable fishing set) to run that ethernet cable over the laundry/bath into the mech room so I could physically wire up my entertainment center to the side of my house with the cable modem.

Life has been greatly improved since. Next up on my list is to wire up the kitchen, not because the microwave interferes with my wifi (I've since gotten a new micro & moved on to a 5ghz wifi), but just because I'm anti wifi. :)

Good on you, DIY ace!

OK. 'cause its a weird angle and quality.

A good tool for showing a subject how they're doing things wrong/improving.