Another reason to hate the digital age

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Steve
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Another reason to hate the digital age

Postby Steve » January 22nd, 2017, 11:12 am

I purchased the Call of Duty Infinite Warfare Legacy Edition over the Black Friday weekend sale for $55 figuring I did want to play Infinite Warfare (IW) so I was basically getting a $4 discount as well as Modern Warfare (MW) Remastered for ‘free’. As many people know, IW came on a physical disk and MW is a 73GB download. That doesn’t include the IW download but I really didn’t care about that as you will see. I didn’t start the downloads until after Christmas and that was my first mistake. I downloaded both during peak season at the same time. I also had smaller digital purchases in my queue. When I saw how slow MW was downloading, I cancelled it and moved on with IW and other downloads. None of the other were a problem.

Then I went back to IW and it was still slow. I tried a variety of things to see if I could get things to speed up:
• Reconfigured my Xbox One settings to continue downloading 24/7
• Pause/Resume
• Uninstall/Reinstall
• Hard Reset
• Waited a few weeks to give the Activision servers a break

Nothing worked. I searched online and sure enough, I was not the only person who was complaining specifically about MW but no solution was to be found. I couldn’t believe how active the forums were about this issue.

Since I had other games to play (and download), I figured I would continue putting it off until yesterday. Before I started my download, I had checked my network speed and had been playing Forza Horizon 3 online so I knew my network was running efficiently. My wireless download speed was about 4MB/s while my wired (Xbox One) was about 11MB/s. Then I started to download MW and the problem was back – approximately 400KB/s. If this speed stays consistent, it will take 7-8 days to completely download. I’m sure I don’t have a cap on my internet usage but that is still ridiculous.

From my perspective, things just got worse……although that can be argued which part of this ordeal was more aggravating. I tried to contact to Activision Support. As you can probably guess, there is no phone number to talk to someone and it wants you to log in to report any issues. I usually don’t like this method of communication since it just ultimately becomes another source of e-mail spam but I was ready to take the plunge. I was still unable to get to a point I wanted to so that’s when I decided to make an admittedly weak attempt at getting a refund – only for MW. That’s when I noticed that it wanted me to grant them access to my Xbox. “Activision needs your permission to: Sign in to Xbox Live and access Xbox Live and partner services on your behalf. Activision will be able to access and update your Xbox Live account and interact with Xbox Live services on your behalf.” & “Access your Xbox Live information anytime. Activision will be able to see and update your Xbox Live information, even when you're not using this app.“. I immediately quit. To be fair, there seems to be another way to log in using your Activision account but they succeeded in doing what they wanted. I gave up. I made a feeble attempt to chat an Activision ambassador but no one ever replied after an hour.

While I prefer physical to digital, I’m running out of space in my media room and I never really minded digital copies. As a matter of fact, with some of the Games with Gold downloads, I’ve been giving away my physical copies of duplicate titles. However, this whole experience with MW has soured me to the point of no return. I’ll continue to download free games, indie games, etc. but I will never allow myself to be suckered into this kind of purchase again.

I should mention that I’ve played the original Modern Warfare so this remaster was more of a bonus and I loved IW so I don’t feel completely ripped off but it’s certainly eye-opening to a very sad trend.

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VideoGameCritic
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Re: Another reason to hate the digital age

Postby VideoGameCritic » January 22nd, 2017, 11:52 am

Thanks for sharing this story Steve! It just goes to show that nothing beats having the physical media in your hand. Otherwise you're at the whims of some nameless remote server. And even if the server is available, excessive slowness can make your life miserable.

And since Activision already has your money, there's really no incentive for them to sure up their services (except bad press of course). That's also why you can't expect these servers to be around for long. Once the money stops rolling in, companies like Activision have no interest in maintaining them.

Basically games that require servers are all long-term rentals. You're paying full price but don't truly own them. That's not good for the consumer.

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Rookie1
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Re: Another reason to hate the digital age

Postby Rookie1 » January 22nd, 2017, 8:44 pm

Wow, 73GB download for MW? Makes me wonder how the Switch is going to get 3rd party devs to come one board with such low storage capacity.

On a similar note, I just picked up Skyrim Legendary Edition. I can almost guarantee that it will be a massive update that will take hours. Guess I should get started now!

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VideoGameCritic
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Re: Another reason to hate the digital age

Postby VideoGameCritic » January 22nd, 2017, 11:17 pm

Writing efficient code is not easy but it is possible. Look at some of the Atari 2600 games that managed to squeeze a quality arcade title into a few kilobytes.

It's kind of like patches. It would be possible to produce a bullet-proof game in modern times, but it's a lot easier and cheaper to put out buggy code and force customers to downloads patches.

The pendulum has swung way over toward the publishers and it time for customers to put their foot down.

ESauce
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Re: Another reason to hate the digital age

Postby ESauce » January 23rd, 2017, 10:30 am

Rookie1 wrote:Wow, 73GB download for MW? Makes me wonder how the Switch is going to get 3rd party devs to come one board with such low storage capacity.



It's not as though the 500GB provided by the Xbox One is enough for even a small library of games of this size. Honestly, the Xbox One might as well have 32GB of storage because with the size of the game downloads, you're pretty much forced to buy a 2TB hard drive to accommodate the system.

Plus, physical games on the Switch will be using carts so really they shouldn't need to install like Xbox One games. The only time you should have to download on Switch is for a digital game or an update.

The mandatory 50+GB installs are very annoying. I have google fiber in my city, and I could have free 4mbps internet, but instead I have to pay $50 a month for the 100mbps internet just so I can actually play my Xbox. The fast speed is nice for other things too, but the Xbox is the only reason I need internet that fast.

Steve
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Re: Another reason to hate the digital age

Postby Steve » January 23rd, 2017, 1:45 pm

Esauce wrote:
The mandatory 50+GB installs are very annoying. I have google fiber in my city, and I could have free 4mbps internet, but instead I have to pay $50 a month for the 100mbps internet just so I can actually play my Xbox. The fast speed is nice for other things too, but the Xbox is the only reason I need internet that fast.


I think we are all on the same page over these enormous install sizes but just to point out, my internet connection is fine for playing games as well as downloading digital games & patches. There is just something specific with this game. I'm not sure how long it has been since I posted the original message but the % complete is now 28% and this is with 24/7 download. :shock:

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Gentlegamer
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Re: Another reason to hate the digital age

Postby Gentlegamer » January 23rd, 2017, 3:56 pm

VideoGameCritic wrote:Thanks for sharing this story Steve! It just goes to show that nothing beats having the physical media in your hand. Otherwise you're at the whims of some nameless remote server. And even if the server is available, excessive slowness can make your life miserable.

And since Activision already has your money, there's really no incentive for them to sure up their services (except bad press of course). That's also why you can't expect these servers to be around for long. Once the money stops rolling in, companies like Activision have no interest in maintaining them.

Basically games that require servers are all long-term rentals. You're paying full price but don't truly own them. That's not good for the consumer.


Pretty sure Xbox Live games (and PSN) are peer-to-peer, not server based. The only server is for the matchmaking, basically what MS turned off for the OG Xbox games.

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Rookie1
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Re: Another reason to hate the digital age

Postby Rookie1 » January 23rd, 2017, 4:39 pm

ESauce wrote:
Rookie1 wrote:Wow, 73GB download for MW? Makes me wonder how the Switch is going to get 3rd party devs to come one board with such low storage capacity.



It's not as though the 500GB provided by the Xbox One is enough for even a small library of games of this size. Honestly, the Xbox One might as well have 32GB of storage because with the size of the game downloads, you're pretty much forced to buy a 2TB hard drive to accommodate the system.

Plus, physical games on the Switch will be using carts so really they shouldn't need to install like Xbox One games. The only time you should have to download on Switch is for a digital game or an update.


Do we know what the storage capacity of a Switch cart is? Sony announced the usage of 1TB blurays for the PS4 with the more common dics holding around 300GB. Can those carts match that? Can they process data fast enough to be able to play the game off the cart itself with no installs? What about digital download games? So many unanswered questions with this thing.

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Atariboy
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Re: Another reason to hate the digital age

Postby Atariboy » January 23rd, 2017, 5:58 pm

Gentlegamer wrote:Pretty sure Xbox Live games (and PSN) are peer-to-peer, not server based. The only server is for the matchmaking, basically what MS turned off for the OG Xbox games.


While I don't know for sure for other Sony platforms, publishers handle matchmaking on the PS3 and often also host their own dedicated servers rather than use P2P.

That's why so many games are offline there as publishers rush to shift their server infrastructure to newer releases, while so many old Xbox 360 releases continue to be able to be enjoyed on Xbox Live (if you can find someone to play with). Often even the same game is still online capable on the 360 while having gone offline years earlier on the PS3, such as Sega's Outrun Online Arcade.

EA is a notable exception on Xbox platforms though, which is why they didn't support the original Xbox Live until an exception was made to the Xbox Live model to accommodate their demands. You still need a valid Xbox Live account, but EA handles all matchmaking functions and hosts their own servers internally.

You're not routed through Microsoft's servers when matched up with other players and you don't host your own games in EA releases. It instead works like it does on the PS3, which is why EA titles regularly go offline as they repurpose their servers to support newer releases.

Steve
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Joined: May 12th, 2015, 5:34 pm

Re: Another reason to hate the digital age

Postby Steve » January 27th, 2017, 10:55 am

Someone congratulate me. My game finally downloaded after 5+ days of 24/7 downloading. I will continue to buy some smaller games digitally but this is definitely the last time I will download something like this.


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