It's on the pile. You know, the one that threatens to topple and bury me any day now? Also the one that if I'm ever in danger of digging my way out, Steam plows me in again.
I want to see the rest of the story. I like the gameplay, and I really do want to see what happens with Desmond, the Filthy Assistants, and whoever the Apache Assassin from AC3 is.
They've presented me with a cliffhanger that I want to see resolved. It's not super-complicated to do it, but most games don't.
I haven't bought a game off Steam in a while - but, depending on reviews, a well-reviewed new game will stay full price for a couple of months, then drop 20%ish. At some point during the next 6 months[1], Steam will have at least one "Massive Sales Event" where various games will go on sale for at least 40% off, usually 75%. If a $60 game is extremely popular (Skyrim, Deus Ex, Call Of Duty, etc) it might "only" drop to $40 during it's first Big Sale, but it will be $20 at the next one.
A game with less-good reviews and sales will drop more initially and ongoing. A game with terrible reviews will fall through the floor - Duke Nukem Forever went to "full price is $30" after a month, and is currently on sale for $10. There's a 2K Games Weekend thing going on right now, so I expect it to be $5 before Monday.
The thing is, as long as you're willing to wait and not play a game immediately, you can snag huge discounts. Skyrim was $30 at Christmas. It's an outlier because it's gotten so much support and so many good reviews and had so many new things come out for it that it's still $60 if you buy it right this instant, which is crazy for a game 4 months old, but it HAS gone on sale and it will go on sale again.
[1]: Because the two that definitely happen every year on the entire catalog are "last two weeks of December" and "first two weeks of July"
(I haven't hit my limit in MONTHS, because it is large. Still, I pay way more than I should for the privilege, because in Canada there is still an anticompetive monopoly on broadband access. They need to dance around to avoid the legislation, but so far they can.)
I'm sure some ISPs in the U.S. still have bandwidth (or more accurately, download) limits, but I think most just throttle your transfer speed if you're getting ridiculously excessive, and by that I mean hundreds of GB per day. (I guarantee I could download 10GB per day without a lash being blinked, with Comcast or Cox.)
It does. What we have now is the fallout from the government turning its telecommunications assets into a state-owned enterprise. And then selling that, but leaving it as a natural monopoly. Record profits to the (mostly overseas) shareholders year after year, but they invested bugger all in improving our infrastructure, putting us seriously behind the curve and now paying through the nose for our internet access..
In my current house, it's ancient '70s copper wire between me and the DSLAM at the exchange, so the line isn't great for noise, too. And when we go past our monthly data cap, it gets rate-shaped down to dialup speeds for the rest of the billing period. We have 80GB allocation for four people, and I've had to download a bunch of software, libraries and data for work purposes already this month.
I was quite surprised when I spent a few months in Canberra about a decade ago; I expected that, it being a fairly modern city, it would have comparable internet access to the DC area in the U.S., but my options were:
1) One public computer lab, or 2) Dialup. That's it. No wifi anywhere.
I used the public lab to find a local dialup provider, and promptly dialed in from the hotel and pretty much stayed connected 24/7 for three months. (It would've been as cheap as $10/mo if I'd stayed below whatever limit, but it maxed out at $20 or $25/mo, which is what I ended up paying)
I spent a few weeks travelling New Zealand in 2008. There was wireless internet everywhere, but almost everywhere had one of those nasty pay-per-day gateways.
At the same time, nowhere I stayed in New Zealand was NEARLY as bad as the internet access in LAX.
IAD: Used to be T-Mobile or Boingo ($6/day, $10/week, $40/mo) -- but according to an April 2011 press release I just found, DCA and IAD now offer free wifi. BWI: $8/day, $22/mo, Boingo. RIC, free wifi.
That is, in fact, far better than last time I checked on wifi at those airports. :)
I don't remember the price. I remember that it was annoying, required custom settings and not just plain DHCP, and was slow.
I also remember that I was stuck in fucking LAX for 16 hours as the nose gear of the plane had fallen off, and they weren't smart enough to realise that I didn't give a shit about a flight to Toronto, I really wanted a flight to OTTAWA - and so, LA -> Montreal -> Ottawa only added 40 minutes to flight time but saved me TWO FUCKING DAYS of layover in LA.
I kind of liked "If you want England, go to Christchurch. If you want NEW ZEALAND, come to the West Coast", which was an actual slogan that Monteith's was using while I was there.
Not so much, except that our Southern Cross Cable traffic had to pick up some of Australia's slack for a while.
We've had a couple of incidents where someone's anchor has damaged an undersea cable, but nothing completely catastrophic. A bit of reduced capacity while they fix it.
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theweaselking
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 02:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 02:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 08:29 pm (UTC)Besides, you (i.e. the weaselly one) are responsible for quite a bit of the pile anyway.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 03:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 04:04 am (UTC)I will pay them their day-1-rate for this privilege.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:29 am (UTC)They've presented me with a cliffhanger that I want to see resolved. It's not super-complicated to do it, but most games don't.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 03:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 04:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 04:40 pm (UTC)A game with less-good reviews and sales will drop more initially and ongoing. A game with terrible reviews will fall through the floor - Duke Nukem Forever went to "full price is $30" after a month, and is currently on sale for $10. There's a 2K Games Weekend thing going on right now, so I expect it to be $5 before Monday.
The thing is, as long as you're willing to wait and not play a game immediately, you can snag huge discounts. Skyrim was $30 at Christmas. It's an outlier because it's gotten so much support and so many good reviews and had so many new things come out for it that it's still $60 if you buy it right this instant, which is crazy for a game 4 months old, but it HAS gone on sale and it will go on sale again.
[1]: Because the two that definitely happen every year on the entire catalog are "last two weeks of December" and "first two weeks of July"
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 06:02 pm (UTC)Which is why I call it a "day 1 premium"
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 04:27 am (UTC)Ahh, NZ. Very pretty but clearly needs better internet. :D
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 04:33 am (UTC)(I haven't hit my limit in MONTHS, because it is large. Still, I pay way more than I should for the privilege, because in Canada there is still an anticompetive monopoly on broadband access. They need to dance around to avoid the legislation, but so far they can.)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 04:36 am (UTC)Cell phones, on the other hand, caps galore.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:14 am (UTC)In my current house, it's ancient '70s copper wire between me and the DSLAM at the exchange, so the line isn't great for noise, too. And when we go past our monthly data cap, it gets rate-shaped down to dialup speeds for the rest of the billing period. We have 80GB allocation for four people, and I've had to download a bunch of software, libraries and data for work purposes already this month.
It's less than ideal, shall we say.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:28 am (UTC)This could, of course, be an entirely bogus assumption, as the real factor seems to be government control / monopolism.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 08:38 am (UTC)Stephen Fry weighed in on our internet situation during a recent visit.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:19 am (UTC)I was quite surprised when I spent a few months in Canberra about a decade ago; I expected that, it being a fairly modern city, it would have comparable internet access to the DC area in the U.S., but my options were:
1) One public computer lab, or
2) Dialup.
That's it. No wifi anywhere.
I used the public lab to find a local dialup provider, and promptly dialed in from the hotel and pretty much stayed connected 24/7 for three months. (It would've been as cheap as $10/mo if I'd stayed below whatever limit, but it maxed out at $20 or $25/mo, which is what I ended up paying)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:26 am (UTC)At the same time, nowhere I stayed in New Zealand was NEARLY as bad as the internet access in LAX.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:34 am (UTC)That is, in fact, far better than last time I checked on wifi at those airports. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:39 am (UTC)I also remember that I was stuck in fucking LAX for 16 hours as the nose gear of the plane had fallen off, and they weren't smart enough to realise that I didn't give a shit about a flight to Toronto, I really wanted a flight to OTTAWA - and so, LA -> Montreal -> Ottawa only added 40 minutes to flight time but saved me TWO FUCKING DAYS of layover in LA.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:41 am (UTC)Also, airline scheduling departments don't generally seem to be very bright.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 05:42 am (UTC)For both, really.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 08:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 03:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 03:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 04:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-10 04:34 pm (UTC)We've had a couple of incidents where someone's anchor has damaged an undersea cable, but nothing completely catastrophic. A bit of reduced capacity while they fix it.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-11 08:01 am (UTC)