12th March 2004, 5:27 PM
Well the thing about matchmaking is all you have to do is point and select the right option. No typing is required at all. The only thing you really need to type in at any point is the nickname of someone you want to add to your buddy list, and that's about as tedius as naming a character in a console game. Navigating the matchmaking programs in these games is just like navigating the items menu as far as the interaction goes. You select if you want the server to randomly find a match for you (and you can filter this in a lot of games), or if you want to pick from a list. Then, you simply move up and down the list just like in any RPG with long lists. I even believe you can press L and R to skip by pages at a time in a few games... You see, that's not really a problem at all.
As far as setup goes, it's plug and play for broadband. You just plug in the cable and boom, the system does everything else behind the scenes via automatic setup. Unless you have a weird online service that requires a user name or password or something similar (cable, and I believe DSL as well, simply use the MAC address of the main modem to confirm you are who you are, and since everything has to hook up to that modem, you don't have to configure anything else). Now, as far as narrowband like dial-up, which it sounds like you have, yes you would have to do the standard setup of the phone number, user name, and password.
Now as far as lag concerning the voice chat, I'll tell you my experience with it. Using narrowband, I can safely assume lag WOULD be an issue. Broadband however doesn't have this issue. You can easily have a full team match on the console games and no lag while chatting up a storm. On the PC, with so many more people in the average multiplayer game, they handle it like you suggest, by using a different server for the voice chat, indeed different programs. This of course means you have to actually tell everyone in the game to load up the program and go to such and such room. Very annoying, but once games finally start integrating the more popular talk servers into the program itself, it'll be the best of both. One last thing, if the lag does get bad, and it can happen with broadband, especially with companies that don't give you nearly the upwidth as they do downwidth, the voice is at lowest priority. It's setup so that if the connection is slow, it'll FIRST lag the voice to get the actual gameplay data sent out, and THEN will send the voice. Conversations will be laggy, sorta like talking to someone several light seconds away like on the moon or something, and break up as packets of voice data are dropped in favor of gameplay related data, but the game itself can still be running smoothly.
I wasn't suggesting making EVERY game online. I was actually stating that online play would sell more of that game, so that's where they would get the extra profit from.
As far as setup goes, it's plug and play for broadband. You just plug in the cable and boom, the system does everything else behind the scenes via automatic setup. Unless you have a weird online service that requires a user name or password or something similar (cable, and I believe DSL as well, simply use the MAC address of the main modem to confirm you are who you are, and since everything has to hook up to that modem, you don't have to configure anything else). Now, as far as narrowband like dial-up, which it sounds like you have, yes you would have to do the standard setup of the phone number, user name, and password.
Now as far as lag concerning the voice chat, I'll tell you my experience with it. Using narrowband, I can safely assume lag WOULD be an issue. Broadband however doesn't have this issue. You can easily have a full team match on the console games and no lag while chatting up a storm. On the PC, with so many more people in the average multiplayer game, they handle it like you suggest, by using a different server for the voice chat, indeed different programs. This of course means you have to actually tell everyone in the game to load up the program and go to such and such room. Very annoying, but once games finally start integrating the more popular talk servers into the program itself, it'll be the best of both. One last thing, if the lag does get bad, and it can happen with broadband, especially with companies that don't give you nearly the upwidth as they do downwidth, the voice is at lowest priority. It's setup so that if the connection is slow, it'll FIRST lag the voice to get the actual gameplay data sent out, and THEN will send the voice. Conversations will be laggy, sorta like talking to someone several light seconds away like on the moon or something, and break up as packets of voice data are dropped in favor of gameplay related data, but the game itself can still be running smoothly.
I wasn't suggesting making EVERY game online. I was actually stating that online play would sell more of that game, so that's where they would get the extra profit from.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)