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Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

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Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#491

Post by glaslong »

inigyou wrote: post #96
spicymaki wrote: post #82

First, we need to make it illegal to say you are buying something when you are actually renting. Words mean something.

They did this in California. Solution: stores don't use any of the words now. Now the buttons say "add to cart" and "proceed to payment". Sometimes the button just says the price. I wonder if it's legal to build a completely scam store like this. You pick a game, you click on "$7", you pay $7, you don't get anything at all, and if you try to sue them, they point out they never actually sold you anything, you just vol…

Judging by other comments, this hypothetical Scam Store sounds very much like trying to buy Minecraft from Microsoft already.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#492

Post by mikrl »

sumtechguy wrote: post #480
michaelt wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were problems, but they were problems of a distinct and different kind. Back in the early 1990s you'd get Microsoft Office from the store, as a box containing 10 floppy disks. And they had to put a lot of effort into testing it, because patching was impossible. And of course it was fully offline. Perpetually licensed, with paid upgrades. The problems were instead things like "this notionally multi-user OS is ju…

'always online' has created a whole new set of buggy from a lot of companies. For example cyberpunk is NOW a playable game. Launch date was a very mixed bag. 'fix it after launch' ugh.

> cyberpunk is NOW a playable game

I never had problems with cyberpunk but I think I know why: I built a new PC right around its release and it was good enough to play it smoothly on 4K medium or HD ultra.

When I checked to see what 4K ultra looked like, the graphics latency caused a bunch of scripting to fall apart and the game glitched really bad.

IIRC the console release was notorious for bugs, so I assume consoles were not performant enough to run the game buttery smooth nor could they be easily upgraded.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#493

Post by walrus01 »

0x457 wrote: post #487
walrus01 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes the game isn't designed from the beginning to be entirely reliant on the operation of servers. For instance there never has been and never will be any form of offline function for Destiny 1 or 2, even if all the person wants to do is play the single player campaigns.

Destiny 1 partially ran on consoles, though. It was mostly p2p: https://gist.github.com/nessus42/55c1260d88e2028689de0c49381...

Yes, but never in the absence of the Bungie servers. It did have a full sequential single player campaign, but parts of the single player campaign took place in shared instances where the user could see other players running around the map. The single player campaign could also be played cooperatively with other players in the same 'fireteam' if desired, but that was optional.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#494

Post by 0x3444ac53 »

toast0 wrote: post #409
0x3444ac53 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry, and that was somewhat extended to Xbox. But they laid off their QA team a year or two ago because "AI will change everything!"

> But they laid off their QA team a year or two ago because "AI will change everything!" They gutted QA in 2014, ending their software development engineer in test positions, and suggesting the developers should test their own code to get velocity. Subsequent releases were worse than before, and things have compounded since then. Hard to say that laying off the rest of the team made a noticable difference.

Oh thanks for the correction/supplemental information. The gutting you're referring to might be the huge lay offs that I'm thinking of. Possibly conflating the recent AI driven layoffs with those from 12 years ago.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#495

Post by 0x3444ac53 »

throwaway85825 wrote: post #395
0x3444ac53 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry, and that was somewhat extended to Xbox. But they laid off their QA team a year or two ago because "AI will change everything!"

QA got laid off all decade ago. It's been 10 years of bugs like this weeks breaking boot on Dell's.

Thank you for the correction! I think I was conflating the two (having heard about the one from 2014, and then also hearing about the more recent rounds, and not recognizing they were different)

I've edited my comment to correct this. Cheers!

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#496

Post by 0x3444ac53 »

vezycash wrote: post #252
0x3444ac53 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry, and that was somewhat extended to Xbox. But they laid off their QA team a year or two ago because "AI will change everything!"

>The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry Blame Satya Nadella. He fired testers and turned customers to helpless beta testers.

Yeah based on your comment and the others, it seems he did an initial purge in 2014.

QA doesn't get enough love :(

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#497

Post by ciupicri »

whycome wrote: post #448
ciupicri wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if Jimi Hendrix wanted for his sister to benefit from his work?

Who made his guitar? It seems like he made all his art on the back of someone else’s work… they should be getting royalties for every track made with their product (I’m pointing out the absurdity of trying to assign ownership within a system of shared creation)

I don't think that the guitar manufacturer asked for royalties.

On the other hand there are video cameras that you can't use for commercial purposes because they lack the appropriate video codec license from MPEG-LA :-) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42735824)

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#498

Post by [deleted] »

inigyou wrote: post #375
sd9 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to play an old call of duty game to reminisce about my childhood. I tried Modern Warfare II and Black Ops, but it’s impossible. You get into a game fine, but every single game is just full of cheaters - not just cheaters with fairly benign (yet unfair) things like wall hacks, cheaters that literally change the physics of the server for all users in a completely unworkable way. I’m not sure whether this is be…

We can't really expect public multiplayer experiences to remain the same across time, but surely you can play it in a LAN style.

[deleted]

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#499

Post by 0x3444ac53 »

tempfile wrote: post #244
0x3444ac53 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry, and that was somewhat extended to Xbox. But they laid off their QA team a year or two ago because "AI will change everything!"

This definitely does not extend to games. I remember microsoft games having terrible UX over a decade ago (not the game, the account garbage around it).

So, I've had a pretty shit time with Microsoft products over the last ten years, but it wasn't quite as bad 5-7 years ago. Our disagreement on that might be that I'm only in my late 20s, so if you're older than I am, or had newer consoles than I had around that time, I might be a little more tolerant of jank.

But according to the other replies, it seems Microsoft has been purging QA for years now.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#500

Post by wvenable »

gh02t wrote: post #288
VeninVidiaVicii wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the argument is in reverse. They are so ubiquitous, they don’t really have to be good anymore to capture the market.

And they got that position of dominance more via shady deals and sketchy practices than by producing excellent software. Microsoft has done some good engineering, but that's not what made them what they are.

I disagree. Microsoft software was some of the best. Maybe not because their quality was excellent but because their competition was easily worse.
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