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  1. #221
    Over 9000! Lahis's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by SpeedyOcelot View Post
    Interesting. I wasn't aware of that. What sort of KPIs does their EU Vice President have to deliver then, if it's not financially connected at all?
    It's quite unusual to run a 5000 employee strong company in completely flat organizational and financial structure. Especially since they're not even same legal entities. I've actually never heard of that before - could you give me a link where I can read more about these insights?
    Blizzard's offices in Europe are subdivisions, answering to the main office on California. Operating in EU doesn't make them completely disconnected from America, what even makes you think somethign like that?

  2. #222
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lahis View Post
    Blizzard's offices in Europe are subdivisions, answering to the main office on California. Operating in EU doesn't make them completely disconnected from America, what even makes you think somethign like that?
    Of course they're not disconnected. But all the global enterprises I've worked in during my professional career have had their regional business responsibilities separated internally. Generally it's hard to run a global business without portioning parts of it due to different legal requirements in different regions. Investors or end-users never see that of course, but internally you normally use some kind of budget responsibility for functional/regional areas and normally you let each area to take responsibility for development of their regional business - but I do have to admit I've never worked at Blizzard, so I wouldn't know how they do this really. I'm assuming you've got some inside information on this matter?

    It seems fairly strange that costs that occur in US would be compensated by raising the prices for end customers in EU. That would create quite a lot of bad will within the EU market I'd imagine. Especially since the EU infrastructure is separate from the US.

  3. #223
    Over 9000! Lahis's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by SpeedyOcelot View Post
    It seems fairly strange that costs that occur in US would be compensated by raising the prices for end customers in EU. That would create quite a lot of bad will within the EU market I'd imagine. Especially since the EU infrastructure is separate from the US.
    If they roll out new microtransactions, they would roll them out in every region, not just the US. Not to mention, every price they already have are on parity, wouldn't be hard to see them raisign every service price everywhere if US has to raise them.

  4. #224
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    Quote Originally Posted by Lahis View Post
    If they roll out new microtransactions, they would roll them out in every region, not just the US. Not to mention, every price they already have are on parity, wouldn't be hard to see them raisign every service price everywhere if US has to raise them.
    I haven’t played for a while so I wasn’t aware off any plans of microtransaction rollouts for WoW. And I can’t see any news of them either. Are you sure? Or is every future cash shop pet and mount going to be a NN ransom?
    Apologies but my tinfoil hat isn’t big enough for that one

  5. #225
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    Blizz is splitting more of their battle net into local regions, so they can flip switches more easily.

    Recently that added Japan, New Zealand and Canada.

  6. #226
    Quote Originally Posted by Skalm View Post
    Prior to Obama passing Net Neutrality, were your ISP's charging you for an 'Entertainment/Gamer' package, to be able to play online games?
    No, but the sky is falling people will whip themselves up to imagine the worst possible outcome.

  7. #227
    Quote Originally Posted by Gadzooks View Post
    It doesn't work that way. At all.
    I came here to post exactly this. You beat me to it.

  8. #228
    Activision/Blizzard has tons of money and WoW is a huge revenue source. If ISPs charge Blizzard interconnect fees, Blizzard will simply pay them and pass the costs on to their customers. Any impact to WoW will be minimal. Now impact to other games, from independent developers or smaller publishers, are another matter entirely. This change increases the cost to enter the market, so there will be a chilling effect on innovation and competition there.

    You will also see some ISPs partnering with Activision, or EA, or Ubisoft, or whatever, to zero-rate their products. This means that traffic to play WoW won't count against your bandwidth cap if you use AT&T. This seems like a great deal to consumers, who don't understand how it has that same chilling effect on competition. That will certainly happen.

    As for paying for fast lanes, "Only $10/month so your online games have great pings!" and so on, I don't think ISPs will try that stuff, because consumers are so strongly against it. But I guess we'll see.
    Last edited by Schizoide; 2017-12-17 at 02:37 AM.

  9. #229
    Bloodsail Admiral Joeygiggles's Avatar
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    The same thing that happened 3 years ago when we didnt have Net Neutrality....nothing
    Thank god this game isn't just for Rym, we'd have a pretty shitty time - Me

  10. #230
    Quote Originally Posted by Twdft View Post
    Patches are distributed via torrenting, so the identification was correct.
    It was not just patches that got hit, but the gameplay traffic too.
    Quote Originally Posted by DeadmanWalking View Post
    Your forgot to include the part where we blame casuals for everything because blizzard is catering to casuals when casuals got jack squat for new content the entire expansion, like new dungeons and scenarios.
    Quote Originally Posted by Reinaerd View Post
    T'is good to see there are still people valiantly putting the "Ass" in assumption.

  11. #231
    Welcome to the Corporate States of America: "Land of the Groupthink and Doublethink."

  12. #232
    Not everyone plays in the US. Lots of us, millions, in the rest of the world.

  13. #233
    Quote Originally Posted by Saffa View Post
    Not everyone plays in the US. Lots of us, millions, in the rest of the world.
    Yes, and some of us can select other ISPs if the current one would behave strangely.

    Unfortunately this anti-NN atmosphere has poisoned the discussion. ISP could use the lack of net neutrality to provide benefits for consumers: low latency when playing WoW and on vent/ts/discord and throttling advanced patch-downloads during nights; but I doubt that they will do that.

    I found the post https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads...8#post48363078 quite informative.

  14. #234
    Quote Originally Posted by Forogil View Post
    Yes, and some of us can select other ISPs if the current one would behave strangely.

    Unfortunately this anti-NN atmosphere has poisoned the discussion. ISP could use the lack of net neutrality to provide benefits for consumers: low latency when playing WoW and on vent/ts/discord and throttling advanced patch-downloads during nights; but I doubt that they will do that.

    I found the post https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads...8#post48363078 quite informative.
    Indeed.

    I will confirm that the post you link above describes what the issue is miles better than the media. (TLDR: there is no TLDR, read the post.) The media hysteria has been wildly off point and the various rallies like those on reddit were complete nonsense, wildly uninformed. I mean, it's not people's fault the media coverage of important questions is sometimes just terrible and misleading, but since it has been terrible and misleading often, it makes sense not to buy into it all that readily - and yes, hear from folks who *actually* have to deal with the nuts and bolts and can explain what the issue is on the technical level (no, it's not at all the simplistic "the carriers want to gouge people for money", again, read the linked post, you have been lied to).

  15. #235
    That poster is completely full of shit. Peering itself is such a low cost that it's essentially free, that's why it's always been done without charging. Comcast's actual costs to increase connection bandwidth peered with Cogent or direct to Netflix OpenConnect CDN were under $100k one-time to purchase the physical hardware. Moreover Netflix offered to colocate cache servers in Comcast's datacenters which would drop their costs to essentially zero, but Comcast wasn't interested in cutting costs, they wanted to generate revenue. Comcast charged Netflix for one reason only, because they like money. Comcast was already being paid to carry that traffic-- by their subscribers. Now they're being paid twice, which is great for their bottom line.

    Charging service providers for traffic has the chilling effect I spoke about earlier as well. It's actually fine (and ultimately, advantageous) for Netflix because they can afford to pay, but the cost to enter the market is much higher for new competition. That stifles innovation in the market. It's inherently anticompetitive.

    Finally, leveraged peering costs are only one aspect of network neutrality and, in fact, were not impacted by the 2015 title II decision. Wheeler declined to designate them contrary to network neutrality at the time, but was "troubled by them" when he was removed from his position. A democratic FCC would likely have taken action to stop that sort of double-charging shenanigans.

    The current administration is all about double-charging people, though. For example, in the new tax bill state taxes are no longer deductible. What that means is the federal government is taxing income you already paid the state in taxes. Double-charge. I dunno about you, but it sure seems unfair when it's my money.
    Last edited by Schizoide; 2017-12-17 at 08:53 PM.

  16. #236
    Quote Originally Posted by Lahis View Post
    If they roll out new microtransactions, they would roll them out in every region, not just the US. Not to mention, every price they already have are on parity, wouldn't be hard to see them raisign every service price everywhere if US has to raise them.
    Really. They pay the same in China, as a US player pays?

    Do tell.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Yelmurc View Post
    No, but the sky is falling people will whip themselves up to imagine the worst possible outcome.

    There's a lot of people talking way, way, way, way above their pay grade in this thread, and they need to just stop.

  17. #237
    The Unstoppable Force Gaidax's Avatar
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    The whole Net Neutrality is not so simple as some seem to think. It a tug of war between ISPs and content providers who want a piece of their pie.

    Problem with Net Neutrality is that you have specific kind of traffic ending up choking everyone else, which in turn by itself becomes unfair distribution of resources for which everyone ends up paying more.

    Of course flipside is that no Net Neutrality is also problematic because it gives too much unregulated power to ISPs. The best thing would be no Net Neutrality, but with tighter ISP regulations.


    There is this thing where people think there are big bad evil ISPs who want to bleed their $$ dry, but the other side - content providers who want to do exactly the same seems to be completely going under the radar and I assure you, they are not champions of freedom and justice either.

  18. #238
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    Quote Originally Posted by Villager720 View Post
    No, but they were throttling your internet for stream services.
    This. Also, they were double-dipping by charging the entertainment companies for 'fast lane' access, which the entertainment companies then passed down to consumers by raising their rates in order to maintain profit margins. So, @Skalm, you were being charged more, albeit indirectly, and there is no reason to suspect ISPs won't pursue other entertainment media with similar shakedown shenanigans.

    Furthermore, this will cripple innovation within the internet because ISPs can simply throttle or block any startup or small business that doesn't pay the fee for fast-lane access, which is the entire reason the FCC stepped in to begin with, just like every other time the government stepped in to check large businesses running rampant to the point of harming consumers and damaging the market.
    Be seeing you guys on Bloodsail Buccaneers NA!



  19. #239
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    Quote Originally Posted by Schizoide View Post
    That poster is completely full of shit. Peering itself is such a low cost that it's essentially free, that's why it's always been done without charging. Comcast's actual costs to increase connection bandwidth peered with Cogent or direct to Netflix OpenConnect CDN were under $100k one-time to purchase the physical hardware. Moreover Netflix offered to colocate cache servers in Comcast's datacenters which would drop their costs to essentially zero, but Comcast wasn't interested in cutting costs, they wanted to generate revenue. Comcast charged Netflix for one reason only, because they like money. Comcast was already being paid to carry that traffic-- by their subscribers. Now they're being paid twice, which is great for their bottom line.

    Charging service providers for traffic has the chilling effect I spoke about earlier as well. It's actually fine (and ultimately, advantageous) for Netflix because they can afford to pay, but the cost to enter the market is much higher for new competition. That stifles innovation in the market. It's inherently anticompetitive.

    Finally, leveraged peering costs are only one aspect of network neutrality and, in fact, were not impacted by the 2015 title II decision. Wheeler declined to designate them contrary to network neutrality at the time, but was "troubled by them" when he was removed from his position. A democratic FCC would likely have taken action to stop that sort of double-charging shenanigans.

    The current administration is all about double-charging people, though. For example, in the new tax bill state taxes are no longer deductible. What that means is the federal government is taxing income you already paid the state in taxes. Double-charge. I dunno about you, but it sure seems unfair when it's my money.
    Ah, finally someone who understands. Read this post.

  20. #240
    Quote Originally Posted by Gaidax View Post
    Of course flipside is that no Net Neutrality is also problematic because it gives too much unregulated power to ISPs. The best thing would be no Net Neutrality, but with tighter ISP regulations.
    Net neutrality is tighter ISP regulations. That's a precise description of what it does.

    The best solution would be no regulation, no net neutrality-- but with meaningful competition. Look to wireless providers for that. In the US, you can choose AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, or any one of dozens of MVNOs that resell their services. This competition has led to lower prices and better service. T-mobile, as the underdog, is particularly disruptive. Competition is great for consumers.

    Problem is that when it came time to wire the USA for telephone service in the early 1900s, they had the concept of a "natural monopoly", figuring that it would be overwhelmingly and foolishly expensive for multiple competitors to actually bury wires across the entire country and wire up to everybody's house, that investment duplication was wasteful and the cost so high that it shouldn't be mandated. This led to Ma Bell and eventually the split up and extensive regulation, because monopolies will run over consumers if they aren't forced to play nice. Cable rollouts followed that same model, which is why the vast majority of consumers in the USA only have one meaningful choice in broadband provider. Comcast and Time-Warner/Spectrum deliberately don't compete in the same markets.

    Since broadband is a monopoly, if you don't regulate it they will screw consumers straight into the wall. Does anyone think Comcast has your best interests at heart? They are the epitome of mustache-twirling comedic evil.

    Of course content providers like Netflix don't have the consumers' best interests at heart either. And that's OK, because they aren't monopolies. Remember the lesson of Myspace and Digg. At one point they owned the internet, then they made some severe mistakes and along came Facebook and Reddit who ate their lunch. If you piss off your users, and they have the option, they can tell you to screw yourself and go elsewhere. But if you have a monopoly, not so much. Regulation is the only answer to that-- without regulation you can do whatever you want and nobody can tell you otherwise.
    Last edited by Schizoide; 2017-12-18 at 01:19 AM.

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