ProSiebenSat.1

[GuyFawkes]

Originally Posted by Dart

Just do what "Dart" the Planetside player from the original article is going to do... Come and play on the NA servers anyway! I scoured the net for research on pro7 when we were fighting this initially and my overwhelming feeling was thatI did not want to do business with that company.

Exactly what I'm going to do

btw, were you originally DartagnionUK or similar on emerald? I remember my first excursion to Emerald back in 04/5 or thereabouts and this cr5 being the only one there worth listening to on vs cr5 command.

edit : GOA and warhammer gives me shudders and hairs on back of my neck stand up. Never, ever again.

[Dart]

Originally Posted by GuyFawkes

Exactly what I'm going to do

btw, were you originally DartagnionUK or similar on emerald? I remember my first excursion to Emerald back in 04/5 or thereabouts and this cr5 being the only one there worth listening to on vs cr5 command.

Haha if I ever seemed trustworthy I assure you it was an illusion, but yeah man that was me. I renamed to Dart (expecting people to spell Dartagnan while under fire was always a little optimistic) and that's how I'll be rolling in PS2. Look forward to seeing you in game!

[Joe]

I do hope Station Cash gets a good exchange rate or it is just a transfer of funds, i have like 10,000 saved up :P

[Pyreal]

Originally Posted by Dart

Haha if I ever seemed trustworthy I assure you it was an illusion, but yeah man that was me. I renamed to Dart (expecting people to spell Dartagnan while under fire was always a little optimistic) and that's how I'll be rolling in PS2. Look forward to seeing you in game!

All for one, and one for all!

[Figment]

Well, I just decided to go and make an account at Pro7, to prepare for the eventual arrival of PlanetSide.



My registration went as such:

First I had to find it. Since I didn't know the website, I searched google and found www.prosiebengames.de quickly enough. Fair enough I think, so I arrive and find the site in German. Not a problem for me since I speak German as a third language, but I'm sure the British users would already go "ew, its the foreign!" (). I first looked around the site a bit to see if I could find anything on PS2, nothing, but did see DCUO and EQII, confirming I was on the right site. So I decided to register, but as I went near the reg button, I saw the websites for the various nations. Alright, nice, own language sites.

So before registering, I went and clicked on what I believed to be the dutch version of the site, being pleasantly surprised there to be a dutch version of the site.

Well, there isn't. Not in that sense, what happens is they take you to another website that's basically a dutch variant on their site, just significantly more basic as it highly favours images and no text. Descriptions of games are about one sentence in length and one image.

However, I was not quite prepared for the difference between the German site and http://www.sevengames.nl/ , which not only looks utterly childish, it also is incredibly basic. (I'll compare more later on). I thought "oh well", let's see what happens, and I registered on the dutch site. The email arrived quickly.



So I go to my email inbox and am shocked to find this:




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Hallo Figment,

herzlich willkommen in der Sevengames-Community! Um Deine E-Mail-Adresse zu
bestätigen und Deinen Account in vollem Umfang zu aktivieren, klicke bitte
auf folgenden Link:

[Registration link]

Nach der Aktivierung kannst Du Dich sofort mit Deinen Zugangsdaten einloggen,
Deinen persönlichen Avatar (Stellvertreter) konfigurieren, Deine Profildaten
vervollständigen und sofort loslegen!
Sollte der angegebene Link nicht funktionierten, kopiere bitte die URL in das
Adressfeld Deines Browsers!

Falls Du Fragen und Anregungen zu Sevengames hast, schreibe an: [email protected]


Viel Spass wünscht,

Dein Sevengames-Team


www.sevengames.nl
http://www.sevengames.nl/imprint


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Uhm... I register on the DUTCH website clearly made for children and get a standard email in GERMAN?

What? The whole point of going to a dutch site is to AVOID the German language!



Though most dutch adults can speak some broken German and most can be derived from the context, you can't expect German language used in mailings (or support) for non-German sites! If they have to use a standard language, have them use English!

Do British users get German e-mails too if they register on the British version of the website? I'd hope not!



So I decided to go to the British site. Which I couldn't find at first: I saw the AT (Austria) and CH (Suiss) versions (all in German) are identical to the German version, while the others are all in the sevengames format. Odd, since the Suiss have a large French and Italian speaking populace. Note that the Belgian site is again in Dutch, but doesn't share the site with the Dutch players for some reason. Perhaps they also didn't realise that 40% of the Belgian populace speaks French... Which btw, doesn't exist: there is no FRENCH version. There is also no Spanish, Italian, Polish, Danish, Finnish or Czech version. There is however a Norwegian version (NO) and Swedish version (SE).



Hmm. That's going to annoy people when they have to make the switch to Pro7. Let's assume most people would want to go to the British version as the most international one. But again, where is it?



Now, it turns out the website for the UK is called www.sevengames.com and is noted on top there not by UK or a British national flag, but by "COM". Ehr... Oookay, so you do all kinds of national tags and then there's "COM", makes perfect sense. Why not just call it .co.uk then? >___>

What I noticed is that this site too, like all but the German language copy pasta sites, has the same basic site as the other non-German sites.

So, anyway I noticed that the frames are pretty bad translations on the dutch site since the grammar on the dutch site was... Typical babblefish. "Dat speelt de community" (non-dutch word at the end and it translates directly to: "That plays the community", not a very nice grammar feel, has it?).

I also noticed that they haven't put up the section for PlanetSide 2 on the dutch site, but they have for the British and German site. Even if it's not easy to find. (It's in the tab Free Downloads and searches don't turn up results).

http://www.sevengames.com/planetside-2
http://www.prosiebengames.de/planetside-2

Note that the download button there links to www.planetside2.com .



The Forum on the Dutch site is even worse. Please don't get me started on their forum design... Just... go to their forum section in any of the non-German sites under community and cry. Yes, they're independent forums, no populace and they don't even have subsections per game or whatever you would expect.

Note that the German forum is actually worse... because I can't find a forum at all! How do they plan to built international communities? How do they plan on receiving feedback? It does seem that their site is under construction, because their buddy list "will be there in the future" on the front page (or they mean that you need buddies first before it shows up). But it's not there yet. I don't see anywhere where a forum might be found either.



Note also that in the top 10 of BROWSER games, it lists both DCUO and EQII, while if you look for them, they're found under "Free Downloads" (next to the Battle Games and Browser Games tabs. Ehr. Okay...

Honestly, they got to step up a bit if they suggest they can support SOE games and also in the local language. Because right now, this isn't instilling much faith for the future.

Originally Posted by Dart

Haha if I ever seemed trustworthy I assure you it was an illusion, but yeah man that was me. I renamed to Dart (expecting people to spell Dartagnan while under fire was always a little optimistic) and that's how I'll be rolling in PS2. Look forward to seeing you in game!

Never trust a Brit with a french royal musketeer guard name!

[SergeantNubins]

That's all very well, but why should EU players have to ay with an extra 150 ping.. as anyone who played fps games back in the days of modems, ISDN and the dawn of ADSL will tell you.. thats the difference between an LPB and an HPB. The best HPB's were only ever as good as average LPB's. In fact, there had to be rules in the competitions where teams had to have limits on the number of LPB's playing. As someone who was unfortunate enough to have to play and compete on a modem during the Quake1, 2 and early CS years, there is no way I would deliberately impose that handicap on myself again.

It remains to be seen how bad or good prosieben actually are with ps2. Basedo n experience i doubt they will be good, but who knows. Nothing will change it now.

[Dart]

Originally Posted by SergeantNubins

That's all very well, but why should EU players have to ay with an extra 150 ping.. as anyone who played fps games back in the days of modems, ISDN and the dawn of ADSL will tell you.. thats the difference between an LPB and an HPB. The best HPB's were only ever as good as average LPB's. In fact, there had to be rules in the competitions where teams had to have limits on the number of LPB's playing. As someone who was unfortunate enough to have to play and compete on a modem during the Quake1, 2 and early CS years, there is no way I would deliberately impose that handicap on myself again.

It remains to be seen how bad or good prosieben actually are with ps2. Basedo n experience i doubt they will be good, but who knows. Nothing will change it now.

Times have changed and a large amount of the latency issues people experienced in past online fps games had more to do with poor netcode than latency. That said, of course 20 ping is better than 120 however there are ways of reducing your ping besides playing on your closest server should you be so inclined...

[IronMole]

Originally Posted by Dart

Times have changed and a large amount of the latency issues people experienced in past online fps games had more to do with poor netcode than latency. That said, of course 20 ping is better than 120 however there are ways of reducing your ping besides playing on your closest server should you be so inclined...

Ping is something that cannot be 'controlled'. Granted that you can 'raise' it via limiting, but lowering the ping is near impossible.

Ping is all dependent on your ISP's hops to the destination. Also, the only real way to negate latency issues is to use this 'client side' crap unless the server can take the load.

Shame really.

[Joe]

I hate the words 'client side'....

[Zetsubo]

So, EU players should make two accounts, one EU and one NA. If latency on NA account is acceptable: put money into that account, as it supports SOE directly. IF NA servers are unplayable, play EU but be careful with buying stuff from ProSiebenSat, because their customer service has a history of being bad.

Is that a good recap of the situation?

[Dart]

Originally Posted by IronMole

Ping is something that cannot be 'controlled'. Granted that you can 'raise' it via limiting, but lowering the ping is near impossible.

Ping is all dependent on your ISP's hops to the destination. Also, the only real way to negate latency issues is to use this 'client side' crap unless the server can take the load.

Shame really.

Not quite true.

[IronMole]

Originally Posted by Dart

Not quite true.

Enlighten me?

[SergeantNubins]

Originally Posted by Dart

Times have changed and a large amount of the latency issues people experienced in past online fps games had more to do with poor netcode than latency. That said, of course 20 ping is better than 120 however there are ways of reducing your ping besides playing on your closest server should you be so inclined...

If it was a stable 120 then id not be quite so worried.. but stable 120 is a good day from the UK to atlantic based servers, it usually averages more like 140/150. The current pacific based servers for panetside get 190-250 .. thats bad even for an HPB. It's not quite so bad for planetside because its less twitch based than shooters like quake, or indeed BF, CS or COD etc etc. But PS2 will be very twitch based and that kinda difference in response time is the difference between getting the kill and getting killed. It can be very drustrating in ps1 now because in a close fight you dont know wether the other guy won because he wa sbetter, or because his pc registerred the killshot before mine could

[TheDrone]

I sure hope there will be US East Coast servers.

[fvdham]

I am tempted to play on a US server while living in Europe because Pro7 is unknown to me.