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Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg | Hacker News Reader

Does this actually happen though? I mean, I acknowledge the theoretical possibility. Is it a commonplace occurrence? It's never happened to me, personally. If it did I'd likely be frustrated but I'd just play something else for a few days.

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To give an example from my own experience, a 13-hour flight is one of the most annoying places to find you can't play the game you'd been expecting to play, and you may not be able to just grab another one.

What 13 hour flight has power outlets that will output the 100+ watts you need to play Red Dead Redemption 2?

This was a Virgin Atlantic 747 (Hong Kong - London). I have a Surface Book 2 which I know has an unusually low-powered power supply (such that gaming will drain the battery even when plugged in), but given how much power sockets are now normal and expected, I'd be surprised if they couldn't handle most laptops.

It looks like a 4800U can run the game at 30fps low settings, and that's a 15 watt part.

And the issue applies to other games and intermittent play too.

I am from Brazil and because of that I never get online-only singleplayer games.

For example I never played Diablo 3, not even in a friend house or a demo (if there is one, I never checked). Ditto for Sim City 5, despite me being a huge fan of Sim City 4.

You did yourself a huge favour by not playing SimCity 5. The sequel to SimCity 4 came out, and it was called Cities: Skylines.

I know.

I nagged EA to let me fix SimCity 4 bugs, but they didn't help.

I found some former employees and nagged them about stuff, interestingly instead the result was being informed they were trying to organize the release of EASTL, so I nagged EA about THAT instead, and kept talking to the employees. That part DID work.

https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL

Even with that I still couldn't figure out how to make a patch for SC4 though. (I want to patch out RDTSC, that is the source of many, many of its bugs. SimCity 4 uses RDTSC to count cycles, that is what RDTSC was supposed to do when originally released, but Intel later changed it to count time instead of cycles, SC4 crashes on modern machines for example is because of that).

It's happening with increased regularity for me in California with PG&E's "Public Safety Power Shutoffs", where even with a generator to power my home apparently my ISP cannot be bothered to install generators to power their facilities – and my cable internet goes down for the duration of the PSPS (aside from the first 1-2 hours, as it appears the ISP at least has UPSes). The most recent PSPS lasted 48 hours.

In 2019, cumulative PSPS time was nearly one week (though I logged it at the time I forget the exact number now, something like 150ish hours).

For clarity: living outside SV, my ISP is Comcast (Xfinity).

EDIT: I'd like to add that phone tethering isn't a great fallback (though it's better than nothing), as literally everyone begins using their cell connection for everything which causes the latency to be very high and the speed to be frustratingly low.

It happens regularly with Ubisoft's Uplay. Like the launcher can't access the Internet so you can't access your games.

I bought two copies of Anno 1404 because I thought I could play with my wife. Big mistake. Uplay is completely busted and I've never been able to get multiplayer working. Wish I could refund that garbage.

The vast majority of the world's population live in places with power outages and flaky internet connectivity. It's extremely commonplace. I live in London and my upstream internet connection is going down multiple times a day at the moment which is extremely frustrating.

It's highly fault intolerant on everything staying the way it is, which means if in the future the internet is temporarily/permanently down for weeks/months for huge swathes of people (e.g. EMP / nuclear war), or the RDR DRM server goes offline temporarily/permanently (will it still be up in 10 year's time?) the game cannot be played. Future fallible not future proof.

Yes. There are plenty of developed countries with awful internet infrastructure. Australia (where I live) is one of those places.

I'm always amazed by this. I live in Vietnam, out of town on a rural road, and I get a solid 60mb connection for both mobile and wired. It's dirt cheap - something like $15 a month for both. Why can't rich countries like Australia manage this? I know population density factors in, but we're not talking about getting data in the outback - just where people actually live.

Because "just where people live" is still a pretty enormous area and there simply isn't political will to build it out properly (See the original NBN FTTH vs the current FTTN rollout).

A lot of the existing infrastructure is very poorly maintained but due to Telstra being privatised back in the 90's but still owning the infrastructure (Under their Wholesale division) the government essentially still has to pay them a fuckton of money to put any new cables in the ground using "Their" conduits.

Our government decided to make our internet infrastructure political rather than choosing what was best for the nation. The right-wing party saw no need for fiber internet, and our left-wing party wanted a proper fiber infrastructure. Australia is massive, and was in dire need of a national infrastructure upgrade.

Rupert Murdoch (who owns Foxtel and a large number of newspapers) is highly right-wing and heavily supported the right-wing government. That government has been changed out since then, but we're left with the lasting effects of their decisions.

It's probably not a common-place occurrence because anyone who doesn't have perpetual connection to internet just avoids things like this.

I just spent the last month in Colorado mountains doing web development without an internet connection (I walked to the nearest spot on occasion for email). We do exist.

It doesn’t need to happen often. Just sometimes would be enough for me to switch the publisher to a list of "never buy-always pirate". Unless it came with a big warning, then I just wouldn’t care and not get the game in the first place.

>If it did I'd likely be frustrated but I'd just play something else for a few days.

Except if every game pulled this crap, then you wouldn't be able to play anything while your internet is down.

Usually, when internet is down, I stop working start playing single player games.

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