Potentially the longest thread in history...

[kmanmx]

Just had a whole week of training, and then a 4.5hr exam. Absolutely exhausting. Required pass mark of 80%.

Got 79%. At least the other two guys got 78% and 59% so I'm Queen of the Failures xD

Doing my second attempt on Sunday.

What's the exam ?

This gives me memories of my IT Apprenticeship. Sat in a training room learning the most boring IT **** ever, followed by laborious crappy exams. I hated it so much. Looking back, they were pretty easy exams as you'd expect. But it seemed crap at the time.

 

[Trotter]

I was out of town basically all week for work, got home Thursday night. I ended up driving 1500 miles from Monday morning until I got home Thursday night. I worked with the Kentucky tech to upgrade nine stores to the newer credit card readers as their old ones were no longer PCI compliant. The locations ranged from Steele, Missouri to Central City, Kentucky.

My wife had an interview for a job this past Tuesday. She said that the interview went very well, and that they took her out and introduced her to several people at the facility which seemed weird to her. I told her that she must have impressed them. The place called her Wednesday and offered her the position. My wife told them that she actually wanted more money than the max that they were offering they said that they would give her the max and re-evaluate it in 90 days. She accepted and asked when they wanted her to start and was told that Thursday. So she interviewed on Tuesday, was offered the job on Wednesday, and started on Thursday. She put in two days at her new job this week after being out of work since December 12.

 

[Yami]

What's the exam ?

This gives me memories of my IT Apprenticeship. Sat in a training room learning the most boring IT **** ever, followed by laborious crappy exams. I hated it so much. Looking back, they were pretty easy exams as you'd expect. But it seemed crap at the time.

https://www.infoblox.com/support/infoblox-education-services/courses/
Core DDI Config & Admin (CDCA)

 

[kmanmx]

https://www.infoblox.com/support/infoblox-education-services/courses/
Core DDI Config & Admin (CDCA)

Ah cool. Never heard of it myself but i'm sure it's super difficult

In other news... I still have to rant about this Steam/Epic store thing. The amount of kids online that seem to advocate so strongly for there to be only one store, Steam, is scary. They think they want just one game store, but they really don't. Monopolies are so anti-consumer it's unreal. Steam is close to a monopoly as it is, and you can tell. Yes it has the most features of any stores, but for it's size and scale it's still pretty terrible. It still has poor 4K support. It is still buggy. The new chat is still way worse than Discord. This is a company which is pretty damn relaxed about improving Steam. It looks ancient in terms of UI. This is a company that has tried things like paid mods. People seem to have a very short memory, it wasn't so long ago that there were no Steam game reviews, no cloud saves, no refund feature, and getting hold of Valve customer service was impossible. All things that people are moaning about with the Epic store.

I'm very unsympathetic towards this whole thing because asking for a single point of sale for games is just stupid and born out of nothing but impatience and laziness. People just can't be bothered to launch their games from multiple apps, but it really isn't hard and only takes like 2 seconds to open up Epic instead of Steam. Yes I do think Epic launched their store prematurely, they should have waited 'til it was more feature rich. But looking at their Trello board it's going to have majority feature parity with Steam in about 6 months.

I guarantee in 5 years Epic have a respectable market share and people are sucking their dick just like they suck Steams today.

 

[carnageX]

Ive had the same experience trying numerous cloud gaming streaming products. But using my own PC seems like less latency, probably because it's 15 miles from where I am accessing it from, rather than potentially hundreds of miles for the data centers where these cloud gaming things are located.

I still probably wouldn't reccomend it for Rocket League, as that's very much a game where every millisecond counts. It would be playable but you would still notice. But it's working great for me on games like Asassins Creed and Skyrim. Slower paced stuff.

Apparently Google are launching there own game streaming product in a few weeks and it's supposedly got much lower latency than all the competitors too.

Steam is releasing "Steam Link Anywhere" as well, to add to the remote gaming. Can opt-in to the beta to try it out vs Moonlight.

I had gotten into Google's Project Stream test; was unable to play because they require 40ms ping to their servers, and I could only ever get around 51ms. Which sucked because they touted "if you play at least 1 hour of game time, then we'll give you a copy of Assassin's Creed Odyssey for free after the project ends." So I did all I could do from home...and then I spun up a VM in Azure and logged in and let it sit and tried to walk around a bit to not timeout the game. So now I have a local copy of AC:O lol.

In my case I'm referring to in home streaming. It's just not quick enough for RL.

I do a lot of in-home streaming without much issue. Played several games to my Steam Link. Weirdly enough, the game I had issues with was Hollow Knight. Would start getting crazy input lag once in a while until I paused the game, let it sit for a minute, and then continued to play.

I played the entirety of Ace Combat 7 just recently without issue, though.

Played a bit of AC:O as well; graphics were kinda downgraded through that - not sure if it's just because I had the graphics up too high for it and it was downgrading it automatically for me, or if it was just because I was playing it on my 4k TV at 1080p res from my desktop.

 

[PP Mguire]

If tens of thousands of people have more than 100 titles on the Epic store in 5 years I'll be surprised and you might have an argument. Otherwise it's a pointless case right now. Let's take Origin as an example, been around since what 2011? 8 years and I have less than 10 titles on there. The same uproar happened when EA forced Origin for Battlefield when Battlefield 2 was on Steam too (in fact I have BF2 on Steam and it wasn't offered on Origin that I know of even though 1942 was). That uproar being EA is ramming a platform up our asses that didn't work and they only did it to try and copy Valve. I remember the struggles of trying to play BF3 while sqauding up dicking around with not only a sloppy Origin platform but also Battlelog and the two not syncing properly for over a year.

This time isn't really the case. Security flaws, terrible UI, terrible store, etc aside the uproar on the Epic store vs Steam is purely the fact that Metro was slated for a Steam release with many people (myself included) having a preorder ON Steam then they yank it literally 2 weeks before launch. So late to the point that they had to put stickers on the physical copy cases to cover the Steam logo. This has more to do with what 4A did than the actual Epic store or multiple launchers argument. If they yanked Steam in favor of Origin everybody would be ****ting on Origin again. Microsoft and 343 would get the same dick ramming if they did the same with Halo MCC and say tossed it on Battlenet. Which I actually don't mind that launcher much.

 

[PP Mguire]

Steam is releasing "Steam Link Anywhere" as well, to add to the remote gaming. Can opt-in to the beta to try it out vs Moonlight.

I had gotten into Google's Project Stream test; was unable to play because they require 40ms ping to their servers, and I could only ever get around 51ms. Which sucked because they touted "if you play at least 1 hour of game time, then we'll give you a copy of Assassin's Creed Odyssey for free after the project ends." So I did all I could do from home...and then I spun up a VM in Azure and logged in and let it sit and tried to walk around a bit to not timeout the game. So now I have a local copy of AC:O lol.



I do a lot of in-home streaming without much issue. Played several games to my Steam Link. Weirdly enough, the game I had issues with was Hollow Knight. Would start getting crazy input lag once in a while until I paused the game, let it sit for a minute, and then continued to play.

I played the entirety of Ace Combat 7 just recently without issue, though.

Played a bit of AC:O as well; graphics were kinda downgraded through that - not sure if it's just because I had the graphics up too high for it and it was downgrading it automatically for me, or if it was just because I was playing it on my 4k TV at 1080p res from my desktop.

Those are wildly different from Rocket League though. I mean if I hooked my Steam Link up or streamed via my Shield I could play a SP game like Skyrim, FF, whatever just fine. Hell I'd probably even be ok with streaming something like Ark or an RTS. Rocket League you can just feel the latency though. It's my go to game for testing any kind of streaming and so far anything but native is just too slow.

 

[kmanmx]

If tens of thousands of people have more than 100 titles on the Epic store in 5 years I'll be surprised and you might have an argument. Otherwise it's a pointless case right now. Let's take Origin as an example, been around since what 2011? 8 years and I have less than 10 titles on there. The same uproar happened when EA forced Origin for Battlefield when Battlefield 2 was on Steam too (in fact I have BF2 on Steam and it wasn't offered on Origin that I know of even though 1942 was). That uproar being EA is ramming a platform up our asses that didn't work and they only did it to try and copy Valve. I remember the struggles of trying to play BF3 while sqauding up dicking around with not only a sloppy Origin platform but also Battlelog and the two not syncing properly for over a year.

This time isn't really the case. Security flaws, terrible UI, terrible store, etc aside the uproar on the Epic store vs Steam is purely the fact that Metro was slated for a Steam release with many people (myself included) having a preorder ON Steam then they yank it literally 2 weeks before launch. So late to the point that they had to put stickers on the physical copy cases to cover the Steam logo. This has more to do with what 4A did than the actual Epic store or multiple launchers argument. If they yanked Steam in favor of Origin everybody would be ****ting on Origin again. Microsoft and 343 would get the same dick ramming if they did the same with Halo MCC and say tossed it on Battlenet. Which I actually don't mind that launcher much.

The difference here I think is that Epic Games have every intention of paying $$$ for exclusivity of any AAA game, whereas EA with Origin clearly wern't. That will put some people off, but a lot of more casual gamers that don't sit on reddit and game forums complaining probably don't care that much and will buy it from whatever store is selling it. If Epic do that with enough big games, people will eventually cave. If there are 4 or 5 big games every year released exclusively on Epic Store and in 6 months time they have feature parity with Steam, then I think a lot of people will give in. One of the unwritten rules about the world is that most people are inherently lazy and have low attention spans. They will care *a lot* about things until it directly inconveniences them, and then they give in. PC gamers will soon cave when so many of their favorite titles are exclusive to Epic store. Some will hold out and refuse to buy, but enough will cave.

What they did with Metro was pretty scummy, but I blame the publisher of that game for that more than Epic Games. Epic Games are playing their strongest card, and I don't blame them for that. The key feature of any game store is what games you can buy on it. That comes above all else. The reality is they have enough money to buy exclusivity for 100's of games. I like it because I have good faith the Epic store will be good in 6 months time, and it will push Valve to be less lazy.

To be extreme, lets pretend by 2021 that Epic has the following exclusive to their store: RDR2 PC, Cyberpunk 2077, TES VI, Division 3, FarCry 6 etc. Are people really going to avoid those games just out of some virtuous protest against Epic ? maybe 10% will. Everyone else will just cave and buy them on Epic store.

 

[carnageX]

Those are wildly different from Rocket League though. I mean if I hooked my Steam Link up or streamed via my Shield I could play a SP game like Skyrim, FF, whatever just fine. Hell I'd probably even be ok with streaming something like Ark or an RTS. Rocket League you can just feel the latency though. It's my go to game for testing any kind of streaming and so far anything but native is just too slow.

Oh for sure, I know RL needs to be very snappy to play well. I was just surprised at how well Ace Combat 7 performed for being an action game.

 

[PP Mguire]

The difference here I think is that Epic Games have every intention of paying $$$ for exclusivity of any AAA game, whereas EA with Origin clearly wern't. That will put some people off, but a lot of more casual gamers that don't sit on reddit and game forums complaining probably don't care that much and will buy it from whatever store is selling it. If Epic do that with enough big games, people will eventually cave. If there are 4 or 5 big games every year released exclusively on Epic Store and in 6 months time they have feature parity with Steam, then I think a lot of people will give in. One of the unwritten rules about the world is that most people are inherently lazy and have low attention spans. They will care *a lot* about things until it directly inconveniences them, and then they give in. PC gamers will soon cave when so many of their favorite titles are exclusive to Epic store. Some will hold out and refuse to buy, but enough will cave.

What they did with Metro was pretty scummy, but I blame the publisher of that game for that more than Epic Games. Epic Games are playing their strongest card, and I don't blame them for that. The key feature of any game store is what games you can buy on it. That comes above all else. The reality is they have enough money to buy exclusivity for 100's of games. I like it because I have good faith the Epic store will be good in 6 months time, and it will push Valve to be less lazy.

To be extreme, lets pretend by 2021 that Epic has the following exclusive to their store: RDR2 PC, Cyberpunk 2077, TES VI, Division 3, FarCry 6 etc. Are people really going to avoid those games just out of some virtuous protest against Epic ? maybe 10% will. Everyone else will just cave and buy them on Epic store.

All games that you can pirate minus Division 3 but that will always be a Uplay thing. I don't see Ubisoft caving on their own platform.

I don't blame Epic for trying, but you don't go all in when your hand is ****. Ever. It creates community backlash like no other. If say this was Battlenet I doubt it would have gotten as much backlash as it did because their platform is at least competent. And everybody knows Blizzard doesn't give a single ****.

I'll just say this, you have a lot of faith in a company that couldn't produce a decent Unreal Tournament in 12 years and relied on the community to basically develop it. Which it's still largely unfinished. You **** on Valve for being lazy but essentially all Epic is trying to do is do the same thing Valve did. Make a few games, create a dominant digital distribution software, then sit on their bundles. I see this failing for one reason, they're 16 years too late. Valve started something that is embedded with time and most people have 90% of their gaming library on Steam. Hence the backlash. We've seen successful boycotts in the ol PCMR (albeit very few but still) and if Epic wanted to do this exclusivity bull**** to gain an edge not only will they see hurt but so will the publishers of the games they're trying to buy out from under Valve. Twofold for the SP games because people will go with the CPY discount like I did with Metro (my girl bought it for me but I had the copy first). Try to remember all the **** PCMR gave console plebs over exclusive games and how "open and free" PC is. Epic is no better than Sony or Microsoft buying out timed exclusivity for a specific console.

Edit: Oh, and we all know the only reason they're getting cocky is because of how much parents paid for v-bucks so the 12 year olds could play with their new bling.