Interconnection
Latest
Report: AT&T will accept net neutrality if it gets DirecTV
AT&T previously called the FCC's new net neutrality rules "a tragic step in the wrong direction" and even filed a lawsuit to block them. However, it would obey at least some of the new stipulations if its $49 billion purchase of DirecTV is approved by regulators, according to the Washington Post. That's a big reversal from before, when it specifically said it would not tie any net neutrality promises to the merger. It also contrasts sharply with Comcast, which vowed it would walk away from its (now-moot) TWC merger before bending on net neutrality.
Time Warner Cable is charging Netflix for a direct connection too
Comcast, then Verizon, AT&T and now Time Warner Cable. That's the list of ISPs that have less-than-politely declined Netflix's free OpenConnect setup, and instead decided they'll take a payment from the streaming service in exchange for connecting its network directly to theirs. Time Warner cable confirmed the deal to Gigaom, saying it was reached in June and implemented this month. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings just published an essay today in Wired as a part of its 'Save the Net" series railing against just this sort of pay-to-play system, which he's previously said undermines the possibility of strong net neutrality. The FCC has said it's looking into the deals and Hastings has mentioned that if the Comcast/TWC merger goes through, he hopes it comes with a condition blocking the combo from charging for interconnections.
World of Warcraft, complexity, and design vs. sprawl
One of those trends that comes out of reading a lot about World of Warcraft is you start to see patterns in the responses. One trend I (and others, to be fair) have noticed coming out of BlizzCon, and then from discussions with people that I think needs to be understood and explored by players is the notion of vastness in World of Warcraft - this is a game that has recently celebrated its ninth anniversary. In that time it's seen four expansions, with a fifth on the way. Each of these expansions has added something to the game - reforging, transmogrification, arenas, new raid content, new dungeon content, new classes, new spells and abilities, new levels, new stats - and in many cases, this all increases the overall complexity of the game. It goes far beyond simple to understand symptoms of this growth, like the upcoming item squish, and into a realm of interconnected complexity that causes dominos to fall in directions we may not have even seen before it happens. We started the game with three classes capable of tanking. We're up to five. Along the way, tanking has changed and changed again, until its modern implementation barely even resembles what we were doing back in the days of ten or fifteen person UBRS groups - tanking today has a host of mob control abilities in order to allow them to more effectively control groups of adds, tools for mobility and is based around actively reducing incoming damage in a way it simply wasn't years before. Now, consider this - how does the game itself change in order to challenge the modern tank? What does it do to demand they play to their best? Encounters of the past wouldn't even make a modern tank blink - what challenge would Garr pose to today's tank, for example? A bunch of adds? Bring it. So design has to take these new tanking modes and abilities into account and provide new ways to give them difficult encounters... and these encounters thus create, in their turn, the new tank of the future.
Storyboard: Swapping tales
A few weeks back, I took the opportunity to explain why roleplaying is most definitely not storytelling. So this week, I'm going to directly undermine every single part of that column and talk about running a steady story via roleplaying. If you haven't noticed by this point, I'm a big fan of subverting expectations. My usual impish sense of humor aside, the two exist rather comfortably alongside one another. A long-running storyline in-game doesn't require you to have arcs and movements and motivations planned out -- rather, it's the natural outgrowth of character arcs and interactions from months or years of play. You lose much in the way of narrative consistency or overall theme, but you gain a sprawling organic network of developing plotlines. So keeping a long-term story running is more a matter of letting time build on an existing base. But getting that existing base functioning and keeping it on an even keel isn't always a simple task, and that's what we're going to examine. There are a lot of ways to keep a story going in the game, but the better the foundation, the better it'll be.
Verizon calls Sprint a deadbeat, takes it to court
Sprint is allegedly pulling the old "aw shucks, I must've left my wallet at home" trick with Verizon, which claims that the former is failing to pay up about $10 million in back interconnection fees. The Delaware federal court filing says that Big Red "repeatedly attempted to resolve this dispute short of litigation," but hey, every so often these megacorporations run into a dispute that only the gavel can solve -- particularly when it involves eight figures worth of cold, hard cash. Sprint seems almost flippant about the whole thing, saying that the lawsuit doesn't surprise them since Verizon's running up against a statute of limitations and that they "remain hopeful" that the whole deal can be put to bed without those nasty court proceedings getting in the way. 'Course, if it was a simple matter of cutting a $10 million check, Sprint probably would've done it by now, so there must be some haggling going on behind the scenes.
