Well, I guess pre-Patch 0 might not be that bad. Played on the Alliance servers for like, say 2 hours plus already I guess. I lowered the settings somewhat, disabled Anti-Aliasing, Textures set to high, View Distance set to medium, Shaders set to high, Shadows set to high. Frame per second does seem to be better after I lowered the settings abit, just type “/fps” to check your frame rate.
The ping with IAHGames’ Alliance server is quite okay, from my 2 hours plus playing experience. Ping ranges from 60ms+, 90ms+, or 150ms+, sometimes even hitting 200ms+, 300ms+, but 300ms+ is quite rare and not much lag spike encountered so far. Except for a couple of “server time out errors”, that would result in me getting “kicked” out of the server. No big deal, I guess, just log back in and continue with the demon hunt!
I think I will discard my previous insane urge to sign up for the bloody USD149.99 “Founders’ Subscription Offer” and stick with the “basic”, “free”, “playable online right out of the box” non-subscription basic account. One should always maintain one’s ideal, mine is avoid subscription based games, and personally I still feel that Hellgate : London don’t quite deserve that USD9.99 monthly subscription.
ArenaNET with their Guild Wars series can survive based on a business model that does not requires any monthly subscription fees from its player base, why can’t Flag Ship Studios do the same with Hellgate : London? Different people, different ideals, I guess.
However, I noticed that the instancing in Hellgate : London does seem to be a bit different from Guild Wars. In Guild Wars, each instance is “reset” when a character or party exits that instance (explorable, mission). In Hellgate : London, this is not the case, the instance is “remembered”.
How is it so? For example, say my character – DeimosTelArin, is currently fraggin’ demons in an explorable area called “Leicester”. I invite 2 players into my party by typing “/invite <insert their names here>”, I am able to open a “Party Portal” for them to enter directly into my vicinity, or they can just take the normal town exit into the area my character is currently in. Neat feature eh? It is like some sort of “Open Instance” technology.
Anyway, I think I will need to split time between 2 games now. Maybe I will frag Stroggs or GDF fools during night time, as the servers will have more people, or should I say, it is easier to join servers with more people. In the morning, say 6am till 8am, there is usually one server, and its FULL i.e. 24/24, no room for me, and I hate to wait for an open slot!
So be it then! Night time = Enemy Territory : Quake Wars, Morning = Hellgate : London
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