Call of Duty 4 calls to too many
August 28th, 2007Last week it was announced that CoD4 would be taking beta applicants “First Come First Serve” basis starting at 12:00 PM PDT today. As soon as I read it, I remarked to a friend “This seems like an immensely bad idea.”
See, playing a really big game before its release for free is very alluring to a lot of people. The 6 million people who own a 360 in the US might possibly be interested. If you tell these people to go to a web page at a very specific time you’re going to need a lot of bandwidth and CPU power to respond to those requests. The only way that you can have a system that’s first come first serve for something like this is if you either make sure you have the needed bandwidth and servers or you maybe open it up at a random time during the day so the lucky people who happen to look at that time can get in (although this could cause your site to be down all day).
So of course today I, along with probably millions of other people, skeptically tried refreshing the CoD4 website starting a few minutes before over and over again trying to get a token for the beta. One time I made it to the “beta” page, clicked on the “Enter Beta” button which unfortunately had to load yet another page. That, of course, failed and then I had to try and refresh THAT page a 100 times. Finally about 20 minutes later I got to the page and it had a message saying they had already given out all the tokens. Fantastic.
Just like console launches, why don’t these companies realize the disaster of these things? It seems Infinity Ward has figured out the problem with “first come first serve” now and has a 24-hour sign-up session where they’ll randomly pick people who registered for it. If you want in, you can go there now and sign up before 7 PM PDT today.
Posted in Idiocy, Jeff, Online, Xbox 360 |
August 28th, 2007 at 4:00 am
Jesus, have you guys kept ahead of the economics news? The market disaster of the last two weeks? Well it seems Nintendo for the first time has suffered a relateively large stock fall….
http://stocks.us.reuters.com/stocks/overview.asp
Down 2.17% from 55200 to 54000. Needless to say, that’s nothing compared to what’s happening elsewhere in the world.
Sony is down 2.31%, Microsoft down 1.11%. Interesting money matters, no?
August 28th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Actually, NTDOY is in pretty good shape right now. It had 3 drops in the last couple weeks. I personally think 2 were tied to the market and 1 was a bit of a correction. This drop is smaller and obviously tied to the market. Its still up quite a bit from where it was even just a couple days ago.
My entire pie chart on Ameritrade is blood red today, overall down about $1000 for the day.
August 28th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Also, Laspy’s comments through me off of my intended comment.
You’d think they would have learned a lesson the with Amazon 360 sale last year. I tried to grab me a $100 360 (was it $100?) and amazon puked so hard I think I had to reboot my parents computer (I was home for a holiday as I recall). Anyway, yeah, I remember MANY more people angry at Amazon, rather than thrilled that they even had a chance at a $100 360, so that kinda blew up in their face as well.
August 28th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
I lost the original link, but Squeenix lost 8.12% of its stock yesterday. TOday it lost 3.01%
Apparently the root of all the carnage is subprime loans. Basically, lenders get greedy and loan $$ to people who have bad credit with low initial interest that suddenly jumps after a set period of time has expired. Then they dosh out CLO and CDOs to foreign institutions and voila. Defaults and foreclosure everywhere.
Question: Up to now companies like Nintendo benefited from low value of yen, allowing to convert a given amount of foreign currency to mucho yen. Now that yen has bounced, how will this affect sony, nintend, etc etc?
Also: how are your stocks doing? ANy big hits?
Disclaimer: I don’t own any stocks for the companies i’ve mentioned.
August 28th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
Well,everything took a bath today, (and for the past month), but I’ve been bleeding heavily on AMD for nearly a year. Probably down about 6K overall.
I’m still hopeful there though, as I don’t think it will go much below 10. +crosses fingers+ Obviously Nintendo is a bright spot in my portfolio, still up 23 percent (even after todays fall) since I originally bought in which puts me up about 2K (yeah, I know, I didn’t have the balls to get in as heavily as I should, WTF, nintendo has disappointed me alot over the last 10 years, I was as surprised by the DS/Wii as anyone).
Most of my other stocks/funds are depressed recently, just like the entire market, but my international funds, while softening are still pretty strong, in particular a nice emerging markets ETF I own quite a bit of (VWO) is weathering this storm very well although it took a 4 point hit today too. My stock funds are pretty much level with where they were 2 months ago, but they tend to rebound pretty repidly. Diversification FTW.
August 28th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
Investing in AMD? Aren’t they dying? I think Intel may be the next microsoft of the cpu industry. Monopoly and subsequent stagnation for the win!!!
August 29th, 2007 at 11:01 am
It’s a long story. My fingers are crossed for their quad cores.