1789 réponses à ce sujet

[Gabriel S.]

LPPrince wrote...

maselphie wrote...

LPPrince wrote...

What was happening was some hacker/spammer had set up a system to have that button be pressed a TON of times in seconds, so that the counter would go up.

No there wasn't. There were people who misclicked, had to restart their downloads, download managers that split files into multiple parts, people who downloaded demos for every platform they own ... Those alone would more than triple the amount of downloads counted IF indeed the counter was tied to how many people just downloaded the thing. There may have been one or two adolescents who who snickered and downloaded it a few times, but that thing is 2GB. Not a casual download, and again, HOW the downloads were counted is not known. People speculate between needing to log in AND complete the demo, to just opening the damn webpage.

What is fact is that Bioware has complete control over the counter and the DLC. It does not matter how many people have legitamately played the demo. They could have gotten 5 million downloads, but the fact of the matter is that they don't want the promotion to be over yet. It is in their interest to force the demo to spread outside of the existing fanbase, so they'll doctor the number to make it look like we're close, but we better start Facebookin' or else we wont get that [mystery] amount of gold that DLC gives!

They've made up some BS about hackers and spammers, because people do actually do things like that. For stupid stuff, too. This? It was a marketing stunt from the beginning. It doesn't matter if 5 people or 5 million people downloaded. It has to last a while, but instead of just admitting they undershot the target number, they make up some lie about hackers. Damn us for trying to cheat them!

If you want to keep being pessimistic and think of Bioware and EA as the bad guys, go ahead. But maybe once you should accept the fact that the fault might be on the FANS rather than the developers/publishers.

They're gonna release the two items anyway, I don't get what all the fuss is about. It's not like they're promo items from retailers. If it's 800k+ now, it's a sure bet they're as good as ours, MWOHAHA!

I guess what they tried to do with this was to expose as many folks as possible to the demo to increase sales, if nothing else. Someone who played Origins, but is not a regular on the forum or not even aware of all the information regarding the sequel might be pleasantly (or unpleasantly) surprised by the changes once they get to play the demo, henceforth becoming interested.

Ultimately more exposure has to mean more sales, it IS a BioWare game after all.

[LPPrince]

By "fault of the fans" I don't mean its actually OUR fault that the count went down.

I'm saying there wasn't enough of us to get it to 1 million.

No blame to be given. Sorry for the confusion.

Modifié par LPPrince, 27 février 2011 - 02:27 .

[Kitsukaru]

Yrkoon wrote...

Kitsukaru wrote...

http://localhostr.co...jZCH/toarms.png

You must log in to be counted. Like myself, I'm guessing many people have not logged in. I don't intend to, either.

I wonder if that means  your download been labeled as a spam download

It would not be labelled as spam unless repeatably downloaded from the same IP. I have only downloaded the Demo once.

[TwistedComplex]

I don't think were gonna make it, jim

[Yrkoon]

Gabriel Stelinski wrote...
 If it's 800k+ now, it's a sure bet they're as good as ours, MWOHAHA!

Well, that's a rather... optimistic outlook.  We've been at 800k+ for about 24 hours now.  And it's the weekend.  I don't see us getting to a million by tuesday

[Kevil]

Just for everyone's information, I'm reposting what was posted in the "Call To Arms" thread in the "Dragon Age II News and Announcements" board. This is from a mod/dev:

Fernando Melo wrote...

Without a doubt we have our share of enterprising folks trying to make that counter go a little faster. {smilie}

For what its worth though, while the counter is updating frequently it is still only meant as a loose indicator - its a fun thing to have on the site primarily for you, the community, to see how we're trending towards the goal.

But if those trigger happy folks are reading this - please note that the unlocks are not triggered by that counter itself, we will still be manually unlocking the items. And to keep it fair and as accurate as we can, daily we are manually revising the counter numbers to include updates from other download reports we get, such as console numbers and external partner PC sites. {smilie}

So we will likely see more flux in the counter - we apologize, as the spamming of it somewhat diminishes the value of the counter - but still believe it meets the original intent to have something simple to help give you all some feedback.

Having said all that - I think we're trending very well towards the goal when looking at 'real' numbers, and keep in mind we still have a full weekend ahead. I sense more goodies for folks in the near future. {smilie}

F.

Thus, that counter is essentially a "dumb" counter that iterates on clicks on the website. So, I wouldn't put too much faith in its' rate of growth during the day. It sounds like they manually update it sometime during the day, but considering the PC demo population is probably pretty saturated I doubt it reflects the actual rate of growth.

[Kajan451]

LPPrince wrote...

If you want to keep being pessimistic and think of Bioware and EA as the bad guys, go ahead. But maybe once you should accept the fact that the fault might be on the FANS rather than the developers/publishers.

Of course its the fans, because EA is just like Google some altruistic company who does give out goodies for free, and would never abuse the information they received, tamper the information it did receive and does not look our for their best interrests.

Why ever would EA want to keep the Items from being released, and put them into some DLC package.

I am not saying it is, and quite frankly, i don't really care if we make 1 Million or not. But reading that i should be the "Fans" fault goes a bit far. And mind you, i don't really count myself in on those Fans. I am no Fan. Not of Bioware, not of EA and not of Dragon Age. I am a customer purchasing an entertainment/luxery product and i don't think EA has as much reason to cheat on us as it doesn't. Even though.. my experiance with the Evil Alliance is that company to be quite cutthroat when it comes to cutting content in favor to sell said content back to its customers.

Thus i am inclined to believe they might tamper with the information just to put said items into a DLC package. Claiming something like "Sorry you guys didn't make it, but since it was close, we give it to you for only 50 / 100 Bioware Points". Thus it will get a couple cents on top of goating people into spreading the word about the demo and the game, hoping to get a couple extra gamers, by "Fans" who desperately try to get everyone they know to download the demo, create an account just so they might still reach 1 Million "counted" downloads.

Of course that only because i certainly do not think very highly of EA and its buisness strategies.

[Taluien]

Kitsukaru wrote...

Yrkoon wrote...

Kitsukaru wrote...

http://localhostr.co...jZCH/toarms.png

You must log in to be counted. Like myself, I'm guessing many people have not logged in. I don't intend to, either.

I wonder if that means  your download been labeled as a spam download

It would not be labelled as spam unless repeatably downloaded from the same IP. I have only downloaded the Demo once.

The thing with that is that you will neither count towards the Call To Arms nor will you get Hayders Razor. You just have to log in to get these. Just like DA:O where you could play the DLC and stuff like that only when logged in.

[Daniteh]

I don't know, we might make it, after all they are advertising on fox during family guy today.

[Grumpy young man]

NUMBER.DOES.NOT.MATTER. - it is just a marketing ploy. We'll get those books eventually.

[nightsinger]

Ok, maybe this is useless but since I am bored and so many of you are speculating about the counter and how it works, here is some information about the counter that is easily accessible to anybody from just using their website (if you know a thing or two about IT that is).

There are three download links on the Call To Arms website, all of which essentially point to the same location.

US flag points to "/da2/demodownload/?download=true&language=en&cdn=L&server=na".
German flag points to "/da2/demodownload/?download=true&language=de&cdn=L&server=eu".
French flag point to "/da2/demodownload/?download=true&language=fr&cdn=L&server=eu".

So everybody is forwarded to the same location, before getting redirected to some local server/mirror for the actual download. It very well maybe that every access to this location counts as one download, but we don't know this. If it is like that however, all the confusion regarding the counter can clearly be blamed on Bioware for the bad implementation of the counter. I'll explain why.

The counter itself is essentially just a little script running in your browser to get the current number from the following location: "/da2/demodownload/?update=true". It does this once when you first access the website and every 15s thereafter. The location which the script is polling may return anything Bioware wishes!!

That is it could as easily return the number of clicks on one of the download links, as it could return the exact amount of logins. If it does not do the later, Bioware has clearly failed in implementing such a simple thing as a counter - and therefore is to blame for all the confusion regarding it. I cannot tell you how much it saddens me, being a software engineer myself, that this is most likely the reasion for the spam. I come to this conclusion since it is substantially more effort to create ~700k false EA-accounts. You not only need a unique E-Mail-Address for each, you need to confirm the e-mail they send you, you probably need to break a captcha (not sure about that, has been some time since I created my last EA account), you need to connect with your new account INSIDE the Demo (which is substantially harder to do automated, although it IS possible), also logout from the account you previously used (if your spamming you need to rotate acounts) AND you have to synchronize all of this. Writing a script that spams the download button would probably take me about 5 minutes of my time, writing something like this would at least require several hours work - I doubt somebody would be so desperate to waste that amount of time on sabotaging Bioware's little promotion.

Ok, waiting for plenty of TL;DR coming my way

Modifié par nightsinger, 27 février 2011 - 03:26 .

[Kilshrek]

I really really don't claim to know how the download counter works but hasn't it been said a few times that the downloads counted are simply those that have had a legit EA account linked to them? I got my download off games.on.net(which has over 1k downloads), whoever put the demo up must have gone through some effort to 'catch' the number of downloads off different sites. Having absolutely no programming knowledge I'm only speculating here of course.

But back to this thread, no loot?! I am saddened.

[nightsinger]

Kilshrek wrote...

I really really don't claim to know how the download counter works but hasn't it been said a few times that the downloads counted are simply those that have had a legit EA account linked to them? I got my download off games.on.net(which has over 1k downloads), whoever put the demo up must have gone through some effort to 'catch' the number of downloads off different sites. Having absolutely no programming knowledge I'm only speculating here of course.

But back to this thread, no loot?! I am saddened.

Yes, according to the Call To Arms website only the logins count. However, as I tried to explain with my previous post it requires no small amount of effort to spam the counter if it actually was implemented that way.

[Lekwid]

150k away...not moving as fast as we'd hope during the weekend. Does not look like we'll get the items.

[VampOrchid]

I am downloading demo on the first!

[maselphie]

Grumpy young man wrote...

NUMBER.DOES.NOT.MATTER. - it is just a marketing ploy. We'll get those books eventually.

[Kevil]

nightsinger wrote...

...

it is substantially more effort to create ~700k false EA-accounts. You not only need a unique E-Mail-Address for each, you need to confirm the e-mail they send you, you probably need to break a captcha (not sure about that, has been some time since I created my last EA account), you need to connect with your new account INSIDE the Demo (which is substantially harder to do automated, although it IS possible), also logout from the account you previously used (if your spamming you need to rotate acounts) AND you have to synchronize all of this.

...

And Bingo was his naaaaameee-o!  Also, given the fact that Fernando referred to the problem as people being "trigger happy," I read it the EXACT same way that you do.  It is an iterative on-click counter.  I would even sincerely doubt it looks at "completed" downloads.

High five nightsinger!

[Kilshrek]

nightsinger wrote...

Yes, according to the Call To Arms
website only the logins count. However, as I tried to explain with my
previous post it requires no small amount of effort to spam the counter
if it actually was implemented that way.

So, logging in with an ea account is horse manure, and all they really have is just a 'click-counter' in place? Does explain how the counter got spammed to the high heavens.

[Teacake]

My husband was slacking so I had to boot up his Xbox and log in to the demo for him... =|

[Recycled Human]

To the guy who said he wasn't a fan : this call to arms is clearly not intended for you. I'm a fan, I went on Facebook, I talked about it at work, I had my girlfriend d/l it and even my long distance friend who loved the game but didn't know about the demo or the promotion. He's happy he checked it out.
The call to arms was for the fans. To me, it's not a dumb book or two. It's two pieces of lore that required an accomplishment from me to get. A moment when I can say I did my part, to go shout to anyone who would listen to check this game out. It worked in my book.
This isn't some cheap marketing ploy. To me, this is an opportunity for the gaming community to say with one voice : we care.
It's a feat.
And I love people saying ea just wants to make money. Yes, yes they do. But if their plan from the start was to hold back dlc and put a price tag on it, wouldnt you think they'd pick a better horse? Say the staff of parthalan... Instead, they chose the xp and gold books that add a few paragraphs of story to the game as the one they thought would really rake in the dough.
The good news is that this outcry (though numerous on these forums) still doesnt account for the other 800k+ people who downloaded the demo.

[nightsinger]

Kilshrek wrote...

...

So, logging in with an ea account is horse manure, and all they really have is just a 'click-counter' in place? Does explain how the counter got spammed to the high heavens.

Not necessarily. They actually may count the logins, they just didn't forward this data to the counter on the website. Instead they presented the (started, not necessarily finished) downloads. If you read Fernando's post about the rollbacks, it'll all suddenly make sense.

Maybe they have fixed it in the meantime since the counter wasn't spamed in the last 24h from what I've seen. Although, it might just as well be the case that the spamer(s) have stoped, after proving their point by pushing the downloads to 1.2 million once (right before the second rollback happend).

Kevil wrote...

High five nightsinger!

^5

Modifié par nightsinger, 27 février 2011 - 03:58 .

[schnitzeljaeger]

just looked up the counter and it's going in single digits now
doesn't look good...

[cactusberry]

Most likely the items are already in the game, to be honest, I know a bunch of companies that do this where as the items are already in. :/

[rogeredge]

If 10% of the people who have downloaded the demo so far get their brother, sister, friend, cousin, or whatever to try out the demo. Logging in with a new account (so that if they like it they get the sword) we would be half way there.

If 20% get just one, or 10% get two then we are finished!

[Maclimes]

Has it been established if the number needs to be hit by the END of the day on the 1st, or by the START of the day?

Since XBox Silver players can't download until the 1st, that makes a pretty big difference.