Whoooosh! (And you also missed the other intentional misspelling.)

"And then they came for me."

You raise a valid point, though Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II and nearly all of the MSN Zone games can still be played online through GameRanger (see the list). You'd be amazed at how many games of Age of Empires II are being played each day -- it puts many recent games to shame.

Throttling does not affect packet latency. At the router level, it generally involves selectively discarding packets. Data is not drip-fed at the bit level or byte level.

In order to intentionally affect latency, it would have to do a lot more work by buffering them for a period of time before forwarding onwards.

Now throttling can affect latency of logical messages within a TCP stream depending on the size of those messages, due to the retransmissions required, but does not affect the latency of UDP packets as stated.

I'm not sure that net-neutrality would help this. ISPs are blocking high volumes of UDP packets, and they'll claim it's to protect users from DDoS attacks. They may even be telling the truth.

The summary is also badly composed by following the latency complaint with a quote about blocking traffic. That is, unless you consider a blocked packet to have infinite latency. The letter is much more vague about what their actual latency complaint is, other than, you know, latency is bad.

Anyone else read it as entrails?

The milk is supposed to be left for Santa, not by Santa.

So kids with a crush on Santa are definitively deciding the naughty or nice question by slipping him some rohypnol.

I almost thought your typo was intentional. :)

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-ecosystem-of-hell/

Very depressing.

+1 nfmtv

For what it's worth, most people are playing Borderlands online now using GameRanger for exactly this reason, because it eliminates all these problems. Gearbox has unofficially recommended it as a solution as well.

It's a space station.

So they can counter their critics by saying they had a positive public beta, yet with a carefully controlled group, to ensure pesky real-world situations don't damage their hype for gaining investors.

At least it makes sense for the Labs to eat their own dog food.