I put in a 256mb video card into my pc and I havent really crashed since then.. but I found it to crash in Trade Mule as well when I used to log in at MP with my bot and try to start it up in a laggy area.

 

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I have a 1 gig vid card, I don't think that's the issue. I just had acclient crash when logging out and all I had running was LTx.


As far as AC being shut down I don't see it happening. Why would Turdine stop supporting a cash cow.

 

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Why would Turdine stop supporting a cash cow.


Well the thing is that AC isn't nearly the "cash cow" it once was. Turbine doesn't release hard numbers, but most observers put the estimated number of subscribers at somewhere between 10% and 25% of how many there were in AC's peak years. The servers used to have thousands of players logged in at busy times, now a busy day peaks at 300-400 depending on your server. Most of us agree that they're not likely to shut down AC as long as it's making a profit, but it certainly costs money to keep running, and nobody knows exactly how many subscribers are needed to KEEP it making a profit.

 

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yeah but those peak hours with thousands was a number for all the servers combined . in its hay day there have never been more then 600 logged in to a single server such as wintersebb for example. the crashing is decall it does it with no plugins just decal running and is a problem that needs to be addressed with programming not excusses.

Asheron's Call is most assuredly NOT a 'cash cow'.

 

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Chazcon: before the release of ToD I'm fairly certain that the input of user account subscriptions was surplus to Turbine... aka.. they've already paid off the developers, hardware, services, etc and still had plenty left over.


At 12.95 a month, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that it doesn't take a whole lot of accounts to produce a large sum of money... multiply this monthly and you can see that I'm sure Turbine does pretty well with AC still.. It still has quite a large following, and even though many accounts may not log in regularly, they are still paying their monthly fees.


The point that AC drops subscriber base less than what it costs to RUN AC and the servers, and the support staff.. only then do I picture Turbine putting a date on the demise. (which would still be sometime into the future form that point is my guess).


so to more short and simply answer the comment.. AC is a cash cow currently. Maybe not as much as before, but it is still making them money.

pookybear348 wrote:

"yeah but those peak hours with thousands was a number for all the servers combined . in its hay day there have never been more then 600 logged in to a single server such as wintersebb for example.....it is a problem that needs to be addressed with programming not excusses."


Pooky I'd like to see where you get your numbers from. My numbers come from logging into the game itself back before ToD. When I logged into AC anytime before ToD, the game would tell me (and everyone else who played) how many people were playing on that particular server. When I started playing AC back in Spring 2002 a busy day on the weekend would have 1500+ people on MY server. On a few occasions it topped 2000. My server is Solclaim, a newer server and one of the less populated ones. People who play on the older, more heavily populated servers remember seeing peak populations up closer to 3000, on ONE server.


As far as the crashing goes, it's my belief also that it is related to decal. However I did not address the crashing issue in any way in my previos post, I was merely responding to the "cash cow" comment. Therefore I fail to see how you characterize what I wrote as somehow "making excuses".


Drakier you wrote "before the release of ToD I'm fairly certain that the input of user account subscriptions was surplus to Turbine" If I understand that, you're saying that Turbine has NO significant costs that occur from the ongoing operation of AC or are leftover from the original development of it, and therefore subscription revenue is overwhelmingly profit. That's a very strong claim there. While I'm sure you could hypothesize a bunch of numbers to support that as easily as I could hypothesize a bunch of numbers to argue it, I'd love to see the actual numbers you based that claim on. Could you post a link please?

 

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You already said numbers.


Think about it for a minute.. you have the number of subscriptions, and you have a general idea of how much money that can relate to.


Think about how old the servers for AC are and how old of a game AC is. Think about the cost of bandwidth and operation of the servers (which are now run by Turbine and not some 3rd party like Microsoft)


Before the release of ToD, I'm pretty sure that the costs had mostly been covered.


The only new costs were the development of AC:ToD. While I don't feel they've paid that off completely yet, I still believe that they can do so with a few more high-subscription months.


I mean honestly.. what NEW has AC had to spend money on besides ToD? We know they haven't upgraded any of the servers in a long time, or added any new ones. They outright PURCHASED those servers from microsoft when they bought the franchise back.

OK ... forgive me, but back to the original problem


I've had this issue as well, always with Decal running, occasionally without. I've had it when logged in through Dual Client or the launcher itself. Time for me does not seem to be an issue - however, that being said, I HAVE noticed that if I log out, need to answer the door, phone, or just step away for awhile, 99% of the time when I return, the character will BEGIN to login, then crash, with the little blip saying it lost the server connection. Prior to ToD, I was able to log out to the character selection screen, step away for a bit if necessary, return and log back in as if I'd never left.


The problem occurs universally across my accounts, any time during the day or evening. Drakier, if there is something you'd like me to run as a "check" to see what might be going on, pls advise, I'm happy to help try to track this one down!

 

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try without plugins and/or filters.


see if you can narrow it down to a specific set of filters and/or plugins.