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This article is a follow-up to my previous post titled “Team Fortress 2’s $3,113.11 Daily Worth of Useless Energy“. If you haven’t yet read that article the paragraph below will catch you up on the situation. Most of the statistics from the previous article were estimated and this new post has been written using real world figures that I took myself to recalculate exactly how much power my own computer consumes. The original goal of this article was to demonstrate how much leaving your computer on overnight costs and whether idling on a game server greatly increases that cost.
The Backstory: Game software developer Valve recently updated their PC game Team Fortress 2 so that new weapons could be unlocked by players simply “idling” on the game servers. In layman’s terms this means that you can sign on to the video game and leave your computer running all night to wake up to a plethora of new items. Online gamers, being efficient (another word for lazy), have begun leaving their computers on overnight to collect the new weapons and the massive number of users doing this brought an interesting question to my mind. How much energy are all of these people using up by leaving their computers on to unlock these new items? My initial report estimated that the dollar amount totaled to nearly $3,000 USD each day for all of those players, but this article will reevaluate those number for a more accurate result.
The Game Update: While writing this article Valve updated Team Fortress 2 so that players can now unlock weapons by either their play time (which results in random unlocks) or by completing in-game achievements. The achievement unlock method was the original method that was used for gaining new content, and after many players complained about the inability to control what weapons you unlocked through the previous method it looks like Valve caved in by allowing achievement unlocks once again. Even though achievement unlocks are now possible there is still a large number of players playing in “idle servers” trying to find items that cannot be unlocked through achievement game play. I suggest that people who continue to try to idle for items switch to the Steam Stats program which lets you mimic idling and alerts you when new items are discovered. Using Steam Stats you don’t even have to run Team Fortress 2, you only need to be logged into Steam. You can Download Steam Stats here.
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I decided to do a little research on the cost of energy and the average computer wattage when it is in use gaming. The results show that Valve’s new “idle” servers for Team Fortress 2 that are being used to unlock weapons are not only slap in the face to the Green movement, but it’s also costing players money that they don’t realize. Players are idling in massive numbers in order to unlock new items and this article outlines how much energy they are spending leaving their computers on while they are not actually in use.
To begin this analysis I gathered the average cost of residential price of electricity as cents per kilowatt hour. As of January 2009, the U.S. Department of Energy states that across the United States the average cost is 11.03 cents per kilowatt hour. If you live in the Northeastern United States you could expect to pay somewhere around 17.88.
I’m going to be kind and round down some of the next numbers so that our final result will be somewhere below what the actual figures probably are using some of the better gaming computer rigs out there. I will also make the assumption that everyone is using an LCD monitor, which use sometimes as much as 66% less power. Let’s not make this a debate over who or why people use CRT monitors, this is just another way for me to tweak the figures in favor of a lower amount of energy being consumed to give a “best case scenario”. I will be assuming that most people playing Team Fortress are using a mid-range graphics card and CPU.
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I don’t normally jump off the subject of web marketing on this site, but it’s Christmas time and I have found myself once again having a tough time finding the perfect gifts for friends and family. I’ve come across a few geek and nerd christmas lists from a variety of well known sites, but I’ve been very disappointed with their selections this year. It seems that they didn’t take time to wander from the main stream sites to find the really unique geek gifts. In an effort to improve the quality of Christmas wish lists for Geeks on the web, I present to you the Every Geek Christmas Wishlist.
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“Tethering” your computer to your AG-HVX200 camera is a feature that I have made plenty of use of over the past couple years.Tethering is when you connect a digital camcorder, like the HVX200, to a laptop or other recording device using a firewire or USB cable. The advantage of tethering a camera rather than recording to a tape or storage card is because it is usually more economical and allows you to use a laptop as a display while recording. The cost of a pair of two 16GB P2 cards is enough to purchase a Macbook Pro (after a $200 student discount) so it never made sense to me to purchase P2 cards when I can get more storage and use from a laptop.This post will outline the three method I have had hands on experience with and outline that advantages and disadvantages of each.
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When trying to dream up the next great social website the other day, I was trying to decide on what are some of the most important features to include in a social networking site. I came up with a list of 10 features that I believe would build a great social network and I encourage anyone who is considering to start their own site to at least consider these ten features and rethink the way your site lets users interact with each other. The list isn’t all-inclusive, but its a starting point and I encourage you to submit your thoughts about what you think needs to be added by submitting a comment.
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vBulletin is probably the best commercial solution for starting a forum available today because it offers a wide variety of features, an excellent administration panel and a variety of both free and commercial plugins and “products”. I have been using vBulletin’s software for the Pligg Forums for nearly two and a half years and through that time I have had to deal with a lot of spam, especially in the past few months. At first it was a rare enough problem that I was able to maintain the spam by manually removing a thread here and there once a week. Through a vigorous program of spam bot registration prevention and keyword monitoring from new users posts I have been able to keep most spam off the general forums, but it’s taken a lot of plugins and continuous work to do so.
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As a founder of the Pligg content management system, nothing frustrates me more than to see everyone and their mothers using Wordpress on their sites when it’s really not called for. I have nothing against using Wordpress for your blogs and other projects, in fact I use Wordpress on this very website, but many people end up using it just because they don’t know of the many other solutions out there that might do a better job accomplishing your goals for your website.
This post is dedicated to those who aren’t familiar with what free scripts are available and I will do my best to describe what each content management system is capable of and what they are best used for. This list is by no means exhaustive, but I try to address many of the more common CMS solutions and demonstrate some of the more interesting ways to use them. I will not cover forum software, since they will be covered in their own post in the near future.
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There are two breeds of internet marketers these days: the ethical and unethical. These the two kinds of marketers have made their living side by side in the past without many problems, but the shift to online marketing has made marketing departments more accountable for their marketing methods and as a result unethical marketing has become more transparent to customers. Because of this transparency, marketing departments are beginning to take the high road when trying to acquire new clients and have stopped using methods that are likely to hurt their brand image such as mass email and phone campaigns. Companies fear losing customers, or even worse starting an anti-company movement because of one bad judgment call in the marketing department.
While considering this at the recent Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, I started to write down some ideas that I would like to share with other online marketers. I have debated with others these three ideals for online marketing and they are only a few of the values that I hold onto when preparing a marketing campaign for a company or product.
