I actually liked Prof's idea of tethering, but it would solely have to be for authenticating, not online play, as 3G just wouldn't cut it. Its like with Steam - if you have no 'net and you wanna play something on Steam, you're gonna be either shit out of luck, gonna need another connection, or find some way of temporarily connecting so you can enable "Offline Mode".
While almost all smartphones allow you to turn it into a wifi hotspot using the 3G connection, you're going to need a wireless laptop/computer/console to be able to connect to it. In fact, strange this should be mentioned - theres a problem with Virgin Media at the moment where downloading patches freezes your machine, or anything downloaded is corrupted (see my post on it right here - it would appear I was also the one who made the distinction between "regular modem = patches fail" and "superhubs = corrupted downloads" as you can see in my second post in that thread - originally there was just one large thread. Go me!).
Anyways, I couldn't download a 12meg patch for Tomb Raider Trilogy, so I set my phone up as a wireless hotspot using its 3G connection, connected to it using the PS3 wireless connection, and downloaded it first time.
If MS do indeed go always online, they're going to need to implement something like this for at least authentication, but even then, that would only work if your internet goes down. If MS's servers go down, you're fucked.
Ax wrote:
(getting flashbacks of Carl sending abusive messages to lagging opponents after playing Street Fighter X Tekken)
Holy shit, he was a fantastic sport. Laggy as hell (but I forgot I had torrents on...) and we called each other all sorts of names before we realised we were actually "alright" and had a laugh about it.
