Kitsune Knight

It would be completely possible, the question is if it's practical. Back in the day when it was just BaBs doing all the animation work, it was pretty definitely impractical (at least without holding up everything else)... but, Paragon now exists, and the Dev team is far larger today.

They spent a massive amount of time to ensure Brawl would never cause redraw... but, hopefully that was partly due to the engine being far more primitive back then, and much of it could be shaved off on modern attempts.


I'd certainly love it if the Devs could get around to it... but the question is always: what do you want to bump? Fortunately, development has increased to such a pace that bumping, say, a powerset doesn't mean a half a year where you get nothing! Hell, post Freedom we've gotten somewhere around as many new powersets as pre-Freedom (seriously, it was pretty shocking!)

Search for pando media booster spyware in Google... and this thread is on the first page (I don't have personalized search/history enabled, so it won't be biased towards things like CoH). None of the links I checked gave any sort of evidence that Pando was spyware (I saw some assertions that it was, but it was never in an instance where the person making that claim seemed to have any idea what they were talking about).

Those suggestions are based primarily on how often people search for things... so a lot of people might be seeing it on their control panel, and wonder "wtf is this?", and searching for "<this> spyware" or "<this> malware".

It's looking like to me that there is absolutely zero evidence that Pando does anything malicious. Even crappy evidence. NCSoft should just the first time ask you if you'd like to enable it, probably saying some crap about "speeding up downloads" while mentioning that it will upload data at the same time.

We can't post a picture of a real dead human here, so... it would be rather consistent

Exactly. When there's a new update out, and everyone's downloading it... that's the only time the servers will be bogged down, and it's the time everyone would be running the software anyways.

P2P distribution like BitTorrent perform exactly the opposite of traditional distribution. Traditionally (client <- server), the less people downloading, the better each download will perform. When there's lots of people, the download rate will go to hell for everyone.

P2P distribution, on the other hand, performs like crap when there's only a few people downloading something (in the swarm). When there's a lot, though, download rates actually increases! It's the reverse.

Combine the two, and you should pretty much always have good download rates (once the P2P network gets enough chunks out in the wild, which will take a few minutes from the initial release). Pando might reduce costs for the companies, but it'll also have the benefit of speeding up big downloads (like issue updates) for users.


The only fundamental problem with that model is that some ISPs are douches (and, as such, it should be made easy to opt out of the P2P distribution... there's apparently already a way now, but NC needs to add it as a launcher option in the GUI).


(from a bit of looking around, most of the hate for Pando seems to be centered around LOTRO including it, and having it set to always run in the background)

Fix't

Not really, since often (such as in the case of AVG and Avast) they have a non-free tier that includes features (such as remote management) geared towards business/enterprise... so they'll be doing the definition work anyways. They'll have the same incentive... and since their software often isn't bundled, they'll depend much more on word of mouth (reputation), and can't just scare massive numbers of people into turning over their credit cards when their free trial expires.

Really, by the time that sort of software is even entering the picture, odds are you're already screwed. Keeping on top of software updates... both for the OS, as well as all your third-party programs (a tool like Secunia PSI is very helpful for all those programs with non-existent/crappy updaters), is the best possible thing you can do to improve your security- beyond PEBKAC issues.

I'm not talking about you downloading, I'm talking about other people connecting to you to download from you. In the Pando control panel item, you can also configure a limit for how fast it can upload in "Advanced connection options" (1 KB/s is the minimum).


Quite frankly, the real problem is that any ISP charge people for total downloaded, instead of actually promising an amount of data they can provide at any given moment. It's a backwards system designed to milk the maximum profit possible (just like what the cellular industry does). Still, I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people are on an unmetered connection.

NCSoft, if they continue using Pando, should follow Blizzard's move and allow the user to easily opt out of the P2P portion.

Edit: [censored] you Arcanaville!

No need for a correction, I didn't mention Preems at all in the body of my post

People already do that all the time: It's called x8 difficulty, and has been part of the game for quite a while. A large number of builds (even before Incarnates, and some before Inventions!) can solo 8 man spawns at a fast rate.

Guess I'll have to figure out when a ustream is, or hope some Dev comments at some other time. Hmm... HeroStats + enough data might actually be able to say with some certainty (do several x8 runs solo, then do several x8 runs with 7 Freems in tow, and see if there's anything noticeable in the data).

I assume you mean incoming traffic? Assuming that Pando doesn't use any NAT transversal techniques (ugh, I hate NAT...), the increased amount of incoming traffic you'll receive will be largely inconsequential (likely lost in the regular noise that gets puked across the entire Internet constantly).

Is there any actual evidence that Pando is spyware, or does anything at all beyond acting as a proprietary bittorrent swarm?

Good one!