[escapist] It's the End of the War as We Know It (dedicated servers)

I assume you've read the news that's been plastered all over every gaming site for the last couple of weeks: Infinity Ward announced it would not release a dedicated server for Modern Warfare 2. On the heels of that, John Carmack made a similar announcement for Rage.

People who cut their teeth on console multiplayer are having a hard time understanding why the loss of dedicated servers is such a big deal. After all, consoles get along just fine without them, right? Even some PC users are having trouble grasping just what we're in for, and they wrongly imagine that PC multiplayer is going to start looking like console multiplayer. It isn't. It can't.

The Escapist : It's the End of the War as We Know It
 
From what I understand, players themselves wont be able to host the servers and will have to play online on pre-defined servers using a "pairing" mechanism with other players, is that correct? :S.
 
baccilus said:
^^I want to know about the implications of the the whole No-Dedicated servers affair too. Can any one elaborate please.

Some of the implications from the top of my mind are

1. Less no of maximum players supported. Max for COD6 is 9v9 while COD4 supports something like 64 players on a multiplayer game

2. No options for local servers. Possibility of connecting to hosts with higher and variable ping.

3. No options to kick annoying/hacking players with no mod/admin on the servers.
 
The biggest problem I see with this is the 0-ping advantage. Trust me when I say this, 0-Ping can be the deciding factor in close games (and these losses hurt when its a clan match).

Though if you look at this this way, P2P can be a good thing over official servers : With official servers, they only exist in 1 place. So say the servers exist in California, all players from California will have low pings vs all others, every single time. P2P isn't that bad, if they can monitor for hackers aggressively, which is easily done on consoles. Not only you have the respective game developers monitoring the game, Sony and M$ also are in charge of anti-hack attempts as its their network all the games take place in, and they do combat the hackers/cheaters very successfully. Though I can see how it'll be a nuisance on PC where the host can easily hack the game. I don't know why IW didn't opt for dedicated servers at least for PC? Too greedy, imo. :p PC Gamers should not buy MW2 (but pirate it for its incredible Single player) and aggressively support BF Bad Company 2, it'll have dedicated servers. Let IW know this isn't going to work. DICE is especially good with pings in their games too. I could play with people from different continents with 0 lag on BF BC and BF1943 (on PS3 at least).

Alias said:
3. No options to kick annoying/hacking players with no mod/admin on the servers.

Vote kicking feature can solve that problem.
 
Read the fine print, it's being done to put the control back in the hands of the content creator.
I wouldn't be surprised to find a console style system of actually paying for multiplayer (wut) being on the horizon for PC's as well.

All this talk of better cheats management seems to be BS, TF2 deals with this quite well with regular updates.

The complete lack of mods should be reason enough for being against wide-spread adoption of this trend.
 
^^ No point game developers are hardly earning from PC game sales, dumbed down consoles is where everyone will cash in...
 
All this is about DLC and modding.

For CoD4 multiplayer, people made their own maps those could be installed on the dedicated servers.

Now, with no dedicated servers, new content can only come from Infinity Ward. It's going to be 10$ for three maps. :|
 
Aces170 said:
^^ No point game developers are hardly earning from PC game sales, dumbed down consoles is where everyone will cash in...

They made $310 MILLION on release day+1.. and this was JUST in Britain + the US.

COD-MW2 is the BIGGEST opening any entertainment title has EVER gotten in HISTORY.

Just the stats from the States & UK are enough to beat out Dark Knight's WORLDWIDE opening.

Then they say, that they are not making money :mad:
 
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