Phatose on 19/10/2009 at 03:40
Didn't peer to peer gaming die off because it had some rather serious drawbacks? Synchronization problems when you can't trust any individual client, the slowest connection ending up being the effective connection speed for everyone and shit like that?
And uh...didn't MW1 support much more then 12 players in a match?
Fafhrd on 19/10/2009 at 06:24
Yeah, it really sucked back in the days when everyone had dial-up.
Malf on 19/10/2009 at 06:50
Quote Posted by Fafhrd
Yeah, it really sucked back in the days when everyone had dial-up.
And it still sucks in these days of omnipresent bit-torrent usage.
EvaUnit02 on 19/10/2009 at 06:51
And P2P still sucks now if you don't live in one of the "major markets" (mainly US and Europe). Being forced to play 300 ping games with Yanks, rather than Australians and Kiwis made me loathe the console versions of CoD4+5.
What's more the console versions of MW2 won't have local match filtering, which WaW did. So there's an even greater chance of being stuck in 300ms games with Americans.
CoD4 for consoles favoured North American connections, so when a Yank joined a match made up of Kiwis and Aussies, he'd automatically be assigned host whilst the rest of us get stuck in lag city.
Aerothorn on 19/10/2009 at 08:22
Quote Posted by Fafhrd
Really the only time a dedicated server is absolutely necessary for an on-line game is if it supports more than around 12 players in a match.
You had me up to here. What game DOESN'T support more than 12 players in a match? Was that a typo? Did you mean 120? BF 1942 has 64 players, and that was seven years ago. Unofficially, Tribes 2 has up to 80 or so, and that was NINE years ago.
mothra on 19/10/2009 at 10:50
it doesn't even help if you are in a major market. matchmaking L4D usually goes like this for me (Austria, Vienna, Middle of Europe):
search....timeout
search....timeout
search....join lobby, nothing happens, leave
search....join lobby, map loads, ping > 200, server kicks me
A friend got his own server, hosting dystopia & L4D and sometimes (although the server is up and has a perfect ping of 20 for me) we cannot join it directly because l4d refuses to and just connects us to my friends local account.
I would never ever dare to ship something as broken as matchmaking as L4D did in its first versions and now, months later it still isn't working or provides an easier way to use browsers or favorites, NO, we release Left4Dead2, with double the matchmaking (errors) you can handle.
everything this industry does is taking 3 steps backwards, instead of embracing what there already is and build on that.
EvaUnit02 on 20/10/2009 at 21:08
(
http://gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2009/10/20/modern-warfare-2-dedicated-server-response.aspx) IW Responds
Quote:
Infinity Ward Responds To PC Fanboys' Dedicated Server Woes
Predictably, nerds across world took to the Internet with a wailing and a gnashing of teeth that would make the Left 4 Dead community proud. An online petition to bring back dedicated servers at the time of this writing stands at 100,000+ signatures. However -- and this may shock some gamers with advanced persecution complexes -- this move was not made to tweak the noses of the PC community. Infinity Ward heads Jason West and Vince Zampella explain the decision as a conscious effort to improve their game for the vast majority of their players.
What is this crap? Professional, objective journalism is dead all of a sudden now? How do clowns like this find work?
Quote:
West takes a shot at the motives behind some of the outrage, noting that there's money to made by selling dedicated servers and adspace on them: "It's a little dubious. Some of the people complaining are complaining with their pocketbook."
Oh yes, those 100,000 signatures are all of disgruntled "garage entrepreneurs". Oh please. Servers are mostly run by ISPs in Australia (and formerly NZ too until fairly recently).
Quote:
"We're just prioritizing the player experience above the modders and the tuners," says West. He points toward the mounting feedback IW has received from PC fans of Modern Warfare who couldn't find a decent server to play on between all of the cheaters, the insular communities, and huge skill level disparities that the original game's community fractured into. "We thought maybe it would be cool if the fans could play the game," he laughs.
I'd love to see some evidence to back up these claims.
Again, America and Europe are the centre universe, where P2P hosting
maybe potentially decent. Meanwhile the rest of the world gets the shaft. GG Bobby Kotick.
Malf on 20/10/2009 at 22:53
Even though I had no intention of buying MW2 anyway (I can't stand the singular gameplay mechanic of the CoD games), I always had respect for the team. One of their main programmers used to go by the name Coriolis on the Quake3world forums, and was a font of knowledge. He wrote some incredible posts explaining how and why strafe-jumping worked in Quake 3.
The fact that when they started out making MoH: AA, they chose the Quake 3 engine, indicated that they were a team from the community. When they decided to branch out on their own as Infinity Ward, and yet again, used the Quake 3 engine, it showed they still had faith in their roots. Hell, even when they ditched the Quake 3 engine in favour of their own in-house proprietry engine, it felt very much like a Quake one still.
All of this is to say, as a team who came from the community and owe a lot of their skills and success to that community, I would have thought they would have understood the need for dedicated servers and making sure your game was mod-friendly.
But maybe you're right Eva; maybe the Kotick cash-thirst is catching and responsible for this, quite frankly, dickish behaviour on their part.
