John Carmack Says No Dedicated Servers For Rage

AndrewDBarker writes "Modern Warfare 2 will use a matchmaking setup powered by IWNet for online play (as we've discussed). It's too early to say what Rage will use, but Carmack indicated he believed the servers are something of a remnant of the early days of PC gaming. That said, he realizes the affinity many PC gamers have for them — and is glad Rage won't be leading the charge away from them. 'The great thing is we won't have to be a pioneer on that,' he says. 'We'll see how it works out for everyone else.'"

Simply about piracy

[assemblerex]

They could give a damn about matchmaking. It's a trojan horse.
They want everyone to use matchmaking, which really means they want everyone to use an authentication system.

Re:A remnant?

[VGPowerlord]

Since you didn't say which company, I'll point out that you're referring to Valve's Steam Stats [steampowered.com] for Counter-Strike: Source, Counter-Strike, and Team Fortress 2.

I'll also point out that those numbers are the number of concurrent players, not the number of total players.

Re:Glad to see he's not charging forward

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like we need another slashdotter's disproportionate observation as id provided the tech, while Raven provided the fun/or lack of fun factor of the new game. It'd help your argument more if you would read up on who's actually putting their hand into the cookie jar of the new sequels.

Not everyone can host a game via p2p

[Mistakill]

you need a very decent upstream connection (sans throttling by overzealous ISP's - thats a whole different ballgame) to host a game in the way IW, and perhaps Carmack are suggesting... ie this is from the FAQ of Call Of Duty 2

to host a game (upload speed)
128kbps upload: 4 players
384kbps upload: 8 players
768kbps upload: 10 players


Id suggest that alot of people just dont have the upstream speed to cope with hosting a game... especially those of us in New Zealand, and Australia

Re:Technical vs. emotional

[Asmor]

Since when has hosting a game impacted frame rates? In fact, I distinctly remember dedicated servers having a very, very low footprint as far as CPU and RAM usage went. That may have changed in recent years, I don't know, but with older games that's what I remember.

One of the first games I played online a lot was Heretic II. I did not have a particularly good computer, and I hosted a dedicated server and played on the same computer just fine.

The issues with hosting your own server are all related to networking, e.g. setting up all of your ports correctly, latency, etc.

Doesn't really matter

[Toonol]

RAGE, from what I understand, won't have anything like deathmatches; last I heard, it would have a two-player co-op mode, and some head-to-head racing. Dedicated servers may simply be overkill in that situation. I think this may be a big ado over nothing.

Re:Battlefield Heroes..

[Hadlock]

You have to know the server's unique identifier, type it into the console, choose "best available dedicated", and then the group will follow you to that specific server. Which is what we were doing the other night, since one of our group of 4 only gets a good ping when it's a west coast server. If you simply select "best available" and hit go, it might pick somewhere in Kansas, which is going to ping badly for us in Texas, Florida, and the guy who only pings well to west coast servers. But it's the best averaging ping server valve could find for us. Valve has introduced group servers, where you can associate a server with a group via your group's id number (you have to be a group admin to see it), but that seems to be buggy, or doesn't update very quickly. This is very annoying if you've paid for a private server (or you're hosting your own somewhere) and are trying to run anything other than dead stock L4D. You can technically connect directly to the IP, but that bypasses the lobby system completely.

Re:boycott

[bcmm]

I'm probably getting trolled here, but here is a list of stuff based on the Quake III Engine [wikipedia.org].

Also remember that Source was originally based on Quake II.

Re:Glad to see he's not charging forward

[JimboFBX]

Yes and no, it would be considered a module of the engine if you will. If programmed correctly, the interfaces should be such that you can swap out one method of networking with another and the game wouldn't know the difference. You should be able to completely spoof being networked at all and have no issues. If programmed incorrectly (like gears of war and gears of war 2), then the core engine and network could be coupled together in a way that it is not easy to modify the netcode without breaking something fundamental to the game engine.

Re:A remnant?

[lga]

I run a Half Life 2: Deathmatch server [inx-gaming.co.uk]. Looking at the Steam stats, only 2,100 people have played it today. If I look at my stats site [inx-gaming.co.uk], though, I can see over 3,100 people have passed through my server in the past month! Now either every single person that plays deathmatch has used my server, or the number of deathmatch players is a hell of a lot higher than daily peaks would suggest.

I will also say that without the community generated by having enthusiasts run their own servers, many people wouldn't bother to play the game.

Re:Simply about piracy

[Kaboom13]

Authentication and dedicated servers are not mutually exclusive, every game I can think of since Quake 3 (and probably earlier) has authenticated the player against a master server before letting them join. While possible to run hacked servers, it generally requires everyone involved to have the hacked client, and they have always been few in number and full of hackers and such to make a guaranteed shitty player experience. This is about selling DLC, plain and simple. I know that this decision is going to cost them my sale for MW2 and Rage. I bought the first Modern Warfare and loved it and was already sold on the second one when they announced this nonsense. They've lost my sale, and it will probably be blamed on piracy and used as an excuse to shove more drm and more DLC down our throats. Speaking of DLC, it has also cost Bioware a sale of Dragon Age, I was actually credit card in hand ready to buy it when I found out about the 3 or 4 different "editions" with different amounts of content, and even the most expensive one still doesn't get you all the content, theres more DLC to buy. It's ridiculous! Why buy and navigate the DLC maze they have created when I can pirate and have all the content and all the DLC and all the pre-oder "rewards" without jumping through hoops?

Re:Battlefield Heroes..

[Anonymous Coward]

if you want proper server choice use the console command openserverbrowser to get a classic "internet", "favorites" server listing.

I typically do this to pick one of my favorite servers, then invite friends.

Re:Glad to see he's not charging forward

[xxuserxx]

Carmack had nothing to do with the latest wolfenstien.