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.'"
But given the mess that has grown up around MW2, it should be pretty clear that the attempt to leave dedicated servers behind is not being taken well. The mechanism in use there seems destined to cause problems for users, and the fluidity available from dedicated servers can't be easily replaced by any system that has users hosting servers. It may be that hordes of virtual servers are the future of dedicated servers, but that's still a far better option than things like a five-second pause while the players' systems figure out who is taking over next.
If there's anyone that I trust to come up with a workable technical solution, it's John Carmack, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good idea.
Battlefield Heroes uses a similar setup and for the most part servers are a nebulous thing the match making servers put you on. Because for the most part real people don't run the servers admins are less common. There's less incentive to rent a servers (through approved resellers) because the communities that usually grow up around more active servers or more skilled players don't really form. My friends might be good but when we join a game it could be just about anywhere, if we even bother to join. One wa
The question is, why not add support for both matchmaking and dedicated servers with a browser? I would imagine it's not *that* difficult to program in a server browser as well, seeing as how companies have been doing it for more than a decade. It might require some more resources, but dedicated servers will almost always offer a better experience than a listen server and that's why it's worth it. Whatever benefits matchmaking may bring to the table are also available for the end user.
It's worth pointing out that the RAGE demo at QUAKECON was done on a 360 controller. That should be a pretty strong sign that this is a console port design decision, that will ultimately affect the PC port. Let's take a look at console games with PC ports that use the "no dedicated server" model!
The downside to no dedicated servers is that you lose the community aspect, community organization becomes MUCH harder, and the game doesn't live on as long. See also: Left 4 Dead. Great concept, but almost impossible to get dedicated servers running for it. Or you can look at the recently released-for-PC game Borderlands - what a clusterfuck; the community eventually figured out what ports to unblock on their firewall, but even now people are having problems getting people to connect to their game/server. Incredibly frustrating, and I'm not really sure game/community mechanics have progressed far enough to allow the community/communities to grow up around the game that you want to push further away from dedicated servers. The one console game that I saw with a decent community setup was SOCOM 3 for the PS2; it had clans and messageboards, a messaging system and a somewhat steam-like buddy system/join buddy's game function.
Case in point: Rage is a console game, with console server matching system. The fact that it's coming out for the PC means that it's simply going to be a piss-poor PC port of a console game, and last time I checked, PC-ports of console games were fucking terrible (see also: Borderlands).
See: Left 4 Dead. Great concept, but almost impossible to get dedicated servers running for it. Or you can look at the recently released-for-PC game Borderlands - what a clusterfuck; the community eventually figured out what ports to unblock on their firewall, but even now people are having problems getting people to connect to their game/server.
We have an INX dedicated server we can switch between Left 4 Dead and the Left 4 Dead 2 demo. Actually using it is a pain in the arse though. We haven't used the feature of associating it to our steam group since they added it, because it didn't support grouping up in a lobby and choosing gamemode, level, characters etc before playing. You had to restart the server to change gamemodes! Setting a search key and force_dedicated_servers list seem to work though, so we've been using that.
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 ave
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday November 07, @01:40AM (#30012750)
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.
Since when has Carmack been a designer or producer? Hint: he isn't. He's in charge of the technical stuff, the engine. If that sucks, by all means blame him. But a crappy game on top of a nice engine means that id Software sucks, not Carmack.
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 somethin
Is the networking/interconnection system part of the engine, and if not, would the former be part of Carmack's responsibilities, too?
Yes, it is. Most major game engine packages, including IDTech contain a networking layer. In fact, John Carmack was the guy who pretty much pioneered the client-server model for graphical games back when he made Quake.
However I've never had a major problem with his game's network layers. The issue is only that the game itself (content and gameplay wise) has been fairly bland for the last few iterations. If what the grandparent post is saying is correct, John Carmack is only responsible for the technical side, (including rendering and networking) and not the game experience itself. However, if "Masters of Doom" is correct, that is simply not the case as that book attributes most of the decisions as to the focus on recent games to John Carmack. It argues that it is the direct consequence of his conservative policy in game design that lead to Quake2, Quake3 and Doom3 being how they are, for better or worse.
The grandparent is claiming that John Carmack's technical record is unblemished and if he says P2P hosting is the way of the future then he should be given the benefit of the doubt and not questioned until he either recants, delivers a bad implementation or proves not to be able to implement this system in reasonable time. Even if he is responsible for the boring combat of Doom3, that suggests nothing about his ability to write game networking layers. I wrote a lot of the network system of a commercial game engine. My personal reaction towards this statement is to acknowledge that past history suggests that he will be able to deliver something very good and there is nobody who can really call him wrong until they have tested his implementation. I however, have not abandoned the client-server model and neither should anyone simply on the words of John D Carmack without thinking exactly about the priorities and requirements of their game.
Back in the original Doom days, John Cash and his friends who worked for Novell used to play deathmatch games on the corporate network in the evenings. When they discovered that the Doom network code was horrible, Cash sent Carmack an email pointing this out.
Carmack responded by sending over the source code (which had been written for id by a contractor), asking Cash to fix it. Basically a 'put up or shut up' situation.:-)
The result, after a few mostly sleepless nights was a totally rewritten network layer which got used by the later Doom versions.
This experience made Cash figure out how a networked game should work, so over the next 2-3 years he did a presentation every year at Novell's Developer Conference (later called BrainShare), the title was something like "How to write networked games".
Another year later, after Carmack had hired Mike Abrash to help with the low-level optimization of the sw 3D engine for Quake, they hired Cash to write the nextwork and AI code.
After Quake 3 shipped, Cash left id for a more relaxed environment, moving to Blizzard who were working on this new massive multiplayer game at the time.
Afaik John Cash is now the chief programmer for WOW.
Terje
PS. I've known Mike since about 1985 and I worked with John Cash for a year in 1991-92.
I wouldn't call ~200,000 people a day between only three games from ONE COMPANY when the most populous of those three games averages ~80-90K a day peak users despite being about 5 years old a remnant of the early days of PC gaming. I'd call that proof of how important dedicated servers and proper mod support are.
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.
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.
Amazing. They do not learn from success and call it remnant of the early days of PC gaming like it is a bad thing. Carmack and the other out of touch with reality greedy people that is.
I have been playing games since C64. I never once bought a game in my life. You just copied tapes, floppy disk etc from a friend of a friend.
Then Orange Box with TF2 came along. Bought and paid for it once. Still playing regularly several hours a week after 2 years. Dedicated Servers. Great community. Strong competitive scene
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday November 07, @05:22AM (#30013282)
They don't want people like you as customers. They want people that toss a game after one month and go buy the next big shit. They want to limit a game's life span by being able to shut of things like multiplayer. They're not making money when you are playing something you already paid for.
I think it is just more proof that they are doing their best to kill the communities and mods so they can shove DLC down our throats. All my favorite games were made favorites NOT by the designers, but by the communities and mods that built up around them and gave me MORE for my money and extended my fun, not screwing me over so they can "maximize profit potential".
No mods? No money from me. No dedicated servers? Again no money from me. If we PC gamers get together and make damned sure that any game that screws us over rots on the shelves, while buying up the ones that treat us right, maybe then we won't end up in x360 hell, which is what they seem to be pushing us towards. I don't want a damned 360, thanks ever so much!
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.
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?
A lot of today's FPSes seem to prefer a ping of less than 100ms. Many of them become very frustrating to play at 150ms -- I can only assume this is due to whatever cheat protection they use forcing them to use less and less lag compensation, and forcing them to run less of the simulation locally.
I live on the west coast, and a lot of the people I play with live on the east coast. So when we have the option of buying a server, we get one somewhere in the middle so that we all have pings in the 50-100ms range instead of the 150-200ms range. Taking this option away will really, really suck.
My earliest experience with gaming was staying up until the wee hours of the morning playing Action quake2 and rail-instagib CTF with those laser hooks they had. It was punishingly brutal back then, you could die 3 times in less than a second on some servers, and hackers could run rampant until an admin banned his ass. It was all worth it once you got that midair lag-shot on the top player on the server. These were all community supported mods running on dedicated servers. No servers, no mods, no community. This will only end in tears, or pirates, or both.
It's not that sad. IMO id hasn't made a game worth playing *since* Quake 2.
Luckily Carmack still makes great engines for studios with actual design skill to use. His "games" have basically become demos for the engines, though...
Anyone remember the days before dedicated gaming and reliable, integrated server browsers? Remember not too long ago when Gamespy was just being started and provided the revolutionary service or helping people connect to servers, but had to be run outside the game and started the game?
Think back even further. Remember trying to set up peer to peer games? Yeah, I'd almost forgotten about it to.
That is until Borderlands came out. This game is a wretched reminder of the 'bad old days'. I spent hours scouring forums and search engines, fiddling with my router, and trying to set it up so that I could host a game for my friend. No dice. Even setting my computer as the DMZ host didn't help. The only way myself and another friend were able to play was through a third friend who didn't have any issues.
Meanwhile, games like UT3 and TF2 work like a charm. Not to mention it's frankly a really cool social experience of having a server you frequent and getting to know the other people who frequent it rather than only ever getting to see the friends you've already got or a continuous parade of people you play with once and then never see again.
With all due respect to a man who is, frankly, one of the forefathers of modern gaming, saying that dedicated servers are an artifact of the past is just a blatantly stupid assertion to make. He should stick to coding and leave the design to someone who has some idea of what gamers want.
With all due respect to a man who is, frankly, one of the forefathers of modern gaming, saying that dedicated servers are an artifact of the past is just a blatantly stupid assertion to make. He should stick to coding and leave the design to someone who has some idea of what gamers want.
That didn't sound very respectful. I think that JC was implying that there is no technical reason for dedicated servers anymore. With the CPU/GPU horsepower available, there is no reason why you can't host a game and stil
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 network
The issues with hosting your own server are all related to networking, e.g. setting up all of your ports correctly, latency, etc.
But most games fail when it comes to that. Ex: Left4Dead
Local hosting has way more latency(and lower bandwidth usage) than a dedicated server on the same box. Even if you tweak cvars(which are capped), you can't push it beyond a certain point.
And to top it off, it impacts your framerate negatively.
Until companies do it right, please, just split them or allow both.
Decentralisation = the people doing it by and for themselves, on their own terms, at low or no cost.
Centralisation = the suits doing it for you, charging you through the nose for it, dictating exactly when, where, and how it's going to happen, and the brainless masses referring to it as being a good thing.
Some of said sheep will probably respond to this very post, in order to tell me I'm wrong.
That is until Borderlands came out. This game is a wretched reminder of the 'bad old days'. I spent hours scouring forums and search engines, fiddling with my router, and trying to set it up so that I could host a game for my friend. No dice. Even setting my computer as the DMZ host didn't help. The only way myself and another friend were able to play was through a third friend who didn't have any issues.
For what it's worth, most people are playing Borderlands online now using GameRanger for exactly this reason, because it eliminates all these problems. Gearbox has unofficially recommended it as a solution as well.
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
In Left 4 Dead even if the upstream is adequate (1024kbps) the CPU-strain on an older (AMD X2 4800) computer will cause severe lag. And if the CPU suffices you can bet that half of the people will drop due to routing issues. In what world can most of the gaming population handle their own routers and firewalls? I thought I had all STEAM relevant ports open and routed but some people still drop.
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.
There is way, way, *way* too much of a push away from open, transparent, decentralised internet protocols in pretty much every area, to centralised, proprietary, suit-run messes.
The benefit of being able to run a decentralised server wasn't about doing the gaming equivalent of channel surfing. It was about being able to throw together a LAN in a basement, bedroom, or living room with some local RL friends whenever you wanted.
I can just hear the brainless, ovine responses now.
So, if the new trend is to lock PC players into closed matchmaking services, wouldn't it start a trend of disgruntled players moding the game into having a satisfactory multiplayer service with dedicated services? Think about it, PC players have already modded single player games into adding entirely a multiplayer service (and quite successfully at that, I'm thinking about GTA San Andreas' two multiplayer mods, MTA SA and SA-MP).
An hypothetical example : Modern Warfare 2. It has both generated epic levels
Gaming companies don't use millions of dollars and hundreds of people working. They spend millions of dollars to get hundreds of people working for them. Open Source have people volunteer to do the work for free because they enjoy it. What, do you think game companies spend those millions on bricks and steel and machinery and sets for actors?
The main problem with OSS games has been there haven't been enough creative and graphic design people helping out. Have you seen what t
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday November 07, @02:05AM (#30012806)
I'd rather deal with the occasional cheater than suddenly lose multiplayer because the publisher decided the servers were no longer financially viable. This is really about making games disposable, which, for me at least, negates any inherent value received at purchase.
What does that have to do with matchmaking vs dedicated servers? You need master server in both cases, otherwise you couldn't get a list of dedicated servers.
Yep, I enjoy playing Tribes 2, despite the company being long gone. I don't like relying on 3rd parties in the tech world. Few companies have proven themselves stable enough to last.
Remember when gamespy was quakespy? And there was Mplayer?
I used to play q2 tournaments on Mplayer. But all the mods rolled on Quakespy/Gamespy. It gave people from such communities as the Action Quake/Quake 2 group some exposure.
More recently a great example of such a contrast is the early release of Halo 2 and even the lack of multiplayer support in the Original Halo in the beginning.
Before xbox live we had Xbox Connect which allowed me to play online before xbox live was mainstream. Furthermore it allowed for the playing of Halo 2, online, months before it came out.
This includes modified versions of Halo and Halo 2 that would never be realized without dedicated servers.
This culture is not even recognized by the noob gamers that started playing games online through a console portal.
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday November 07, @04:06AM (#30013138)
Yep. The scenario you mentioned is the same one that went through my mind: a couple of generations of gamers goes by and suddenly no one even notices that you have to play on their servers because that's the "standard." Then it'll be you have to pay to play on those servers because bandwith is too costly, or storage or some crap. It's all bollocks, and it's setup to move the industry into a position to capitalize on the only portions where it's not making any money.
Glad to see he's not charging forward (Score:4, Insightful)
But given the mess that has grown up around MW2, it should be pretty clear that the attempt to leave dedicated servers behind is not being taken well. The mechanism in use there seems destined to cause problems for users, and the fluidity available from dedicated servers can't be easily replaced by any system that has users hosting servers. It may be that hordes of virtual servers are the future of dedicated servers, but that's still a far better option than things like a five-second pause while the players' systems figure out who is taking over next.
If there's anyone that I trust to come up with a workable technical solution, it's John Carmack, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good idea.
Battlefield Heroes.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Battlefield Heroes.. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's worth pointing out that the RAGE demo at QUAKECON was done on a 360 controller. That should be a pretty strong sign that this is a console port design decision, that will ultimately affect the PC port. Let's take a look at console games with PC ports that use the "no dedicated server" model!
The downside to no dedicated servers is that you lose the community aspect, community organization becomes MUCH harder, and the game doesn't live on as long. See also: Left 4 Dead. Great concept, but almost impossible to get dedicated servers running for it. Or you can look at the recently released-for-PC game Borderlands - what a clusterfuck; the community eventually figured out what ports to unblock on their firewall, but even now people are having problems getting people to connect to their game/server. Incredibly frustrating, and I'm not really sure game/community mechanics have progressed far enough to allow the community/communities to grow up around the game that you want to push further away from dedicated servers. The one console game that I saw with a decent community setup was SOCOM 3 for the PS2; it had clans and messageboards, a messaging system and a somewhat steam-like buddy system/join buddy's game function.
Case in point: Rage is a console game, with console server matching system. The fact that it's coming out for the PC means that it's simply going to be a piss-poor PC port of a console game, and last time I checked, PC-ports of console games were fucking terrible (see also: Borderlands).
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
See: Left 4 Dead. Great concept, but almost impossible to get dedicated servers running for it. Or you can look at the recently released-for-PC game Borderlands - what a clusterfuck; the community eventually figured out what ports to unblock on their firewall, but even now people are having problems getting people to connect to their game/server.
We have an INX dedicated server we can switch between Left 4 Dead and the Left 4 Dead 2 demo. Actually using it is a pain in the arse though. We haven't used the feature of associating it to our steam group since they added it, because it didn't support grouping up in a lobby and choosing gamemode, level, characters etc before playing. You had to restart the server to change gamemodes! Setting a search key and force_dedicated_servers list seem to work though, so we've been using that.
For Borderlands, only t
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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 ave
Re:Glad to see he's not charging forward (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
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Here's a question, though... and I mean this as a genuine question, having never done game development:
Is the networking/interconnection system part of the engine, and if not, would the former be part of Carmack's responsibilities, too?
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Re:Glad to see he's not charging forward (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it is. Most major game engine packages, including IDTech contain a networking layer. In fact, John Carmack was the guy who pretty much pioneered the client-server model for graphical games back when he made Quake.
However I've never had a major problem with his game's network layers. The issue is only that the game itself (content and gameplay wise) has been fairly bland for the last few iterations. If what the grandparent post is saying is correct, John Carmack is only responsible for the technical side, (including rendering and networking) and not the game experience itself. However, if "Masters of Doom" is correct, that is simply not the case as that book attributes most of the decisions as to the focus on recent games to John Carmack. It argues that it is the direct consequence of his conservative policy in game design that lead to Quake2, Quake3 and Doom3 being how they are, for better or worse.
The grandparent is claiming that John Carmack's technical record is unblemished and if he says P2P hosting is the way of the future then he should be given the benefit of the doubt and not questioned until he either recants, delivers a bad implementation or proves not to be able to implement this system in reasonable time. Even if he is responsible for the boring combat of Doom3, that suggests nothing about his ability to write game networking layers. I wrote a lot of the network system of a commercial game engine. My personal reaction towards this statement is to acknowledge that past history suggests that he will be able to deliver something very good and there is nobody who can really call him wrong until they have tested his implementation. I however, have not abandoned the client-server model and neither should anyone simply on the words of John D Carmack without thinking exactly about the priorities and requirements of their game.
Parent
Quake's network code was written by John Cash (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the original Doom days, John Cash and his friends who worked for Novell used to play deathmatch games on the corporate network in the evenings. When they discovered that the Doom network code was horrible, Cash sent Carmack an email pointing this out.
Carmack responded by sending over the source code (which had been written for id by a contractor), asking Cash to fix it. Basically a 'put up or shut up' situation. :-)
The result, after a few mostly sleepless nights was a totally rewritten network layer which got used by the later Doom versions.
This experience made Cash figure out how a networked game should work, so over the next 2-3 years he did a presentation every year at Novell's Developer Conference (later called BrainShare), the title was something like "How to write networked games".
Another year later, after Carmack had hired Mike Abrash to help with the low-level optimization of the sw 3D engine for Quake, they hired Cash to write the nextwork and AI code.
After Quake 3 shipped, Cash left id for a more relaxed environment, moving to Blizzard who were working on this new massive multiplayer game at the time.
Afaik John Cash is now the chief programmer for WOW.
Terje
PS. I've known Mike since about 1985 and I worked with John Cash for a year in 1991-92.
Parent
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teh stoopid is overrunning slashdot too.
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screenshot of doom4 [wikimedia.org](uses raytracing)
A remnant? (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't call ~200,000 people a day between only three games from ONE COMPANY when the most populous of those three games averages ~80-90K a day peak users despite being about 5 years old a remnant of the early days of PC gaming. I'd call that proof of how important dedicated servers and proper mod support are.
Re:A remnant? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:A remnant? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
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Amazing. They do not learn from success and call it remnant of the early days of PC gaming like it is a bad thing. Carmack and the other out of touch with reality greedy people that is.
I have been playing games since C64. I never once bought a game in my life. You just copied tapes, floppy disk etc from a friend of a friend.
Then Orange Box with TF2 came along. Bought and paid for it once. Still playing regularly several hours a week after 2 years. Dedicated Servers. Great community. Strong competitive scene
Re:A remnant? (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't want people like you as customers. They want people that toss a game after one month and go buy the next big shit. They want to limit a game's life span by being able to shut of things like multiplayer. They're not making money when you are playing something you already paid for.
Parent
Re:A remnant? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it is just more proof that they are doing their best to kill the communities and mods so they can shove DLC down our throats. All my favorite games were made favorites NOT by the designers, but by the communities and mods that built up around them and gave me MORE for my money and extended my fun, not screwing me over so they can "maximize profit potential".
No mods? No money from me. No dedicated servers? Again no money from me. If we PC gamers get together and make damned sure that any game that screws us over rots on the shelves, while buying up the ones that treat us right, maybe then we won't end up in x360 hell, which is what they seem to be pushing us towards. I don't want a damned 360, thanks ever so much!
Parent
Simply about piracy (Score:4, Informative)
They want everyone to use matchmaking, which really means they want everyone to use an authentication system.
Re:Simply about piracy (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Parent
Having no dedicated servers is a bad idea (Score:3, Interesting)
A lot of today's FPSes seem to prefer a ping of less than 100ms. Many of them become very frustrating to play at 150ms -- I can only assume this is due to whatever cheat protection they use forcing them to use less and less lag compensation, and forcing them to run less of the simulation locally.
I live on the west coast, and a lot of the people I play with live on the east coast. So when we have the option of buying a server, we get one somewhere in the middle so that we all have pings in the 50-100ms range instead of the 150-200ms range. Taking this option away will really, really suck.
sadder than a crying puppy (Score:3, Interesting)
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It's not that sad. IMO id hasn't made a game worth playing *since* Quake 2.
Luckily Carmack still makes great engines for studios with actual design skill to use. His "games" have basically become demos for the engines, though...
Decentralized gaming IS the ancient remnant (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone remember the days before dedicated gaming and reliable, integrated server browsers? Remember not too long ago when Gamespy was just being started and provided the revolutionary service or helping people connect to servers, but had to be run outside the game and started the game?
Think back even further. Remember trying to set up peer to peer games? Yeah, I'd almost forgotten about it to.
That is until Borderlands came out. This game is a wretched reminder of the 'bad old days'. I spent hours scouring forums and search engines, fiddling with my router, and trying to set it up so that I could host a game for my friend. No dice. Even setting my computer as the DMZ host didn't help. The only way myself and another friend were able to play was through a third friend who didn't have any issues.
Meanwhile, games like UT3 and TF2 work like a charm. Not to mention it's frankly a really cool social experience of having a server you frequent and getting to know the other people who frequent it rather than only ever getting to see the friends you've already got or a continuous parade of people you play with once and then never see again.
With all due respect to a man who is, frankly, one of the forefathers of modern gaming, saying that dedicated servers are an artifact of the past is just a blatantly stupid assertion to make. He should stick to coding and leave the design to someone who has some idea of what gamers want.
Technical vs. emotional (Score:3, Interesting)
That didn't sound very respectful. I think that JC was implying that there is no technical reason for dedicated servers anymore. With the CPU/GPU horsepower available, there is no reason why you can't host a game and stil
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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 network
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The issues with hosting your own server are all related to networking, e.g. setting up all of your ports correctly, latency, etc.
But most games fail when it comes to that. Ex: Left4Dead
Local hosting has way more latency(and lower bandwidth usage) than a dedicated server on the same box. Even if you tweak cvars(which are capped), you can't push it beyond a certain point.
And to top it off, it impacts your framerate negatively.
Until companies do it right, please, just split them or allow both.
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Decentralisation = the people doing it by and for themselves, on their own terms, at low or no cost.
Centralisation = the suits doing it for you, charging you through the nose for it, dictating exactly when, where, and how it's going to happen, and the brainless masses referring to it as being a good thing.
Some of said sheep will probably respond to this very post, in order to tell me I'm wrong.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That is until Borderlands came out. This game is a wretched reminder of the 'bad old days'. I spent hours scouring forums and search engines, fiddling with my router, and trying to set it up so that I could host a game for my friend. No dice. Even setting my computer as the DMZ host didn't help. The only way myself and another friend were able to play was through a third friend who didn't have any issues.
For what it's worth, most people are playing Borderlands online now using GameRanger for exactly this reason, because it eliminates all these problems. Gearbox has unofficially recommended it as a solution as well.
Not everyone can host a game via p2p (Score:3, Informative)
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
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Doesn't really matter (Score:4, Informative)
This isn't a good thing (Score:2)
There is way, way, *way* too much of a push away from open, transparent, decentralised internet protocols in pretty much every area, to centralised, proprietary, suit-run messes.
The benefit of being able to run a decentralised server wasn't about doing the gaming equivalent of channel surfing. It was about being able to throw together a LAN in a basement, bedroom, or living room with some local RL friends whenever you wanted.
I can just hear the brainless, ovine responses now.
"But we'll still be able to do
New trends, new counter-trends (Score:2)
So, if the new trend is to lock PC players into closed matchmaking services, wouldn't it start a trend of disgruntled players moding the game into having a satisfactory multiplayer service with dedicated services? Think about it, PC players have already modded single player games into adding entirely a multiplayer service (and quite successfully at that, I'm thinking about GTA San Andreas' two multiplayer mods, MTA SA and SA-MP).
An hypothetical example : Modern Warfare 2. It has both generated epic levels
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You fit your sig all to well.
Gaming companies don't use millions of dollars and hundreds of people working. They spend millions of dollars to get hundreds of people working for them. Open Source have people volunteer to do the work for free because they enjoy it. What, do you think game companies spend those millions on bricks and steel and machinery and sets for actors?
The main problem with OSS games has been there haven't been enough creative and graphic design people helping out. Have you seen what t
So where are HIS details? (Score:2)
If the system he is proposing is so much better than dedicated servers, where are his details?
If he is suggesting the client/server model is dead... then he's having a stroke. How are you supposed to have lan parties without a dedicated server?
Dedicated servers are a must (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This is a bonus (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd rather deal with the occasional cheater than suddenly lose multiplayer because the publisher decided the servers were no longer financially viable. This is really about making games disposable, which, for me at least, negates any inherent value received at purchase.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
What does that have to do with matchmaking vs dedicated servers? You need master server in both cases, otherwise you couldn't get a list of dedicated servers.
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Dedicated Servers = Freedom (Score:4, Insightful)
Dedicated servers are the shit.
Remember when gamespy was quakespy? And there was Mplayer?
I used to play q2 tournaments on Mplayer. But all the mods rolled on Quakespy/Gamespy. It gave people from such communities as the Action Quake/Quake 2 group some exposure.
More recently a great example of such a contrast is the early release of Halo 2 and even the lack of multiplayer support in the Original Halo in the beginning.
Before xbox live we had Xbox Connect which allowed me to play online before xbox live was mainstream. Furthermore it allowed for the playing of Halo 2, online, months before it came out.
This includes modified versions of Halo and Halo 2 that would never be realized without dedicated servers.
This culture is not even recognized by the noob gamers that started playing games online through a console portal.
Definitely worth fighting for.
Parent
Re:Dedicated Servers = Freedom (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Both of them?
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Also remember that Source was originally based on Quake II.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Two words: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wooden barrels.