EA Ending Online Support For Dozens of Games 329
Last month Gamespy announced it would be shutting down at the end of May. Many game makers relied upon Gamespy for all of the multiplayer and online services related to their games, and there was a scramble to transition those games away from Gamespy. Now, Electronic Arts has decided it's not worth the trouble for older titles. They're terminating online support for a huge number of games. The game list includes: Battlefield 2, Crysis 1 & 2, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2, and Star Wars: Battlefront 1 & 2. EA said, "As games get replaced with newer titles, the number of players still enjoying the older games dwindles to a level - typically fewer than 1 per cent of all peak online players across all EA titles - where it's no longer feasible to continue the behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping these games up and running."
Release the server side code (Score:5, Insightful)
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While EA does plenty of stupid things that don't even seem to be attributable to greed, I'd be a bit skeptical that even they are dumb enough to slap their customers in the face like this without any reason whatsoever.
Re:Release the server side code (Score:5, Insightful)
Never underestimate the tendency of a large corporation to do something mean and stupid just to save a few pennies. Someone is probably going to get a bonus for shutting off some servers and doing some creative accounting.
Chances are that no extra effort has to be undertaken to keep these games online beyond "do nothing" and "just let it be".
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Never underestimate the tendency of a large corporation to do something mean and stupid just to save a few pennies. Someone is probably going to get a bonus for shutting off some servers and doing some creative accounting.
Chances are that no extra effort has to be undertaken to keep these games online beyond "do nothing" and "just let it be".
The problem is that "do nothing" still has associated costs. EA may be planning on upgrading or moving their data center, they could be moving towards new servers or clusters that require less power, cooling, cheaper to run etc. The cost of moving or migrating the legacy game servers becomes costly and a nightmare. On top of that, they need to keep the servers patched, monitored, etc. The point is that "do nothing" still requires overhead (electricity, cooling, maintenance, etc) that costs more than the
EA ... Plan LOL (Score:2)
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In this particular case, they might have to re-write the entire server code from scratch, depending on whether the server was written by EA or by gamespy. Even if it was written by EA, and they still have the source, it might need modification to run outside the gamespy system.
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It would cost money to release the code, because they'd have to clean it up. There is a lot of code-reuse in games, especially those that are part of franchises. Releasing even older code means giving access to potential insider information, like naming conventions, or even exposing possible bugs exploits that could very well have carried over to more current games.
The backlash on this stuff is actually kind of interesting to me, though. I see a lot of people basically complaining about this 'in principl
Re:People thought they had bought these games (Score:4, Insightful)
Except these are offline games with a multiplayer component, which is rendered useless without the servers to host it. This is very different to the licensed MMORPG-type games.
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Why? Did they promise you anywhere that multiplayer would be available in perpetuity?
The games in question (IIRC) all have single player modes that continue to work.
You might have an argument on a refund, but only if it is prorated over the lifetime of the game. So at this point, you would be owed what? A couple of bucks at most?
Their support was laughable anyway... (Score:2)
I attempted in vain to get assistance via the legitimate support channels.
I quickly found out their "support" isn't worth the time and effort and I was got more help via forums, etc;
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It was the problem many users had running the game once EA made ME a "phone home" game.
I think this was in ME 2?
I would start up the game, get to the login screen and it would show I was connected but would then throw a variety of errors...
I eventually figured out a sort of "dance in a circle backwards during a full moon on a Tuesday" workaround that some on the forums had suggested.
It was bullshit that I couldn't just play the game, that I paid fo
Wait! (Score:5, Funny)
Can I still play Skate or Die on my C64?
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Distinction between "support" and "play". (Score:2)
Some are offline already (Score:5, Informative)
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Cool, good to know that NWN still has a way to do matchmaking post Gamespy. Even if I no longer run my own node I definitely have fond memories of NWN and realize that there's STILL not a better engine for rolling your own adventure game.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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You've nailed it. This is simply to make people buy the newer games.
They keep support alive only long enough so as to not attract the attention of the FTC.
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You've nailed it. This is simply to make people buy the newer games.
Not buying it. If BF1942 has been online all this time, its kind of hard to accept your statement.
Its because GameSpy went offline, and they dont think its worth the effort to patch those games. That too may be a problem for some of the more recent games, but some of the complaints about this are ridiculous.
Every title is doomed. (Score:4, Insightful)
"As games get replaced with newer titles, the number of players still enjoying the older games dwindles to a level - typically fewer than 1 per cent of all peak online players across all EA titles
So every EA online game will die when the figure on a spreadsheet drops below a certain threshold. Why not open source the server software rather than abandon it?
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What makes you think they are abandoning the software? Chances are the software core is the same for older and brand new games, with the differences being the rules system and assets - the system holding it all together at the EA end is more to do with scalability, speed, user management etc. Whats more likely here is that they are seeing too few users to justify a single supporting cluster per game, which would include front end servers, interconnects, database servers etc. From their point of view, its
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No, The problem is that all their games relied on Gamespy. Now that Gamespy is going bye-bye, EA has to make the choice to either remove all the Gamespy crap from all of these game and patch everything or to just say, "it is too much work for absolutely no payoff". Now, for Battlefront 2 and Crysis this is a big deal because you can still purchase these games (Steam and Origin). The others as far as I know aren't still being sold and there is no real reason to still support them other then supporting the fe
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"As games get replaced with newer titles, the number of players still enjoying the older games dwindles to a level - typically fewer than 1 per cent of all peak online players across all EA titles
So every EA online game will die when the figure on a spreadsheet drops below a certain threshold. Why not open source the server software rather than abandon it?
I know this isn't a popular idea here, but it really is a bad idea for EA to do anything to keep these games playing. They make money when selling a new game, anything that theoretically keeps old games out there being played takes up some of the gaming market and is interfering with them selling more games. As much as it sucks, it would be most useful to EA's position to try and stop people from playing these old games in any matter. It's not a matter of spending money maintaining old servers. No one e
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However, a boycott of their games for their crappy "practices" might make them reconsider perhaps? Boycott schmoycott, at the end of the day nobody is going to care and they will do what the bean counters say looks best on the balance sheet.
A boycott might help if it could be done, but it seems clear that the majority of the gaming market doesn't care about this at all and will continue to buy EA games. The people that are impacted by this are exactly the people that aren't buying new games anyway.
Seriously now (Score:2)
How many of those games actually have a very active online community that's getting annihilated by this move?
That's right, none. Kids these days are pretty fickle and will move to the next online game and drop the last one, making it a barren wasteland online, as quickly as Carmen switched love affairs.
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On the flip side: What would be the cost of running them on a "up as much as it's up" matchmaking VM. If there's so few people, the load should be trivial.
Heck: Why aren't these all using the same single match-making system with just game profiles?
Are any of these affected from a single-player POV? EA was a pioneer in "always call home' DRM.
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The Star Wars Battlefront (SWBF) games aren't affected in single-player mode or LAN play. Yes, the PS2 versions support LAN play.
You see how some are saying "this is why users should be able to run their own servers" comments?
Well that's how the SWBF games have always worked! You can host the game either by:
1 Using freely downloadable software provided by EA, on a PC to host game servers for PS2's (Dedicated PC)
2. Hosting a game on a PS2 in "Dedicated" mode (PS2 Dedicated)
3. Hosting and playing on a PS2.
Adios MOHAA (Score:2)
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If you're on Slashdot, you should know better... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Because SW Jedi Knight, SW Battlefront, KotOR, Crysis, Mass Effect, SimCity, The Sims, Dragon Age, and Red Alert are all fun games.
Bitch and moan about their business practices all you want, they still make games people want to play.
The players brought this on themselves (Score:3)
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NWN predates EA, as do several other titles on that list.
Oh God No! (Score:2)
Bloddy MBAs (Score:2)
With enough squeezing they might even be able to
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So, what you're saying is that you don't disagree that it's entirely appropriate for EA to make a tradeoff between the costs of maintaining these games and the goodwill that maintaining them generates, but you're somehow certain that the "sleazy MBA" hasn't actually done a robust job of balancing those two factors. You acknowledge that the goodwill side is hard to measure, and you've therefore decided to assume, without knowing what the costs of maintaining the games are, that the goodwill must be greater
Re:Lol... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lol... (Score:5, Insightful)
They either need to guarantee some period of service (which will also call attention to the fact that support will one day be lost along with the ability to use whatever program or device), or allow users some alternative for when they do retire something.
I think it is unreasonable to demand that products be supported in perpetuity, but companies need to also understand it isn't right to orphan and render software or devices unusable. They need to open it up, remove DRM with a patch, or do whatever it takes to allow products people pay for to continue to be used. Or state very clearly (not in the fine print) that said device or software will likely cease to work past some date, but is guaranteed to work until that date.
There is precedence for this in DVD digital downloads. They clearly state the download is available until some time or other, and the buyer knows when that date is (if they read the package).
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I think it is unreasonable to demand that products be supported in perpetuity, but companies need to also understand it isn't right to orphan and render software or devices unusable. They need to open it up, remove DRM with a patch, or do whatever it takes to allow products people pay for to continue to be used.
No, they don't need to do that. I certainly agree with you that it is preferable that they do that but the market has decided that they don't, until people start supporting companies that do it in place of companies that don't then those companies don't need to do anything.
That's the fundamental problem, you need to convince people that they should not buy from those companies but ultimately most people are fine to just upgrade when the hardware/software goes EOL. It's a similar issue with the whole DRM con
Re:Lol... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm thinking they should be on the hook for supporting them for 95 years: the length of their copyright terms.
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Bf1942 and MOHAA DO let you run your own servers. Thats not the issue: How do you find those dedicated servers?
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You use google. Here is what i found with 3 seconds of googling for a game older than any of the EA titles. http://dtaskforce.forumotion.c... [forumotion.com]
The in-game server browser is a huge convenience, and the costs to support such old games are minimal. You could probably support the server browser for all these games on a single blade. The server browser is basically a fancy web server, taking input such as "I have a server a xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" and answering requests such as "Give me your server list". For legacy games this is probably less than a 100kb transaction. For unpopular legacy games, probably less than a 10kb transaction.
Re:Lol... (Score:4, Insightful)
BF2 64 man Karkand Infantry Only probably the best PVP game ever, and I doubt it will ever be topped on the sick trajectory PVP shooters are on.
Sad to see it go, though there is only one server left. Big E, and the Big E admins suck so it was effectively dead already anyway.
All of EA's lame COD knock offs since simply don't capture what makes multiplayer PVP intense and fun, nor does COD:
A. Teams need to be evenly balanced
B. Teams need to be in a confined space so there is immediate contact
C. Needs to be some tactics and strategy but not a lot, versus aimless COD styling circling, killing and being killed
C. Weapons need to be equal, simple, skill based. No air, no armor
D. No stupid gimmicks
E. No excessively dense, expensive graphics. Simple graphics is actually better and you aren't forced in to a constant hardware upgrade just to play games that are immensly fun even if the graphics are simple. Excessive graphics also drive up costs needlessly.
If EA had just kept fixing the bugs in BF2, spent more effort controlling hacks, did new maps occassionaly, did minimal refinements, someone like Twitch promoted a competition system around it, someone provided some professionally admin'ed servers to get away from clan based bias, it would've gone on forever like Starcraft.
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That's why non-MMO multiplayer games should always allow users to run their own servers.
The PS2 Star Wars Battlefront games listed DO let you run your own servers, it works as follows:
1. Run dedicated software on a PC that hosts a server for PS2's.
2. Run a PS2 with the game in "Dedicated" mode. You can't play the game this way, the PS2 only serves as host in this mode.
3. Host the game on a PS2 in non-dedicated mode.
You may be thinking that if you can host the game yourself why is it shutting down? Because while you can easily host the game yourself...the server list and matchmaking is provid
Re:Lol... (Score:5, Insightful)
No they aren't stealing. They paid for the game upfront. There is no theft involved.
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I do not need some special "right" to host a game using my own equipment; that's absurd.
Besides, how is it theft? I doubt even our insane legal system considers it theft to host it yourself, but I wouldn't be all that surprised if I was wrong.
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But if the game is so DRM'd and requires an active service that goes belly-up so the game isn't even playable - why does everybody think the distributor gets to keep the money just because you "broke the seal" to find out you can't play the game?
Who do you think is suggesting that?
You're saying I can't demand a refund because I've already driven the car
No, I never said anything of the sort. Take a deep breath and try reading what is written and then taking some time to make sure you actually comprehend it. I don't know where you get the idea I was suggesting anything of the sort, I explicitly stated that you should take action against the merchant [slashdot.org], which you somehow managed to not read or misinterpret so I even restated it for you that you take action against the merchant [slashdot.org]. I don't see how that can be so difficult for yo
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So what you're saying is that people who create something should donate their time and creative abilities for free.
Would you be willing to go to work tomorrow and tell your boss that you'd like to give up your paycheck, because people ought to work for free? Then what right have you to say that authors should work for free?
(Yes, I realize I'm tilting at windmills here, because the bottom line is that you want to steal people's creativity and time, and instead of just owning up to it, you want to try and ju
Re:Lol... (Score:5, Insightful)
the only reason why MMO games DONT let players run their own servers is that they make no money from them. im sure blizzard wouldnt mind letting people have private servers as long as they still paid for the content and the subscription... but generally speaking, they are stealing.
You can't steal an intangible, you fucking idiot. I know that's not very diplomatic, but for fucks sakes, this is "News for Nerds", not the bloody short bus.
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short bus
If anybody wants to throw money at purchasing shortbus.org and repointing it at Slashdot, I'm in.
Good luck (Score:2)
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Peter Woodman? That sounds like a porno name.
Re: Lol... (Score:2)
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Now that's just plainly overly generalized; "theft of services" is an entirely real thing and may not involve anything tangible; the most obvious business example is refusing to pay a consultant. In the case of private MMO servers, this isn't happening: the client, protocol, and server content are already paid for, after all, so what is done is definitely infringement, but there are definitely still kinds of intangible theft.
Theft of service is something tangible. What are you stealing? My electric service? You're stealing my tangible electricity (try not to kill yourself if you touch it). If you steal my internet services then you are stealing the physical capacity I have to transport bits across the internet. If you copy my data, I may not be happy with you, but I still have a copy of it. I'm not saying that it should be legal to do so, I am just saying that it's not really stolen. Some other law has been broken (for ins
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You can't steal an intangible
Actually you can, your rights are not tangible but you can have them taken from you.
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Computer game: published creative work.
Medical records: private papers.
They aren't the same thing. The only thing anyone views them as the same is the fact that a certain contingent of corporate lobbyists has convinced everyone into equating every worthless scrap of paper with something scribbled onto it as the equivalent of Dickens or Shakespeare.
Re:Lol... (Score:5, Insightful)
I oppose the very idea of "professional entertainment", be it musicians, athletes, actors or games programmers.
Let me get this straight: you oppose all forms of compensated entertainment? So you consume no music, no movies, no fictional books, no games of any kind (electronic or otherwise), view no works of art...nothing at all? Or do you consume these things but just presume that people should never be paid for providing them to you?
I'm not about to shill for the copyright-manipulating media conglomerates, but IMO your viewpoint is either hopelessly extreme or ridiculously hypocritical. If people choose to entertain someone else, that effort has intrinsic value. Now exactly what that value might be is debatable and purely subjective based upon the value it has to those consuming said entertainment, but it surely has value to those who consume it, otherwise they wouldn't. You pay for people to fix your food at restaurants, or to build your computer components, or any number of other trades that require someone with a particular skill to perform a particular service. Why should entertainment alone be considered a pro bono profession?
Re:Lol... (Score:4, Insightful)
I make a concerted effort to:
- consume no music that wasn't published freely by it's creators
- amuse myself instead by jamming with my friends, or hanging out with my friends who are jamming and aspire to nothing more
- read books that are published free of any copyright, or are no longer governed by copyright, or are available at the library
- publish my writings free of any restriction
- build software only for hire, and only on platforms that are not restricted to those who pay for a license, never for those who would profit through copyright
- avoid playing video games
- avoid television and movies that were created for profit
- purchase used clothing from boutique stores, or have clothes made for me by someone I know
- avoid purchasing anything that I've seen an advertisement for
- eat only at owner-run restaurants where I can introduce myself to the owner and the cook and get to know them
- volunteer my time to creating abundance by involving myself in urban gardens, distributing parts for RepRap's, etc
- avoid working for companies whose profits come from advertising or copyright enforcement
- never loan money at it interest, but give it away to freely to those who need and deserve it if I can afford it
- give away my material possessions when I have no further need of them, rather than selling them
Have I held to these principles like a rock? No. I'm a human trying to get by in a culture whose values are diametrically opposed to my own, and it's proving very difficult to leave, though I am trying my best to get the hell out of North America. When every scrap of material and every square foot of land is someone's private property, you have to make compromises in order to survive. But these are my principles, and I do try to live by them.
At the end of the day, I am opposed to profit, and to private property. I consider both to be crimes against mankind. Which basically puts me in opposition to every signatory to the United Nations, because private property is one of their core shared values.
I've brought a lot of good to a lot of people with my deeds and my creations, and I am not a greedy person, so even though I've made some compromises that I'm ashamed of, I feel pretty good about it all at the end of the day. I'm not God's gift to mankind, but I know I am one of the men who carries other men on his shoulders.
The point of this isn't to toot my own horn. You wouldn't recognize me on the street, what would be the point. It's to assure you that, while you may or may not agree with my views, they are GENUINE. I have been described as inspiring by people who didn't think I was within earshot, and that's all the reward I need to carry on.
Re: Lol... (Score:3)
But it's nice to know you're paying attention ;)
Re:Lol... (Score:5, Insightful)
So buying a game and not continually paying the company to be able to continue playing the game is stealing?
Imagine how much I'm stealing by not buying the game in the first place! Not as in pirating it but as in refusing to deal with a game where I need to pay for a subscription just for the "privilege" of playing the game I purchased.
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All of these complaint posts are ignorant. Several of the games there have no DLC (BF1942, BF2, MOHAA, etc). They also allow dedicated servers.
Would be nice if those most vocal about complaining about abuses would actually take the 3 seconds to see if an abuse is happening, but then this is the internet and ignorant outrage reigns supreme.
Re:Lol... (Score:5, Insightful)
What a combination of naivete and FUD... the mind boggles!
First of all, the case law on this topic was in fact Blizzard v. BNetD [eff.org], where Blizzard objected to people running their own servers despite the fact that there was no content or subscription associated with it. That pretty much blows your claim that "Blizzard wouldn't mind" out of the water. Second, it is entirely unreasonable, and perhaps even slanderous, to claim that "generally speaking" people must have committed copyright infringement based solely on the fact that they wanted to host their own multiplayer games!
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It could very well be the case that running a private server requires running leaked code from blizzard servers, or else reverse engineering some code (which is almost always verboten according the client EULA).
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All that argument does is further prove that EULAs are unconscionable.
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its not stealing - they paid for the game. End of story.
Now, if the company wants to host servers and let players run about using them, then there's a fair assumption they should pay for the hosting and bandwidth and server admins and support guys required to run such a thing.
If they choose to run it themselves, on a LAN for example, then they pay for the running costs themselves directly. No big deal.
The only issue I have is if a group run their own server, then its not longer a MMO, unless you redefine "M
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Most MMO's these days are a service, not software. They usually don't charge you anything to download the client software. But you do have to pay, in some way, for the service they provide. And most people are willing to pay for that service, since it helps stop cheaters and gold farmers from ruining the game and since most people have neither the bandwidth nor CPU muscle to run a modern MMO.
So you're paying for the service. The same way you would pay for any other service.
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The biggest problem I can see with running an MMO server is that server and game designs aren't using the optimal division of matter-energy over space-time. Network perspective can provide endpoint identity authentication; DHT can locate, subscribe to and enlist world servers; And network consensus can detect and correct game-state based "cheating" at the cost additional logic batch processing (which you're doing anyway for client side prediction). Recording signed input streams, starting state and output
Re: damn EA.. i hate you (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree that play has dwindled to almost nothings. Some hugely popular games like JKA have fewer than a dozen players on at any one time over dozens of servers sitting almost empty, but fun times are still had. One the other hand, there are still a lot of people playing Tribes and Tribes 2 mods, so community support for some games could be quite large. I would think it would be that way for Battlefield 2.
Re: damn EA.. i hate you (Score:5, Interesting)
This is where I see a niche market. A company that provides multiplayer access for legacy games... stuff like older C&C games, NWN, and many other games that are still playable, but may not be worth it financially to keep the servers up.
Given the choice, I'd go with a paid subscription model because one is paying for the servers, not the game, so the multiplayer access is for all the games. One could also add stuff like the NWN/NWN2 vault for easy download of player-made content as well as FPS maps/scripts.
However, I don't know if a sub model is viable, so what might work is getting newer indy games to use it, perhaps adding a couple dollars to the price of the game in order for it to use the multiplayer functionality for a couple years.
Maybe this might be something for gog.com to make? GogNet anyone?
Re: damn EA.. i hate you (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe this might be something for gog.com to make? GogNet anyone?
That's quite cool idea, actually.
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Remember when we used to be able to run our own servers, and the server software was included with the games?
Remember when triple-A titles didn't cost $200+ million to develop and market?
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Some of those games I can understand the outrage for, but BF1942 and MOHAA are roughly as old as Windows XP. Its time to lay it to rest :(
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Seriously? There's still an active Doom community. People play games because they're fun, and they don't become less fun just because they're old.
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Right, and I think BF1942 is still the best thing ever (#WakeIsland4Lyfe). But expecting an update for a 12 year old game is a bit much.
Re: damn EA.. i hate you (Score:5, Insightful)
They should be forced by law to release that source code. The only reason the public granted them copyright in the first place was so that the work could eventually become Public Domain. If they're going to lock it away instead, then they've violated the social contract and no longer deserve the privilege of holding a monopoly on it.
Re: damn EA.. i hate you (Score:5, Informative)
US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8:
(emphasis added)
Also, this article [techdirt.com] quotes and discusses correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison that shows their reasoning behind the issue. Jefferson eloquently defined the essence of the Public Domain:
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That's the biggest reason I stopped gaming -- ALL the game companies turned into customer-hating monsters. Fuck all of them.
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It takes a special brand of twisted logic to conflate a PAYING CUSTOMER with a "freetard".
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Re:If they programmed it correctly (Score:5, Insightful)
> If they programmed it correctly
As a server admin, if this is your standard for correct server side programming, I've never seen a correctly programmed application in my entire 30 year career.
In my experience, server application migrations rarely function flawlessly across OS versions. Most of the time, major application modifications need to be made.
I agree with you on the server code, however. If they're going to abandon it, they might as well open source it.
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As a server admin, if this is your standard for correct server side programming, I've never seen a correctly programmed application in my entire 30 year career.
It's not surprising. Programmers make lousy interfaces for customers, they make even worse interfaces for other programmers. One of the most terrifying things about moving to a new company is downloading the source tree and trying to get it to build. Sometimes you get weird things like, "did 'make' fail? Just type it again a few times until it succeeds." WTF.
It doesn't have to be that way. Maybe from win95 to win2000, where everyone finally agreed to use TCP/IP instead of IPX, but now if you limit yourse
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It's truly a wonder how Enterprise can even exist... Oh, right, virtualization exists. I fucking forgot how shitty humans are.
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Except that they are shutting down because gamespy is shutting down. They made the games with gamespy based matchmaking, so they would either need to change the games to use a different matchmaking service or get the source for the servers from gamespy (lol yea right).
Re:If they programmed it correctly (Score:4, Insightful)
If they programmed it correctly, migration to a new server would involve "rsync *.tar.gz . && tar xfz *.tar.gz" or something similar. There is no reason that needs to be complicated, so maintenance time should be minimal.
Yeah, good luck finding *anything* that's that simple.
Even moving the simplest possible website (just static files, nothing dynamic) to a new host is more work than that. (You could move the content itself with rsync or tar (though not with the command lines you gave), but the new server needs to be configured, the web server still needs to be set up, etc.)
If your definition of "programmed correctly" is that migration to a new host is as simple as you think it is, let me give you a hint ... by that definition, almost nothing of any value is programmed correctly. And modern systems, with clustered setups with failover across multiple nodes, multiple databases, connections to billing systems and the like are several orders of magnitude more complicated than you seem to think they should be.
In any event, this is moot. It's Gamespy that's shutting down, not some server that EA runs that's currently sitting under somebody's desk. In order to fix this, EA would need to dig the source for their old games out of storage, make sure they can still build it (for a game that hasn't been touched in a decade by them, this is real concern), pay a programmer to replace the bits that Gamespy uses to use something else, build it, run it through some minimal testing and release it. All this for a game that may not have made EA any money in years, and it needs to be repeated for a large number of older games.
It's a business decision. To update every game ever made by them would cost a bunch, so EA is wisely deciding to only support the more recent games or the games with sufficient demand. We could argue that they're not using the ideal criteria in deciding what should be updated, but ultimately they do have to draw the line somewhere.
My guess is that Gamespy has had very little development done in a long time and mostly just sits in a room of servers somewhere mostly running on autopilot -- costing money in hosting and power costs. I'm not sure how it is about making money -- do game publishers pay to use it? Advertising? In any event, if it's costing money but not making money, they probably told the developers if they didn't pay up they'd shut it down, and the developers didn't pay up sufficiently, so ... shut it down.
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Even moving the simplest possible website (just static files, nothing dynamic) to a new host is more work than that. (You could move the content itself with rsync or tar (though not with the command lines you gave), but the new server needs to be configured, the web server still needs to be set up, etc.)
And how long exactly should setting up config files (etc) take?
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Longer than "rsync --archive --verbose /var/www/html/. new-host:/var/www/html/." takes to type.
But again, that's the extreme simple case. That'll serve you well for somebody's 1993 web site, though their "contact us!" form may require a little more work (though I do realize that this form doesn't fit into the "just static files" restriction I mentioned.)
But even back in 1993 that was simpler than most "real" services. Scott Adams gave a nice example of how people viewed complexity back in 1994 (and it's s [dilbert.com]
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Again, by your definition, in the real world ... almost nothing is programmed correctly.
And I imagine that Gamespy is far more than a single server. The server side is probably at least a rack of servers, with databases and who knows what else. And it's owned by a totally different company than EA, a company that wants to shut it down (probably because it doesn't make them any money) so it's not just a matter of "migrating a server".
Companies often spend weeks planning migrations of their services, and of
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almost nothing of any value is programmed correctly
Wish I had mod points today. Best comment I've read in a while
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Sim City got the "offline" treatment (thanks to a huge backlash and insanely poor sales), but you can be sure the servers would have gotten retired within a few months of "Sim City 2015" being released.
The problem is any time "Revenue Stream" is mentioned in a corporate board room, the immediate reply is "do it and shove it down our customer's throats".
For EA, that revenue stream is in the form of yearly editions of games with few new, compelling features, other than a new price tag and servers that remain
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Some games, like NWN/NWN2 or older C&C versions were bought before the companies were bought out by EA.
I wish EA would go private like Dell, so it wasn't beholden to the lash of next quarter's earnings to shareholders. Then, it could do some cool stuff with all the IP it is sitting on.
Wing Commander re-releases, done as the Origin-style "interactive movies", using a full studio come to mind. Or single player games that when you finished them and put in a code, you got sent a T-shirt or a plaque, and t