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Longetivity of Online PC Games
Masqued Man
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Registered User regular
The recent announcement that StarCraft 2 won't have LAN, and thus cannot be tunneled independently of a master server reminded me of this issue.
With consoles, online multiplayer is usually managed through proprietary software, which is almost always exclusively under corporate control. When the servers for a console game are taken down, usually said game is unplayable from that point on, as the software had not been released to the public.
In my little experience with PC gaming, I've found it's usually the other way around. Quake 1-3, for example, have address books, and the games have dedicated server software built in, so you can host games, and have people join, without a master server, and will be able to do this as long as the Internet is up. For a while, I had thought this to be a standard practice in PC gaming, because of just how many games I had were like that, but recently, I found that developers often won't release the server code for their PC games after taking them online, so it is up to private coders to reverse engineer server software.
How common is it for PC games to have server scanners made for them, or to have master lists reverse engineered? Is there some database of PC games that have server software available to the public?
With consoles, online multiplayer is usually managed through proprietary software, which is almost always exclusively under corporate control. When the servers for a console game are taken down, usually said game is unplayable from that point on, as the software had not been released to the public.
In my little experience with PC gaming, I've found it's usually the other way around. Quake 1-3, for example, have address books, and the games have dedicated server software built in, so you can host games, and have people join, without a master server, and will be able to do this as long as the Internet is up. For a while, I had thought this to be a standard practice in PC gaming, because of just how many games I had were like that, but recently, I found that developers often won't release the server code for their PC games after taking them online, so it is up to private coders to reverse engineer server software.
How common is it for PC games to have server scanners made for them, or to have master lists reverse engineered? Is there some database of PC games that have server software available to the public?
Masqued Man on
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In fact, none of the Xbox Live games have even gone offline yet - except for certain EA titles. Except EA also turned off the PC version's master lists for those games.
TRIBES, Quake, etc all allowed you to point the game in a different direction when fans put up new master servers after the official servers went down; they weren't "reverse engineered".
Games that didn't have that ability or had the servers hardcoded in the game and not in an .ini pretty much just up and died.
Actually TRIBES 2 I suppose could be considered thus, what with the patch to play it free and all that jazz but I'm pretty sure they had to get explicit permission to do so and iirc had some help from folks at Garage Games.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Can't google them because this thread shows up as the first result.
Probably a bigger problem I'm seeing, especially with consoles, is that with the huge number of games with online playability, player bases drop off significantly after a few short months. Want to play pretty much anything on the Xbox online? TOO BAD.
PCs, well I haven't really seen this problem at all. Maybe there are less quality games with online capabilities available, so the playerbase is clustered around a few very good ones.
As for the OP, I share the concern. GTR2... something happened with 10tacle studios, or SimBIN, or someone... for a few weeks the centrel server list went down due to the parent host going bankrupt, which made for a rough week with our league. We still had the ability to host a private game through one of the guys' servers but couldn't even get it up on the server list. Just as big a problem IMO.
Not giving any sort of host code kinda sucks though.
PSN - sumowot
The only console game off the top of my head that needs unavailable server software is PSO and that has been reverse engineered.
As for PC stuff what recent games use a master server list? I thought most games these days had an address book option at least.
Most FPS are map and server based, without any sort of GUI or lobby. You can even just open the console and type in an IP to join a server. However, you need a dedicated machine to host a server, and the larger the player count the more powerful the machine and connection is needed. Except for 2 people in the same area connecting to each other directly via IPs, everything is done through dedicated servers which DO cost money to upkeep. There are many hosting sites that you can pay to run servers for you, and for older games like Quake 1-3, and Half-Life DM, these servers are usually supported by donations from the community.
Real time strategy games are usually run through the developer's own hosting network, like battle.net, which keeps track of stats and makes match making easier, but that still costs. They're often ad supported if the game keeps going. I'm not as sure about that because I only play Blizzard RTS games online.
Until a couple years ago, All-Seeing Eye was the most user friendly way to keep track of community servers for pretty much every PC game going, but it's been shut down.
The standard response by a community that loses its server support would probably be IRC + hamachi or a service like Garena, if there wasn't already a built in way to connect or find servers.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromehounds#Scheduled_Server_Closure
I remember the day the MGS3 servers went down, up to that point there was perhaps 20-30 regulars who you would always see when you jumped into a server, and it felt really unfair that the servers were axed just because Konami said so. If they had let us maintain our own servers, or at least released the server code it would have been so much better.
Yup - this whole discussion is just begging for a DRM talk. You pay for X product and everything that comes with it at time of purchase, so how long can we reasonably expect that to last? If online suddenly stops working, be it two, five, or 10 years down the road, should we expect that? How long should we expect a company to pump money into maintaining a server for (in this case) a 100 playerbase game? If they don't provide an option to host our own servers, do we have any right to assume online play should work indefinitely?
PSN - sumowot
Chromehounds isn't the first Live game to have its servers shut down.
As mentioned earlier EA regularly shuts down servers and aside from that I know off the top of my head that PSO had their servers shut down long ago on Live and everywhere else.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
The reason Chromehounds is getting shut down is because it's online mode is a persistent world, MMO style. Sega probably doesn't have the money to keep it running.
The only one I can name off the top of my head is Freelancer, and it was a Microsoft-published game, even.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
PC gaming is doomed, blah blah blah, Derek Smart to buy Microsoft in 5 years, etc.
Why does PC gaming enjoy longer running and larger fanbases for the most games, even when sales are lower?
My initial hypothesis would be that the ability to have multiple games "in the drive" so to speak on a PC allows people to keep buying new games while still playing their older ones. With a console, you can play your older ones, but the odds of you slotting in CoD4 drop precipitously when you have another game already in the drive that you might also want to play.
It would've killed you to read even the first four sentences of the OP, let alone any of the rest of the thread, right?
There are certainly some disparaging comments to be made about console gamers here, but I'll leave those to someone else and say that it seems to be a chicken-and-egg problem. When the community starts feeling empty, people leave. And when people leave, the community starts feeling empty.
I did read the thread, I only posted that because some fuckwit always eventually comes in these threads and talks about how PC gaming is dying, consoles are the only way to play games, etc. I went ahead and got that stupid bullshit out of the way.
You know, this is interesting, since some games have larger fan bases for the older games than they do for the current ones, Unreal Tournament is an example, where Ut99 has 843 players, which was against UT3's 600 something players at some point. Now, UT3 has grown thanks to the booster pack, but it was really amazing how the 9 year old game was doing better than the new one
Can't say it really surprised me. Aside from the really low system specs on UT (don't even need a graphics card, a decent processor will run it), I felt Epic really made some poor decisions with UT3.
I'll agree that it's cool that some multiplayer communities stick around for ages. Those niche communities though tend to split into two varieties, at least in my experience. First is the ultra-hardcore, ultra-bitter communities who despise outsiders and often lament the fact that nobody new plays the game (whilst actively discouraging anyone new from playing through constant fuming nerd-rage at people who don't know everything off the bat). The other type tends to be quite hardcore as well, but they're very welcoming of new guys because hey, the more the merrier, and they'll actively take time to show you the ropes and often times you'll get guys just helping you out during your early games.
I think whether a community shrinks to one or the other often depends on how "competitive" the game actually is. Team based games and more open ended games tend to have more accepting communities, at least from what I've seen.
The orignal games tend to garner a large following early on and various people think that way is "best". Often they divide into camps for various games but that's really beside the point for the most part.
But then when a sequel comes out and changes a few things, everyone blasts it saying "zomg, 1 was way better for all these reasons", when the fact isn't that 1 was better, but it's what is familiar and any change to a formula in a game you've been playing forever won't necessarily seem like a change for the better, whereas if your're a new player a game like UT3 is hands down better than UT, though it deviates from that original style.
The perfect example of this is TRIBES -> TRIBES2 and what happened to the fanbase when it came out. It was destroyed. And in hindsight TRIBES2 wasn't a bad game (after patches anyway), it just wasn't TRIBES and that made it not as fun to many many people (myself included).
On the other hand you have developers that will release a sequel to a game and change literally nothing but the graphics and communities tend to migrate to the new game relatively well. However what was accomplished? Nothing new was made or tried, the game just got an engine upgrade.
There's something to be said for both approaches I suppose but to me it's pretty lame to buy a sequel to a game and have it be by the book identical to the predecessor. But on the other hand I've been bit in the ass for buying a sequel to a game I loved and having it deviate too much from the formula (Heroes IV anyone?).
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
I mean I know people who played XvT 5 to 6 years after it came out. Hell look at Korea, Starcraft is still pretty much a national sport still. And that game came out when I was still in high school, at least 12 years ago. I don't see computer gaming as dieing, I think it just has reached it's maturity as a niche group. Since unlike consoles one has to keep upgrading and working on your system where a console is good till the next generation. The DLC on consoles is cool, it is still a shadow of what the pc gaming communities put out. And I haven't even mentioned NWN.
You just did. :P
As someone that prefers UT99 to all the subsequent UTs, the sequels changing too much is exactly what happened there for a lot of people. It's not that UT2k4 or UT3 just aren't familiar. They feel entirely different. While UT99 isn't a slow paced game, it feels meaty and the weapons powerful whereas the subsequent games feel significantly faster and more floaty with weak weapons with even weaker sounds. They feel more like Quake than UT99 did.
UT99 isn't objectively better or worse than its sequels, but it is definitely different.
A better example would have been something like Counter-Strike: Source.
I think this is helped simply by the platform natively having easy access to forums. It's easy to open Internet Explorer, search for a fansite for a game you like, and go to the message board. The 360 doesn't, as far as I know, have a browser, and the PS3 browser is definitely not that great. This allows PC players to easily find a community to fall into who play and enjoy the game they do.
Hell, that's how I got hooked on CS: S, Guild Wars and Dystopia. hell, I even joined the Dystopia test team. I haven't found that level of community in any console game I've played, multiplayer or otherwise.
It's more incentive than any amount of unlockable guns or achievements will ever be.
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If only 20 people in the world want to play a particular niche game/mod at any given time, and there's say 8 servers hosted, everyone is going to congregate in the one or two that has other people playing. It's like your favourite bar, you can just drop in on any given night without organising anything and meet someone you know.
Now match-making to me is very interesting, back in the earlier days of the 360 and oxbox I pined for dedicated servers and a browser (with a numeric ping for gods sake). However the match making systems in call of duty 4 and halo 3 impress me with their elegance. It's extremely easy to get a game and completely removes the hassle of trying to get yourself and a few buddies into the same server and on the same team.
The one problem with match-making is lack of transparency. When gears 2 sits spinning it's cogs for 10 minutes you don't know why in the hell it isn't finding you a match.
The difference in strength of gaming communities between PC games and xbox games stems from everybody's favorite PC vs Xbox argument: Dedicated servers.
The reason why I (and many other people) can continue to play, say Counter-Strike: Source, for many years is because we find a server where I can expect to see many of the players on it night after night, such that you can actually develop a lasting "relationship" with these players.
When you have a server that you can call home, and friends (I use the term loosely) to play with, then you will naturally feel a connection to the game, the players, and ultimately, the community.
Hell, I even still play with some of the people I played with way back in the early Counter-Strike betas.
Now don't get me wrong, peer to peer connections are great because you get to mix it up and play with fresh people every round, but it creates an emotional disconnect. . . you just feel like one of many in an infinite sea of xXDeathxXxSephiroth97Xx's. Unfortunately, the friends list just isn't enough to maintain a community in as an effective way as having a dedicated server to call home.
edit: Yes, I agree that particularly strong match-making solutions, like those in CoD4 and Halo 3 make long strides in increasing the effectiveness of the friends list. I think that maybe if the friends list allowed for creating groups much like those that can be made in Steam, then the friends list solution would be much more viable in keeping a community going. The current meta-gamertag solution that we've hacked together for playing games like Street Fighter 4 just requires too much work in my opinion.
edit 2: electric bugaloo: I'm admittedly not talking about the PSN because I don't use PSN often enough to form an educated opinion about.
I'll have to disagree... the Halo community here has stuck around for the past 5 years here with only the Live friends list for constant communication.
I wonder if most online gaming is done in groups that remain reasonably static. I mean, I know that while I occasionally partnered up with fellow PAers for Call of Duty 4, I actually spent the majority of my time hopping around game modes and trading the controller with my roommates. That lasted for about a year and a half. Maybe it takes an organized out-of-game community of sufficient size to keep games going into another generation, though.
I tend to agree with this. Outside of the really huge multiplayer games, it becomes very hard to maintain a community. The games just die, for some reason niche and smaller communities seem to survive a lot better on the PC. I'm not really sure why, I think it's really just a confluence of all the different stuff people have already already mentioned.
It varies, I still play Quake World (aka Quake 1 online) and it's not hard to find a game. The core people still playing, hasn't changed all that much, though there is an influx of new players whenever there is a tournament. If you can track down the right IRC channels, it's fairly active, and those aren't that hard to find if you are familiar with good competitive gaming sites or the quake community.
I think the biggest problem to online gaming communities is the dreaded sequel. I loved UT99, but UT2003, while good, didn't feel the same at all. So a lot of people just kept playing UT99 and community split in half. UT2004 was close to UT2003 + vehicles... which ruined it. Now you had the community split between UT and Battlefeild UT. UT3, good game, but changed things again so some didn't like it, and still kept the vehicles vs pure FPS split. The franchise just ate itself alive.
I think the problem we're debating is that the console game communities die before any kind of cannibalism can occur. It seems to me that the console communities (barring exceptions like halo and call of duty) just die when the next big AAA game (regardless of the genre) comes out. Whereas the comparative pc communities only die off when the next big genre-defining title comes out. . . Well, games like doom, quake, and starcraft seem to prove that PC games never really die.
umm yeah, I lost my train of thought and most of that is probably gibberish, but anyway some of that must be food for discussion. . .
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/09/08/battlezone-ii-its-alive-er-still
On the PSN, it's a little like the PC way of playing games, with server browsers, dedicated servers, and such. In Warhawk or Resistance, you can jump into games based on who's hosting them, and sometimes find the same people there, just as you can on most PC games
Playing Quake will not make you good at CS, playing CS will not make you good at Quake. Playing UT will not make you good at TF, playing TF will not make you good at HLDM. Playing HLDM will not make you good at Tribes. You have to learn a completely new game if you want to move on, so it's just easier to stay where you are.
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