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> act like "dude just get more servers" is the answer. The biggest problem here is that it largely used to be a distributed system. You used to just be able ru

> act like "dude just get more servers" is the answer. The biggest problem here is that it largely used to be a distributed system. You used to just be able run your own dedicated server on whatever provider you liked. The dev would just run a single server list. Now many game developers have decided they're the only ones who get to run servers - primarily because they can charge more for micro transactions and private servers this way as far as I can tell. It really hurts games - PUBG is the best example I've seen - constant lag issues, complete lack of server side checks for things like shooting through the ground (because hey, that costs CPU and every additional cloud server they need means less profit), etc. It's basically made the game unplayable. Game developers are unfortunately stuck between immersion in their games and the rage that leaves players with when technical issues occur. The more immersed your players are, the more rage they'll experience when your game crashes or lags at the wrong time.

TheCapn 9y ago
>primarily because they can charge more for micro transactions and private servers this way as far as I can tell. I believe its more about standardizing the user experience. Now that enough games have dedicated servers with a standard expectation of latency your game looks poor if your user experience is beholden to community servers with selfish moderation and varying stability. The added benefit of centralized server hosting and control is exactly what you point out though.
- SiempreViernes 9y ago
  No: standardisation is easily enforced by just having two server lists, one for normal/central hosting and one for custom games where any host can register. At most you might want additionally give the user the ability to blacklist servers for themselves, and that's it. The reason for banning community servers is probably mostly for combating piracy; by eliminating the ability to run on a LAN the game must always call home to be played.
chipperyman573 9y ago
>primarily because they can charge more for micro transactions and private servers this way as far as I can tell. It also hurts the game's image if many servers spam players with "Donate $20/mo for the MASTER rank and get exclusive weapons that deal twice the damage of normal weapons!" I haven't played in a while but I remember playing Minecraft when I was still in school and servers were filled with this- many would let you donate hundreds for admin/OP/whatever, many would restrict core parts of the game to "donating" members (such as mining certain ores, going into certain areas, etc). Eventually it got so bad that Mojang actually had to step in and (vaguely) threaten to sue any server owner who does this - http://andrewtian.com/mojang-threatens-lawyers-against-pay-to-win-minecraft-server-operators http://andrewtian.com/mojang-threatens-lawyers-against-pay-t... Also, admins that can ban players for any reason, who are picked by the server owners (and not the devs), can result in backlash if someone influential is banned.
- pathseeker 9y ago
  >It also hurts the game's image if many servers spam players with "Donate $20/mo for the INVINCIBILITY rank!" That's a problem with the client design. Don't allow the server to send banners or any map tiles and that problem goes away.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Flammy 9y ago
    That isn't really a realistic solution if you also want to support the mod ecosystem (which IMO is much more valuable to a game's community than the potential downsides)
    - pathseeker 9y ago
      Ok, but the mod ecosystem is a separate discussion. And even if you do want the mod ecosystem, you can distribute mods as client add-ons so the mods can be evaluated independently of the host server.
ankjl 9y ago
I think that part of this trend may be tied to games, such as PUBG, becoming popular while still "under development". I imagine once a game has a stable server build it is much more practical to distribute that server to all of the community operators and have them update on a fixed / infrequent schedule. Whereas, while changes are still being constantly made to the server application, this would probably result in users only being able to connect to a small fraction of available community servers while waiting for the other servers to update.
zbentley 9y ago
Dedicated game servers are only part of the problem. The matchmaking/community-connecting servers were also implicated in the outages discussed in TFA. Community/matchmaking servers don't distribute ("run your own server") too well. If you only ever want to play with and against people you know, that's fine, but a lot of people don't want that: some want to play on randomized (or ranked, if the game supports it, across a large number of players; not just the ones in the potentially-altered rankings on a single person's server) teams. Others (more commonly) want to play against new and different teams. Unless your graph of social connections willing to agree to use a given server is big enough and the right shape, hosting your own matchmaking/community services just results in isolated islands without a vibrant overarching community. Put another way: the separate-server approach of e.g. TF2 works fine for some, but a lot (judging by play counts) of other folks prefer games with a centralized community. To be clear, I think it's fine to have the option of a separate community server. But if a game developer already has the centralized infrastructure, is making tons of money off of it, and spending tremendous resources keeping it intact (as Epic apparently is), it's a pretty tough sell to say "oh and you should also spend the resources to make a hosted option for this". "Take the complex thing designed for centralized, single-instance internal use with a team of support staff, put it in a box, and let users run it on their own hosts" is far from a simple proposition. I'm unsure if any companies doing centralized community servers/community federation also have a large portion of their actual game servers not hosted by the company; I'd love some examples of that phenomenon. The examples of Minecraft and TF2 come to mind as doing some subparts of that, but those games only have limited matchmaking capabilities.

TheCapn 9y ago

>primarily because they can charge more for micro transactions and private servers this way as far as I can tell. I believe its more about standardizing the user experience. Now that enough games have dedicated servers with a standard expectation of latency your game looks poor if your user experience is beholden to community servers with selfish moderation and varying stability. The added benefit of centralized server hosting and control is exactly what you point out though.

SiempreViernes 9y ago
No: standardisation is easily enforced by just having two server lists, one for normal/central hosting and one for custom games where any host can register. At most you might want additionally give the user the ability to blacklist servers for themselves, and that's it. The reason for banning community servers is probably mostly for combating piracy; by eliminating the ability to run on a LAN the game must always call home to be played.

chipperyman573 9y ago

>primarily because they can charge more for micro transactions and private servers this way as far as I can tell. It also hurts the game's image if many servers spam players with "Donate $20/mo for the MASTER rank and get exclusive weapons that deal twice the damage of normal weapons!" I haven't played in a while but I remember playing Minecraft when I was still in school and servers were filled with this- many would let you donate hundreds for admin/OP/whatever, many would restrict core parts of the game to "donating" members (such as mining certain ores, going into certain areas, etc). Eventually it got so bad that Mojang actually had to step in and (vaguely) threaten to sue any server owner who does this - http://andrewtian.com/mojang-threatens-lawyers-against-pay-to-win-minecraft-server-operators http://andrewtian.com/mojang-threatens-lawyers-against-pay-t... Also, admins that can ban players for any reason, who are picked by the server owners (and not the devs), can result in backlash if someone influential is banned.

pathseeker 9y ago
>It also hurts the game's image if many servers spam players with "Donate $20/mo for the INVINCIBILITY rank!" That's a problem with the client design. Don't allow the server to send banners or any map tiles and that problem goes away.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Flammy 9y ago
  That isn't really a realistic solution if you also want to support the mod ecosystem (which IMO is much more valuable to a game's community than the potential downsides)
  - pathseeker 9y ago
    Ok, but the mod ecosystem is a separate discussion. And even if you do want the mod ecosystem, you can distribute mods as client add-ons so the mods can be evaluated independently of the host server.

ankjl 9y ago

I think that part of this trend may be tied to games, such as PUBG, becoming popular while still "under development". I imagine once a game has a stable server build it is much more practical to distribute that server to all of the community operators and have them update on a fixed / infrequent schedule. Whereas, while changes are still being constantly made to the server application, this would probably result in users only being able to connect to a small fraction of available community servers while waiting for the other servers to update.

zbentley 9y ago

Dedicated game servers are only part of the problem. The matchmaking/community-connecting servers were also implicated in the outages discussed in TFA. Community/matchmaking servers don't distribute ("run your own server") too well. If you only ever want to play with and against people you know, that's fine, but a lot of people don't want that: some want to play on randomized (or ranked, if the game supports it, across a large number of players; not just the ones in the potentially-altered rankings on a single person's server) teams. Others (more commonly) want to play against new and different teams. Unless your graph of social connections willing to agree to use a given server is big enough and the right shape, hosting your own matchmaking/community services just results in isolated islands without a vibrant overarching community. Put another way: the separate-server approach of e.g. TF2 works fine for some, but a lot (judging by play counts) of other folks prefer games with a centralized community. To be clear, I think it's fine to have the option of a separate community server. But if a game developer already has the centralized infrastructure, is making tons of money off of it, and spending tremendous resources keeping it intact (as Epic apparently is), it's a pretty tough sell to say "oh and you should also spend the resources to make a hosted option for this". "Take the complex thing designed for centralized, single-instance internal use with a team of support staff, put it in a box, and let users run it on their own hosts" is far from a simple proposition. I'm unsure if any companies doing centralized community servers/community federation also have a large portion of their actual game servers not hosted by the company; I'd love some examples of that phenomenon. The examples of Minecraft and TF2 come to mind as doing some subparts of that, but those games only have limited matchmaking capabilities.