I kinda like how the Unreal Tournament 2004 situation resolved itself:
Epic pulled the game from sale on online stores, but you still keep it in your library.
After almost 20 years of continous operation, Epic shut down the master server last year, this should be a benchmark of a good deal when buying a multiplayer game, now shutting down the master servers didn’t mean online play stopped working, no, even before the shut off date, fans had a new fan made master server up and running and a quick config change in the ut2004.ini file is all that is required to get the experience back to how it worked on release.
I don’t know exactly how the fan server was implemented as I am not a developer, but I would assume that the team analyzed the calls between the master server and the client and built a server to respond like the real master server.
Also the master server doesn’t actually host any games it is just a simple server that collects and distributes a list of active servers, then the client checks in with every server listed and gets more information.
As for how this applies to the current situation, I thought it was obvious… ditch the whole central gameplay server concept, go back and host a master server and let other people set up their own servers to play on.
Then the resources needed for the server the publisher needs to maintain will be minimal and when they don’t want to run it further then the fans are able to build their own master server and let it run for as long as they want it.
Right. The problem is they never want this to be possible because there is mtx involved.
And presumably they don’t want anyone to get anywhere near being able to mess worth that shit.
Perhaps if they made their mtx code completely isolated from the rest, it might be possible, but that would be the first time I hear of a bigass company having a clear modular isolated codebase. Would be nice though.
I kinda like how the Unreal Tournament 2004 situation resolved itself:
Epic pulled the game from sale on online stores, but you still keep it in your library.
After almost 20 years of continous operation, Epic shut down the master server last year, this should be a benchmark of a good deal when buying a multiplayer game, now shutting down the master servers didn’t mean online play stopped working, no, even before the shut off date, fans had a new fan made master server up and running and a quick config change in the ut2004.ini file is all that is required to get the experience back to how it worked on release.
How was the fan-made server implemented? Would this apply to this current situation?
I don’t know exactly how the fan server was implemented as I am not a developer, but I would assume that the team analyzed the calls between the master server and the client and built a server to respond like the real master server.
Also the master server doesn’t actually host any games it is just a simple server that collects and distributes a list of active servers, then the client checks in with every server listed and gets more information.
As for how this applies to the current situation, I thought it was obvious… ditch the whole central gameplay server concept, go back and host a master server and let other people set up their own servers to play on.
Then the resources needed for the server the publisher needs to maintain will be minimal and when they don’t want to run it further then the fans are able to build their own master server and let it run for as long as they want it.
Right. The problem is they never want this to be possible because there is mtx involved.
And presumably they don’t want anyone to get anywhere near being able to mess worth that shit.
Perhaps if they made their mtx code completely isolated from the rest, it might be possible, but that would be the first time I hear of a bigass company having a clear modular isolated codebase. Would be nice though.
MTX?
Monetary transactions