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John Carmack Says No Dedicated Servers For Rage

Posted by Soulskill on from the will-you-rage-over-rage dept.

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.'"

7 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Simply about piracy by assemblerex · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Simply about piracy by Kaboom13 · · 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?

  2. Re:A remnant? by VGPowerlord · · Score: 5, Informative

    Since you didn't say which company, I'll point out that you're referring to Valve's Steam Stats 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.

    --
    GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
  3. Re:Glad to see he's not charging forward by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  4. Not everyone can host a game via p2p by Mistakill · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

  5. Doesn't really matter by Toonol · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  6. Re:A remnant? by lga · · Score: 3, Informative

    I run a Half Life 2: Deathmatch server. Looking at the Steam stats, only 2,100 people have played it today. If I look at my stats site, 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.

    --
    A latent existence