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Dedicated Halo 2 Fans Keep Multiplayer Alive
On April 15th, Microsoft terminated Xbox Live support for the original Xbox console, marking the end of online multiplayer for many older games. However, a group of Halo 2 players have refused to give up online play by leaving their consoles on and connected since then. Overheating consoles and dropped connections have taken their toll, but at present, 13 players are still going strong.
You mean you couldn't care less. Sorry, grammar nazi mode from all those Xbox's.
Please investigate the situations of individual titles before suggesting blanket solutions.
Halo 2 is being end-of-lifed in no small part because it relies on an outmoded Xbox 1 Live server ecosystem. This has limited the Xbox 360 to a specific number of friends on their friends list, older types of interactions with people online, etc. There are a lot of people asking for upgrades to the Xbox that have been blocked for this one particular game, which Microsoft has kept alive for 4 years after the original console (that didn't sell that well anyway) went away.
All of this relies upon Xbox Live. The game expects friend requests, chat requests, server pings, score update connections, DLC purchases, etc. All of these things are signed and protected to prevent A: online cheating, B: griefers, C: penis spam. Further, they have legal commitments to their partners to keep Xbox Live a secure system. This doesn't apply to most individual PC titles, as they are essentially standalone.
For Microsoft to release official software that allowed people to play Xbox 1 games like Halo 2 online, they'd have to release large chunks of Xbox Live. Then they'd need to do things like strip out any dedicated IP's, Oracle database calls, other copyrighted code, etc that might be floating around in there. What would people get? An impenetrable mess that, at best, would still require a fake NAT and a server farm to work.
Halo 2 fans, currently by comparison, can use SSH tunneling to create a fake LAN, and enjoy the game that way. This is a much more sane solution.
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