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Post by trog @ 10:57am 07/01/10 | 26 Comments
 There's a lot of speculation about why they're doing this - is it just to 'encourage' people to upgrade? Kill the second hand market for these games? As the services are closed it's hard to accurately gauge how many people are using them. I have read that they do state on the box that the game is only supported online for a year after purchase, so in their defence, it's not like they didn't make it clear about what was going to happen (in fact in many cases some of these games have been online more than a year). One thing is for sure though - it show another clear advantage of the dedicated server model. Games like Quake - which you played way back when it was released in 1996 - are still playable today, often with vastly improved, community-provided services and features. 
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Posted 11:05am 07/1/10
Is this an authentication server thing, or is it straightforward for anybody to replace these servers if they wanted to?
Posted 11:12am 07/1/10
Posted 11:15am 07/1/10
Posted 11:51am 07/1/10
Posted 11:57am 07/1/10
Posted 12:05pm 07/1/10
I'm sure most remember the joys that went on with BnetD (or whatever the 'homebrew' BattleNet client was called)..
Posted 12:15pm 07/1/10
Posted 12:20pm 07/1/10
Posted 12:25pm 07/1/10
because in Australia at least, if someone sells something, regardless of the warranty period etc set forth by the producer
there is an expectation that the product should work for a "Reasonable amount of time"
ie if you buy a chair and it breaks in 13 months, they can't say it's out of warranty
you can argue that it didn't work for a reasonable amount of time ..
Posted 12:59pm 07/1/10
just not online.
Posted 01:27pm 07/1/10
Sierra shut down the Tribes 2 master and authentication server years ago; some of the community members actually wrote a master server (for both T1 and T2) with a login server (that works) and the game's still going because of it.
I don't think VU Games (Sierra) care about that though ("whats tribes?!"), but its interesting to know its possible when the community is determined enough.
Posted 01:35pm 07/1/10
E..A.. Sports
If the game is old, we'll shut you down.
Posted 01:43pm 07/1/10
Posted 02:22pm 07/1/10
They haven't really deceived the consumer so its up to the market to decide if this level of game support is acceptable or not. Hopefully this sort of thing will eventually wear away at the monolith.
last edited by Hogfather at 14:22:07 07/Jan/10
Posted 02:19pm 07/1/10
That would be like MS saying they only support windows for a year and then disabling internet access after that, support to me means help, assistance etc and not connectivity.
What happens when you want to install an older game and they just decide to close the auth servers?
Posted 02:20pm 07/1/10
Posted 02:24pm 07/1/10
Posted 02:26pm 07/1/10
Yup.
Or from companies with an epic support commitment like Blizzard - you can still play Diablo I on BNet!
Posted 03:12pm 07/1/10
An interesting story: For Tribes 1 at least, its master server was supposed to be shutdown 3 months before it ended up shutting down.
They couldn't find it (haha) and it was running the masters for T1/T2 on a machine that no one maintained. I really dont buy that it costs a lot of money/resources to maintain these things (rubbish). I think that for games like BF2 that have stats, it may be more work, but for regular games that just have a master list or something, its pretty much 'set and forget'.
Also for those interested, here's a pretty cool insight into the demise of the Tribes franchise from the people that worked on the game and marketed it.
http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=457247
Marweas ("marketing weasel" - cool dude) and other tribes devs/PR people explain what went wrong from the higher ups who control the money and how come Tribes: Vengeance failed at launch.
Basically higher ups were like "just publish it, we're competing against WoW and HL2!" and they didn't even know what Tribes was.
Really worth reading if you want to find out how much bureaucratic crap goes on in some of the big game dev companies (VU Games/Sierra).
Posted 03:19pm 07/1/10
Posted 03:26pm 07/1/10
Posted 03:29pm 07/1/10
Impressive. I had to look it up - Diablo is just over 13 years old!
Posted 03:36pm 07/1/10
http://www.instantaction.com/
Looks either american or peer to peer, so latencies are horrible tho.
Posted 03:47pm 07/1/10
To be fair, Valve aren't the only ones running dedicated servers for TF2 so it's apples and oranges. Having said that though, they did have their own money grab by releasing L4D2 so soon after L4D.
But at the end of the day: shutting down online play for a game only released around 12-18 months ago? I'd be pissed.
Posted 03:50pm 07/1/10
http://www.tribesnext.com/
Posted 03:56pm 07/1/10