Wednesday, October 21

Zipper: Dedicated Servers are beneficial, helps resolve peer-to-peer issues


While Infinity Ward is abandoning dedicated servers, the guys and gals over at Zipper who are developing the biggest war game to ever grace any gaming console, decided that there are too many benefits to not use them.

Because of Infinity Ward's decision, PC gamers have launched a petition that over 100,000 people have signed. And although the studio gave a response, it seems there's no turn of heart from Robert and the gang. Should they change their minds and stick with the servers? Certainly you can't just give millions of PC owners your back.

Zipper interactive sees it differently, and speaking to DigitalFoundry, Zipper said it does a whole lot more good than bad to use dedicated servers.

"Having dedicated servers actually provides benefits that extends beyond just managing network bandwidth issues, it resolves some of the more difficult peer-to-peer issues such as host migration," says Zipper's Jason Tartaglia. "This is a situation where the client who is primarily responsible for simulating a game suddenly quits and becomes disconnected. By hosting a game on a server, the quality of games is no longer determined by a randomly chosen host in a peer-to-peer solution.

"Additionally, we are able to provide advanced methods of cheat prevention by providing validation of player inputs and movement within the game world and by recoding entire game sessions for later review and analysis."

Makes a lot of sense to me, to you?

10/21/09 Ernice Gilbert

6 comments:

  1. what Infinity is doing is not right! I say stick to dedicated servers or I'm not buying this game!

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  2. ya dedicated servers on the ps3 on other games have been quality with no lag - fck infinty ward - greed fatcats - just trying to save on money so they can eat more of it.

    GD job Zipper and sony.

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  3. I'm curious if Activision will close the MW1 servers. If not people will keep playing that game and less will migrate to MW2, if so I'll just keep on playing on Killzone's dedicated servers untill MAG releases. I think the world can do without MW2, PC guys have a lot of shooters to play and a lot of 360 users recently re-bought the Halo 3 multiplayer.

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  4. No dedicated servers = no buy

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  5. First thing I am going to say right off the bat is I am a console gamer: only have Gears 1 on PC, and I have barely played it. Also, I DO NOT work at Infinity Ward (even though I really want to), so this is not an official statement, it is just what I think is happening. Finally, yes, I do know that without dedicated servers, PC gamers won't know how good the connection is when they try to play online, and yes, I sometimes really hate when I lose my console connection to a game of MW team deathmatch, but sometimes there have to be compromises: in this case, you give up dedicated servers on launch day for a launch day of November 10.

    Now that you know what to expect, I think that they are having enough trouble already at IW trying to develop one of the most anticapted games of all-time, so I think that they found the fastest working solution, and chose to stick with it until they finish working on the game. In fact, I think that they will start working on getting dedicated servers up and running immediately after the game launches if they start getting a lot of complaints about the new servers from the people playing online. Either way, they have too much work to do now in order to drop everything for a couple of servers, and in the end, I think that they will do whatever their community at large likes the most. I personally see this giant protest against the lack of dedicated servers in MW2 in the same light as I see the people who are boycotting L4D2 because they think that there are not going to be any more updates for L4D1 after the new game comes out.

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  6. @Anonymous - You're well on your way to becoming a corporate schill, so maybe your dream of working for Infinity Ward will come true. In fact, I'm sure they are reading this post right now, and are in desperate need of your assistance in explaining this horribly complicated situation to the slack jawed masses of MW fans.

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