🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:52:00 -0400, David Lamb <dalamb@cs.queensu.ca>
wrote:

>On 18/03/2012 12:48 PM, Rin Stowleigh wrote:
>> On Sun, 18 Mar 2012 09:10:25 -0400, David Lamb<dalamb@cs.queensu.ca>
>> wrote:
>>> On 17/03/2012 8:00 PM, Rin Stowleigh wrote:
>>>> On Sat, 17 Mar 2012 16:41:45 -0700, John Slade<hhitman86@pacbell.net>
>>>>>        What everyone seems to want to do is be the next WOW. Well
>>>>> WOW already has that market and anyone else trying to get into
>>>>> it will probably fail.
>>>
>>> Not relevant to Skyrim, but: wouldn't a change of genre, e.g. to science
>>> fiction, make a difference?
>>
>> There was a lot of speculation this big MMO project might be a Fallout
>> series world instead.  Personally I wish it was.  But a setting that I
>> prefer does not necessarily mean it would be a better or more
>> successful game.  I played some "wasteland" themed MMORPG about 5
>> years or so ago, and it was so horrible that I can't even remember the
>> name of it [side note, I noticed that Wasteland 2 is in development...
>> maybe I'll post a second thread for that one]
>>
>> Its been known for a while that they've been staffing up in areas that
>> made it clear MMO was one direction the company was headed.  During
>> the hiring process you can only prevent word of mouth to a limited
>> degree.  What nobody knew before now was whether it would be an Elder
>> Scrolls type game, a Fallout game, something else, etc.  Looks like
>> the recent success of Skyrim might have helped them make up their
>> minds.
>>
>>>> ...Now his server shows up in the server list, but when people join they get
>>>> client mismatch errors.
>>>
>>> Can't the server list include the server version?
>>
>> Well it could, and games have used this to varying degrees of failure
>> in the past.  ... What ends up happing is people just set
>> their filters to exclude hits for non matching versions, then there is
>> no motive to go back and clear the filter once in a while.  This means
>> they end up playing on Admin Joe's server forever, and forming all of
>> their opinions of the game based on the way it plays on his server.
>
>Hmm.  I'm a programming geek so keep trying to think of technical 
>solutions, even to things that are basically social problems.  The 
>filter issue for selecting versions could be partly automated, if I 
>understand the problem correctly, by only showing you servers compatible 
>with your current client, and if you were considering upgrading your 
>client for some reason, only then would you have to consider a larger 
>list of what servers (and version numbers) were out there.

As a software developer myself, I too like to think up technical
solutions to problems, however after being in this industry for a very
long time I sometimes become aware of the difference between tech
solutions to tech problems vs. tech solutions to people problems.
There are lots of technical possibiliies for solving version problems,
but from a human factors standpoint, a game will typically be more
successful with any solution that's as close to "Update available,
click here to download now".  Or better yet, one step further and do
what Steam does "we updated that for ya while you slept buddy", and
this of course implies keeping everyone on the same client and server
version.  

But, in keeping with the scenarios posted so far, the filter issues
I've imagined would still exist in context of the Admin Joe scenario,
because in this case if a player has been playing on Joe's server, and
the filter is set to show current version only, the player might never
see the other servers available, as Joe might be the last remaining
server running v1.0.  Then player gets on forums or usenet and says
"multiplayer seems to be dying out in this game" because he's unaware
of how many possibilities he has isolated himself from simply due to
stagnant filter settings.  

Plus, while it is unfortunate, we live in a world of
console-induced-lowest-common-denominator, and I doubt console players
would be able to grok or tolerate server browsers and versioning, so
unlikely it would be feasible to support it just for PC.

>>
>>>> The game is not going to be fun if a clan can set up cheat-capable servers
>>>> for their people to level up, then folks with ungodly powers can go to
>>>> any other server and abuse (or just have the upper hand on) the
>>>> mainstream crowd.
>>>
>>> Disallow character transfer between servers?
>>
>> ...that is catastrophic, because most people want to
>> develop their character, meaning that even if you don't have the
>> server/client mismatch problem I described above, you have a bigger
>> problem in the sense that when Admin Joe ...  server goes down and the
>> character you worked for months on is gone forever.
>>
>> There are of course ways around every problem.  ...  There was ranked mode and player
>> mode, dedicated servers and non dedicated servers.
>
>Some kind of 2-level thing like that might wind up being acceptable. Was 
>there a reliable way to tell which servers hadn't been modified?

In Far Cry 2?  You chose Ranked versus Player mode as a top-most menu
item.  It was not a server browser setting, it was a menu choice made
right off the bat (think of choosing New Game vs Continue Game from
the top level menu of a SP title and you get the idea).  The ranked
matches were not even displayed in the same browser as the player
ones.

But, to clarify, Far Cry2 did not really have modded servers, per se.
You could have dedicated or non-dedicated (actively hosted).  With any
two-core system or better, it was easy to host while playing without
game performance impact (CPU usage of server is very light).  In
FarCry2 the non-dedicated servers were often better, because it
guaranteed there was an admin present to do things like rotate the map
if folks didn't like the current one.

The difference between Ranked and Player mode, aside from persistent
stats, was that in player mode you could upload and download community
made maps.  It came with the most incredible map making application
I've ever seen in a game, only creativity required... it was about as
damn easy as playing Minecraft to make gorgeous interesting maps, so a
lot of folks did.  But, most of these maps would not be available in
Ranked mode.  There were some custom maps that graduated to "Ranked
Mode Approved" status, which means they could be played as ranked
servers.  The reason they didn't want custom maps in Ranked mode is
because people could be a tool and create maps that had all sorts of
hidden advantages that only the creator knew about, then he could go
in and exploit to the dismay of others.  The whole system was really
brilliantly effective in so many ways.