2 replies to this topic

[Nesutizale]

Since PGI said that MWO has a problem of financeing itsself and the recent drop in players and it comming up in another topic, I had an idea.

Servers, maintainig them cost money and time. With private servers you could to some extande shift those costs to the players who set this servers up.
On the other hand private servers could have set rules for different kind of player groups. For example you could have FP only servers or servers with only a specific map or mode rotation.
I think we all know how this is from other games like Counterstrike, Call of duty or Battlefield.

Servers of this kind could espacialy be interesting for groups that do a more roleplaying approach or want to do a scenario approach.
Also people who just want to play a certain mode could just look for the server of their choice or open up their own.

Add to that a map builder for the community to use and we would surely see a spike in new maps.
I think that could bring back a lot of people and reduce the costs on PGIs side, turing MWO again into something more profitiable?


Now there are some concerns.
Cheatprotection, setting up of rules for what a server can do and what not and "to many bu..servers".

Cheating
Not just cheating like aimbots but people setting up servers to farm ingame money, XP or whatever. I think it would be hard to protect against that kind of behavior as its not changeing of code or something but just onesided battles.
Easy way would be that you can't earn money, XP, etc. on private servers or that there can't be closed servers. I am not certain how to prevent such behavior.

Rules
Rules in the sense that you have to agree to terms of service like that your private server can't sell MC or any other stuff that PGI makes money off. That should be logical but I bet that someone would try that. So there would be a need to protect against that.

To many buckets
Not quite sure if that would realy be a problem when you have a good server browser. I mean if I see that there is no one on a certain server then there isn't much reason to join it. The bucket problem might solve itself that way.

What I see more of a problem is how the matchmaker could work with that. Sure when I see a server that has, lets say, 200 people on it then I can aspect to have some form of matchmaking working. When there are just 23 people then I know that the matchmaker will not have much choice of how to make the teams.
On the other hand neither do I know with CS, COD or Battlefield and it still kinda works.
What would be pretty cool and something I think I haven't seen anywhere else is if you could have the option to see how many people of what skill level are on the server. Has the problem that this could lead to T1 looking for some seal clubbing but I hope that would be such a small number of people that it wouldn't be a problem.


Overall I think that private servers, a mapeditor and a server browser in the launcher would help MWO to regain some footing and bring back players while reduceing the costs.

What are your thoughts?

[Prototelis]

It won't work, or it would be expensive. The game pretty much requires a centralized server, and it wouldn't exactly be easily reversed.

Either way, it would cost money and/or a possible renegotiation of their license for this game. It isn't happening.

[Monkey Lover]

If we were allowed private servers I would take it and make my own game I would mod the maps, roll back most the balance changes and it would party like 1999!