On Multiplay and Servers

[Cal97g]

Dear paradox, whilst I have read you FAQ where you state:

Will I be able to host my own server?

"We know for sure that we will have dedicated server support. We’ll announce more concerning server options and hosting as we get closer and closer to launch." Source

I urge you to allow the community to host there own servers, for those with technical experience we will be able to bring more servers to the game at a lower cost to ourselves, meaning a wider variety of servers which in turn would mean a better experience for your players.

As it is, multiplay are wanting to charge me £24 pounds a month for a 16 player server which is branded with multiplay, If I wanted to remove multiplay I would have to pay an extra £3 a month.

Of course this is just multiplay, and I imagine you wont be hosting exclusively with them..

And for anybody looking for servers I would firmly recommend not purchasing one from them as they are extremely expensive, cheaper options will probably appear after launch.

[gdelavald]

Just to add to the discussion, my clan has some dedicated machines on Nuclear Fallout and we'd love to be able to host some servers of WotR, but as of now the only option of hosting seems to be Multiplay. Will it change? Will we be able to host on NFO?

Thanks.

[Robin.]

From our guys at multiplay

Hey guys! Will from Multiplay here, just wanted to explain a few bits for you.

Currently we're dealing with a new engine that has had most of the optimization done on the client side. This means that currently the server has a higher CPU usage than other games in the market which have been released for some time.
This is our initial pre-order price for how the dedicated server stands right now, but as the requirements fall we will of course be dropping our prices in line with the optimizations.

With War of the Roses, there's a lot going on at any given time to ensure that the hit-detection is the best possible for the combat.

We've been operating now for many years and have great hardware and network setups ready to give you guys the best experience possible on this amazing new title, just be aware that not every game's dedicated server uses the same resources.

[Encadi]

Any chance for privately hosted servers Robin?

[Blaine500]

As it currently stands, that is ridiculously expensive and I hope Multiplay can do something about that before release. This is the problem with exclusivity (which apparently is the case if I'm not mistaken), there is not enough competition to drive down prices. I could in theory purchase a dedicated server that would hold 128 players or more for cheaper than what they provide - if it was possible.

[Cal97g]

As it currently stands, that is ridiculously expensive and I hope Multiplay can do something about that before release. This is the problem with exclusivity (which apparently is the case if I'm not mistaken), there is not enough competition to drive down prices. I could in theory purchase a dedicated server that would hold 128 players or more for cheaper than what they provide - if it was possible.

Exactly, I think paradox are shooting themselves in the foot with this.

[GordonVanDyke]

As it currently stands, that is ridiculously expensive and I hope Multiplay can do something about that before release. This is the problem with exclusivity (which apparently is the case if I'm not mistaken), there is not enough competition to drive down prices. I could in theory purchase a dedicated server that would hold 128 players or more for cheaper than what they provide - if it was possible.

That is just unfounded and not your place to say at all. It's on our end and we're working to lower the CPU hit our server is causing. So before you go wagging your finger at least have all the facts infront of you.

And if you think for one second we'd give out our ranked server files to just anyone then you're mistaken. It would compromise everything we've built. We will however look into making unranked only servers if we can do it without jeopardizing our rank system. I hope you understand where we are coming from and know we're working hard on our end to improve performance and reduce server cost.

[vertinox]

That is just unfounded and not your place to say at all. It's on our end and we're working to lower the CPU hit our server is causing. So before you go wagging your finger at least have all the facts infront of you.

This kind of developer response makes me not want to buy your games. The customer always has a right to voice their opinion even if you think its wrong. You could have said the second part and not belittled a potential customer. No offense or anything.

I can understand if you don't want to let people host their own private servers, but Taleworlds has quite a success with letting people host private servers.

C-RPG on M&B:WB would not have been possible without private servers and the openness of the mod-ability of Mount and Blade. Truth is a lot of people bought M&B:WB just to play C-RPG (it's that good) and it usually has 128 players full of private servers.

[GordonVanDyke]

This kind of developer response makes me not want to buy your games. The customer always has a right to voice their opinion even if you think its wrong. You could have said the second part and not belittled a potential customer. No offense or anything.

I can understand if you don't want to let people host their own private servers, but Taleworlds has quite a success with letting people host private servers.

C-RPG on M&B:WB would not have been possible without private servers and the openness of the mod-ability of Mount and Blade. Truth is a lot of people bought M&B:WB just to play C-RPG (it's that good) and it usually has 128 players full of private servers.

I agree, post opinions on facts, but what I don't want to see is false facts being spread around and flaming others (company or people). It's confusing, misleading, and unfair to others not as familiar with server hosting. All I asked was not to do that because it's not fair to unjustly attack groups (like Multiplay) with unfounded reasoning. And if asking someone to stick to the facts makes you not want to buy something then I respect that, but I don't think it's a fair judgement on your behalf.

[BlueFang]

I believe people missed the point Multiplay was trying to make. The reason the price is currently so high is because of how much CPU power these servers take to run. Especially since this is beta and virtually all of the servers stay at 99-100% capacity. As Mr. Gordon and Multiplay stated, the servers take up a lot of CPU power and if you mix that with 100% capacity at all times the server specs need to be MONSTER level to be able to support it. Running very high end dedicated machines require a lot of maintenance (employees to pay) and money. As Gordon also stated, the kinks are being ironed out for future server providers, whether it be company or private, to be able to host servers at a lower price overall. Just give it some time.

I personally have a question for you Mr. Gordon, will there be Linux dedicated server support?

[shadoom23]

I feel that almost every game dev. doesnt want to release linux server files anymore... a lot don't release any files at all and say its because "of the cheating".
Strange that MW3 and BF3 is full of cheaters.

I love hosting my own stuff as I have a powerful-enough server myself which is bored doing nothing most of the time.
It's a sad development these days... sad days

Don't let us hang down paradox, we trust in you.
Help us Paradox, you are our last hope.
*R2D2 stops projection of Princess Leia*

[lFortune]

As it currently stands, that is ridiculously expensive and I hope Multiplay can do something about that before release. This is the problem with exclusivity (which apparently is the case if I'm not mistaken), there is not enough competition to drive down prices. I could in theory purchase a dedicated server that would hold 128 players or more for cheaper than what they provide - if it was possible.

That is just unfounded and not your place to say at all. It's on our end and we're working to lower the CPU hit our server is causing. So before you go wagging your finger at least have all the facts infront of you.

And if you think for one second we'd give out our ranked server files to just anyone then you're mistaken. It would compromise everything we've built. We will however look into making unranked only servers if we can do it without jeopardizing our rank system. I hope you understand where we are coming from and know we're working hard on our end to improve performance and reduce server cost.

I want to reply to this.

As I'm very experienced in hosting multiple game servers and have been in the game server hosting industry for many years this is not so unfounded as you portray.

Exclusivity deals never work out positively for the end user.. It never has and again it shows in this case.
Multiplay asks 73.15 euro per month for a 48 slot server, for that price you could rent a full Quadcore dedicated Intel server with windows.. and maybe even Managed for you.

Even if the War of the Roses server is badly optimized and takes 100% CPU all the time, it will only use one core (its single threaded!), meaning that for the same price I could host 4 servers, but due to the exclusivity deals people are forced to pay for overpriced servers, Which in the end ends up with less servers online (teens can't pay for it) and is basically limiting and extorting your userbase.

Gordon, you don't have to give ranked server files to everyone, like EA games and many other company’s do, they give non-ranked dedicated server files for people to host their own servers, there is nothing stopping you from doing the same.
You could even give read-only access to the War of the Roses stat system for non-ranked servers, this way they can still give people their equipment but they can't progress in these servers.

Your exclusivity deal, how much you try to defend is the worst choice you made when producing this game.
I can figure Multiplay paid you guys a lot of money for that deal, but be honest about that they paid for being exclusive, and don't lie about the servers taking a lot of CPU for the prices.

Also, monopoly positions are banned in our European union, I wonder when a big game hosting company gets up and sues the companies behind these exclusivity deals.
You need competition between companies to allow a fair price for the end user.

[Robin.]

I'm not going to bother answering the other stuff as that's more Gordon's cup of tea, but as a programmer I must object to this:

Even if the War of the Roses server is badly optimized and takes 100% CPU all the time, it will only use one core (its single threaded!), meaning that for the same price I could host 4 servers,

The server is absolutely in no way single threaded. What do you think this is, the 90s? The amount of cores the server runs on at once kinda depends, but the app definitely is multithreaded and the job management system in the engine is fairly efficient at distributing jobs between multiple cores. It's also correct as he said that the massive improvements can be made to CPU efficiency as we've had to cut corners to get the game ready for release. Corners we'll have time to uncut when CPU load on the servers are our highest priority. But as there probably won't be a staggering amount of people renting servers at day 1, we're primarily focusing on getting the gameplay, networking and stability ship shape before turning our eyes otherwhere.

[WilsonMG]

I was thoroughly disappointed to find out that the servers would only be available to be hosted via lease, especially an exclusive situation such as this where there's no competition to keep prices low, but I checked them out anyway. Multiplay is simply asking too much for what you get, at least initially. It is definitely going to have a huge impact on the availability of servers to play on. As much as I enjoy and support WotR, let's face it, it's not as high profile of a game as Battlefield 3, CoD, etc.

Even though the player base is substantially smaller, what happens if there's not enough open servers to meet the demand for this, a multiplayer-only game? Is PI/Fatshark going to eat the cost of leasing more "official" servers to keep up with the demand? If players don't get access to a game they paid for when they want it, there will be a flood of demands for refunds and probably a lawsuit or two. Can you say Diablo 3? Blizzard could take that hit. I'm not sure Fatshark can. Does PI/Fatshark plan to pay the cost to host official servers long-term so that the game doesn't just die one day because there are no servers to play it on? If I stop playing now and decide I want to play the game again a few years down the road, will there still be servers there, or will the game then be useless since there's no single player options?

I've been hosting servers for a very long time. I have a beefy server sitting in my home office that we host a number of game servers on for the MilitaryGamers.com community that can handle anything you can throw at it game-wise. The fact that WotR is multi-threaded (referring back to a post I made during Alpha) is awesome for high CPU-count servers, which ours is. I was hoping to have a WotR server up and running at launch, but that won't be happening now. I'm certainly not going to dip into our funds (or my own) to lease a server unless there's enough interest within my own community to warrant it and the funding to support it. If it didn't cost me any more than I'm already paying, i.e. maintaining our own server, I would host it even if our own involvement was small, and that would mean one more large powerful server for everyone else to play on, and more happy customers.

I understand the reasoning behind not releasing the server files that track player progress and the need to protect the integrity of that system, and I fully agree with that thinking. You don't want those dishonest folks to cheat the system and ruin the game for everyone else. I also understand that you are considering a post-launch effort to release server files that allow unranked play. Unless everyone you're hosting the server for is maxed out, then there's absolutely no point to doing this in my opinion. Everyone is just going to go play on ranked servers where their time investment actually goes towards progressing. Is there no way to allow privately hosted servers to handle the processing load for the actual matches while the profiles are handled via the Fatshark backend server and keep the integrity while still allowing for wider server distribution and availability?

I realize this entire argument is practically null and void considering the deal has probably already been inked between PI/Fatshark and Multiplay, but I still felt the need to put my opinion on the matter out there. I, like most others who feel strongly about this point, only wish to see WotR be successful and not fail due to a lack of people to play with and servers to play on in the long run.

[BlueFang]

Fortune and Wilson have a few valid points but I am sure Gordon has a few tricks up his sleeve regarding servers and hosting. I would like to get an official answer regarding Linux dedicated support though.

[ZeroGravitas]

I can't connect to any of the Australian servers at the moment. If the community could host servers then there would be internode and gamearena servers to play on as well. One company running all the servers means one point of failure, which means my entire continent can't play unless they want to deal with 200+ pings right now.