What happened in 2009 and what will we do in 2010?
2009 was the year, where ETQW reached 2 years of age. We did expect ETQW to be more popular that it went. Numbers of active servers dropped. ETQW had some bugs, and increasing numbers of cheaters and nothing was done about it (still the same). The cause of some of the problems seems to be within punkbuster-server-client part, which among others can’t get screenshots from 30-50% of the players (I won’t reveal the main cause). Another Punkbuster (PB) fault is the fact, some players does not communicate with Punkbuster servers, you all know what this means… Some players do this deliberately; others do not, hard to see the difference.
The guys at PPBans.com are doing a great job, discovering faults inside Punkbuster server BF2-PB-takeover and so on, but the publisher of PB have announced nothing will be done.
A new version of Wolfenstein was released, just before the release, Raven got to finalize the code. We had very high expectations; most of us did order the game before release date. What a disappointment. First impression was, and I’ve heard this lots of times; ‘I feel I have played this game before’. Laggy server-code, unplayable in my opinion. Like Quake4, this game is dead before you know it.
With these disappointments, we were looking for another game, which we could use on cold evening hours. A new version of COD was released; COD MW2. Well we all learn from experiences; who want to waste money on a game, if you don’t play it. COD MW2 was released with a lot of publicity, stating cheating was very difficult since Steam-account was required. 10 hours after release, a demo of a very effective multihack could be seen on youtube.com. Will publishers ever learn? Well cheater can be dealt with manually, but looking through more reviews, it became clear, no dedicated server code would be released. This means the dead of all competition, no modifications are allowed. Lots of noise was made by the community, but publisher stays firm. If you look around, boycott is the word used to ward COD MW2. It’s hard to get some clear statements, so the community did come up with plausible reasons. The PC segment of gaming is not giving enough profit. No dedicated servers point, as PS3 and XBOX360 is the customers in the future. PS3 and XBOX do not allow same degree of modification. All too sad, through time I have bought all the COD titles, but not MW2, I’m on the team who say boycott.
What’s to come in 2010?
So far we haven’t seen any game of interest. The last 2 months we have spent time on the good old ET – Enemy Territory, which can be controlled in all aspects (literally).
My wish for 2010 in the gaming-community, is the game developers to look through list at FPSAdmin.com, which states what to do, if you want to make a successful online game.
Teamspeak 3 has been released, which we have tested, and there is a lot of improvement. Quality of sound is improved a lot, still UDP communication though. With UDP-traffic comes LAG in the voice, if you got any Ethernet packetloss. The developer of Teamspeak seems to have forgot one thing to get in competition with Ventrilo, I am missing protocol for the server, to make a decent viewer in html or php. As soon as the protocol is released, we will look into a upgrade of Teamspeak-viewer made by Makro.
What a load of complaining, nothing positive? Well the gaming community all over the world do make an effort in people having a great time doing FPS-gaming. All this is useless in the future, if the developers continues in the path they have chosen at this moment. There are still people who want to contribute to the online gaming for free. Lots of experience will be lost, if they find another hobby. I will say thanks to all those people, who spend many hours improving aspects of online life unpaid.
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