As i see it, community servers are becoming/have become obsolete for
many games, because the companies are finding out that running servers
for themselves for their games is a service and they can provide same
quality of game all the time in terms of same configs, sufficient
hardware and such. At the end, they can also just kill off the servers
once they see fit. But as long as there are enough players and it's
profitable, it will continue.
They used to have either dedicated server bundled in or just use the
Player 2 Player model where there is no server, but the games happen on
someones machine where others connect. But that was really bad way of
doing it because you cannot predict that everyone has sufficient
bandwidth or powerfull enough machine.
There is no space left for dedicated community servers or server
browser, because the system assings to any server available in the pool
of official servers. This is where TF2 also went - there is still option
for community servers but after 2 years of favoring quickplay over valve
servers instead of community, pretty much nearly every community server
has died off from players (and nobody wants to join empty server if
there are servers available with players). Now with the halloween and
all, not even the tags event_247 and eventmix had no affect for getting
players in anymore since quickplay is defunct.
It's still nearly impossible to compete with Valve servers with a
community server. Before you just ran a server, had players in it and
others joined because they used the server browser, as it was the only
way to connect. Now, you just press button, get set into queue and thats
it. Even if you would provide same gameplay and same quality of service,
with the addition of running some custom maps some players like me have
cooked up and admins around to watch over cheaters, there is just no
viable option to do that. Automatic search too stronk!
I've been watching this change happening over 11 years now and sadly the
wheels are currenly turning forward, not backward. Times change and i
guess some of us have decided, are deciding or are still sticking with
running servers but eventually it looks like we are fading out one way
or another.
-ics
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