Player Hosted Servers/Communities
Hey,
Correct me if I am wrong, but, from what I’ve seen, Absolver’s client appears very self-sufficient, and the server seem mostly there to tell which clients to connect to and potentially verifies player data consistency (i.e. anti-cheat). This game does not feature a cash shop, and the characters are stored client-side. If it wasn’t the case, being limited to an official server would have made a great deal of sense. In Absolver’s case though, it doesn’t.
I would take Terraria as an example of game that has somewhat similar conditions (no cash-shop, characters are client-side). It greatly benefits from letting its users make their own servers. Indeed, this means that even if, for whatever reasons, the company stops allocating resources to this game, players do not lose any existing content from the game (this also reduces fears of games becoming unplayable due to being unsuccessful, a dangerous downward spiral). It also means that the company doesn’t have to spend money on servers, as players are more than happy to provide quite a lot of them. Note that Absolver would be even easier to adapt to such model, as uses "peer-to-peer" connections whereas Terraria relies on the server.
Letting your customers make their own servers does not prevent you in any way from selling DLCs, and so I believe it would be in everybody’s interest if you would sell the option of hosting an independent server as a DLC.
As far as I know, and I play mainly instance based games, when a company says its game uses peer-to-peer, it actually means: one client acts as the server (i.e. it decides what happens) and the other are pure clients. That means Absolver already has all the disadvantages of player hosted "servers". This is going to make things slightly confusing, since that might make people believe that clients are able to act as servers, which would make the suggestion useless. However, you could simply consider these sub-servers: those "client-server" are not independent from the real main one. First, in most cases, the choice of who is hosting the game instance is not up to the players, but chosen by a master server. This master server is what I want to become available for hosting by players (this lets you form and control communities - useful if you want specific rules in your community*, and, most importantly, makes multiplayer content available pretty much forever). Second, the information about who is logged-on, the school stuff, map selection on PVP, and a few other small things are handled by this master server, meaning that you are still depending on the real master server when doing multiplayer, even if the heavy processing part of a server should do is already in the clients (hence why this suggestion should not be difficult to implement).
Having the option of having that player hosted main server do the heavy processing too would be very nice, but to me it seems secondary.
Terraria is ported to consoles, and not just a few of them (PS3, Xbox360, PS Vita, PS4, XBone, 3DS, and Wii U. Switch is TBA), so I don't think that's actually a problem. Furthermore, this suggestion does not prevent in any way the current system from continuing (it just means they don't have to continue it, all of the game content would now be safe if they chose not to). You'd simply have something like a "Enter player server IP" entry in your options menu, letting you either enter a IP and a port to connect to a player server, or simply empty (as would be by default) to use the official server.
*Why would you want community specific rules? Well, quite a lot of possibilities there. First, this is likely to mean tightly controlled communities (burden of banning cheaters transferred to passionate people, which I believe are going to be more responsive than a company). Second, you can have a theme for your community (e.g. RP strict server, PVP strict, PVE strict, kicks only server, punches only server, ... you get the idea). Additionally, and since we are in agreement over the issue of lags, you're likely to understand the benefits: you can create a server reserved for people in your close region whereas it would not be financially beneficial for the company to do so.
Correct me if I am wrong, but, from what I’ve seen, Absolver’s client appears very self-sufficient, and the server seem mostly there to tell which clients to connect to and potentially verifies player data consistency (i.e. anti-cheat). This game does not feature a cash shop, and the characters are stored client-side. If it wasn’t the case, being limited to an official server would have made a great deal of sense. In Absolver’s case though, it doesn’t.
I would take Terraria as an example of game that has somewhat similar conditions (no cash-shop, characters are client-side). It greatly benefits from letting its users make their own servers. Indeed, this means that even if, for whatever reasons, the company stops allocating resources to this game, players do not lose any existing content from the game (this also reduces fears of games becoming unplayable due to being unsuccessful, a dangerous downward spiral). It also means that the company doesn’t have to spend money on servers, as players are more than happy to provide quite a lot of them. Note that Absolver would be even easier to adapt to such model, as uses "peer-to-peer" connections whereas Terraria relies on the server.
Letting your customers make their own servers does not prevent you in any way from selling DLCs, and so I believe it would be in everybody’s interest if you would sell the option of hosting an independent server as a DLC.
As far as I know, and I play mainly instance based games, when a company says its game uses peer-to-peer, it actually means: one client acts as the server (i.e. it decides what happens) and the other are pure clients. That means Absolver already has all the disadvantages of player hosted "servers". This is going to make things slightly confusing, since that might make people believe that clients are able to act as servers, which would make the suggestion useless. However, you could simply consider these sub-servers: those "client-server" are not independent from the real main one. First, in most cases, the choice of who is hosting the game instance is not up to the players, but chosen by a master server. This master server is what I want to become available for hosting by players (this lets you form and control communities - useful if you want specific rules in your community*, and, most importantly, makes multiplayer content available pretty much forever). Second, the information about who is logged-on, the school stuff, map selection on PVP, and a few other small things are handled by this master server, meaning that you are still depending on the real master server when doing multiplayer, even if the heavy processing part of a server should do is already in the clients (hence why this suggestion should not be difficult to implement).
Having the option of having that player hosted main server do the heavy processing too would be very nice, but to me it seems secondary.
Terraria is ported to consoles, and not just a few of them (PS3, Xbox360, PS Vita, PS4, XBone, 3DS, and Wii U. Switch is TBA), so I don't think that's actually a problem. Furthermore, this suggestion does not prevent in any way the current system from continuing (it just means they don't have to continue it, all of the game content would now be safe if they chose not to). You'd simply have something like a "Enter player server IP" entry in your options menu, letting you either enter a IP and a port to connect to a player server, or simply empty (as would be by default) to use the official server.
*Why would you want community specific rules? Well, quite a lot of possibilities there. First, this is likely to mean tightly controlled communities (burden of banning cheaters transferred to passionate people, which I believe are going to be more responsive than a company). Second, you can have a theme for your community (e.g. RP strict server, PVP strict, PVE strict, kicks only server, punches only server, ... you get the idea). Additionally, and since we are in agreement over the issue of lags, you're likely to understand the benefits: you can create a server reserved for people in your close region whereas it would not be financially beneficial for the company to do so.
Comments
If anyone has played Jedi Outcast/Academy on honor servers, it was some of the best combat and emergent gameplay around. It would be amazing if Absolver could emulate some of that.
I would love to see this game evolve into providing an experience similar to the jedi knight series as it had a very strong community as a result.