this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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Per the official Stop Killing Games FAQ: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq (apologies if formatting ends up looking weird)
That's fine for single player games but modifying some massive MMO so that someone can host it on a laptop is literally impossible. This language applies to everything. EVE Online, WoW, FFXIV, all of it would need to be able to run on someone's home computer when they're purposefully built from the ground up to work on massive servers?
It's not impossible at all. People have done this literally for decades. Classic WoW only exists because people hosted their own seevers and Blizzard wanted in on the money. Star Wars Galaxies the same. I think Everquest 1 as well. And probably others as well.
So why does this law need to exist if everyone is doing it and has been doing it for decades?
Because they can be sued for that. Have been sued for that. And while it is possible to reverse engineer this stuff it is incredibly hard to do. So games with smaller fanbases might lack the manpower to achieve it. Or the game was made in such a way as to make reverse engineering impossible.
Just because it's possible with a small sample of games doesn't mean it's possible for all or even most of them.
Also, even if a normal desktop can't run a particular game server, there is almost always a way to get a computer that will.
The difference between a home server and a larger business server is simply the scale of how many players it can host at once.
WoW's server binary was reverse engineered by fans, and a large ecosystem of privately run WoW servers that players can connect to exist at this very moment.
Private servers running older vanilla versions of wow became so popular, blizzard then created their own vanilla wow server to get in on the action.
People have been running private wow servers for a long time now apparently, so it seems possible for mmos.
Not a fair comparison. The private servers were written with the small hosting in mind. They would very likely never scale to what Blizzard has in place. For all I know, Blizzard could run their stuff on a Mainframe with specific platform optimizations against an IBM DB2.
But I also don't think this has to be transferable to a local setup without effort either. Once they release the source, people can refactor or reengineer it to run on smaller scale, replace proprietary databases with free ones, etc.
You found the point. It's not about having it scale to the level the official servers are at. It's about preserving it in some fashion, so that the dedicated few can still experience it. We don't need thousands, we need a few dozen. And, if developers develop with this design philosophy - that eventually the game servers will be shut down and we have to release a hostable version at end of life, then the games can be written from the ground up with that implementation in mind.
Such an architecture is typically shit. Building a system that is simple AND scales high won't work. Complexity usually gets added to cope with scale. If we don't allow companies to build scalable (i.e. complex) systems, we simply won't get such games anymore.
Again: I am completely in favor of forcing devs to release everything necessary to host it. I am not in favor of forcing devs to target home machines for their servers, when their servers clearly have completely different requirements. That's unrealistic.
Its not said that they need devs to target home machines, it says they need to give the resources so people can host it themselves, period.
Also, tell me you've never worked with scalable infrastructure without telling me you have never worked with it.
There are dozens, if not hundreds of games, including MMOs, that are privated hosted, and by that I don't mean hosted in a basement potato.
Look at Ragnarok servers, there are hundreds of them, DEDICATED servers, with all the newest technology, for an old game nonetheless.
Have you ever seem how massive the infrastructure are for those big minecraft multi-servers? Thousands and thousands of concurrent players.
Im not asking you to research what you're talking about or anything, but if you clearly dont know what you're talking about, refrain from sharing your opinion so you may not negatively influence a similar minded person.
Before attacking me with such an arrogant rant, maybe read what I wrote.
I said:
So of course it's about releasing anything (!) at all.
I simply said that you can't compare a small fan project like a WoW self hosted server with Blizzards infrastructure and the requirements to have a high available setup for millions of players.
ArenaNet is quite open about their infrastructure and you can see that this is far from trivial, but also allows them to have zero downtime updates. That is a huge feat, but also means that self hosting that thing will be a pain in the ass. Yet I would not want them to not do this just so it could be easily (!) self hosted some time in the distant future.
Fair enough.
I don't think there's any language in this petition that says it must be hosted on a laptop. The server binary, with a reasonable expectation that someone with documentation, the hardware, and the know-how to use it, would be enough.
This comment betrays a technical misunderstanding.
Not only is it possible, but designing games from the ground up in this way makes it easier for developers to test and make robust software.
Lol that not impossible.
FFXIV has headed in the opposite direction of your claim. They’ve recently been making a lot of changes to major story dungeons so that the experience relies as little as possible on online communities. Right now, playing requires a subscription. It’s more and more believable to see that requirement removed if the game was somehow dead and that ‘had’ to happen.
If a big MMO closes that'd be rough, but those types of games tend to form communities anyways like Minecraft. You don't have to pay Microsoft a monthly rate to host a Java server for you and a few friends, you just have to have a little bit of IT knowledge and maybe a helper package to get you and your friends going. It's still a single binary, even if it doesn't run on a laptop well for larger settings.
With a big MMO, there will form support groups and turnkey scripts to get stuff working as well as it can be, and forums online for finding existing open community servers by people who have the hardware and knowledge to host a few dozen to a few hundred of their closest friends online.
Life finds a way.
If it's a complicated multi-node package where you need stuff to be split up better as gateway/world/area/instance, the community servers that will form may tend towards larger player groups, since the knowledge and resource to do that is more specific.
God, finally someone with common sense. The devs do not need to change the software for you to host a server in your 10 year old ThinkPad, they just need to make the software available. It's not up to them to figure out HOW you are going to host the game's server, they just need to make it POSSIBLE.