No Private Dedicated Servers For Overwatch

[Hairless Mammoth]

And suddenly my interest in this game has risen. Not to play it, but to see how Blizzard can once again ruin a promising game for a lot of people with just one or two obvious mistakes. (The desire to try Overwatch never existed from the beginning, and this news certainly doesn't help.)

At least for Valve, the little threat this game posed for scooping up hat buyers TF2 players is quickly waning.

There's a smalllll chance someone at Bliz will see how hated these decisions are. Either way, it's popcorn time for me.

 

[ShakerSilver]

That's honestly very troubling, and it'll probably turn me away from this game in the long run. The only reason I quit certain shooters like TF2 was because that servers I always frequented were shut down and the community around it faded away. Even after most of the updates that I felt really strained my interest in the game itself, the community was what kept me there. I feel like this is true for a lot of people too - community run servers add something more personal to the game that people grow more attached to, and it's a lot more enticing to play a game with familiar faces rather than with complete strangers.

Sure, there's an option to play with friends, but it's not exactly the same as having a server community with several dozens of acquainted people that frequent it.

InB4 Blizzard hate.... ah shoot.

Even before clicking the link I could guess what the comments would be like.

I hope your not implying that the negative feedback for this change is unwarranted.

 

[major_chaos]

Well that makes me slightly more interested. Wasting my time fucking around with the sever browser, thus making sure I had a migraine before the game even started was one of a large list of reasons I quit TF2. Being able to hit the matchmaking button and go is more convenient and conducive to my continuing to play by a factor of roughly infinity. This post would just about double in length if I went into detail about every unique moment of "that gave me cancer" I have encountered on community servers.

Also: "But... but... LAN..." Yea I can see how this might put a damper on using the game at LAN parties, but lets be honest here, Blizzard isn't going to notice even if all ten of you actually go through with boycotting. LAN, along with splitscreen and actual face to face human interaction are things now widely considered to be in so little demand that they aren't worth supporting. If I refused to buy any game that didn't support splitscreen just because me and my buddies played a shitton of Halo 3 that way I would suddenly find myself very short on games.

 

[Makabriel]

InB4 Blizzard hate.... ah shoot.

Even before clicking the link I could guess what the comments would be like.

I hope your not implying that the negative feedback for this change is unwarranted.

I'm implying that it's all the same Blizzard hate that follows every single game or expansion they release. It never changes, and yet their games still make a killing and are still highly popular.

"We'll allow you to set up some of those things that traditional dedicated servers allow you to do. Basically give you a safe place to go play a match to play with your friends and not go into the big matchmaking pool, we'll have a setup that will allow for that as well,"

To me that implies that communities would be able to set up games for their people to join. It's way too early to start boarding the hate train, but as always people are eager to jump on. Because it's Blizzard. It's the popular thing to do.

 

[Michael Dunkerton]

I will probably get crucified for this, but this actually increases my interest in the game. Not that I'm surprised, this is a new IP and if you want to get new players in, you have to be user-friendly. This is something that the communities of old games like TF2 and DOTA don't seem to get. I loved the gameplay of TF2 but hated having to scroll through all these weird server names with no idea how to know which server to pick. Until they added quick matchmaking (which took them way too long in my opinion), I just had to pick a server at random and hope I got one where people were actually playing the game and not holding an auction or ERP'ing as ponies. As long as the servers are stable, I just want a game where I can get on with my friends, we can get right into a game, and we know we'll be playing the game as it was intended, in the setting it was intended, without all kind of weird private server mods and unspoken rules.

(Yes, I know the first response will be that removing features is not ever to anyone's benefit because if they have both features, you can just opt out of the one you don't want. But TF2 being based around private servers meant that for years, you *didn't* have the choice to just jump into a game, and even when you did the matchmaking was buggy and there was no ability to use a ranked system to play against people of your basic winrate. Yeah, if you could have fully functional matchmaking in public servers *and* private servers at the same time it'd be great. But that particular case is definitely a lot of extra work and bandwidth for Blizz, and if we do have to choose, I'd take smart matchmaking and the guarantee to be in a stable server when I click to enter a game.)

 

[OldNewNewOld]

And just like that, any interest I had in this game is dead. I'm really sick of Blizzard being such control freaks.

Same here.
I started playing TF2 on the public server, but really soon I moved to private and never went back. No private server is really a deal breaker for such games.

 

[thewatergamer]

Nope.avi sorry Blizzard you've killed any interest I had now see yah!

Oh don't worry I'll stick around to see how you manage to fuck this game up royally because of your need to control everything

 

[babinro]

Absolutely nothing surprising about this news.
In fact I find it odd that this was deemed newsworthy.

It's going to be a free to play game and so Blizzard naturally wants to control the environment and minimize the impact of hacking/mods/etc could have on their payment model. This is no more surprising than a game like Path of Exile having no offline single player mode.

Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm was a clear giveaway to this.

Now it's time to go through the predictable motions:
- Tons of people will claim to no longer play the game because of this.
- The games launch will be unplayable due to severe lag as a result of the massive number of players trying to play the game they already declared they'd never play.
- People will complain and declare they'll never play overwatch again because of the launch.
- The game will remain overwhelmingly popular despite the hate.
- Blizzard won't have to learn from their mistakes because the fans refuse to stand by their word. Rinse and Repeat for the next game.

 

[J.McMillen]

This news doesn't bother me at all. As someone who's played Counter Strike since around 1.2, I've connected too many times to a server only to spend several minutes downloading sounds and/or other files just to play the game there. I'm one of those types who 99.9999999999999% of the time just wants to play a vanilla version of the game. No mods, no tweaks, no Quake announcer shouting 'Head Shot!' or 'Kill Streak!'. Just the plain old boring regular game is all I'm looking for.

 

[Aeshi]

Eh, no big loss. 90% of the Public/Custom servers for TF2 are just "Like a Valve Server, but now you can buy our new Premium option for perma-crits and insta-respawns for only $9.99!", and I doubt these would've fared any better.

 

[elvor0]

I'm not really surprised or all that bothered by this.
This is the standard model for MOBAs these days and this game looks to be closer to a MOBA than anything else.
As long as the custom matchmaking Blizzard puts in is good, you haven't lost that much.

Its a team based shooter. Is TF2 a MOBA?

Eh, no big loss. 90% of the Public/Custom servers for TF2 are just "Like a Valve Server, but now you can buy our new Premium option for perma-crits and insta-respawns for only $9.99!", and I doubt these would've fared any better.

It's not just about that, it also provides better ping and thus gameplay for everyone(hence why they talk about ping in the article). Server a bit dodgy on Blizzards end? Well then you're fucked. Dedicated servers allow you to find a server with the better latency, provide longevity for the game and free up resources on the developers end.

Well that makes me slightly more interested. Wasting my time fucking around with the sever browser, thus making sure I had a migraine before the game even started was one of a large list of reasons I quit TF2.

So use the matchmaking system TF2 has?

I'm implying that it's all the same Blizzard hate that follows every single game or expansion they release. It never changes, and yet their games still make a killing and are still highly popular.

"We'll allow you to set up some of those things that traditional dedicated servers allow you to do. Basically give you a safe place to go play a match to play with your friends and not go into the big matchmaking pool, we'll have a setup that will allow for that as well,"

To me that implies that communities would be able to set up games for their people to join.

As much as the general Blizzard hating and pissing and moaning fucks me off too, this isn't that. Refer to earlier in my post for as to why Dedicated servers are better and because people get fucked off /whenever/ dedicated servers are denied.

 

[deleted+75193]

DELETED

 

[Li Mu]

I have to say that I'm getting a little tired of Blizzard's art style. Does everything have to look like Mists of Pandaria stylistically?

 

[Loop Stricken]

I have no problem with this. If you're not connected to Blizzard's own servers, how could they tell you're not fudging your account data to progress faster?

 

[SadisticFire]

Its a team based shooter. Is TF2 a MOBA?

Look deeper than the genre. There's a cast of widely varying fantastical characters all with unique (and again) widely varying abilities. There will most likely be a persistent character system where the player levels up and gets more options as they compete in more and more games. The game will obviously involve micro transactions.

Look beyond the surface and it has way more in common with MOBAs than it does any team based shooter.

I would like to point out that you also just described TF2. 9 classes, all play very differently. You play the game and as you go on you unlock weapons which allow you to tweak how to play a certain class for the rest of the game if you choose. TF2 still isn't a MOBA. And TF2 also can do all that with private dedicated servers, and still manage to be successful. The worry I have now is that there will be no custom content. No fan made maps most notably.

 

[vallorn]

I have no problem with this. If you're not connected to Blizzard's own servers, how could they tell you're not fudging your account data to progress faster?

By connecting to separate servers that check against that stuff. TF2's idling servers and achievment farms don't break the game because they do that with player accounts.

 

[Poetic Nova]

Is it really that hard to have LAN in your game?
There went the bit of interest I had, and hope that Battleborn doesn't pull the same stunt.

 

[Kathinka]

Is it really that hard to have LAN in your game?
There went the bit of interest I had, and hope that Battleborn doesn't pull the same stunt.

It isn't. It's fairly similar to make to the internet connections, uses the same protocol, and so on.
The reason they don't do it is because it is fairly easy to simulate a LAN over the internet. That means, players could make their own servers, as it was the norm a few years ago, which they could mod, change, set up and administrate to their desires. And god help us if consumers actually start improving on a game and creating free content for it, increasing its longevity, so that people will be less eager to buy the slightly improved squeal one year later.
That takes control away from the game creators. And nothing gets game devs and publishers as aroused as control, except maybe the tears of freshly mutilated orphan toddlers.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

You know Blizzard, gloating about less features in your game and attempting to put a positive spin on it is only going to fool the exact people that, in your eyes, make this a necessary "feature".

Quoting for truth. Advertising less features than older games is a negative, and in the team shooter space, these features are part of the reason that TF2, CS:GO and the like are still so popular in spite of newer offerings.

This game will have a higher cost of entry, less features, less customisation, no community/mapmaking and tho I don't doubt it will be made to Blizzard's usual high standards, it's already a sub-par product before it's even hit the shelves. The way to make a great game is to at least match those great games already out there. Shooting themselves in the foot is an apt metaphor I think.