Could Uber please start renting us servers directly?

When I started playing PA about a month ago my clan consisted of 5 people, and by now it's up to 10. The way I am going about it, pushing the game on every new subscriber to my site, it will be 20 by next month and the sky is the limit. The problem is we are getting sick of having to divide ourselves up in smaller teams when more than 5 people happen to be online and wanting to play the game at the same time. We really want to get going with 10v10s and above.

So, as I understand it, the 40-player battles are possible right now, and have been for some time, but the holdup is the 8 games per server policy which throttles the bandwidth necessary for larger games. So why not rent servers to players directly? You don't need to release the server for that -- all you need is an option in the Uber store, or better yet in-game, to pay Uber a monthly fee (and also, why not, a fee per game or per day) so that they can allocate to you an entire server. I don't care how much it costs either -- when you have 20 people all pitching in, any amount of money can be easily gathered.

Now, I googled this, and also did a forum search, but all I came up with was Brian's plan to rent servers when the server is made available, and also the following threads, which did not address the issue:

http://pamatches.com/servers/
https://forums.uberent.com/search/424166/?q=rent servers&o=date&c[node]=61

But what Brian is offering, as I understand it, would not solve my issue, because I want a server tied into Ubernet, so I can play with randoms 24/7 if I feel like it, not a private server wholly distinct from it, to which I would have to invite people via email every time I wanted to play a frigging game. Tell me if I am getting this wrong, because right now that's how I understand the issue.

This way, eventually all clans would have their own servers on Ubernet, and if we were also allowed to advertise them in-game (in our lobbies, for example, so that randoms who participated in our games and enjoyed themselves could click on a banner and be taken to our sites), it would help greatly with getting the majority of MP players into the clan system, which is so necessary for a game that's so heavy on team-play as PA.

And hey, it would be an extra revenue source for Uber. I mean, I don't have anything against Brian offering this service and making some money off of it, but if Uber can make the money instead, and use it to further develop PA, I think even Brian would agree that that would be a better solution. Obviously both solutions could and maybe even should be offered at the same time, but I know which one I would choose, if given a choice.

Finally, everyone's been saying how horrible performance has been in the latest stable build for the last couple of days. It this is due to heavy server loads due to Uber's inability to rent more servers, this solution would certainly help mitigate the problem.

So please, start renting us servers directly as soon as possible, Uber.

I think Uber plans to release the server asap. So you can just run it on your own server, no need for Uber to start renting actual hardware to anyone.

Read my entire post please. I don't want to run my own server, and I want to still be tied into Ubernet with the server I will rent.

When servers released there likely will be option to add it to master sever list of UberNet. E.g if you want it's will be visible for everyone who play MP.

That would be ideal.

I hope private servers will be visible by default, in that case, otherwise it would still defeat my purpose of gathering players from UberNet (just look at how few people play modded games now).

Also, aren't private servers more susceptible to cheating than Uber's?

That would be another reason to rent directly from Uber -- giving randoms and other clans more confidence in joining your games -- on top of the desire to direct even more of the cashflow surrounding the game to the devs.


EDIT: Also, when the ladder comes online, wouldn't a private server mean your games on it would not be taken account of in the ladder? If so, that's another reason to rent directly from Uber.

I was thinking of what SXX said, yeah.
Sure a private server means the server owner is like god. Can't change that fact.

Ladder games most likely will be hosted by Uber anyway, it makes no sense for anyone to host a server and then have ladder games on them, unless we have our own ladder.
If you're just looking for global stats however, it might be that the server you host and connect to ubernet is actually reporting everything you would expect it tto report. Basically it might very well be that hosting your own server listed in ubernet means that the only difference is where the server is running, everything else would be just like now. So fully connected to ubernet basically.
There really is no need whatsoever for Uber to rent servers. Though they should think about putting a bit more money into better servers to reduce server lag.

How can this:

be reconciled with this?

If someone could explain this to me as if I were an idiot, I would appreciate it. I know nothing about server tech.

Well there are different possibilities for having "your own server".

a) you configure your own server completely yourself, you change files, mod it, do whatever. This is a server where you as the server owner may cheat in any way very easily.

b) PA handles the server creation for you. Instead of asking ubernet to provide a server however it offers you the option to simple start a server on your own local machine.

in the case of b obviously you don't have a dedicated machine to play games on, but it would be a kind of more trusted server than a full custom server. It already would make cheating easier.

As I said, you can't change the fact that a server hosted by a random stranger may cheat on you. But I doubt cheating like that will be a major concern.

Basically most of players don't really care about ladder games so they won't care a lot about risk of cheating and likely we'll able to see who's is host certain game. Also hosting of PA server would require a lot of upstream bandwidth so it's not something everyone can do so number of people own the servers likely would be low and you can just only play on server owned by someone you can trust.

You might be able to mod around cheating concerns with central server config repositories. You could then have a client-side mod that checks the advertised mod against what it is supposed to be and let you know if some unscrupulous admin had been altering things he shouldn't have been. I know this sort of thing was done in some of the earlier versions of cod and made everyone a lot less nervous of joining random match servers.

I am doubtful it is worth it to implement such a feature, in the end a knowledgable person still will be able to get around it. If the server is in the hand of a person there is little you can do. Basically all clients blindly trust whatever the servers tells them afterall.

Also few random thoughts about the server hosting by Uber.

First of all when server-side released I suppose that most of single-player games would be played locally so load on UberNet servers will be decreased dramatically and developers would able to increase average performance without spending any extra money on hosting.

Second I personally against idea that Uber will sell server hosting or be affiliated with services who sell it. I'm support developers in mostly anything they doing and I do think it's good if they can make extra money for game, but in such situation they would be really biased because:

• We can't check if servers Uber or their partners run is same servers provided to us.
• We can't be sure they isn't optimize them for their secret environment.
• If they going to make money on fact that servers are slow there is less interest in optimizing them.

I think Uber have direct interest in game community growing and I pretty sure there is a lot of other things to make money on.

There certainly are a lot of unknowns right now with Servers...

I really hope we will be able to tie in our servers to the default server browser. I imagine we will be able to. That'd make sense. Most other games that allow players to host their own servers do that. I doubt Uber would do anything different.

The plan for my servers is to be able to provide more power, and most importantly, greater bandwidth, to allow for larger games.

I really want to see some 20v20 games on a 30 planet system or something insane like that.

Gonna be awesome.

Bad bad bad bad bad idea.
This is not like Battlefield or other games where you can rent servers to do your stuff.

Let me explain very lightly the server-client stuff.
PA, the game, is "divided" in two :
- the server part : this part run the calculations, the simulation, the pathing etc... It's like the internal parts of your car : engine, gas tank... Without them, nothing work.
- the client : this part display the simulation and allow you to interact with it. The wheels or the brakes on your car.

When you buy a car, you buy the all part in one go. A complete car.
When you bought the game, it's the same, you bought the two parts : server and client.
Problem with PA: you still haven't been delivered with the server (so engine or the gaz tank of your car), so in exchange, Uber is allowing you to run it, but on their machines (or to plug the wheels and the brakes on their car).

But you WILL get delivered one day.

Now back to business.
To run the server, you need a powerful computer. In case of a 40 players game, a very VERY powerful computer.
And this is why this big games are not available anymore : no hardware was sufficient at the time to allow this kind of games to run.

So sorry for my words, but you are basically saying nonsence.
You propose to pay again for something that you already have.
In the future, Uber will (hopefully) optimise the code, and such games will be possible again. then you will just have to create them as you create a game right now.

I am clear ?
Regards,

Edit : typos

That's not really true. We've played 20 and 40 man games many months ago. The hardware is fine, the bandwidth was the main issue.

It's not nonsense. Lots of games do this. Servers are expensive – especially powerful servers. It doesn't make sense for Uber to run the most powerful servers available for free. However, if someone wants to play on more powerful servers, they can – they just need to pay someone. Most people don't want to manage a server or even don't know how, so they pay a third party to do so.

Minecraft is an easy example. People can play locally. Or they can play on servers. Mojang recently started offering servers, but some people pay 3rd party sites for server rentals and you can get more powerful servers than Mojang's servers. More powerful servers means bigger worlds and more players.

Basically it's doesn't matter how many players you have in-game 4 or 40 if number if units remain the same. Server don't really care if it's accept commands from 4 or 40 players.

Careful about what kind of "server" we are talking.
The server that Uber has to deliver is a little executable file.
The servers you could rent look like somewhat like this:


Very different things. Why should Uber start making money of renting hardware to anyone?

So my choices -- since I am not willing to get into server setup myself -- are:

1. Play on Uber's free shared servers, which will always be slower than dedicated private ones running on good machines

2. Rent servers from third-party providers like Brian, but with the caveat that people will be wary of joining my games because they will never be able to trust me as much as Uber (plus no ladder ranking, which is essential for me)

Neither of them is optimal to me. I want both maximum trust and maximum speed (AND maximum player numbers) at the same time. Is there any solution that I am not seeing here?