This FAQ has apparently been available for a while, but I only found it today. In short, you will be able to rent and remotely administer dedicated servers, and players will be able to connect to your server through a server browser.
With no access to the dedicated server app itself, and no mod tools, it's safe to say that there will be no (or extremely limited) FTP access. Presumably, configuration will be handled through a web interface like TCAdmin. Although DICE's Gordon Van Dyke has said that "a majority of the the games [sic] logic is controlled by the server," the only settings that are confirmed at this point are: (1) custom server name, (2) reserved slots, and (3) password protection. The option to enable "hardcore" mode is probably a given, though.
The game also lacks demo recording and first-person spectating. The absence of those two features will diminish the game's suitability for competitive play, and may reduce the effectiveness of the Punkbuster implementation (along with the aforementioned absence of support for PB streaming; at least for now).
While the inability to mod the game is disappointing, Bad Company 2's online component should be vastly superior to Modern Warfare 2's. Dedicated boxes will still sit in datacenters and move packets through nice, fat pipes. In that regard, the only major source of apprehension that remains is pricing: as far as I know, no GSP has announced what these things are going to cost per slot.
Check out this pricing list from Game Servers if you wish to speculate.
I say $1.77 per slot. It's a new game, a popular game.
ReplyDeleteI am going to say higher being that not just anybody is going to be renting these servers. I am imagining up towards $3.00 per slot.
ReplyDeleteIf it's $3 a slot, the MP will die in the womb.
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