maccabi wrote:
If listen servers are such a bad idea how comes when said devs were making cod they didnt have dedis and remember back then there was a much smaller player base which made dedis more financially viable???
P2P and listen servers work really well on a local area network, player hosted matches on a LAN do not give the host much of a lag advantage because of the very low latency. Scaling up to internet, player hosting adds quite a large number of switching devices between all players (switches, routers and so on) and increases the latency and lag and limits the game to the host's upload bandwidth. I don;t know exactly what the bandwidth requirements are for each player in a game, but multiply that bandwidth by 16, including voice and I'm sure it would soon start to eat up the hosts connection capacity. For example, I am on ADSL 1, my maximum upload is 0.4 Mb/s, I doubt that is enough to host a 16 player CoD game. I know the game can migrate to a new host when there are such problems, but it is so annoying.
Player hosting has also been a cheatfest for the idiots who think it's cool and clever to use cheats.
Dedi server architecture is different, usually much more bandwidth available (usually on or close to the internet backbone), and usually well managed by game hosting companies to ensure consistent connectivity. If you have a server list to choose from, you can find ones with low ping and the game modes you want to play - it works, and works well - CoD4 has proven this, and is still very popular. There are probably more people playing CoD4, than playing MW2/MW3 combined - because of the multiplayer architecture. Also, dedi servers make it somewhat easier to find and ban cheaters, as well as abusive morons that make gaming a much less pleasant experience for others. We want to play fair, and we want to have fun.
Let us hope that the light of reason shines on Ghosts and we see the return of proper servers, both 'Official' servers for match-making, and rentable ranked servers (though locked down somewhat - like BF3) for clans.