It seems like such a no brainier, give players the ability to host servers so the players are the ones paying for them.
It’s a real shame too because SWBF2 could really benefit from player servers with custom settings. Don’t want heroes? Play on a no heroes server. Only want Prequel maps? Play on Prequel Maps only servers.
The game also doesn’t have much in the way of anti-cheat so it would be awesome if server admins could help police the game themselves.
It’s such a fucking travesty that most modern large scale multiplayer games, mainly FPS games, don’t have this feature anymore. All these companies have to do is spend a few dollars a month to keep a master server alive, then let the players host the actual servers and use an in-game server browser. But they have to keep control of everything and aren’t prepared when the servers get flooded during a sale.
/Rant
Disclaimer : I realize this has already been extensively discussed post-release, and that some of you might find this redundant. This is not necessarily meant as a Blizzard-bashing post - though it will inevitably turn out to be one - but more as a summary of the events of the past twelve months, as seen by someone who has been actively playing Warcraft 3 for almost two decades.
This is also meant to hopefully shed some more light, through a big subreddit, on a group of people who have been very hard at work trying to fix Blizzard’s many mistakes, and who could do with a bit more mainstream recognition.
The original Warcraft 3 was released in 2002, with its expansion The Frozen Throne coming a year later. It has, ever since, been many different things : One of the staples of early RTS competitive gaming, the main hub for Blizzard’s then-new and improved BattleNet, the setup for World of Warcraft’s entire storyline and, perhaps most importantly, the …