Serving Up a Better Game

In a lot of ways, online gaming is a victim of its own popularity. Back when Quake originally came out, there were only so many servers and so many players. If you had a favorite server, chances are you got to know the admin because you'd see him online. You got to know the other players. If somebody caused any trouble, they were soon banned. And the game went on. I used to run servers myself and I didn't take any crap.

Nowadays we've got people flooding servers from all over the world, and thousands of servers to choose from. On the one hand, it's great -- I can regularly find a Battlefield: 1942 server packed with 60 or more chumps, which I couldn't see happening back in the early days of gaming. But the flipside is that you get a lot of jerks on there, and there's nobody around to stop them.

You know the type. Cheaters, using hacks to see other players behind walls. Or teamkillers, chat spammers, spawn campers, and trolls who just live to ruin the game for as many people as possible. I never understood the point of being a jerk to people who can't fight back, but there they are. And you can't snap their neck like a turkey bone.

Ways Around the Cheating Problem

There are a couple of ways around these problems. One way would be for developers to constantly update their game every time a new cheat is available, but let's be honest: Nobody's paying them subscription fees, so their bottom line has no reason for them to have their best programmers working on anti-cheat solutions instead of their next big game. The better companies take the time to release anti-cheating patches, but you really can't count on it.

You could allow the community itself to police its own servers. To some extent this works, and that's certainly how we did things back in the day. But remember that the people running game servers are usually doing it for fun because they love the game. Constantly updating a server with the latest anti-cheat systems and constantly banning players and monitoring the server can be a pretty thankless job. Most of the best server administrators I know eventually just got burned out, privately locking up their server just for a few friends. That's not the answer.

Microsoft has a third solution. With Xbox Live, it simply shut off ALL online play, except through its service. Because everyone on Xbox Live pays subscription fees, Microsoft can tightly monitor the players. And because it runs all the servers AND the game platform itself, it has control over cheating. That works, but I can't see applying that to the whole of Internet gaming. It's never going to happen. Besides, you always want to keep an avenue open for people to play online games for free. I want MORE gamers playing, not less! And I don't want to be stuck only playing one publisher's titles

GameSpy's Solution: Managed Servers

I've been watching this problem for a long time … and it's getting worse. I can't stand playing a great game online only to have a couple of creeps start to ruin the server (worse yet, have you ever been doing really well only to have everyone accuse you of cheating?) So it was finally time to step up and DO something about it.

What we've created are a set of premium game servers for the best online games that are open to GameSpy subscribers. Just like the old days, when you knew the server admin personally, we run these servers based on your feedback and monitor them 24/7. We run the latest anti-cheat software and we maintain a *permanent* global ban on players caught cheating (and we think less people will try, given that we have their information).

The nice thing about this model is that it's a self-selecting group of players. Because you're paying a few bucks a month to play, you KNOW that the group you're playing with won't be filled with smacktards, lamers, cheaters, and teamkillers. You're only going to get serious gamers, playing with teamwork in a cheat-free environment.

We're beta-testing this idea with a few servers right now. Want to jump in? If you're a subscriber, feel free to check them out and see how it's going down. We have servers running for Battlefield: 1942, Desert Combat, and a few others right now. What would you like to see? How's the service? How's the response time in your area? We want your feedback on this!


In Other News: GameCube for $99? Sign Me Up!

Last week Nintendo dropped the price of the GameCube to $99. That's just out of control. While the 'Cube doesn't have a huge selection of games, it has some of our all-time favorites. Check out our Top 10 in GameCube area.

With under ten million units sold (Sony recently announced 60 million PS2 systems sold) and inventory backed up, the price break makes sense. It's also a bit of a white flag indicating that Nintendo is throwing in the towel on this round of hardware. For years we'll be looking at where it might have gone wrong: a "system for kids" image haunted them, its licensing was just too strict, no plans for online play, etc., etc. Whatever the reasons or the ultimate result, at $99 bucks I guarantee you can find a handful of games to get your money's worth out of. It's a fun little system. And who knows? Maybe someday soon all consoles will be $99 ... or less. After all, VCRs are less than $50 these days and DVD players are less than $100.

How's GameSpy doin'? You can always e-mail me to get something off your chest. Talk to me! •

-Mark "FreshMaker" Surfas
GameSpy Founder
and man-with-the-plan