Custom Server Space

[rakiru]

Source: http://www.aceofspades.com/forums/showt ... discussion

One of the biggest issues for our community right now is the ability to customise your own experience of Ace of Spades. Our goal has always been to give you more freedom of choice – This process has been started already with addition of customisable weapons and Classic mode. Following on from that, we’re now looking to open up the ability for you to control your own matches in the form of custom server space, giving you the option to make private matches, choose maps, game types, load-outs and even more besides.

We want to be able to give you the ability to customise your own matches and control the types of games you want to play, while still maintaining the security and quality of service that you expect. To make sure we deliver the best experience possible we are looking to you, the Ace of Spades community, to help us deliver on our goal.

In the next couple of weeks we will be looking for volunteers to help test out our new customised match system, and regularly feedback to us on the experience. This period will be a beta test, and the system will improve as we apply updates and react to your feedback. In particular, we will be looking for clan leaders, leaders of large communities and experienced beta testers to get involved.

We are still finalising the method of distribution, but it is likely that we will provide local server space with a set number of game ‘slots’ for a modest, reasonable fee. This opportunity will be available to our community leaders and will be much like them having their own server, except that the game will be running securely within our own environment on Steam’s platform. It’s worth highlighting at this point that player-rented servers have not been ruled out as an option for Ace, but there are some hurdles we need to overcome before we are able to offer that solution, so we hope that this will serve as a good start along that path.

This is a really exciting project for us to work on, and one which has been initiated by you, the community. With your help we can make Ace of Spades an awesome, ever-improving experience for a long time to come

The Ace of Spades Team

[rakiru]

My reply: http://www.aceofspades.com/forums/showt ... #post71357

Our goal has always been to give you more freedom of choice – This process has been started already with addition of customisable weapons and Classic mode.

No, it has not. If it has, you have failed in every possible way. If this had been your goal from the start, you would not have removed the ability for people to host their own servers or modify their game.

We want to be able to give you the ability to customise your own matches and control the types of games you want to play, while still maintaining the security and quality of service that you expect.

Security and quality of service? I've asked this several times before, and either been ignored or told to take it to PMs (which never get answered), but what security? The only sense of security I can see is either stopping piracy by hosting the servers, or stopping server admins from getting people's IPs (which is so easy, it's basically a non-issue). As for quality of service, servers are laggy and buggy. I will admit there has been improvement since the game was released, but it's still got a long way to go. The ease of hacking the game (you even left a debug console in the initial release) shows how little you actually care about this.

We are still finalising the method of distribution, but it is likely that we will provide local server space with a set number of game ‘slots’ for a modest, reasonable fee. This opportunity will be available to our community leaders and will be much like them having their own server, except that the game will be running securely within our own environment on Steam’s platform. It’s worth highlighting at this point that player-rented servers have not been ruled out as an option for Ace, but there are some hurdles we need to overcome before we are able to offer that solution, so we hope that this will serve as a good start along that path.

If this is supposed to be some sort of compromise, think again. Ideally, what we want is customisable server software that we can run on our own hardware. By customisable, I mean the ability to write plugins for it and create our own maps. This is a large part of what made 0.x successful. Paying you more money to rent servers from you with severely restrictive customisability (your maps only, your game modes only, etc) is not what we want, and frankly is rather insulting.

This is a really exciting project for us to work on, and one which has been initiated by you, the community.

Well it's nice to see that after several months of asking, turned arguing, has finally brought along some change, but it's just a shame to see that it is barely like the change we wanted.

With your help we can make Ace of Spades an awesome, ever-improving experience for a long time to come

It would seem to be "ever-improving" only because you are drip-feeding us things that used to exist before you removed them and sold us a cut-down game with extra guns.

[Jdrew]

It feels like the game is like battlefield heroes:

Leasing servers out which aren't even servers only a way to which you can set how to play a match is a start but it isn't enough. You knew we could modify the files and directly made a way to counter it. You say that you have hurdles to overcome when you are using the same server software that voxlap used. You said you were going to use steam workshop but never even opened it, it would be a fast change to add slab6 and the pyspades map editor into steam. Although you have started in a good foot here I think you will break down before you get to the finish line.

I believe that just like battlefield heroes you are going to go from a great free to play game to a point where you must pay for all the extra features. Ace of spades was built on community generated content and I just don't see it here. You have gained some support from this but the main community will see where this will lead. I just hope TGM and the others can change your minds.

[Handles]

good reply rakiru. what did they say to that?

[Bigcheecho]

I'm continuing my petition anyway. This corporatism... I'm already a communist because of cold-blooded corporate standards.

[rakiru]

good reply rakiru. what did they say to that?

Directly? Fuck all.

A couple of pages later, Sniped posted this though:

Hey guys,

This is the start of the process not the end. What we end up with may not be what we start out thinking about. As the message says, we will be inviting a whole load of testers to give us feedback on how the system will work.

The message even says that we have not ruled out what you want, but we are some way off that yet. If you want to be part of the process we would love you to be, and a lot of you have some very strong feelings so I really hope you take part in the testing phase.

I'll let you pick the gaping holes in that yourself (or look on page 4 of the original thread for my reply).

[Handles]

I dont even need to test the game to tell them that it sucks!