"Ultimately, it keeps the game that everybody at the studio worked so hard on alive forever."
  • Kogasa@programming.dev
    37·
    9 months ago

    I was one of the last ~50 active players on War of the Roses when they shut down the backend. I had a bit over 1000 hours almost entirely in 1v1 dueling servers. Everyone knew everyone else. Tons of tribal knowledge about weird mechanics and glitches, blood feuds, and just generally interesting emergent gameplay within this tiny little niche. Since they shut it down I’ve been through college, grad school, a couple jobs, moved across the country, etc. and I still miss it. I really wish we’d been given this consideration.

  • bitwolf@lemmy.one
    171·
    9 months ago

    It’s a shame they waited until the end to do it. I’d have bought the game just to support the gesture had they done it earlier.

    Will be setting up a server and trying it out now 🙂

    • thantik@lemmy.world
      11·
      9 months ago

      It would be hilarious if in like, 8 years from now, it somehow blows up out of the middle of nowhere and becomes super popular; simply because they opened it up to privately hosted servers.

      • HakFoo@lemmy.sdf.org
        6·
        9 months ago

        I don’t get why day-1 private servers aren’t a thing. If nothing else, it allows them to cast off some problematic customers: the guys in Outer Slobavia with 1750 ping can set up a private server and have a better experience, the chuds can set up their own servers where the gameplay is just exchanging slurs without burdening the official GMs.

        I suspect it’s about economics; someone will setup a PS with the microtransactions turned off, or not enforcing license keys/accounts, and people will crowd it.

        • catloaf@lemm.ee
          21·
          9 months ago

          Because most people want to play without the hassle of setting up a private server and punching through NAT, or worse, CG-NAT. They want it to Just Work, and having the company run the servers is the best way to do that.

          Ideally, they’d just set up the private server software for release and then just run some servers themselves, but I suppose it’s faster and cheaper to make the software just good enough for internal use than to polish and package it for public release, and have to support it too.