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[dakotaboul123]

Well guys sorry to ruin your hopes but good old laggy saggy gameservers.com is the ONLY place allowed to host COD:Black Ops servers

Article from: http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2010/9/2/activision-allows-dedicated-servers-with-cod-black-ops-but-theree28099s-a-catch.aspx

Some of you may be extremely excited about the future release of the next installment of the newest installment of the Call of Duty franchise. The Black Ops [or "COD7"] installment appears to be very close to Modern Warfare 2 that was made by the basically defunct developer that went by the name of Infinity Ward. As things have gone in the past, Treyarch, the developer of COD: Black Ops, is basically taking the previous COD game engine and slightly tweaking it with new game modes and new maps and models. Personally, I’m not too big of a fan of these Treyarch games… but after what Activision and Infinity Ward did to MW2 on the PC… it’s hard to live up to worse expectations.

This leads us to today’s announcement - Call of Duty: Black Ops will definitely have dedicated servers. That is, as long as you get them from gameservers.com. We can compare that with Henri Ford's legendary statements that customers can have a car in any color as long as it’s black. The statement goes,

  "GAMESERVERS.COM SELECTED AS THE EXCLUSIVE DEDICATED SERVER PROVIDER FOR CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS. GameServers.com, in an exclusive contract with Activision and Treyarch studios, announces that they will offer dedicated server rentals for the upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops release scheduled for November 9, 2010. We are extremely excited about this unprecedented relationship with Activision to offer dedicated servers exclusively for Black Ops”, says David Aninowsky, CEO of GameServers.com. “We are placing a great amount of pressure on ourselves to ensure that we exceed any and all expectations."

What does this mean? It basically boils down to Activision Blizzard, Inc. still wanting control over what kind of content is played on the servers and not allowing the development community to do as they please. For gamers, this means that there won’t likely be many if any mods much like MW2. The exception, though, is that there could be a possibility for a competition mode of the game, but that’s still, of first, last and only resort.
GameServers.com effectively have a monopoly on COD: Black Ops server hosting. They also have limited the ranked multi-player to 18 slots just like MW2. If in theory want to have more, you can pay for an unranked server for $.99 per player per month.

So, for those of you that thought that Treyarch and their announcement of dedicated servers would bring back life to the COD franchise, Activision appears to have made sure that they limited it to the point of not really being dedicated anymore. This appears to be yet another game that has been ruined by the narrow mindedness of management that only wants to see margins and deliver dates rather than a good game. This, in the end, will hurt Activision greatly as they are effectively killing off a franchise on a platform that it originally started on. Interestingly though, it looks like Activision Blizzard is desperate to repeat the curious case of Electronic Arts and their fall from grace.

If MW2 didn’t leave a bad taste in gamers’ mouths, there’s a good chance that the way Activision is handling Black Ops may. Here is also a new game play video of COD: Black Ops that was just released.


So once again they really f***** up big time

[Courgette]

What to say ? Oh I know : free games rule ! go one ioQuake3 community !

[ryry46d9]

But the real question is ... Will B3 run on it?    

and I second Courgette, "Zachary Slater" FTW

[Courgette]

If B3 was ever to work for it, we would have to negotiate with gameservers.com to be an 'approved admin tool'.
Chances are that they won't like having to install a mysql db for each of their clients and see 100-200MB of RAM eaten by just an admin tool.

Maybe B3 could be run remotely, but we are taking the risk that gameservers.com block such communications all together or to just some admin tools.
If I were gameserver.com with such a monopoly on MoH, I would develop/buy my own exclusive admin tools and make ppl buy it.

[ryry46d9]

not sure how different cod b3 is to urt b3, but ever since you fixed up ftptail I've had no urt problems with gameservers.com. I  think 7 of the b3's, I over see are from there. Maybe I just got lucky racks to work with  

[Freelander]

No surprise...

[GrossKopf]

If B3 was ever to work for it, we would have to negotiate with gameservers.com to be an 'approved admin tool'.
Chances are that they won't like having to install a mysql db for each of their clients and see 100-200MB of RAM eaten by just an admin tool.

Maybe B3 could be run remotely, but we are taking the risk that gameservers.com block such communications all together or to just some admin tools.
If I were gameserver.com with such a monopoly on MoH, I would develop/buy my own exclusive admin tools and make ppl buy it.

I don't see why they would block it. Did you have to negotiate with every GSP to have B3 be able to use all the games it supports? Why would you need to negotiate to be an approved admin tool as long as it's not running on the server itself. B3 can be run just like it's been run - remotely with an FTP connection to the log and a remote MySQL database.

[MordyT]

Yes, but they may not allow it so they can sell their own tool for more money...

*Via my HTC EvO 4G*

[Courgette]

anyway, this is supposition. Let's see

[Bakes]

I don't see why they would block it. Did you have to negotiate with every GSP to have B3 be able to use all the games it supports? Why would you need to negotiate to be an approved admin tool as long as it's not running on the server itself. B3 can be run just like it's been run - remotely with an FTP connection to the log and a remote MySQL database.

What Courgette is saying is that B3 for CoD demands access to the gameserver logfiles. Maybe GS will allow that, maybe not, but they won't provide full FTP access purely because it would allow anyone to set up their own BO servers - therefore unless GS provided access to the logs, B3 would be impossible.

[grosbedo]

What Courgette is saying is that B3 for CoD demands access to the gameserver logfiles. Maybe GS will allow that, maybe not, but they won't provide full FTP access purely because it would allow anyone to set up their own BO servers - therefore unless GS provided access to the logs, B3 would be impossible.

I recently added an httpytail.py plugin, which is capable of fetching a log via an http url. If they make the logs accessible from the web by a way or another, there should be a way to make it work with this plugin (although it may have to be updated if they use a weblogin system to protect the files).

[GrossKopf]

Yes, but they may not allow it so they can sell their own tool for more money...

*Via my HTC EvO 4G*

I don't believe GameServers.com has ever developed their own server admin tool. The closest thing might be some sort of rcon interface in their control panel.

[GrossKopf]

What Courgette is saying is that B3 for CoD demands access to the gameserver logfiles. Maybe GS will allow that, maybe not, but they won't provide full FTP access purely because it would allow anyone to set up their own BO servers - therefore unless GS provided access to the logs, B3 would be impossible.

Unless it can be done via rcon, like BC2. No log access required to use B3 with Bad Company 2.

[Bakes]

Unless it can be done via rcon, like BC2. No log access required to use B3 with Bad Company 2.

That was due to good engine design

[Wright]

They do not block it, I currently host several servers with gameservers.com that run B3 on from a remote box using FTP.