Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Yeah, I saw this the other day. I didn't read that the footage was from a console or PC. Looks good plus they aren't ripping dedicated servers from us. The language is definitely NOT for the faint of heart but I will be interested to see how this plays on the PC. Hope its not a crappy port to PC product.

 

I'm going to wait and see, but if I do get it, it will be an honor to fight beside you again Shads

 

Looking forward to trying this out.

And I seem to remember reading somewhere, DICE remembers it's core roots of PC gamers and wouldn't dare think of pulling dedicated servers.

 

Big maps, and vehicles again, looks pretty good so far..

Gameplay Panama

 

While cheaters are a part of the problem, the bigger issue is that DICE wants to police it's game. That's fine. But when Tribes and Tribes 2 came out, who did the majority of the policing? The server admins. You quickly found out which servers didn't put up with shenanigans like aimbots and cheats. Because the admins were actively monitoring them. And by monitoring the servers, Dynamix had off-loaded a huge majority of post-release responsibilities to the end user.

Like it should be.

If I get into an accident today because I failed to stop at a stop sign, do I get a chance to sue GM because they didn't provide me the necessary tools to make me see the stop sign? I probably could try, but I would fail miserably in court. That's what DICE and Infinity Ward are pretty much assuring won't happen on their 'monitored' servers.

Yeah, right. Gots me a bridge over Lake Champlain I'd like to sell you too.

 

What Infinity Ward did was retarded.. why? Because I've been playing MW2 on the 360, which can't have dedicated servers the same way PCs can; and their matchmaking is a patchwork, clunky, buggy mess..
What DICE are doing is little different than they did for their previous games, except that they aren't letting you run a server on your machine at home.
Fact of the matter is, during BF2 (and BF2142 for me) I only ever played on servers like Trinity and the like anyway. Most of the one off servers were crap or couldn't handle 64 people.
You may not remember it, but the majority of the playing you guys did in BF2 was on servers like that, or on the one we'd rented for a while.

I'm not reading anywhere in there that you can't admin the server you rent, only that you can't mod it. Ultimately I can't remember playing on a modded server for any BF game since BF1942 and those were serious conversions.

As soon as you throw in all those upgrades and achievements tied to 'time spent playing' and ingame statistics, I can see why the devs want to keep things secure.
There's already cheating all around in MW2 on the xbox.. "Severs" or game sessions you end up in with unlimited ammo, and no reload and score limits set into the thousands. So all you do is rack up a disgusting number of kills, and rank up in a matter of hours rather than days. Primarily possible because in MW2 one of the players IS the server for a time, without IF or Microsoft policing the game at all. One little "serverside hack" is all it takes, which is sad.

About the only negative I see here is that, for example, Hamma wouldn't be able to personally host a server for us. I can't say that bothers me all that much. I'm interested in the game because many of us can all play together again, at something that isn't WoW. I was never excited about it because we might be providing a server resource for the community.

Though if you want to rent a server, I'd certainly chip in, if we were taking it seriously.

my $0.04