Would we be better off if EA was still the publisher?

[Swoosh So]

After all they gave us a great foyer with an online ladder, we got zilch from either activision or sega :\ It should probably come as no surprise that the game sucks mp under sega.

[Orda Khan]

Even though there were periods when the server would go down, I still think EA was far better

.....Orda

[ELITEofWARMANGINGERYBREADMEN88]

After all they gave us a great foyer with an online ladder, we got zilch from either activision or sega :\ It should probably come as no surprise that the game sucks mp under sega.

I would Love to see a Ladder system in place today. I was bugging CA to do it for MT2W, but to no luck of course

[Aelwyn]

I check these forums about once every 6 months, after sometime around 2005, but I had to comment on this.

Isn't it sad? Seriously, I know Swoosh and Orda remember the crying about EA...yet they are better? Just sad.

The atmosphere, features, and support were...well not support, but the atmosphere and features were way better with EA.

That's so sad, I'd cry if I was the current publisher.

People who turn out sub-par products should be ashamed of their failure.

[Wishazu]

Dont get me started on the m2tw lobby!!!!!

Yay for EA. Never thought i would ever cheer EA.

[KrooK]

Yes I would.
Polish release of Shogun was something great.

[Shazz]

Looking forward to the allegded ladder system in Empire: Total War though.

[Monarch]

Its a sad state of affairs when EA offer a superior service to the one we're using currently.

[ELITEofWARMANGINGERYBREADMEN88]

Yea. Mabye CA's ETW Ladder System would be worthwhile.

[t1master]

Would we be better off if EA was still the publisher?

i'm sure the mp crowd would still find something to whinge about...

[Stig]

Say what you want about Gamespy, but EA uses it as well.

And t1 is right

[Puzz3D]

i'm sure the mp crowd would still find something to whinge about.

I'm sure that you have a rather low standard as to what constitutes a worthwhile multiplayer game.

[Cheetah]

I'm sure that you have a rather low standard as to what constitutes a worthwhile multiplayer game.

Is this necessary?

[Nikodil]

I don't think that the choice of publisher matter much here. The problem is more fundamental than that. It's not the publisher but rather a marketing model that's inappropriate for MP. More players online means more operating and support cost, without the revenue to back it up. So understandably, they do not encourage MP. But I'm afraid choosing the right publisher wouldn't be enough. Digging deeper there's a problem with the developer and the development and QA process too. As it is now it works for SP, churning out a new title every other year, with an add-on in between, and a single patch (maybe) if there are showstopper bugs. For most SPers the amount of play hours are just right the keep up the interest. Imbalance is a non-issue, as there are no opponents that would complain. But this slow pace won't do for online games. Play hours are measured quite differently. There's no "end" when you can say that you've completed the game. You don't get bored because the game gets too easy, because it can't, you don't play againt the game, you play against your pals. A better process would be an evolutionary one where the game and players can evolve together. They have to rethink everything to do that.

I'm puzzled why they keep failing to see the potential of MP. Simply putting in a ladder is no solution. Maybe they are just blind by the success of their SP.

[Stig]

Good post mate

And the truth. I think it might have to do with what they see on the forums. Look for yourself, which forum is more active, this one or the SP one. Sure if you change things people might come in, but what tells you that it will pay off.
It's a gamble you have to take. You might win, but you might also lose. And that's not worth it for CA and Sega it seems. They can invest a couple of million, but if it doesn't pay off, well, they lose. This game is free to play, most other MP games get their money from different things, MMORPG's from monthly fees, Battlefield and that new Quake Wars from advertising. This all is more or less impossible in this game. And it is costly to put 10 men on continously patching a game for just 1000 fans.

At the moment TW has the monopoly, they don't need to change, for the fans it's either this or nothing. So they will sell games, and tbh reviewers are not that interested in a Battlefield-like MP mode, with ranks and such, ever read the review for this game, all it talks about is SP. The main crowd is still SP, if that does not change this game does not change.

[Cheetah]

Perhaps surprising but I would agrue that MP just does not have the complexity to sell. You are stuck with your original army for the entire game, you cannot change your basic strategy, you cannot rebuild your army, you cannot adapt your army build to your opponent, the outcome is decided very much by the first engagement, maps offer little variety, there are no strategic positions to defend or capture.
As opposed to this any of the RTS games offer more complexity in MP than TW. You can adapt during the game, rebuild your armies, decide what to develop, what to build, there is large variety of maps, there are strategic points to defend/capture.
On the top of it in most RTS games there are clearly differentiated factions with no overlapping units. Zergs play out differently than humans; Rohan plays out differently than Mordor, etc. This gives an other level of comlexity whereas in TW games large cluster of factions play out the same way, and to make things worst there is almost always an exploit which makes the few exsiting alternative styles non-competitive. It follows that, as far as I can see, in competitive RTS games there is a great care on faction balance as for obvious reasons there is a huge public outcry if a certain faction is overpowered compared to the rest. Also lack of balance is relatively easy to spot and correct as units are faction specific. As opposed to this there was never an explicit faction vs faction balancing in TW games (though efforts to make factions more or less equaly competitive can be observed) and exploits inherent in the engine live forever.

Add to this which was already mentioned, i.e. it is SP that sells the TW genre and one can see why the situation is unlikely to change.

[Nikodil]

It's a gamble you have to take. You might win, but you might also lose. And that's not worth it for CA and Sega it seems. They can invest a couple of million, but if it doesn't pay off, well, they lose. This game is free to play, most other MP games get their money from different things, MMORPG's from monthly fees, Battlefield and that new Quake Wars from advertising. This all is more or less impossible in this game. And it is costly to put 10 men on continously patching a game for just 1000 fans.

The funny thing is that they already have technology involved, the development costs wouldn't be that significant. What's needed is rather a new way of packaging, a think-different business model. I'm sure they considered the options, and I don't think that it is the investment, but rather the risk of having MP canibalize on SP that's scaring them.

[Orda Khan]

We have gone off on a tangent, talking about SP, in the MP forum. It is easy to argue that publishers do not make any difference but it is also easy to argue that they might. From a multiplayer perspective, having witnessed the lobby in STW and the lobby in M2TW, I know which one I prefer. Whether an EA published M2TW would feature a lobby of the quality of STW, we will never know.
MP used to be important on this forum, the publisher was not the reason the MP community left

........Orda

[t1master]

the publisher was not the reason the MP community left

indeed.

I'm sure that you have a rather low standard as to what constitutes a worthwhile multiplayer game.

whinging about individual members of the community, instead of gameplay is one thing we'd engage in, if EA was still the publisher.

[CBR]

For MP to be good it requires a working battle engine, no connection issues, good lobby and reasonable faction/unit balance. All that from day 1 with only minor tweaks needed in quick patches. Throw in some CA sponsored tournaments and use some of the PR to hype up MP should do something about numbers of MP'ers.

Unfortunately CA's policy of releasing a title once a year, and a whole new engine every second year, means first releases becomes less than ideal (to put it mildly) with many months of patching just to fix the basic problems and then off to the next game with same old and new problems to be fixed all over again.

The total war engine has the potiential to attract a hardcore group of players but not anywhere near the numbers of classic RTS games. And nor should it try as it would just become yet another RTS game among so many others.

But the business model and lack of attention to the most important element of the Total War game (the battle engine) means we will most likely never see this potiential.

None of that has much to do with the publisher.


CBR

[Puzz3D]

whinging about individual members of the community, instead of gameplay is one thing we'd engage in, if EA was still the publisher.

The complaints about the state of multiplayer in the game are legitimate. Suggesting otherwise, as you did, is doing a disservice to the players.

[t1master]

where did i suggest that the complaints against the mp game were illegitimate?

i suggested, in this nostaligic glimpse back thread, that even if mp were perfect, we'd still spend time whinging about something, probably something as petty as personal snipes, as you demonstrated yuuki....

[Puzz3D]

where did i suggest that the complaints against the mp game were illegitimate?

In this statement:

i'm sure the mp crowd would still find something to whinge about...

You posted this in a thread that raised a legitimate question.

i suggested, in this nostaligic glimpse back thread, that even if mp were perfect, we'd still spend time whinging about something, probably something as petty as personal snipes, as you demonstrated yuuki....

This thread isn't a nostalgic look back, and you continue to devalue the opinion of players who point out deficiencies in the game.

[KrooK]

If MP were perfect we wouldn't complain only play. Do you know what really annoyed me into CA - the behavior before Kingdoms release.
They just announced that : yes game is bugged and we know it but correcting these bug would take too much time. Instead of that we will make you (player) new campaings and some new units with same bugs like before.
Enjoy it and see how we care about you. Thats why I have no Kingdoms and I don't think I buy.

[t1master]

edit: never mind, have fun playing sam wars...

[Puzz3D]

Do you know what really annoyed me into CA - the behavior before Kingdoms release. They just announced that : yes game is bugged and we know it but correcting these bug would take too much time.

Feature Crazy Syndrome is what I call it. I don't see value in having features that don't work properly. If the company is going to maintain this limited patching policy, then it should be releasing a more polished v1.0.

As to the main topic of this thread, I remember Gil Jaysmith saying that GameSpy provides no server side support. This was in response to the question of why we lost player created chat rooms, so it would seem that EA did something on their end to support specific games whereas GameSpy does not. When I contacted GameSpy Customer Support about a connectivity issue that had shown up abruptly in MTW, they took the position that it was caused by bugs in the client software and only Creative Assembly could fix it despite them acknowledging that they had recently changed the GameSpy server software. Basically, this problem was that if you were hosting a 4v4 and the battle crashed, you could not log into GameSpy after that because a file was created in the main game folder that prevented logging in. GameSpy wasn't creating that file. The game itself was doing it, and why should crashing out of a battle prevent you from logging into GameSpy anyway?

I think it has something to do with Creative Assembly changing the network code after STW to require connection to the matchmaking server at all times so that a fakeserver could never work for MTW. That adversely affected online stability, and it just happened to coincide with the move from EA to GameSpy. Why Creative Assembly is so concerned with preventing direct IP connectivity for a game where MP is less than 5% of their sales is beyond me. Some players buy Total War exclusively for its MP component. If this is a mistake, then maybe someone at Creative Assembly should inform potential customers of it.

[Nikodil]

Why Creative Assembly is so concerned with preventing direct IP connectivity for a game where MP is less than 5% of their sales is beyond me.

Smells like a political decision, my wild guess is that the deal between gamespy and CA might have some kind of exclusiveness clauses. The end user license has it for sure.

[Whacker]

It would seem to me that the problem isn't really the publisher, it's really CA. MP in the TW games, even Shogun, always struck me as rather halfarsed and tacked on as an afterthought. It's been very evident ever since RTW that the MP component is for all intents and purposes expendable.

To me, the problem is really CA's mindset and direction they are taking the TW games in; arcadey, graphics-focused, barely-modable offerings. As of M2TW, I completely agree w/Puzz's assessment that CA is getting in over their heads with their game engine. Things such as net code are so poor and buggy since RTW that it's a wonder they even chose to include the MP portion or spend any time on it. The other problem is modding support, which I still say is tied largely to the above. CA has repeatedly stated they fear to give any kind of access to their "intellectual property", and I'm also willing to bet that the code is so convoluted and hosed up it'd be near impossible to do something like ID/Valve do with the client/server model. This is why we haven't and won't ever see a real SDK. If we could mod it, we could probably fix a lot of it ourselves, save for certain things such as net code which are always part of the server (following id's model).

In summary, I think the problem is really CA, not the publishers.

[ELITEofWARMANGINGERYBREADMEN88]

Smells like a political decision, my wild guess is that the deal between gamespy and CA might have some kind of exclusiveness clauses. The end user license has it for sure.

Raise your hand if you read the End User License (or if you even care about it).....

[Puzz3D]

CA has repeatedly stated they fear to give any kind of access to their "intellectual property", and I'm also willing to bet that the code is so convoluted and hosed up it'd be near impossible to do something like ID/Valve do with the client/server model. This is why we haven't and won't ever see a real SDK. If we could mod it, we could probably fix a lot of it ourselves, save for certain things such as net code which are always part of the server (following id's model).

Beginning with RTW, CA brought down a curtain of secrecy about the game that wasn't there during STW and MTW. I personally think the purpose of this secrecy was to hide shortcomings in the game's design. They have also stated, as far back as I can remember, that host controllable parameter values have been intentionally limited so as not to confuse new players. This is the reason given for limiting parameters such as rate of fatigue and amount of ammo to simple on/off switches or providing no control at all over other important parameters. It's therefore CA's responsibility to optimize the parameters since they aren't allowing the players to do it. However, it appears that the majority of players don't care if the gameplay is optimized, so I don't see much incentive for CA to do it.

Total War does not follow the client/server model. It's uses a peer-to-peer model. "A pure peer-to-peer network does not have the notion of clients or servers, but only equal peer nodes that simultaneously function as both "clients" and "servers" to the other nodes on the network. This model of network arrangement differs from the client-server model where communication is usually to and from a central server." I think Total War is a modified peer-to-peer because the host becomes the server in the sense that each joiner sends it's battle data to the host which in turn relays it out to the other joiners, but it's peer-to-peer in the sense that the battle is running on all the machines simultaneously. In any case, the entire network code necessary to play online is already in the game itself. GameSpy is simply being used to limit online play.

One thing that suggests network code inefficiency is the lag in online M2TW that people mention. The amount of date passing between a player's machine and the host machine is insignificant compared to the bandwidth available. Theoretically, you should get about the same or even better performance in multiplayer that you get in single player.