[cod] Need to know

[dallas at crd-dwc.com]

We were thinking of following the WOW model but maybe not going to be the case. How are the sites that give the servers for free, make enough to pay the bills? I have looked through a couple of sites and they are asking for donations? Is this it? I am new to this and COD is the only game I play online.

What our Idea is: We manage several datacenters that see near zero use after 6pm our time. They are all connected to the net with 100meg ethernet, we can download from clients at over 6 megs a second. We want to find a way to resell these connections after this time. Our servers are all clusters and have over 3 tb's of disk space. I have run an example COD server on one of our servers in St.Louis to a cable modem in Idaho and averaged 60-80ms ping time. We could easily run over 100 players and up to 25 different game servers.

But if there is no way to pay for it, then it maybe is a dead idea.

Thanks for everyones input.


stalvi wrote ..
> So you're thinking the whole model of WoW??   Meaning an open world  
> where you wonder around looking for something to kill?
> 
> Nah, FPS is a frag atmosphere.   And while some servers can get up to 
> 64 users, the average server is less than 20 users.
> 
> You'd have to make a world with a balance of power through huge  
> campaigns.  Now that would be fun, but it's not the FPS gamers idea  
> of a good time.  You'd have too many fraggers just charging around  
> into battles instead of well orchestrated campaigns involving many  
> players controlling individual aspects.  While the whole idea might  
> be a great premise, the reality is that it just would not be popular  
> enough to make it really work.
> 
> I'm not real familiar with WoW, but it seems that you can get by  
> without having a group effort and you can have character downtimes  
> whenever you want.  In a simulated war FPS, losing half your squad  
> because they had to go to bed can be fatal.  :-)
> 
> So, it's not only the server's speed or bandwidth, but map size and  
> qualities.  Imagine 200 people in a map like TigerTown.  LOL
> Yes, a single server can handle multiple games, however, that single  
> server would need to handle literally thousands of games to make it  
> worth while.
> 
> 
> On Oct 6, 2005, at 10:41 AM, Jay Vasallo wrote:
> 
> > From: "stalvi" <stalvi at tek.iarc.uaf.edu>
> > To: <cod at icculus.org>
> > Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2005 1:32 PM
> >
> >
> >> .  I don't  think there is any way that Activision can support  
> >> 4000-8000 servers.  Figure 20 people per server, 8000 servers,  
> >> that's only 160,000 users.  Not enough to make a stink over and  
> >> that is using a very high estimate.  The numbers would be more  
> >> like about 2000 servers with  about 20 users each.  40,000 is a  
> >> small number to support the  infrastructure of the charge-based  
> >> system.
> >>
> >>
> >
> > 20 man per server? If COD2 is going to release a realm like wow,  
> > wouldn't it also mean that the server player amount would be  
> > astronomical? The systems that ran the servers wouldn't be dual 3.2 
> > or dual amd's either I would imagine. I wish we had the final  
> > details on the release.
> >
> > J
> >
> >