Are Dedicated Servers Really That Important for CoD Ghosts?

It’s been confirmed that Call of Duty Ghosts will have dedicated servers after Mark Ruben spoke during the Microsoft Media briefing.

But Are Dedicated Servers Really That Important for CoD Ghosts?

[ATi_Elite]

are brakes and tires really important for race cars?

COD along with any online game ESPECIALLY FPS needs Dedicated Servers.

I don't want "little Johnny" hosting a game on his turtle slow, Lag infested internet service making NOT so much fun for everyone when the game should be on a State of the Art server making it fair and enjoyable for ALL.

[ErcsYou]

Im still waiting for some info on these Dedicated servers. How many is the US getting? What about Europe? Where are these servers located? Will Each state Have thousands of servers spread out or will everyone in California have to ping to LA or SF? Will people close to these dedicated server have a advantage over people hundreds of miles away? Can we still use P2P if we want to? What if i live 300 miles away from these servers? What if i live in the mountains in a small community and P2P gives our small town a better ping to each other? I would really like Microsoft to address these issues.

Question: Are brakes and tires really important for race cars? Answer: Yes, they are important on the track but become worthless if you have to drive your race car on a back road made of ruff terrain covered in mud and rocks. You might as well just just stay local(P2P) if the path to the race track(DS) is too far away.

[WrAiTh Sp3cTr3]

If you plan on buying it for the XB1 then you probably won't have to worry. But anywhere else is a cause for concern I'm sure, even on 360, although it would be interesting if the Azure tech would be used by IW on the 360 or if it's allowed.

[P0werVR]

One Data Center alone is more than enough for a region. But providing two each within strategic points of each continent will provide full dedicated servers.

Microsoft since 2009 has been spending billions in preparation for Azure platform.

Finally Australia will be supported, since after current generation of bad connectivity in MP games in general. So they should thank Microsoft IF they're purchasing X1s for MP gaming that is.

http://twthereddragon.blogs...

EDIT:

I believe his analogy of tires and cars was general and not literal. You kinda took it too far, because we're talking about Data Centers not racing cars.

[ErcsYou]

@P0werVR. i refuse to believe 4 data centers will be enough for the US. I live in the central valley in California and i ping SAnFran in 29ms. People in Oregon will have to use the data center in Cali for there dedicated servers and i ping Oregon in 80ms. So every gamer in California will have a advantage over every gamer in Oregon or Washington with a half second less of lag. I understand that P2P can have its issues but forcing every one to use a dedicated server a thousand miles away will cause more issues than P2P ever did. I know we are all excited about the idea of a dedicated servers for every game but if your to far away from these data centers its kinda pointless. We no longer have to deal with a host advantage but we are now forced to play with more lag. I would prefer a choice.

also if your playing COD and "little Johnny" is hosting a game on his turtle slow, Lag infested internet service your service is probably worse since COD chooses the best connection for the host.

[n4rc]

Seriously... Is it 2001 all over again? Lol

I could ping anywhere in NA and not see triple digits..

And I'm 150km from Toronto in a small town.. 11ms to the speed test server there..

That's like lan 10 years ago... Point I'm trying to make... If you arent in the middle of absolutely nowhere and don't get a better connection then p2p, its on your end...

For a fps.. Dedicated servers are a must... Or deal with lag switches, host migrations or drops.. Saturated connections and the dreaded "lag comp"..

[BoriboyShoGUN]

"Lag infested internet service your service is probably worse since COD chooses the best connection for the host."
Do you actually believe that!! I run 89 mgbs Fios Quantum with a ping less then 10 and in Black Ops 1 i did get host a lot of the time and the rooms ran great! But it wasnt guaranteed either. In MW3 and BO2 I rarely got host and was in terribly laggy lobbies all too often. But im no longer concerned about COD. BF4 and KZ here i come.

One last thing dedicated servers can suck as well they arent the be all end all!!!

[ErcsYou]

@n4rc, nope. Its 2013 and i still can get pings over 100ms only traveling half way across the US. I guess my point is that a 20/30ms difference is a BIG difference. a 50ms ping on COD is noticeable when switching from a lobby with a 75ms ping.

@BoriboyShoGUN , well, i get some horrible lobbies too. A match my start out well until someone on the hosts side decides to start down loading files and watchings videos. COD chooses the best connection at the time and doesnt mean the connection will stay that way. Your 10ms ping my be good to one server but it doesnt mean your going to have a 10ms ping every where. Your internet provider speed will not determine your ping time. im using Comcast and have 30/mb dl speeds and can ping a city 30 miles away in 8ms. Also CODs net code sucks

I guess i could just not care because the Data center will be located close to me and give me a good ping but what about the rest of the country? What about Alaska, or Hawaii? If their only choice is a server on the main land or Canada why even play. They NEED P2P on COD. Then again most gamers probably play on TVs without using the game mode to reduce lag while playing over wifi so my concerns wont even effect them because they dont care.

I dont usually comment much due to the Fanboy gibberish that goes on around here but thank you for responding without attacking me. bubbles up for the conversation

[P0werVR]

@ErcsYou

I believe you underestimate the scale these data centers cover. These aren't simple data centers, these are Regional Data Centers. Either way, Microsoft has pot shot container data centers in differing part of the US.

If you do your research, you wouldn't be questioning Microsoft's dedications to these services.

Just recently after purchasing Nokia they are setting down a $250 million data center in Finland and is will be growing overtime until demand is met.

http://www.datacenterknowle...

Besides, Washington is their state. Who's to say they will not have support. So your having wrong sense in how much ground these data centers cover.

[n4rc]

@ercsyou

yes... but you'll never see that difference..

furthest speed test center i can use on my phone is in Kentucky.. ~650 miles away..

57ms... on my cell phone, on wifi..

if your ping to the closest data center is 75ms (which is the most you'd likely get with a decent connection) then you can easily get used to it.

when it changes lobby to lobby, or host to host in the same game.. then it becomes impossible to really have a consistent experience

[s8anicslayer]

I will quote one of my favorite comedians in reply to the title "Shirley you can't be serious"?. But since I actually read the article and to put it into layman's terms for the less tech savvy people...P2P sucks meaning having to rely on someone else's connection is crappy and with cloud (Dedicated Servers) the agony of having to deal with lag bandwith issues or just someone who is having a crappy match and quits in the middle of a game in turn throws everyone back to the lobby, you lose all your xp, bonuses, will now be a thing of the past with azure and ghosts on the X1.

[BLKxSEPTEMBER]

Leslie Nielson?

[s8anicslayer]

@Blackx Yes sir!

[MizTv]

YES YES YES YES YES YES YES!!!!!!

[ssj27]

They where not necessary before and they are not now for a COD game unless they actually make or use a good engine for it with better programmers.

Just look at the MP forage for ghost, the engine itself lag and is cheap. No dedicated server can fix a broken game.

[TheHybrid]

Very well said

[Olympus]

Another reason why Xbox one is best for online multiplayer and Shooters. DEDICATED SERVERS probided by Microsoft...does Sony provide third party with dedicated servers? No.

[DeadlyFire]

Its not provided at all. They are just synced in the Cloud. Only 2 benefits of the Cloud servers = Faster match making and a stable consistent host. Your distance still determines lag to any host. While you can assume all hosts are local they likely will be spread far and wide in certain regions.

Does Sony provide servers? Wow really? You don't think they would do so if they see it as necessary. They have done so more often than Microsoft with their first party games. I don't think its impossible to say they could do the same for third party as well if there are real cost effective benefits to it for them.

[ErcsYou]

srry, wrong reply

[johndoe11211]

People are just not getting it. The problem with past cod games was not the lack of dedicated servers, the problem was BAD PROGRAMMING. Regardless of how much dedicated servers there are if the game is not coded properly then it just won't work. Infinity ward and microsoft are trying to pull the wool over everyones eyes.

Black ops 2 had dedicated servers on PC and still PC players were complaining about bad hit detection and lag comp. MW2 had no dedicated servers and yet 90% of people had no hit detection and lag comp complaints. MW2 is considered one of if not the best, most smooth playing cod game ever. How did it accomplish that without dedicated servers? Simple, good programmers.

If infinity ward does not get there act together and sort out there programming issues then people will be back here in 4 months complaining about the game just as they did about every cod since black ops 1.

[CarlosX360]

Sounds like the writer has never played a Call of Duty title to experience the various lag...

of course it's important!

[HammadTheBeast]

Depends on the netcode. Plenty of laggy games in BF3 because of net code. It's a step in the right direction though.

[thrust]

Yeah, look at quake 3 IMO the best net coding ever, I use to play that in a 56k modem and it was perfect same goes for CS.

[FlyingFoxy]

Are you serious, the only games i could play on dial up was like Worms 2 because it was turn based.

I remember trying Quake 2 and it lagged so bad, as did South Park and Delta Force land warrior, first FPS games i ever played online.

First time i ever got playable pings of like 70 or so was when i first moved to 128k broadband cable when RTCW and SOF2 were around. both of which were awesome games to play online.

But then i remember reading that Quake 3 was getting multiplayer on Dreamcast and wondered how it was gonna be smooth over the dial up it used, Half Life was supposed to be released with online multiplayer on it as well.

[thrust]

Yeah it was great, I used gamespy, my ping was always about 52ms.

This was before dreamcast aswell and quake 4 on the DC was only 4 player at a time.

My dial up ISP at the time was yahoo cost £14.99 a month and it would cut off every 3 hours I had to reconnect after that! Like I said netcoding when we had 56k modems was important.

[NarooN]

Quake 3 had better netcode than Q2 did, and Quake 3 still has some of the finest netcode around.

The Dreamcast did have a Broadband adapter you could buy, and it was bundled in with some Dreamcast bundles. I remember that the Dreamcast version of Quake 3 allowed cross-platform play with the PC users (Dreamcast version did have keyboard & mouse support as well.)

[SolidDuck]

Is this the dumbest question I've read in a long time?

[thrust]

They are important for any online game!

[SmokingMonkey]

I love how everyone is all into dedicated servers now.

Resistance Fall of man, Day one, 20 vs 20 player's online, dedicated servers, thank you

Sony

[thrust]

I understand what you are trying to say but it's not really the same is it?

Only selected games had dedicated servers on ps3 and Xbox 360, now on the Xbox one all online games are going to have them because of the 300000 servers more to come as needs be.

I see your a little hurt but am sure Sony are seeing that ms are doing this and they are slap dashing something together.

Plus PCs have had them for 15+ years, it is nothin new we have always wanted them just MS making it happen for all online gaming right now, it was the only downside, hosts and so on.

[SmokingMonkey]

How is it 'slap dashing something together" after they saw the xpox one if it was in the PS3 day 1 in 2006/2007?

And yes the mighty PC and all it's glory did it first 15 years ago, all i'm saying is that Sony did a good job with dedicated servers on PS3 exclusive's

[SpitFireAce85]

You still believe M$ will have 300K physical
servers..

[thrust]

Never said physical! That's not needed anymore its over kill.

[MysticStrummer]

"now on the Xbox one all online games are going to have them"

No they won't. EA has their own, and they're not the only ones that do.

[MizTv]

Don't forget about 32 player killzone2

[M-M]

Nope, COD on PC had dedicated servers and the lag was still as bad. It's with how the game is coded, someone made a video of them playing on LAN in Black Ops 2. If he turned around a corner and saw the enemy on his screen, the enemy couldn't see him until a few moments later. Also, if the enemy went through a door then the other person wouldn't see him until a few moments later. Wish I knew where the video was.

[NarooN]

This. I know what video you're talking about, but I don't remember the guy who made it.

I remember I was playing an offline 1v1 against a friend of mine earlier this Spring. The game started *LAGGING*, and it was an offline match. I'm not talking framerate lag, actual NETWORK LAG, as if it were built-in to the game. It was a disgrace. Our minds were blown.

I've been telling people for years, the main problem with CoD isn't the servers (though it is a big part), but the netcode. The netcode is terribly optimized in these games. The last CoD that had good netcode was MW2, as much as I hate to admit it since that game was a POS. The hit-detection was on-point, and that getting-shot-around-a-corner stuff wasn't as prevalent as it is now.

[deadfrag]

Indeed!What counts is the netcode of the engine and not the dedicaded servers like some think wrongly!

[Caleb_H]

I didn't stop playing CoD because of lag, I stopped playing because it's not a good game.

[Supermax]

You need dedicated servers in competitive multiplayer period.only people that want p2p are the ones that want a advantage.

[SegaSaturn669]

The more players you have in a game, the more important dedicated servers become. It strains a player's connection and can cause nasty game breaking glitches.

If you're playing with 8 people or less on a small map, you can usually get away with it.

[slampunk]

Yes!

[ape007]

hell yes that's why im getting CoD on X1

[iiwii]

They need to do away with the lag compensation as well. It's frustrating when you can actually feel the game counteract what you are doing just to make you miss. I've actually complained about that for a long time that feeling of something literally pushing my gun off target so that I missed.

If their new matchmaking is all that they claim, surely they can match up all of those with lesser internet connections together so that they don't have to lag compensate.

[XboxFun]

Heck Yea, thank goodness MS is providing Activision's CoD with dedicated servers. The matches should go a lot smoother and no more "host advantages" everyone keeps screaming.

[iiwii]

I can tell you there is surely no "host advantage". I have a 50MB down 5MB up connection and I ALWAYS get stuck being the host. It ALWAYS gives the advantage to the opposite team. When I am host it is nothing but a struggle for me and my team. I can unload whole guns into someone point blank and not kill them, and then they can fire once at me and drop me dead. Yet, if it does flip the host to the other team, we mop the floor with them. So no, there is NO host advantage as some seem to think. It's actually the opposite from my experience.

[christrules0041]

Depending on if your console is starting to crap out. The CPU handles everything from player to player so when your console is hosting it uses all the power of the CPU. If your console is starting to give out then trying to use all of your CPU can make the host lag and others will be fine because it isn't using there CPU.

If your consoles CPU is really bad it can make everybody lag because it just can't get the job done right on time.

Since your always hosting it actually works your CPU harder so chances are after a while it'll make you lag and the others.

Things that cause lag can be from network coding, distance and the state of the persons CPU.

Now what a lot of people don't understand about dedicated servers is that it doesn't take away the lag. It makes everybody lag and offloads calculations so hoster lag/advantage is gone. It makes it more fair but there still will be lag. Another thing is I live in Canada and if I try playing with my friends in the US then if I am connecting to there dedicated server that is closer to them they get the advantage over me because it takes longer for my calculations to get to the cloud before mine will. So if there are people from different countries it'll give a hoster advantage to whoever they are closer to.

No matter what we do if it's online multiplayer there will be lag. It's literally impossible to have 0 ping online.

There is also the loss of data packets. Where if you have a computer on and it is connected to the internet. Then if it is sending out data and fills up all of the bandwidth when you start to shoot your data packets doesn't go through so your bullets don't count until they can start to go through. But when data stands still for too long it just disappears.

So many issues. Almost no solutions.

[ZBlacktt]

Not like the hackers, glitchers, modded control users and boosters are going to stop. Cheating will be in there just like it always has. More so in COD.

It's funny how MAG ( PS3 ) had 256 players and ran fine. Now all of a sudden this is the best thing ever. Yet, what next Gen game is even close to 256 players on the X1?

[iiwii]

Have you ever noticed how as the year goes on and it starts getting closer to time for their next COD game to come out that each new patch seems to make the game worse and less tolerable? Enough to make you just "forget it" and move on to the next one?

[ape007]

yes ps3 exclusives had dedicated servers but u can count that with your fingers and mag 256 player is what the game is supposed to be/designed to be not that X1's LIVE can't do that, that's childish and secondly more is not better in all cases, less lag and disconnections is way more important

Xbox one cloud servers allow for dedicated servers support for almost every 3rd party game, im sure sony will do something because that my friend is a HUGE selling point, just imagine if X1 is 399$, imagine how much it will outsell ps4, 3rd party games are dominating PSN, CoD, FIFA and GTA, all of those play better on X1, like i said, sony must do something, this is very dangerous for sony if u take into full account

volition and Dice see big potential in it, read their statements

[ZBlacktt]

Yeah, I read both sides of the story and I too think it's a good thing for sure! But we can't say it's a fix all. But a very good step in the right direction for gamers, agreed. I know what dedicated servers are by the way, lol. Not new here.

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

What about PlanetSide 2 coming to the PS4? The player count?

[MizTv]

And it all comes back to the magical "cloud"

[Sci0n]

do modded controllers work on COD? haven't really heard anyone complain about or mention using them on there. I know modded controllers ruined GTA IV's competitive multiplayer though. Freaking FragFX and Turbo controller users SMH they are pathetic. I hope they aren't as effective on GTA V. Back on topic COD sucks, I am happy with my vita as I received the declassified bundle as a gift but I tossed that cod crap so fast lol.

[ZBlacktt]

They were huge on ebay and Craigslist. Might even still be on there. But I also saw people getting banned using them. So there are ways to find out it seems. I guess playback video of single shot weapons going off on full auto. Also check youtube for videos. People dumb enough to post them.

[lastofgen]

How are ded servers a bad thing? Any game that has them is great.

[SuicideKing]

Are dedicated servers coming to the ps4 for ghosts also? I read the article and it seemed like he was hinting at that.

[Arty84]

yes dedicated servers are important but that's just one of the CODs franchises problem

[jahfen83]

If they don't have dedicated servers for PS4 then I'm not getting it.

[Subzero200]

yes to keep all these freaking hackers out.

[Codey47]

You still get hackers on dedicated servers

[WeaseL]

Dedicated servers are great until they get turned off

[Codey47]

I think that next gen console games should have Dedicated Servers and a server list as a number one priority in multiplayer orientated games(Captain Obvious) ...anyone that has played Splinter Cell Blacklist online can attest that the "host migration, returning to lobby" is a BIG pain in the ass.