Shouldn't be different to any other server. I've not heard of it happening. However I've heard of many bugs in Overwatch which let you crash the server via in-game actions and kick everyone out.
Why would that be a problem once they decide to no longer support overwatch? When you turn off your servers, release one last patch that adds running your own server to the game as part of your game shutdown.
No skin off your back other than "cutting into sales of thatsamegame, butnextversion", which people are going to buy anyway.
I play Overwatch with my sons and not only can you not run a personal server, the game frequently has fundamental mechanic changes for certain characters (and all characters in this Tuesday’s update). The Overwatch of a year ago is a very different game than is now or will be a year from now.
If someone was to provide an Open Overwatch server, I don’t even know what it would look like at this point since game clients aren’t available for particular versions (maybe on PC, but not console). When Microsoft is done with Overwatch it’ll be gone.
"If there has been we haven’t noticed. Taking down one wowza server wouldn’t cause us any problems. They would have to take down 5+ servers for us to notice."
The game servers don't restart after the end of a round, though, do they? I'd imagine they kick the players back to the lobby, reset the in-server game, and then tell the lobby to send the next batch of players.
This has happened before. It goes down something like this:
Server admin starts harassing people for whatever reason
Users from that server start calling them out (usually with a #fediblock tag)
Any sympathetic users will block the entire instance where the abuse is happening (this is called de-federation)
Any instance is basically a private space, and there is no external authority which can influence what happens there. Instead, that server gets blocked from interacting with other servers. A server in isolation isn't much fun, so those users tend to migrate elsewhere until the offending server is empty and shuts down.
The beauty is that there is no central authority which could potentially abuse users, but there is also no central authority to protect them. So we protect each other, and let the toxic servers stew in their own juices away from everyone else.
Game can't run without a server and server owner decided to shut them down? Then game is a defective product and customer is eligible for full refund of the game. Those servers will be running forever or should not be necessary at all.
If people aren't happy with how their instance's admin behaves (e.g. "banning" users or removing ties to a particular server), they'll leave the instance. There is no single entity that's in control anymore.
On moving the game to a beefier server: “This is the machine that systems get reinforced on when players request that. Unfortunately, the same thing above applies – anyone in the system when the move happens gets disconnected. Because of this, it’s basically never done,”
It seems like a fairly small addition to the game logic to allow the game to freeze for a few seconds and be forcibly moved to another server. Is this kind of scenario so rare that it's not worth the trouble, or am I missing something else?
> Admin can also be fickle and kick players for whatever reason,
This also describes the behaviour of common game providers. The difference is: you can switch to a different server if you are annoyed by this, but cannot get rid of the game provider/publisher.
> And there is no automated matchmaking that takes balance into account.
Not much to be done about that with community ran servers for a lot of games. Its a thing when the game developer runs a ton of servers but usually that only lasts a few years after release before these are shut down by the game developer.
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