Features
Dead MMOs, emulator servers and the licence question
Rebuilt MMO servers survive on the publisher's tolerance, and the rare licence goes to a game the publisher no longer sells, run by a team that never charged for it.
SweetMask · · 5 min
Editor
I run JoinGG. I have been hosting and breaking game servers for longer than I have been writing about them, which is mostly what I write about.
Rebuilt MMO servers survive on the publisher's tolerance, and the rare licence goes to a game the publisher no longer sells, run by a team that never charged for it.
SweetMask · · 5 min
Moving bans, tickets and the console into Discord made administration easier to reach and harder to audit, and it turned a Discord account into a condition of appeal.
SweetMask · · 4 min
The word sells the absence of plugins and pay-to-win, yet on a real listing it covers everything from Mojang's own server to Paper with a dozen plugins.
SweetMask · · 4 min
When GameSpy switched off in 2014, the game servers survived and the directory did not: one hostname inside every copy of a game was the part nobody could easily replace.
SweetMask · · 4 min
Players picture a server that sees a name and a score; an ordinary setup logs addresses, account IDs, team chat and commands, and keeps them until someone decides otherwise.
SweetMask · · 4 min
A 24/7 Dust2 or Mirage server sells certainty and a regular crowd, and the bill goes to custom maps and to players who only ever learn one map.
SweetMask · · 4 min
Nobody joins an empty server. The interesting part is that the number that matters is not zero.
SweetMask · · 3 min
Whitelists are justified as a filter against bad actors. They are not very good at that, and extremely good at something else.
SweetMask · · 4 min
The community is there, the machine has headroom, and the case looks obvious. It usually is not, for reasons that have nothing to do with hosting.
SweetMask · · 4 min
For fifteen years the basic unit of organised multiplayer was the clan. It did not lose an argument — the things that made it necessary were removed one at a time.
SweetMask · · 3 min
Reports, logs and time spent online all miss the same things, and they miss them in the same direction.
SweetMask · · 3 min
Every long-running server's rules contain a clause so specific it can only have been written the morning after something happened.
SweetMask · · 4 min