Travis Bradshaw

There’s been quite a bit of attention lately over the future of “dedicated servers” for PC gaming titles, particularly first person shooters.  I even noticed a thread erupt on the QuakeCon forums about the topic after it was addressed during Carmack’s keynote presentation.

Quite a few gamers seem very sensitive to the subject, but for the most part it seems that the symbolism of the dedicated server is what is important, rather than dedicated servers in practice.  I thought I would throw my opinion into the ring, especially on how I don’t think that dedicated servers are particularly relevant to gaming these days and especially how dedicated servers have little impact on LAN gaming and will have no impact on QuakeCon in the future.

First, I think it’s worth looking at what exactly a dedicated server means. The name is pretty self-explanatory, it’s a piece of gaming server that’s “dedicated” to being the server of a match and isn’t also running any of the client code that’s associated with the game.  Historically this was a very important distinction, because the client code includes the renderer, and the renderer is almost always more computationally intensive than maintaining the state of a game.  Back “in the day”, running a server on the same computer as the renderer meant latency and other issues for the other participants in the game.  These negative effects would not be experienced by the client running the “listen server”.

So a dedicated server came to mean many things.  It began with separating the renderer from the server code, so that “running a server” didn’t require an unreasonable amount of computational power. As a corollary, a dedicated server became a symbol of fairness: because no player on the server would have the advantage of zero latency.  A dedicated server was also representative of flexibility and software maturity: lots of gamers have access to computationally strong computers with little or no rendering prowess, server class hardware is perfect for the job.  Coincidentally, server class hardware is also already available all over the web in infrastructure situations perfect for running services.

These are a lot of great notions, and I think it’s important to recognize right off the bat that dedicated servers have been a integral part of internet PC gaming.  But like a lot of things that change with time, I think that the golden age of dedicated servers has passed and most of these benefits either don’t hold to the same truth that they used to—or just don’t matter anymore.

The first benefit of dedicated servers is the division of computational power.  This distinction has been undermined in a couple of ways.  The most obvious is the rise of available processing power—particularly in the form of GPUs.  Simply put, a modern “gaming computer” is nothing short of a supercomputer.  It’s not uncommon for a modern gaming computer to be able to run multiple complete server/renderer stacks with tons of processing power to spare.  The need to separate the computationally intense tasks of running a game into separate binaries is gone. (Though, strangely enough, the need to separate computational tasks internally has gone up.)  These days, being able to run a server component of a game separate from a render is a minor convenience, at best.

To compound the effect, game clients and renderers now always target the mature console market.  Since PCs are (and almost certainly will always be) significantly ahead of technology curve compared to the consoles, the chance of a game actually needing to tax a computer to the max is very slim, indeed.

The second major benefit of dedicated servers is that of fairness.  Now we’re really past the point in online gaming that ping is the single dominant factor of a “fair” game online.  There’s no question that the real qualifier of “fairness” in online gaming is effective matchmaking.  It’s not enough to just have a level playing field regarding the technical considerations of the game (like ping), we now demand as gamers to be placed into matches with other players of comparable skill.  Even with all clients at zero ping, an unbalanced set of players will be regarded as “unfair”.

Additionally, it’s clear to see that the majority of modern games have moved away from game designs that latency plays a major role in the success of the player.  Play the latest shooter on console or PC, and it’s easy to identify the decreased role of “ping” in the games.  Witness that the ultimate move in a shooter has transformed from carefully timing a mid-air rocket into flying in a cruise missile; per-pixel accuracy is replaced with assistive “random” distribution.  There’s no value statement implied, gaming is just as exciting now as it’s ever been, but the character of the games have unquestionably changed in a way that de-emphasizes the role of network latency in a game.

Finally, when looking at the flexibility and software maturity that the dedicated server used to represent, cross-platform availability and robust social networking/matchmaking features have taken that role completely.  A mature and flexible game isn’t one that can separate the renderer from the game state (though most probably can), a mature and flexible game is one that can be actively developed on XBox, PS3, and PC.  (Especially if Wii and Mac are in the mix.)  A flexible game isn’t one that allows game community to run their own game-server-as-a-service systems, a flexible game is one that allows gamers to quickly get into a game with other players that are of a similar skill level—considerate of what social relationships exist between the players (friends or what-have-you.)

That said, what does the “loss” of dedicated servers really mean for LAN gaming?  Honestly, not that much.  At QuakeCon we’ve ran an impressive array of dedicated game servers for the BYOC for decades, but in recent years we’ve struggled to even have them used.  Not because the games in question aren’t being played (these days we’ll set up a dedicated server for anything), but because there’s no significant—or even noticeable—quality of service difference between a dedicated game server and a listen server anywhere else on the network.  An “official” dedicated QuakeCon game server just doesn’t mean anything, anymore.  Try try and keep things relevant with dedicated servers, we now try to provide more organizational support to competitions and stuff; because the human touch is still valuable when dedicated servers aren’t.

So, if dedicated servers really don’t mean anything for LAN gaming, what should fans of LAN gaming really be asking for from game developers?

LAN awareness in the global infrastructures and matchmaking frameworks that exist along side the latest games.  When two LAN gamers at an event like QuakeCon (pretend there was functional internet access) are on Battle.net looking for a game of Starcraft 2, the matchmaking system should realize this and match them up!  There are two levels of existing goals in modern matchmaking systems that LAN party awareness creates an instant win.  The first is the desire to match geographically local gamers together.  One of the gamers is almost certainly going to end up being the server for the match, both gamers will be happiest if the experience is a swift and low latency one.  The second is the desire to match socially local gamers together.  Whether this is members of a friends list, or organizational mapping, or attendees of a university, gamers want to play with other gamers we are socially connected with.

A LAN party solves both goals.  Players/servers on the same LAN are perfect geographically.  Additionally, participants at a LAN party share a social connection (even if it’s temporary) that makes a match up perfect.

As my suggestion to the community at large that still enjoy LAN gaming, let’s push these features to the game developers we admire the most.  It will mean a lot more than just trying to hold on to the past with dedicated servers.