cobrachoppergirl

As far as I was concerned, this was the preeminent forum for modding BF. Did any DICE or EA employee ever show up or post here... at all...? Anyone?

1. No* 2. No * Technically you can, but it would be like trying to drive a car with nothing but your toes.

WTF? But we've moved on to other vbulliteen boards... lol... http://www.homebuiltairplanes.com/forums/member.php?u=37217 And suddenly, millions of threads were... resurrected...

My team is only me. Humnoid was only helping me test remotely logging into my emulator with his French game client from "out there on the internet". Any website he made was on his own initiative. I had serious issues myself with him copying someone else's site as well and associating my project name with it. As such, he is not working with me anymore. I ended that quickly. My official site is at http://revive.net which was made by me and copies nothing. And there is nothing "scammy" about offering a paid server browser list. I'm quite up front about that. If I did offer something like this, a lot of development and maintenance work is involved, and it would be quite a long while before I would actually be able to "charge" for it anyway, because a lot of additional work is involved in setting up a billing back end. And there would be a lot of time working the bugs out of the system. If I offered something like this myself, I would want to get paid for it, because its an ass load of work involved running a mission critical app that supports 1500+ people logged in concurrently, in undocumented C+ code that works with sockets, and laying down new code. But hey, if you want to do all that shit for free... God bless you. Good luck running a mission critical network service and babysitting it for free forever. Have fun with that. Ditto for the "hub" guys. Maybe you value your own time as $0.00/hr... I myself just do not. I've done stuff "for free" for 6 years now... and its not all that cracked up to be *all that*. Sorry, it just isn't. My own personal opinion is there will ALWAYS be a bunch of kids ready to step up and try and do the same as you, run this kind of service for free (which is the main thing keeping me out of it), but eventually all of them will crash and burn on that one. Hey, life is a free for all, and everyone is welcome to do whatever you want to do and give it a shot. My own theory is something like this can not survive unless it is on a sound financial foundation. By injecting money from the players into keeping the server browser lists functioning, the following things (I speculate) will happen: a. Someone can get paid to babysit it 24/7 and jump when it goes down, and keep its uptime like a mission critical app. Bandwidth and servers can be paid for. There will never again be a worry for lack of funds and the server browser list going down because someone else has finally gotten fed up and sick of paying for it (like GameSpy did). b. Money from the players can get fed back to the server admins to defray the costs of running their servers. Finally, people would get paid at least something for all the work involved running a server. Popular servers would get more money, less successful servers, less compensation. But any compensation would be a kick in the arm, for server admins to try to compete to improve (mod) their servers. c. You'd clean up the BF commons and get rid of an ocean of these douchebag little kids, script kiddies, and purile little boys that have pretty much sunk the gameplay experience for everyone. Sure, some of them still would be able to get mommy or daddy to pay their monthly membership, but for the most part, even charging a fee as low as $1.99 a month would wipe away most of them, leaving for the most part the older hardcore players (with means or a job) behind that took the game seriously, for which such a fee would be trivial and irrelevant. This is what I project will happen... for this analogy, I shall compare BF players to hotdog customers / hobos wanting to get hotdogs for free... (it was a "Tom Goes to See the Mayor Episode I once saw entitled "Hobotown" http://video.adultswim.com/tom-goes-to-the-mayor/vice-mayor.html ) Players, being the ocean of idiots and hotdog loving wino bums they are , are going to flock to those offering the free hotdog ride, all the while, flipping off people such as myself trying to sell a decent hotdog. That drives me out of business before I even open my stand, so I'm not even going to offer hotdogs for sale. Eventually those who offer the hotdogs for free, are going to get sick of it as well, having to keep paying out of their pocket to pay for supplies and make the hotdogs, and dive out themselves. There may still be hotdogs around, here and there fragemented little charity communities, but it won't be anything like what it could of been... if the players had just paid to buy a decent hotdog from the start from one centralized hotdog manufacturer. So that puts me in the position... hmmmr, should I stand back and watch the whole show play out as I predict, and go ahead and build my hotdog factory to be at the ready when all these free experiments exhaust themselves and collapse... in a year or two... or should I take into consideration who these customers are, and realize, most are little kids, none of them actually have any money anyway, let alone credit cards or paypal accounts, so there's no market here to begin with.... *Shrug* Let the catastrophe begin... Since I have no real stakes in it, I plan to watch from the sidelines. Because... What you don't realize, is this fun little emulator code you guys have downloaded from the net, is nothing more than a proof of concept hack made by Luigi, with some SQL database code patched onto it by someone else, that hasn't been stress tested beyond more than 8 players at at time... lets just see how it holds up to 1500 players and 150 servers on it at a time... With no hardcore programmer getting paid 30K a year to make it more robust... Yeah... hope you got a hotshot C+ socket programmer willing to work for free in your back pocket... Let's just see.... But hey, fuck CHOPPERGIRL, that girl don't know shit.... and she's just trying to scam people... Yeah.... Hey, the people have spoken, and fuck me for trying, take your chances with the free shit... Do you think Boba Fett delivers quality service for free...? How you going to pay for all of this? They never listen... Caveat emptor to the players: You'll get the quality of service that you pay for.... :-/ Enjoy

When I work on something for 5 years, and some other company pulls the rug out from under it, yeah, I get rather P.O.ed. My comments are in general and not directed at you or to any one person. It is probably very possible to redirect the game client to using the ReSpy servers ( http://respy.net ) without making any changes at all to the game clients, therefore keeping the players inside their EULA. The redirection occurs in a Windows system file "hosts". No DICE or EA files are involved, changed, modified, or distributed. So we and everyone else would be within the EULA. You'd no longer be using the GameSpy network service and servers, but the ReSPY network service and servers. And for you to access some other servers... yes, it would be a-ok for them to charge for it. Just like switching cable tv providers.

People pay $14.95/month to play WOW, month after month. They have millions of users. . BF players, by comparison, have gotten to play on ranked an unranked servers forever for free.... game server admins have footed the entire bill... . So like wow... watch the bitching begin, about how it would kill "us players" to pay $2.99 a month.... . I'm not even going to listen, I'm just going to pull the plug and walk away.... . If we could even get a pay system in place... with all its associated program and backend, which would take months to do as well, and in that mean time you'd still get to play for free on the new emulators... . But that player is right. No players are going to pay. And if you run one of these emulation projects, you are going to end up... the hero for today, the bad guy tomorrow...

There is a bigger problem then the technical hurdles. I have a working system running right now for 2142, and one almost ready for BF2... revivebf2 people are working on their own system for BF2, then there's the PR one for BF2 to save their own mod mentioned above, and someone else has one running for 1942... maybe someone will do something for BF1 and Vietnam, and the demos... as well. . The real problem is, Battlefield players don't really give a FUUUUUCCCCK..... . They don't. The revive people are getting no donations ( http://revivebf2.com/2014/05/22/why-its-important-to-be-awesome/ ), we're not getting any donations, and players really don't give two shits to see this game continue. Oh yeah, sure, if someone else does all the work and someone else pays to keep it running and invests all the time to babysits and maintains it, so their little game crack fix continues to work for free... but they really don't actually care. Not enough to open their wallets at all. If they even have anything in them... most are kids. . So I'm like, even though I and a friend busted our ass to get a system running, do I really care to support a game that people don't give a cr@p to support back? . I think the other projects rather realize this, and are running on fumes themselves just to maintain their own game crack fix. But for myself, by now, the game has pretty much lost its gloss become repetitive and boring for me. If there were a big outpouring of support from the players, or even some casual interest, I think it'd make it worthwhile for the projects to continue, but as is... geez... . After a few years running these gamespy substitutes without recompense, these kind of projects are going be thinking.. man, why did we ever get involved in running this thankless back end crap that is costing us money and generating no revenue or donations or ad revenue at all... and now if we pull the plug, everyone is going to hate us, so we are stuck in this catch-22 situation. . If we keep on keeping on, its coming out of our pocket, mostly in HOURS and HOURS supporting it (the bandwidth and electricity are trivial by comparison, I can get those for free). If we pull the plug on our emulator after everyone has been using it, we look like the bad guy, cause we just killed their game. Like EA or GameSpy does today. . So who wants to step up and be the future sacrifice and badguy.. hero today, demonized bad guy tomorrow... yeah... After taking crap and dribble from purile little players for years for running a highly modded server (hey, your server is effing hacked! hey, girl, you're fat! hey, everyone here is looosers! etc...) you got to think, eh, that's it, f*ck it!

ReSPY (Battlefield 2142): http://respy.net/ We have a gamespy emulator running on a dedicated box, game servers showing up in our ReSPY browser list, and a working patch for the 2142 game client (about to be released)... how to get 10,000+ players that don't necessarily speak english, to install a patch and move over, however, is a different matter... Multiplayer is still going to tank hardcore...

Nope... its definitely going down this time... the writing is on the EA wall: . http://www.ea.com/1/service-updates . To be TERMINATED June 30th, 2014 . Battlefield 1942 for PC and Mac (including The Road to Rome and Secret Weapons of WW2 expansions) Battlefield 2 for PC (including Special Forces expansion) Battlefield 2: Modern Combat for PlayStation 2 Battlefield 2142 for PC and Mac (including Northern Strike expansion) Battlefield Vietnam for PC I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm going down to the river to throw all my copies of Battlefield off the side of the bridge... just maybe I'll pause long enough to make one pissed off video about it... What have we learned from this? Never build your product on top of or with someone else's shitty product... :-/ Here's my final words to EA on the subject: "We'll support your crappy game, if you will not. Give us the damn source code... " Make your own displeasure known on the EA BLOG: http://www.ea.com/news/update-on-ea-titles-hosted-on-gamespy