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