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TOO late to the party: The Club online servers disabled (PS3 only?)

D

DaBargainHunta

Member
Probably old news, but I couldn't find a topic and it's not mentioned in the official thread...

Well, isn't this a giant load of shit... Sega has taken down the online servers for the PS3 version of The Club. (I believe it's still up on Xbox Live from what I've read [LINK TO SOURCE], but correct me if I'm wrong.)

The game is, what, two years old? Come the fuck on!

It's a shame too, because the score-based single-player mode is a blast. However, without leaderboards, I definitely feel like I'm missing a major part of the experience. And, of course, I'll never be able to play online multiplayer with anyone else.

My opinion of Sega lowers with each passing year, and this is yet another example of why I despise them so strongly now. (And they used to be my favorite company...) :(

Not sure why there's a disparity between the PS3 and 360 versions when it comes to online (if that's in fact even still accurate), but I assume it has to do with the respective company's online policies.

Whatever the case may be, this is a massive bummer and definitely one of the major negatives of gaming this gen.

It's still a fun game, and I only paid $15.xx for it, but god damn it!

REQUEST: If this gets any replies, let's please try to avoid system wars bullshit and "get a 360" snark. If online has also been removed from the 360 version, I'll update the OP.
 
N

Neuromancer

Member
Great game, never actually played in online though (Xbox 360 version). Maybe I should get a round in before they shut that down too, or is it not running through a Sega server?
 
S

ShogunX

Member
An article a while back was talking about Call of Duty 4 on both Xbox Live and PSN and in the article is listed the different approaches the developers have take with each service (Things may of changes since).

Long story short :lol - It costs developers $$$ to maintain their games on the PSN as all servers must be provided by each individual developer. Apparently on Live this isn't the case.
 
E

electricpirate

Member
RiccochetJ said:
That's P2P isn't it? I thought very few 360 games actually use servers.
Click to expand...

I think OP means matchmaking and high score servers.

Xbox live titles use Microsoft's Xbox Live servers for that kind of stuff, so I doubt the xbox version is going offline.
 
A

Apharmd Battler

Member
Hey, I stillplay form time to time on the xbox360. I'd love to get into a game online if there's interest. One of my favorite titles by Bizarre Creations that was severely underrated. This game is a blast. The comparison was made before by N-Gai Croal (or someone in this forum) that this game really boils down to being a 3rd person shooter using Project Gotham Racing rules and mechanics, and once you get it down it really works and it's really addictive.

Now a few years later Epic & People Can Fly announce BulletStorm...and the media goes batty. Not that the games are that similar, but they're both about killing with "flare" and style. I still pop this in form time to time, I love racking up the kill combos.
 
S

Seventy5

Member
That sucks, I still play this game once or twice a week. I don't care about the matchmaking being offline, pretty standard stuff tbh, but the leaderboards were a big draw for a score driven game like this. I'll keep playing it though, I love the game and it was really underrated imo.
 
stuminus3

stuminus3

Member
Don't hate Sega for this. Hate the fools who didn't buy this awesome game even though it's been $20 or less brand new since about 5 minutes after it released.

Silly people.
 
B

Beer Monkey

Member
I remember Xbox 1 where the publisher ran the leaderboard servers. Pissed me off when Midway Arcade Classics discontinued their boards. I never did make it to #1 worldwide on KLAX, just #2.

Shame on Sega. We aren't talking about the resources that a Chromehounds needed. A tiny unattended virtual server could run the leaderboards for an old game.
 
Genesis Knight

Genesis Knight

Member
outtrigger--article_image.jpg


Sega did the same thing with The Club's spiritual inspiration, Outtrigger. I was one of the last people on that game when they pulled the plug.
 
B

Beer Monkey

Member
Wario64 said:
Shit I guess I better play this online on the X360 version before it goes kaput.
Click to expand...

It probably won't go kaput. The only peer-networked games that get killed on 360 is the proprietary EA stuff.
 
Genesis Knight

Genesis Knight

Member
beermonkey@tehbias said:
It probably won't go kaput. The only peer-networked games that get killed on 360 is the proprietary EA stuff.
Click to expand...

Not trying to troll, but is this because server costs on the 360 are directly subsidized by the cost of Xbox live, whereas PSN is basically like a free service to the fans?
 
M

MightyHedgehog

Member
I do wonder if a subscription tier of PSN could cover the costs of such things in the future the way Gold subs seem to cover so much of what is taken for granted on Live.
 
D

drizzle

Axel Hertz
epmode said:
And here's why dedicated servers are pretty awesome.
Click to expand...
Well.... not really.

Dedicated Servers, on Console, usually means "The creator of this game has servers running which hosts every single game". On PCs, it usually means "some company with lots of bandwidth is hosting some servers for any player in the world to play in, even tho the company that hosts the server gains little with it".

If the company stops supporting the game (in other words, stops paying to keep those servers up), the online portion of that game dies.

If a game is entirely P2P, it only uses the console's framework for online (and that framework won't stop working during that console lifetime, because every single game uses it).

Only P2P games that stop being supported, as pointed out in this thread, is the EA stuff, because EA demands their game to sign through their online servers. If they used Microsoft's shared framework, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be shut down either.

However, this is the ONLY situation where P2P online gaming is better than dedicated server gaming: when a game has lost it's "momentum" and is no longer economically viable for the company that hosts the servers to keep them.
 
B

Beer Monkey

Member
Genesis Knight said:
Not trying to troll, but is this because server costs on the 360 are directly subsidized by the cost of Xbox live, whereas PSN is basically like a free service to the fans?
Click to expand...

Sort of, yeah. Microsoft hosts the basic networking and leaderboard stuff for all publishers. Exception is EA because they want control, plus dedicated server games like Chromehounds, the original Battlefield 2, FF XI, etc.
 
D

DaBargainHunta

Member
electricpirate said:
I think OP means matchmaking and high score servers.
Click to expand...
Yep, that's mainly what I'm irritated about, but having online multiplayer would've been nice too.

davepoobond said:
if only people buying used games paid 10 dollars more to sega.
Click to expand...
I'm guessing this isn't directed specifically toward me, but just for the record, I bought it new.
 
D

Dead Man Typing

Member
CHROMEHOUNDS had additional online functionality, didn't it? Like some kind of large scale war mode, that was hosted on dedicated servers controlled by Sega, which they turned off.

Steel Battalion: Line of Contact for the original Xbox had a similar situation, where it's large scale campaign mode was turned off, but you could still play normal battles over the regular peer to peer systems. Why this didn't happen with CHROMEHOUNDS is still a mystery to me. I guess the developers just didn't think about what would happen when the servers were turned off.

As for the PSN vs Xbox Live thing, this is true. Z-level developers can release a Live compatible game and as long as there are two people in the world who want to play it online, they can, and the developers have no responsibilities for the upkeep of the servers. On PS3, there are costs involved and Sega has to be smart about which games it continues to invest money in. I seem to remember one of the first PSN games to go offline was Sega's Full Auto 2. (can't find a link)

As much as people complain about peer to peer networking on 360, it was the smart move to base Xbox Live around it. They really should support larger titles with more dedicated servers, though. If they'd had just a little more forethought with the original Xbox Live, we might still be able to play Xbox 1 games on line, without "holding the 360 service back". But that's another issue.
 
B

Beer Monkey

Member
Dead Man Typing said:
They really should support larger titles with more dedicated servers, though.
Click to expand...

When peer-networked Halo 3 sells fuckloads, I doubt if they agree with your feelings. They just don't have any motivation from a business perspective.
 
D

Dave Long

Banned
Damn it! The Club is a super experience and was specifically designed for high score contests. How can you pull one of its most important features?!

Not to mention that Team Siege is one of the best mulitplayer modes I've ever played in a shooter. There's just nothing quite like it. One team defends a tiny area on the map with only one life and the other team has infinite respawns to try and take them out while the clock counts up. Sides switch and you try to stay alive as long as the othe team did.

One map in particular was so incredible because you're on top of a hill near a mansion with sandbags blocking multiple approaches while the other guys are trying to make their way up the various walkways to take you out. Freaking awesome action.
 
L

Lain

Member
drizzle said:
Well.... not really.

On PCs, it usually means "some company with lots of bandwidth is hosting some servers for any player in the world to play in, even tho the company that hosts the server gains little with it".
Click to expand...

I may be wrong, but I thought on PC it usually means "users with bandwidth to share are hosting servers to let other users have fun".
 
D

drizzle

Axel Hertz
Lain said:
I may be wrong, but I thought on PC it usually means "users with bandwidth to share are hosting servers to let other users have fun".
Click to expand...
That's not a DEDICATED server. That's a server that some user is creating, to play on with others. It's no different than P2P. When you're playing P2P on Halo 3 or Call of Duty 4/Modern Warfare 2, one player is the server and everybody else is connecting to them.

The only difference is that, on the console front, if the user that's hosting the match quits, somebody else is chosen on the fly. On PC's, if the user that's hosting the match quits, everybody is dropped.

A DEDICATED server is a server that runs without any user interaction. Hence, the term dedicated. One could, obviously, create dedicated servers on home connections and not play on them, but I believe they're not as common as you might think, as they require processing power and decent upload bandwidth (so you can update everybody at the same time with information of where everyone else is).

I used to run a Left4Dead server on my not-home, yearly-paid-machine-at-an-actual-hosting-service, and eventually I noticed that it wasn't worth it, because it was using most of my system's resources (mostly RAM) and I couldn't do much more with the machine itself while the server was running, even tho it's a dedicated computer I have entirely for myself (as opposed as a shared server).

Most of the Dedicated PC servers we play on (Call of Duty 4, Bad Company 2, Left4Dead) are either servers paid by one-or-more players (usually clan members) rented on Server Hosting Companies or public Server Hosting Companies servers, used mostly for advertising of their service. If users stop paying for the server, or the Server Hosting Company decides that a particular game stopped being a profitable revenue for them, there will no longer be servers for that particular game. Case in point: Shattered Horizon. That's a dedicated server game, but since the audience for that game is so small, no server hosting company provides servers for that game. What happens is that most of the servers you see are users creating home servers to play on with others, which means the ping is atrocious, the upload speed is not enough to host big matches, the actual routing of the packets is crap, because it's a home connection without multiple outputs and sometimes the server is just bad because the processing power required to coordinate everything is just not there.

This is also why most console games are only up to 16 and, when the netcode is really good, 24 players. People don't have the upload bandwidth required to update everybody at all times.
 
S

Segata Sanshiro

Member
There's only so long they're going to take the financial hit (even if it's a small one) for a game no one is playing. Totally sucks for people with the game, but this is the future of gaming, unfortunately.
 
F

FoxSpirit

Junior Member
What I REALLY don't get: if there are literally a hundred people still playing the game the cost of running the server is barely anything. Literally a hundred dollars per month for a corportae business. For a company like Sega, that's literally nothing.
So why take them down? The people who still play that game seriously care or they wouldn't still be on. Way to let down your most loyal customers. Who are also your best word of mouth advertisers. Go Sega :-(
 
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