Titanfall’s release of March 11th is looming on us, the game hits the news again as the developers, Respawn, have started addressing concerns on their forums regarding the nature of the cloud based dedicated Servers. Just a few weeks ago, there was much made of the reveal Titanfall’s player limit would be only 12. Now the developers are defending match making with Dedicated Servers.
The developer first responded to the issue that with instant match making, dedicated servers aren’t important.
“You’re conflating server browsing with dedicated servers. Regardless of the method you use to connect to them, dedicated servers offer better performance, lower pings, more consistent pings, remove host advantage and increase security when compared to P2P. A server browser that listed P2P servers would provide none of these benefits, so surely it can’t be “the entire reason” for dedicated servers.”
And then, addressed the concerns that with instant match making, you’d have no control over who you play as. Thus increasing the chances that you’d be put up against ‘foreign’ players which could increase the chances of lag.
“This is incorrect; many matchmaking systems choose to match players across regions in favor not matching them at all, but it is not a “guarantee”. Your assertion that, with a server browser, there will always be a game with other players available with a low ping is also incorrect. Simply put, sometimes there’s not going to be anyone to play with locally at 3am, matchmaking or not.
Server browsers and matchmaking both provide numerous (if sometimes different) benefits. Give them both credit where credit is due.”
Respawn’s Scriptacus then said “I’ve never seen anything like this happen in all of our hours of testing. That’s no guarantee that it couldn’t, but the nice thing about being exclusively dedi’s instead of P2P is that we can fix this sort of thing quickly without any sort of patch required for the clients.” when concerns over servers being stuck in the dreaded ‘infinite loop’ were raised.
Personally speaking (and without trying the beta) I’m still more for an open match making system. One of the best aspects of online games is the ability to create your own servers, setup your own rules, and possibly mod / configure the servers differently with your own rule set. But without the game being released into the wild, it’s still too early to make such judgement.
As stated above, Titanfall is going to be seeing a release on March 11th (although 3 days later, March 14th in the UK) on the PC, Xbox One and Xbox 360.
