Dedicated servers and multiplayer communities

Following the lecture today I had some interesting thoughts about multiplayer games and some of the developments in interacting with others. With the use of servers some players pick their favourite server and choose only to play on those servers. However some of the more recent releases have done away with dedicated servers in exchange for peer to peer connections. The use of peer to peer connections is implemented to reduce lag. The game searches for players in the same area as you and selects one player the host. Although this makes play faster for countries such as New Zealand where the physical distance from the servers creates an enforced lag. However this effort to reduce lag also reduces the community environment that can occur on server based multiplayer games. Players will most often play only against players from their own country or nearby countries as they cannot choose who they play against. With dedicated servers the community is much stronger as players will consistently play on the same server and will build up relationships with other players on that server. I think this means that the technical barriers that peer to peer overcomes is limiting the social aspects of multiplayer games. The use of peer to peer, while useful in the short term may also become redundant in the future with further developments in broadband technology.

Patrick R