One of the few complaints against Activision’s last Call of Duty was the publisher’s arguably casual dismissal of dedicated server play with the game’s PC version. With this November’s Black Ops, Activision has announced that it will be bringing back dedicated servers, but with a price attached. The dedicated server provider has been announced as Gameservers.com, and those wishing to play on their services will have to pay an additional fee atop the price of the game. For unranked servers, this fee is $.99/month with a maximum of 24 players, with ranked servers costing $15/month with a maximum of 18 players, with both options offering discounts on pre-paid monthly plans. This is also in addition to any other fees required from voice chat services like Ventrilo.
“We are extremely excited about this unprecedented relationship with Activision to offer dedicated servers exclusively for Black Ops”, said GameServers CEO David Aninowsky. “We are placing a great amount of pressure on ourselves to ensure that we exceed any and all expectations.”
“If players want to run a dedicated Ranked or Unranked server on the PC, they will have to rent one through GameServers,” Treyarch Community Manager Josh Olin mentioned,” Treyarch will be providing a fleet of ‘Day-1 Servers’ (through GameServers) which will be up and operational on November 9th. Nobody will have to rent a dedicated server through GameServers in order to play the game…But for anybody who wants to run their own server, it will be run from GameServers.com.”
“If you rent a server, you will still have the ability to Kick, Ban, and Configure it the way you see fit,” Olin continued. “Of course Ranked servers will have some set configurations that can’t be messed with; but you will still have the power to administrate your servers as a customer of GameServers.”
This is a slap in the face to PC gamers, but still not as much as the no dedicated servers that MW2 had. Still, you shouldn’t have to go through just one company, especially if they can’t handle the influx of servers and player demand. There needs to be more server companies to offer competitive speeds and the such.
I know servers cost money to run, and that is fine to ask the players to support the server, but not when one company has a monopoly over them.