How do developers feel about modded player run servers?

Thanks Chris; that's understandable. It makes sense for this game entirely and I support that.

In Blizzard's case though they are just being a complete douche bags about it since they already have more money then god but outlaw offline play, private servers and modding for diablo 3 since it could have a negative impact on the revenue they'll generate through the auction house and a small number of people would pirate the game.

I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but GGG has already stated that they're open to paid leagues with special stipulations:

Paid Leagues

In addition, we plan to allow guilds or groups of players to pay for the creation of their own league with a choice of game rule modifiers. Only players invited by the people who paid for the league can create characters in these private leagues. This option helps cater towards any groups of players who want to play online together but don’t want their playgroup to have access to items traded from external players.

I guess I don't get why people would want to go through the trouble of running their own servers when the game developers themselves are willing to support custom leagues on stable, secure official servers for a small fee.

I don't think this should be allowed, as we are already gonna have leagues. And if you were a game developer, you wouldn't make a free game (with a game shop) and like that people mod it and make private servers.

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Chris wrote:

Jonathan points out that it would be a pretty difficult task to make servers compatible with our client due to having to reverse engineer and reimplement the random level generation entirely.

Is the random level generation done by the server, and the entire map sent to each player of that instance?
I would have thought a random seed would be sent to the players and they would then generate the same instance based off that seed.

Isn't torchlight going to be a mainly P2P game with just server storage and basic authentication (for anti-cheating)? (D2 system)

I think PoE is a lot more than that (more like guild wars), and hence would be virtually impossible to emulate (just like guild wars, or MMO games)

Because of this, it doesn't even make sense to ask their opinion. Not only that, but it doesn't make sense to ask because the only way they can get money is by micro-transactions, why would they throw away their only method of gaining income?

Sadly just like any game, there will be those out there who want a private server for what ever reason. and those out there who like the challange to make a private server from a reverse engineering persepctive.

With specific parts being server based only then other aspects being client/server based, it not hard to make the assumption of the following.

One: Terrain is server generated in the send of a seed (think of java random function or C# random functions) if two people have same seed the same map will be generated.

Thus server generats a few random seeds sends to the part/players loading the current instance, clients all generate the same map even though its technically random, server uses same numbers to generate high masks for the map so it knows if player Y should really be at a set position or not etc..

Two: as dynamic as a map maybe it will still have a overall set of combinations so lets assume for PoE 200 with 10 main themes/styles/paths, the chances of reverse engineering this is quite daunting granted it is not impossible, so your limited to amount of people captable to do this. With the payed leages and the fact the dev's are willing to listen to players, etc.. surely is enough to styfle the creation of private servers.

And returning the orignal topic of disucsion Private/modded player run servers aren't generally a good idea, there is not many good ones and they are few and far between, plus when dealing with a Free to play game they make no sense at all. as it has been mentioned, if they want a private league they can pay for it or talk to likes of chris ot discuss it.

IF you have the money to run a proper private server why not give the money to the devs to run something for you rather than a hosting company, your helping the game/devs that way instead of realistically hurting them.