Many Games nowadays such as Battlefield, , COD, FIFA are forcing us to use official servers and disallow uses to host their own game incase of server down.

I guess their main aim to prevent MODS which will affect DLC sales and FORCING players to move on by shutting down old game servers.

I missed the old days where Battlefield 2 u can host your own lan party server and FIFA 09 can direct connect IP bypassing EA Online.

And all those cool mods for COD 4 ...

Is Player Side Server such as L4D 2 are dying ?

Not quite yet...i mean,it is even given free for a while,and there would allway have some who is willing to release dedicated server.

Piracy, 'nuff said. LAN kinda encourages piracy, you don't need no original copy to play online. L4d2 is one of the best example

Punishing legitimate player for piracy seems unfair. 'nuff said.

They're out to make money, not charity

There's no such thing as punishing legitimate player for piracy. Consumers are the one pirating their products. What they are doing is simply protecting their properties and justifying the purchase of legit consumers.

How would you, as someone who bought the legit license, think if someone with a pirated copy is playing the same game with the same amount of content without having to pay a single cent out of their pockets? Or perhaps you prefer to have multiple DRM to combat piracy, which it had failed to do time and again but publishers just don't learn?

This post has been edited by gbwedward: Apr 16 2014, 10:21 AM

No ah CoD and BF4 online service is free

When you want to play, and can't due to server issue, DRM, useless update. While pirate users can just click and play on the fly, you are being punished.

There aren't many publishers that enforces always online DRM, so as a consumer you need to know what you are buying. If you do not, it's simply a case of consumers' own negligence and should not be blamed on any other party.

Server issue is something that will happen once in awhile, if there's no forced online DRM then there is no issue with it. Update, useless or not, is an attempt by the developer to better polish their product. If you do not want said update to be patched to your copy of the game then simply don't update it, disable auto-update. Worst case scenario is you won't be able to join any multiplayer sessions.

In terms of multiplayer/online connectivity, if you do not own the legit product you do not have the ability to play/connect online. Punish legit players, how? Pirates have access to this component, how? The only way for pirates to ever enjoy the multiplayer/online component of a game is for it to allow LAN connectivity.

Take a look at CS, Half Life, L4D, L4D2, Warcraft 3, Starcraft, C&C. Tell me the piracy on said titles aren't abundant. All those titles have LAN connectivity.

IF pirates were able to access components of the game offline, what is there to stop a legit player from doing the same thing without compromising their original copy? You have the same, if not more, access to contents that they can get.