As we mentioned last week, Left 4 Dead 2 had a less than brilliant launch on the Xbox 360 thanks to the fact that it lagged out horrendously once it got online. Fortunately, Valve has dropped a Thanksgiving Day gift on our grateful heads, having just boosted the servers for Xbox Live.
“We have upgraded our network infrastructure to better accommodate the huge response to L4D2," blogs Valve. "360 players will now have lag-free servers. We’ve also added more dedicated servers."
Great stuff! There's nothing more frustrating than lining up your reticule on a witless survivor, letting your Smoker's tongue fly, and then waiting five seconds for him to actually attack, by which time the survivor is now onto you and pumping your tumor-riddled face full of bullets.
I have many fallen Smokers to avenge this night.
Jim Sterling serves as reviews editor for Destructoid.com, head of the Podtoid podcast, and produces a number of news stories, original features, one-of-a-kind videos. With his passionate argumentative style, controversial opinions, harsh delivery, and dedication to brutal honesty Sterling is a name that you can't help but recognize.
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Contest:
8:00 AM on 11.26.2009
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If valve are sorting the servers out, like activision/demonware did for the ps3 mw2 issues, why do ms still make you pay for live!?
I don't get it.
Why on earth am I supporting this game while Shaniqua wearing a Depeche Mode tshirt...
fuckin hate that band -_-
EA do the Xbox publishing for Valve and EA insist on running their own dedicated servers, be it for L4D1/2, BF 1943, BF BC2, any of the EA sports titles, etc.
Basically they do it for marketing purposes: ie. if games are played on EA servers then it makes it easier for EA to link those players into EA's social sites. Remember when EA did that promotion with Bad Company where you got special weapons for signing up to the site, linking your gamertag/PSN ID, etc?
Also I suppose running your own servers mean you know exactly who is responsible for server lag and why it's happening. Whether or not this is their intention is anyone's guess.
@jim
Kick some survivor arse for me. I'll be joining you on Saturday when I pick up my imported non-nerfed UK copy. Atkinson can go fuck himself in the ear.
What? no! google shaniqua, you will see the resemblance
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyeemtS1jII
@Brolsen
Cool casual racism, bro.
Is the same thing only that valve got around to solve the issue.
And paying for lag for like a fucking week is unacceptable right?
I mean mw2 went down for like 6 hours on psn before they fixed it, but if you pay for live it takes a week? What?!
FUCK OFF DICKHEAD.
Left 4 Dead servers are run by Valve, EA has nothing to do with them and you do not need an EA account for any part of the process. EA's job with Valve products is literally only to package them and ship them, that is IT.
It wasn't down, just very laggy. Most of the Dtoiders that play L4D2 regularly now have still been playing it and enjoying it.
And we don't pay live for just one game. That's some weird reasoning you got there.
I would be pissed off if i bought a Pizza, only half of it had cheese on it and the delivery guy, said "well, you've got SOME cheese"
Free - fair do's I can live with the odd problem and the odd shortcoming - to a point.
Paid for - Not fucking acceptable, use some of that cash that you tricked millions of people into paying to make sure it fucking works all the fucking time.
Before you get all ranty about how you knew full well you'd have to pay for live; my aunty, my colleague, and my sister in law all bought 360's for their kids last Christmas, (must also point out that only 1 of the 3 have survived a whole year!) only to be hit with that awesome Christmas morning surprise of "mum, I need a LIVE subscription too!"
Not too long after they also got stung for HDD's and WiFi add ons as the brilliant price of the 360 - designed specifically to appeal to Kids parents who don't know what their kids are going to need, doesn't include one, or anything you need for that matter.
I personally don't associate shit with chocolate, or shit with sex, however if you do, all power to you my friend, each to his own.
Don't let people tell you you're wrong, our brains are all wired slightly differently.
Die in a fire please.
I haven't picked up L4D2 yet, but I will probably get it at some sort of black Friday sale tomorrow, and am glad that the severs will have been beefed up, lag sucks.
I don't believe you. I just don't. I'm not denying RROD, not at all. But I don't believe your handy little infobite. I just don't.
Kisses.
*leaves*
And I really thought I'd never say that.
I'd like to add though that until 3rd party servers popped up for the PC version, it was pretty much unplayable there too.
Still is with it crashing all the time, but you know what I mean.
@ chaos, i shit you not mate. One my colleague's son's is in repair for rrod, the other my nephew's had disc drive stuck, in or out or something.
At the very least online play should be free and perhaps Gold should offer certain services beyond that like 1 vs. 100 or Netflix or whatever.
Following my inevitable turkey crash around 3 PM, I will be online spitting green shit at people for the balance of the evening.
Can you confirm that it is indeed Valve and not EA running the dedicated servers? Someone mentioned it to me before but when I used my google-fu I turned up nothing.
Also - I realise that you don't need an EA account to play the Left 4 Dead games. See my second point though - even if it is Valve running the dedicated servers it may have been a condition of the partnership that SOMEONE run dedicated servers, be it EA or Valve.
EA seem to be trying to distance themselves from the business model of old; they shifted their casual games and partnership with Hasbro under the EA Casual label, distancing itself from EA Sports and EA proper; they've actually come out with some innovative titles (Mirror's Edge and Dead Space) and; they've made some good moves with DLC (BF 1943/Coral Sea, free DLC for BF:BC, free DLC with DA:O). Maybe they feel they have a burgeoning reputation with hardcore gamers that they don't want to tarnish with bad online experiences.
@everyone whining about the whole week (9 days) it took to fix
Let's not forget that whoever the dedicated servers belong to they still have to deal with Microsoft to get everything fixed. In that context a week really isn't that long.
Let me guess - they got Condoliza Rice as a spokesperson now and she said something like - "We could never have imagined people who bought an online game would want to play the online game online."
On the PC version when you get a non-3rd party server it's a Valve server. Since the PC version both is and isn't published by EA (due to Steam) EA doesn't prop up the servers.
But that's the PC version so I could be totally wrong on the 360 version.
If you can't see a difference between the two services, then you need to get some glasses. PSN may be free, but it's fairly bare-bones.
@readbigwordsisgood
Stop being such a baby. One week. One. Week. Really? That's a bad time span for you? A week is a damn good length of time, considering what it probably takes to acquire, install, configure, and test new servers. What they've done is fantastic. That is, they've done what they're supposed to do, and promptly. That's more than I can say for most companies.
All I can say is, please turn to chapter KMFDM.
Valve could have saved time, and just let the default game option for servers be 'local server' or w/e. Once I saw that was all it took for the game to not blow online, I was happy. Yay to getting around to more servers though.