Besides the private server approach, great news on all of those points. They are really kneecapping the self-hosting crowd by limiting to specific hosting providers. Server hosting companies (especially gaming related) are charging exorbitant rates and the rate hiking for upgrade is usually illogical (i.e., prices increasing exponentially per GB of memory you allocate to an instance). The self-hosting rates were like that before the AI boom too.

I hope they don’t take a hard stance on this and open it up their server binaries in the future. I would not be opposed to them having different categories in the server browser though. Separate the progression synced, “official” servers from the non-synced private/community servers.

Edit: Read through an X thread explaining their reasoning for sticking to a limited set of providers. The main reasons were for server performance and security. I personally think these are both weak arguments.

For server performance, it would be easy enough to add a server health indicate in a match and to the server browser that appears when the server can’t keep up with the target TPS. I think plenty of people will throw powerful enough hardware at the game and people will not play on servers long that have a degraded experience.

For security, not distributing the binaries is just relying on security through obscurity. I’m sure this isn’t their only approach to server security but the obscurity approach is a pretty weak one. What happens when the binary leaks? Perhaps a server host client figures out a way to extract the files from their instance. Additionally, look at other games that allow for self-hosting (example: https://linuxgsm.com/servers/). Why is distributing server binaries not a security issue for any other of these games? The only argument unique to Wardogs that I can think of at the moment is abuse of the progression system but to that I think we can refer to my earlier point in the original post of having non-synced servers.

A side concern I haven’t seen discussed is how will the official servers deal with cheaters that slip through anti-cheat, griefers/trolls, and other common things that private server ban people for.

Clearly I’m pretty passionate about this. While I don’t think it will be going this direction anytime soon, this kind of stuff is why stuff like the Stop Killing Games campaign exists. Who knows about how things will look decade from now. By no means is this stuff a deal breaker for me. I just hope that they will change their stance on this someday.