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Old June 27th 04, 11:19 PM
Peter Duniho
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"Dylan Smith" wrote in message
...
I doubt gaming will be a big area of support - all the games I play
online work through my hardware firewall without the need to open any
ports. If you want to run a game _server_ it will affect you, but most
Internet game servers are on co-located boxes because of the bandwidth
requirements. It will affect LAN parties, but since LAN parties tend to
be hosted by geeks anyway, it won't really be a problem.

There are very few end user applications that need to listen on a port.


You obviously do not spend a lot of time playing a wide variety of computer
games online.

A number of games on the market today support online, peer-to-peer
multiplayer gameplay. And with every single one, every time someone has a
firewall or NAT router in the mix, there's trouble getting it set up. A few
gamers are also network-savvy, but most are not.

Just as for-example: why don't you go check the Neverwinter Nights forums at
http://www.bioware.com and see whether you think there are "very few" people
playing Neverwinter Nights that don't need to listen on a port or otherwise
figure out their firewall configuration.

It is simply not true that "most Internet game servers are on co-located
boxes". Most Internet game is done peer-to-peer, which means one of the
players is actually the server. To make matters worse, Gamespy (to name a
popular "meeting place" game server, used by Neverwinter Nights as it
happens) uses a variety of ports, and so for a person to host a game there's
not even just a single port they need to configure, there's a whole slew of
them (or slough, if you prefer ).

It's hard enough getting Gamespy (and similar) to work with a NAT router
hardware box, but once XP SP2 comes out, there's going to be all sorts of
new "how do I do this?" questions from gamers.

I'm not blaming them for catering to their audience, they could have
easily done that without leaving so many services the vast majority of
users don't use open and vulnerable to attack without lessening the
usability of the system. Windows XP Home Edition, out of the box, is
like a poorly-configured *server* and it's supposed to be a home user's
OS.


Again, you simply do not understand the number of operating system
components that act as servers, even if the user has not intentionally
decided to be a big-time Internet server.

I will agree that more than 50% of users (significantly more) never use
those services. But enough do, and of those, most will complain that they
can't figure out how to get it working, even if all that's required is to
click a checkbox to turn it on. Users are dumb and lazy, and rather than
try to figure things out and RTFM, they will just make the phone call or
send the email and ask someone else to fix it for them.

In any case, I've run out of ways to relate this back to aviation, so you'll
have to carry on the debate without me from this point on. I *will* suggest
that you do a little more research (Googling is sufficient if you use the
right search terms) so that you actually understand what multiplayer games
require of their users to get them to work behind a firewall or NAT router
(like Windows Internet Connection Sharing). It's not nearly the non-issue
you claim it is.

Pete