Update: New Procedures for Distribution of Project Reality Server Code

[eggman]

NEW PROCEDURES FOR DISTRIBUTION OF PROJECT REALITY SERVER CODE

Due to some unfortunate intentions of some server administrators with the v0.6 release the Project Reality team will no longer be freely distributing licenses to run a Project Reality server.

A server license will require that administrators:

• Register for access to the Server Registration forums on the Project Reality website
• Apply for a License for your server in the Server Registration forum on the Project Reality Website
• Are 18 years of age
• Have read and understand the License Agreement

Unfortunately if you are under 18 years of age, you will not be granted a license to run the server code.

There is no fee for a Project Reality license, tho the software being free no longer automatically grants a license.

Completing the following questionnaire and submitting it in the Server Registration Forum constitutes "Application for a License" of your server. Not all applications will be approved. Each application will be notified of approval in the Server Registration forum.

Application for License Questions:
1. A statement that you have read and understood the License Agreement (you will need to cut and paste this into your registration post):

I am at least 18 years of age and I have read and understood the Project Reality License Agreement. I understand that use of the Software is governed by the License Agreement.

2. Your Server Name(s)
3. Your Server IP Address(es)
4. Your Server Type (Windows or Linux)
5. Physical Location of your Server(s)
6. Name of your Server Provider or Server ISP
7. Game Monitor Link to your server(s) (to get this link, use the link "http://www.game-monitor.com/GameServer/*IP*:*PORT*/" without the quotes and insert your IP and Port into the link, exsample: http://www.game-monitor.com/GameServ...161.157:16567/)
8. Link to your website (if available)
9. Link to your profile on your forums (if available)
10. Are you running ABR? (yes or no)
11. Are you a PunksBusted Member? (www.punksbusted.com)
12. Are you streaming to PunksBusted?

When you have applied for a license, your application will be evaluated and if approved you will be issued a license and a link to the server download and any required passwords to access the download.

You will also need to keep this registration information current. If your server IP changes, you will need to update your registration information. Your server may be prevented from functioning in the event that you do not keep this information current.

We'll try and process these as quickly as we can, but this overhead will slow down the server distribution to some degree.

If you plan on running a v0.6 Server, you need to request access to the Server Administration Private Forum.

IMPORTANT NOTE: For those administrators who hold a valid license you will still be permitted to run server side mods and adjustments *as long as the server has a password on it*.

This is an unfortunate situation, but we have spent a lot of time and energy in developing Project Reality and the Project Reality Community. This is largely the result of one organization refusing to comply with some reasonable requests, but the lesson is one that is applicable to possible future situations where an organization is intent upon using Project Reality code in ways we do not condone. We need to establish some means for recourse by the PR team and this is our most readily available method for doing so.

This topic is not open for discussion.

Thanks,
The Project Reality Team

[JDFryer]

I have a question.

I am currently taking part in the PR tournament and for training purposes we have a passworded server with shortened spawn times in order to train in armour and air tactics (shortened vehicle spawn time) and also to keep training time to the minimum (shortened player spawn times).

With this licensing system will it still be possible to create passworded training servers for a tournament team or clan?

This ability is important for organised teams to practice and train IMHO.

[Rhino]

Originally Posted by JDFryer

I have a question.

I am currently taking part in the PR tournament and for training purposes we have a passworded server with shortened spawn times in order to train in armour and air tactics (shortened vehicle spawn time) and also to keep training time to the minimum (shortened player spawn times).

With this licensing system will it still be possible to create passworded training servers for a tournament team or clan?

This ability is important for organised teams to practice and train IMHO.

As stated (i think) in the official post, you are allowed to have SSM on a passworded server, as long as the password aint in the server title or anything like that.

if its not stated I think egg needs to put it in

[eggman]

Haha! Brilliant flame degeneration by 3 people with nothing better to do lol

Regarding growing the Community... we've been growing the PR community for about 3 years now. About 18 months of that has been with actual software releases as part of the growth. While we am open to sensible input from all kinds of folks, I personally am most interested in hearing it from folks who have communities as large or larger than the 10k + of the PR community.

We look at a few different metrics to determine how things are going in terms of growing the mod....

Size of the Community
I don't have a handle on the size of the Forgotten Hope community, but if I evaluate Forum Members as an indicator of community size, PR is the largest community of any BF2 mod (save FH as I don't know their numbers).

Concurrent Players
In terms of "concurrent player base", PR is about the same size as all other BF2 mods combined. For something we'd define as having "niche appeal" that shows a pretty good track record of growth ability.

Quality of Gameplay
This one is by far the most important, but I've listed it last because it's the most subjective. Most of the Dev team members are hardcore tactical gamers. If the game play is sucking we try and evaluate why and it's one of either two things: the players or the feature set.

==

How we grow the community
We've used a methodology implicit in how the game works to help filter and meter the growth of the community. That is that the game absolutely sucks balls if you don't adapt to how it needs to be played.

Community Dynamics and Gameplay
We do NOT want it to grow willy nilly. We want a controlled attrition of n00b t00bers and adoption by tactical gamers. We absolutely do NOT want the mod "re-modded" to appeal to n00b t00bers, we want them to change how they play .. or find another title that better suits their gaming interest.

There is nothing inherently elitist about that, tho unfortunately some folks seem to adopt annoying personae over the interwebs and can be complete dickheads. We also want to work on that aspect of the community.

Getting people to adopt a helpful mind set toward other players makes the game play better for everyone. We're adding more and more teamwork elements and requirements into the overall design of the game so that you really must have a full team of people applying tactical gaming sensibilities and teamwork, as opposed to just one squad. So having more good players makes the game play more enjoyable for everyone.

Lemmings and Releases
After every release there is an influx of folks checking out the mod. Between people who won't stay around and people who will stay around but are learning the mod.. the game play quality tends to suffer pretty badly. After a couple of weeks it sorts itself out and the quality of game play tends to come back up.

When we released v0.5 there was a proliferation of modded and "short spawn" servers. This release was also the one where the quality of game play was worse than any previous releases and where that poor quality lasted for much longer than with previous releases.

While there were some other contributing factors, we largely attributed it to the fact that with a small gaming community and an influx of lemmings, the modded / short spawn servers were populated and the normal servers were empty. This was NOT because everybody liked the modded servers, it was because the lemmings just flocked to the most popular servers and at one stage the majority of regularly populated servers were modded servers.

So now as a result of server side mods and configuration changes, the core audience we are building the mod for (me and about 18 other Devs) can't enjoy a decent round of our own freakin' mod. And frankly the mod gameplay was so awful I couldn't even recognize it as PR.

So here we are with people changing OUR product into something almost COMPLETELY antithetical to OUR design. If there were 20,000 people playing PR I wouldn't care. Those servers would just get jumbled into the mix. But that's not the case...

The BF2 mod player base is VERY small ( btw largely because of EA's closed ranking system "mod" ). Even as the largest BF2 mod in terms of concurrent player base, PR can only support a FEW servers. Given player populations, player & server geographies and ping rates to servers, with 50% of the servers running some degree of mods it becomes very difficult to find a well administered popular "pure designer's intent" server. That should NEVER be the case.

The Dev team and other contributors collectively spend THOUSANDS of hours working on PR and producing elements that fit into a design that (thump, thump, thump on the R-DEV chest) works pretty damn well. And we want it played the way we designed it. We want that design accessible to the hard core tactical gamer community that have been faithful PR fans and supporters.

As a result we defined a program of standardised server settings (the Project Reality Official Settings stuff). This was so that folks could know these are the "pure designer's intent" servers.

In March we clarified our policy that as of v0.6 we would no longer support server side modding. We made this clear through a News Announcement and also through direct communications with server administrators. We determined that private servers with a password on them could be modded / configured any way the admin wants. But public servers could have very few alterations to the default config.

Recently we discovered that there are server administrators out there that, regardless of our wishes and requests, felt as though they are freely able to modify PR v0.6 and make that available to the public. Even after requesting and clarifying we do not want this to happen, it was clear that there's some probability that they will do whatever they want with the software we and others have created regardless of what we say about it.

And as it currently stands, without any form of licensing, we are completely powerless to do anything about that. So we're taking steps to protect ourselves from that.

The PR "designer's intent" is to appeal to tactical and teamwork oriented players. And we are NOT going to allow other people to redefine that design to broaden the appeal, we are committed to pursuing that design and hope there are enough players out there with the same interests so that I can find a decent game 24/7.

[Rhino]

bumpy.