Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2005 10:30 pm Post subject:
Bye Bye WOL! XWIS is the official online gaming service now!
I've just received a new email from Aaron Kaufman about EA's partnership with XWIS. Here's the contents:
"EA Partners with XWIS Community Service
Greetings from your C&C Community Manager!
To continue the ten year anniversary celebration of the widely popular Command and Conquer franchise, I am pleased to reveal EA’s partnership with XWIS (XCC WOL IRC SERVER)!
Through this partnership, all Command and Conquer games formerly supported by EA/Westwood Online will be redirected through XWIS, thus instituting XWIS as the main online game server management team. XWIS is a community driven online game server that launched in October 2003 to replace the XCC Community Ladder. The new and improved features enabled include chat, in-game ranks, matching filters, lobby monitoring, improved Quick-Match, and fully functional automatic ladders for clans and individual tournament players. The beauty of this partnership is that you won’t have to download any external programs to utilize XWIS. All the enabled features and connections to the servers are already integrated into the supported games!
I’m also excited to share with you that the Strike Team will be monitoring the banning and anti-cheat controls on a daily basis and will provide technical support as needed. The Strike Team is a website built of hardcore Command and Conquer fans and is sponsored by the EA German Community Team. Their goal is to ensure a controlled and fun online environment for all players.
XWIS will commence a two week trial period with Command & Conquer Red Alert 2 and Command & Conquer Red Alert 2: Yuri’s Revenge. Once this trial is completed on Oct. 20th, XWIS will be supporting the following EA/Westwood online games:
Command & Conquer Red Alert 2
Command & Conquer Red Alert 2: Yuri’s Revenge
Command & Conquer Tiberian Dawn
Command & Conquer The Covert Operations
Command & Conquer Red Alert
Command & Conquer Red Alert: Counterstrike
Command & Conquer Red Alert: Aftermath
Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun
Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun: Firestorm
Command & Conquer Renegade
Dune 2000
Nox
Emperor: Battle for Dune
EA is 100% dedicated to the Command and Conquer franchise and wants to ensure a strong and secure online gameplay environment. Long live Command and Conquer! We hope to see resurgence in the legions of NOD and GDI followers claiming ground online.
Good luck soldier. Hit the hot keys and get online with Command and Conquer!
--Apoc"
And this is definitelly a great news, since WOL wasn't being properly supported anymore. Now you'll have more people to play with, at XWIS servers! QUICK_EDIT
This is one of the best news posts Ive seen in along time. The thing I love abut this is that TD is able to be played again, thats my fav C&C game ever. I hope all this works out great. And I do hope Sole Survivor will be supported aswell. _________________ QUICK_EDIT
OMG! That is cooooolio! And you don't know hos special is a 5 oed coolio! Im so happy Im gonna cry! Hey somebody, anybody, when will go and play YR online with me! Anyone wants to? Geezuscrist! This is the best notice since I've started modding YR! QUICK_EDIT
There is one major problem, however. So far, the XWIS servers have been pretty well empty. With the added traffic, we can only hope they can handle it.
Also, I'm surprised nobody else has noted what this really is. EA is just shifting all the weight and cost of keeping those servers maintained to someone else. They can blame all problems on Strike Team. _________________ QUICK_EDIT
"EA is 100% dedicated to the Command and Conquer franchise and wants to ensure a strong and secure online gameplay environment. Long live Command and Conquer! We hope to see resurgence in the legions of NOD and GDI followers claiming ground online."
ztyping bullshit. ztyping, bullshit. They are not 100% dedicated. They did not make things secure. You know who made Renegade online far more secure than EA ever dreamed? Black Hand Studios. Props to the original Renegade coding team though; they managed to nicely encrypt and protect a lot of the internal workings and data passing, significantly reducing the existance of 'trainers'.
However, as EA has shown, they LOVE to screw over the online systems, shutting them down so only the bot-runners and hackers can even publicly chat anymore. They're so *committed*, they won't hire people part-time or even randomly give them any kind of moderator/admin status on the old chat channels. I'm sure it wouldn't hurt them to give somebody $5 an hour to just keep a little bit of order; hell, I do that kind of thing for free. Many people do. They're so dedicated to providing secure systems, one person named Adad has thousands and thousands of the Free Dedicated Server serials for Renegade... in fact, he has *every single one* that was left at the time when he launched his thievery attempt! And of course, EA hasn't provided more.. oh, no, they're too dedicated to do that. They're so wanting to provide for a secure environment that tons of serials were stolen or spoofed, and relays are in abundance.
This is, again, EA trying to take credit for the community's effort; claiming they've always been there. ztype you EA. I'll give them 50% dedication points for continually caving to demand and PR concerns by periodically giving out free software to contest winners that they could buy for anywhere from $4 to $18 for the full damned set retail new and unused, and for periodically giving out various goodies they had spares of that were otherwise just piled up in boxes and IF ever sold, haven't been for a long damn time despite any demand (I want a damn GDI pewter soldier, but nope). I'll give them a couple points of credit for actually giving some support to somebody else who has to handle the running of servers and the day-to-day concerns. I guess though, this invalidates their bullshit claims of always going to fully keep WOL supported and secure until no longer needed. ztype, they cheated by making it needed, to the point that a third party actually had to create an alternate place to play. Yeah, legally they're clear-- WOL is no longer needed. But that's like buying your buddy life insurance and then offing them. That's what happend in Free Willy from memory, right? Evil company has tons of money to gain from offing the friendly, gentle whale it no longer cares for (but yet everybody else adores). The fans come to the rescue.
They should make a movie called "Free Wolly" based on XWIS. Hmmm. Imagine if EA was the bad guys in that whale movie... the evil company would pay for the truck to haul Willy around and periodically give some $5 pails out for the rescuers to use to keep some water on the poor thing. They'd maybe print some cheap T-Shirts and such, and send out some free supportive "We Care" emails and messages...
EA is not "dedicated" to the Command & Conquer franchise. They are only dedicated to a lame attempt to steal credit for the fans' preservation of that reveared brand name, so they can apply it to future piles of shit under a false pretense of quality.
EA has finally killed WOL, as they pretend to be our friends and pass it off to somebody else to handle because they're so committed to us, they won't even do it themselves. Thanks, assholes.
Banshee, there is absolutely no way that EA is doing this out of the goodness of thier heart, or lack thereof. I didn't say that they aren't going to pay Strike Team, I'm saying that they won't be paying as much as they would otherwise be paying to support their servers.
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Bye Bye WOL! XWIS is the official online gaming service now!
