I wrote:Could Uber please start renting us servers directly?When I started playing PA about a month ago my clan consisted of 5 people, and by now it's up to 10. The way I am going about it, pushing the game on every new subscriber to my site, it will be 20 by next month and the sky is the limit. The problem is we are getting sick of having to divide ourselves up in smaller teams when more than 5 people happen to be online and wanting to play the game at the same time. We really want to get going with 10v10s and above.
So, as I understand it, the 40-player battles are possible right now, and have been for some time, but the holdup is the 8 games per server policy which throttles the bandwidth necessary for larger games. So why not rent servers to players directly? You don't need to release the server for that -- all you need is an option in the Uber store, or better yet in-game, to pay Uber a monthly fee (and also, why not, a fee per game or per day) so that they can allocate to you an entire server. I don't care how much it costs either -- when you have 20 people all pitching in, any amount of money can be easily gathered.
Now, I googled this, and also did a forum search, but all I came up with was Brian's plan to rent servers when the server is made available, and also the following threads, which did not address the issue:
http://pamatches.com/servers/https://forums.uberent.com/search/424166/?q=rent servers&o=date&c[node]=61
But what Brian is offering, as I understand it, would not solve my issue, because I want a server tied into Ubernet, so I can play with randoms 24/7 if I feel like it, not a private server wholly distinct from it, to which I would have to invite people via email every time I wanted to play a frigging game. Tell me if I am getting this wrong, because right now that's how I understand the issue.
This way, eventually all clans would have their own servers on Ubernet, and if we were also allowed to advertise them in-game (in our lobbies, for example, so that randoms who participated in our games and enjoyed themselves could click on a banner and be taken to our sites), it would help greatly with getting the majority of MP players into the clan system, which is so necessary for a game that's so heavy on team-play as PA.
And hey, it would be an extra revenue source for Uber. I mean, I don't have anything against Brian offering this service and making some money off of it, but if Uber can make the money instead, and use it to further develop PA, I think even Brian would agree that that would be a better solution. Obviously both solutions could and maybe even should be offered at the same time, but I know which one I would choose, if given a choice.
Finally, everyone's been saying how horrible performance has been in the latest stable build for the last couple of days. It this is due to heavy server loads due to Uber's inability to rent more servers, this solution would certainly help mitigate the problem.
So please, start renting us servers directly as soon as possible, Uber.