To make a long story short, the AvP3 dedicated server system is more than annoying like Battlefield 2 or the Unreal engine, it just plain does not work.  If you’ll notice, there are no GSPs who actually have AvP3 servers yet.  You may think that this is just because the game is new, but it’s not.  GSPs fight to get the newest games out there first to get both SEO and pre-orders.

The simple fact is that the AvP dedicated server exe REQUIRES a user environment.  This means you literally have to be logged into remote desktop on a Windows machine to make it work.  It’s the most obnoxious requirement for any software thats supposed to run en’ masse ever.  Beyond that, you can’t enforce anything via the command line.

For example, lets say I wanted a set number of slots as maximum… you can’t pass that as a command line argument and lock down a server.  You have to literally open a config file and put it in there.  The same config file that customers can use.

ASIDE from getting work arounds for having a user environment and not getting auto-generating configs that you cant’ enforce slots and public/private availability on… there’s more.  Steam has to be running and logged in, which means you actually have to remote desktop into the server to enable a steam logon.  Then you have to leave the session running open so it stays on.

Even further, the game console that pops up is difficult to shut down remotely because it spawns a new process.

The game also requires 15GB of data to host a server, which is just annoying.

We’ve tried everything from rigging up a Windows server to have an SSH session with the ability to run things in a screen to deploying every windows control panel we could get our hands on.  Theres just no way to integrate this crap game server into any control panel out there.  From the looks of the way the system is developed, they don’t plan on changing it either.

So unless you want to have your dedicated server up on remote desktop 24/7 while logged into it’s own unique steam account… give up.

We’re sorry, but until AvP3 does a complete overhaul and makes it possible to integrate their game into some kind of control panel, we can’t host it… it’s just not possible.

So, theres the reason nobody has AvP game servers guys, sorry.

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