General thoughts about gog and war2.ru servers and our relations

[iL]

Had conversations with Burnt about GOG and this story between us and them.

So, my thoughts:
- As i understand, GOG admins are not interested an any relations with us. They are officials and we are nobody.
Otherwise, would be interesting to talk with them about war2 community.

- I don't want to steal players from GOG community. They made a great job attracting war2-players, we should appreciate that.
That's not a good behavior to come to their server and say "download combat and come to war2.ru, your server is shit, your client is shit, and ours are the best". Even if that's partially true...

My position now:
- players should know there's another war2 server: war2.ru with the strongest war2 players who played war2 all these 25 years and are the best in war2 in the world. Also this server have many enhanchments: status page, extended commands, active moderation, icons and many other beautiful modifications.
They feel free to play on any server they want. They can add server.war2.ru to their gateway list and play using GOG war2 on both war2.ru and GOG, or use War2Combat and play on both war2.ru and GOG also, switching between them any moment.

We should not prevent players to run from war2.ru to gog, if players don't want moderation - let them join gog. Otherwise, welcome to war2.ru.

- We can make tournaments on GOG server, the main question is how to make them interesting to newbies. Otherwise our top players will just come and win everybody as usual.

- I don't want Combat to be a pirate warez client. Actually it isn't. Combat is a project which task is to make war2 maximal playable for most players on new computers under most OS: lastest or previous windows, linux, mac - everywhere it's possible.
Combat's goal is it have been delevoped for all these years, so lots bugs have been fixed, all fixes and impovements have been tested carefully.
Main attention payed to multiplayer, so it should be more comfortable for multiplayer than any other war2 build, and it is.
At the same time, Combat works with single player also perfectly. We didn't do any serious fixes for that, that was just nothing to do with single player.

So, War2Combat is just one of war2 builds, based on bne version, and some players think War2Combat is the best one.

War2Combat will not work on official GOG server without legal cd-key, same as original GOG-war2 build.
Combat designed to be as compabible with official GOG client as possible, just with it's improvements and bugfixes.

- We all like war2, so our task is to make both servers maximally player-friendly. GOG server could be frienldy for newbies, war2.ru server - for experienced players.
Our task is to make all our tools compatible with all the war2 versions. I already updated war2ppatcher and war2ploader for compatibility with original 2021 and also with gog 2021. You can use war2ppatcher to fix bugs in GOG, you can use war2ploader to start GOG and get uPNP and lat/resBug fixes. You can get it yourself on GOG war2 or use War2Combat build and use everything built in 1 installer. It's up to you.

- That's sad GOG server have no such useful commands like /r, /con, /games. i have no idea what to do with that, but i think we should do what we can:
we can make something like "status page". We can use bots to control most channels to know approx amount of players in gog chats. Not sure what we can do with games. Looks like we need some programming for bots on GOG server.

[Tolean]

Good post, thx man!

[Shotgun]

Thanks iL for all the work you do and have done behind the scenes so that we can all continue to enjoy our war2

[{Lance}]

PVPGN can be setup to only accept clients with valid CD Keys.  Seems to me that would be the part that GoG fucked up the most with

[Lambchops]

cool 

[tk[as]]

I didn't agree at first when GOG came out, but now I think this is a good direction to go.

let GOG be a training camp for newbs. if they like the game, they will eventually get better and almost definitely migrate to .ru

Maybe people like me and burnt who make YouTube videos can make it a point to always mention server.war2.ru at start of video so anyone watching it knows about us. maybe he already does that not sure. I only have one video advertising .ru

[baRa]

Has there been any contact with someone from Gog at all?

I find it hard believing blizzard would re release a game and literally spend 0 time on it ie patches and support etc

[tk[as]]

Tora e-mailed GOG discussing st least 1 issue he was having with the Gog War 2 battle net client. His response from Gog was essentially they do not own the rights to the client and therefore cannot make any modifications or updates to it.

[baRa]

So essentially why you get is what you see? Good to know

[tk[as]]

appears to be the case unfortunately

[iL]

His response from Gog was essentially they do not own the rights to the client and therefore cannot make any modifications or updates to it.

But they actually did.
I looked into GOG's exe - they changed about 150 bytes in exe code: nocd, moved cd-key from mpq to windows registry and renamed install.exe to install.mpq.
Plus used their own certificate to sign their exe.

BTW, combat always used original untouched exe.
Now combat have to use untouched exe from GOG, only to keep it compatible with cd-keys from registry.

[iL]

Tora e-mailed GOG discussing st least 1 issue he was having with the Gog War 2 battle net client.

BTW, i asked several people to repost my query about adding support for 2020 version to GOG server. GOG answered nothing...