South African PC gamers shared a sad day in early September, when it was revealed that Gameservers.com will be the exclusive proprietors for Call of Duty: Black Ops dedicated servers. Unfortunately, GameServers do not have any presence in SA, nor have they voiced any clear intention to launch servers here in the foreseeable future.
This essentially means that if you buy Call of Duty: Black Ops for PC, you will not be able to play on a local server, against local players, with local latency. Gamers can expect at best 250ms lag when playing on an international server, and often it is much higher. This sort of time delay between the player and the server will essentially make the game unplayable.
We have tried to contact Activision regarding the issue, but to no avail. It seems that while the publisher is quite happy to sell its games here, it does not see any need to provide its South African customers with the required support to fully enjoy it, nor does it feel obliged to engage with us.
There have been rumblings amongst the local gaming community, with rumours that various parties are in talks with Gameservers.com over local servers, but sadly, nothing concrete has been put forward.
A Gameservers representative told us the following:
“I’m afraid we do not have a datacenter in that region at this time. We are looking to open new locations were there is high demand, but I don’t have any specific information as to if/when we would be doing so in the region.”
In a previous article, we encouraged local gamers to suggest SA as a future location for Gameservers.
There is also now a quickly growing contingent of local gamers who want dedicated local servers that have started a Steam group, and have managed to get in touch with someone at Gameservers, who again confirmed that they are looking into the matter.
The group has been up for less than a month, and it already has over 1,200 members. The success of this group can only do good things for the case for local servers, so sign up. However, we encourage users to post with a measure of maturity and positivity; spouting off with threats to pirate the game is not helpful.
On the other hand, EA’s competing modern combat FPS, the Medal of Honor reboot, has been confirmed to feature open dedicated server support, and South Africa will be getting dedicated servers for this title. With MoH launching in mid-October, it will have about a month’s head start on CoD: Black Ops, which arrives mid-November. If SA gamers don’t receive news of local dedicated server support for Black Ops by then, we could see Medal of Honor becoming the local favourite.
Discuss the Call of Duty: Black Ops SA dedicated server debacle on the MyGaming forum.
Loading ...
