I'm afraid it's the worse case scenario. On the XS4ALL forums all the admins have seen their servers fall, apparantly we've been lucky enough that the QW server has lasted for this long, for at least two years there hasn't been any physical contact with the servers.
This was posted in february 2013:
Quote:
Maar van games is niet meer veel over. De ene na de andere machine down en/of ip's niet van buiten te zien.
Wij draaien nog maar 1 q3 osp server zolang het duurt. Ik ben erg teleurgesteld in op de manier hoe games word weggezet alsof het allemaal niets voor hun heeft betekend.
Ze kunnen wel druk zijn, maar dat vind ik geen excuse om helemaal niets meer van je te laten horen.
Roughly translated There's not much left of the games. One machine after another is breaking down or you can't see their IP's externally.
We still run one Quake3 for the time being and I'm extremely disappointed with how XS4ALL is handling this, as if the games era means nothing to them at all.
They might be busy and all, but to make absolutly no contact is really ridicilous
Could someone give some insight on this topic. I always thought XS4ALL were Flepser's servers. Do they belong to someone else and if yes, who paid for them? And what means, "for at least two years there hasn't been any physical contact with the servers"?
XS4ALL is an internet provider in The Netherlands, in the golden ages of online gaming it provided servers for all kind of games (CS, Q1, Q2, Q3, QW, ET and a few more). Back then it had an employee who managed the machines in his spare time (Yomama), but he left a couple of years ago.
Over the years his sparetime got more and more limited and the decline started and when he left XS4ALL it rapidly went downhill with maintenance to the state where we are now. I merely took over the external administrating, just before Yomama left I managed to get the QW servers on their own machine, instead of sharing it with other games (which resulted often to lag).
So they are not my servers, XS4ALL 'paid' for them and noone touched the machines for years
So I've gotten an answer from XS4ALL and roughly translated it;
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Our moderators are clearing the data center and there's no documentation whatsoever about the gameservers, because the departure of employees monitoring these servers the chances of them coming back online are very slim.
Seeing that the backup server is doing a mighty job as a replacement nothing is lost except for the name of our shining beacon in dark days.
@gore: since 1998 at least when it was named "Axes 4 all", possibly earlier.
A real pity; although I haven't played any 'real' QW for a couple of years I would still periodically jump on for some FFA every now and then. I suppose it was inevitable they would be shut down eventually and perhaps one should be grateful they lasted this long. They were somewhat an anachronism in the sense that the days of ISPs providing dedicated servers for older games has been phased out in favour of being setup by individuals.
Looking on the stats site well over 40m frags were made on that server since the last stats reset, more than 10x the second placed server from what I can see.
Xs4All Free for All server is down for undertermined reasons.
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