Different types of TA game services

Basically there are two kinds of online game services for TA right now: Commercial ones provided by companies bound to economic goals and game services coded, setup and operated by members of the TA community. Depending on your preferences you may like one of them more than the others. For some people the pre game chat interface and the game lobby environment look and handling are the most important thing. Other may care more about the attitude of the players on a particular service, for example on Microsoft's Zone things can get a bit rude sometimes, especially when you are a new player. I suggest you try them all at least once and come to your own conclusions.

Community operated game services

In contrast to the commercial TA game service listed above the community operated ones took TA game hosting to a new level by re-implementing the Inter Galactic War (IGW) meta game idea Cavedog introduced with their Boneyards TA game service (which dosn't exist anymore). If you never have played on Boneyards and wonder what Inter Galactic War means: The meta game starts with a galactic sector map split into (usually) equal parts between Core and Arm. The planets at the border line between the areas controlled by the two races are in contested state. Games you win or lose when playing on these planets are counted and will lead to a change of ownership to the race which won more of the battles taking place there. As you can see the sector border line will move back and forth according the denouement of the battles on the planets. Besides Galactic Wars there are ladder systems, built in clan support and much more interesting stuff.

PhoeniX WorX

PhoeniX WorX (PW), also often denoted as the Phoenix Project (PP), has a quite interesting history: Around the year 2000 Cavedog was about to shutdown its own TA game service Boneyards due to financial problems. The Phoenix Project was founded as a direct consequence of the impending shutdown for two reasons:

Other TA game service didn't provide a ladder system nor something like a IGW meta game.
It was belived that in the long run a community operated game service was the only way to make sure that people would have a place where they can meet for an occasional TA game - even in a distant future. Back then it was already all too clear that the community was too small to get any future support from the owner of the rights on TA.

So basically the name roots to the idea to recreate the Boneyards TA game service with all the features originally provided by Cavedog.

Since its founding PW went thru lots of changes with regard to its goals, the software implementation and the staff behind it. This is nothing unusual for a project of this kind though and the results achieved so far speak for themselves.

Commercial game services

Gamespy

I can't say much about Gamespy except I don't like their interface because it's getting hard to track all the games and people once you have like 30 or 40 people in the TA lobby. There is just not enough room for displaying the data for my taste. Last time I checked I was suprised to find around 40 people there. When Gamespy started to support TA the lobby used to be empty.
But the actual reason why I don't play on Gamespy is their game client. My router kept dialing out every time I logged on my WindowsNT workstation on which I installed it. The client seems to change the system in a way causing it to fire a DNS request for some domains every time you log in. I couldn't get rid of it by just deinstalling the client, I had to restore the operating system partiton from an image file to get it fixed. If you have a permanet cable or DSL connection this dosn't matter much for you though.
Gamespy is free of charge too but they offered a so called Premium Membership you have to pay for once. Don't know if it's worth the money and what advantages you get from it.
Anyway, my information regarding Gamespy dates back to 2001 since that was the last time I checked them out so things may look a bit different nowadays.

Page last updated 2005/02/01 by tcbw@tcbw.net