Paid hosting servers
EA_David why wont EA let us rent servers and give multiple people admin access to servers? IE letting clans and teams renting servers from EA and let us control the servers. IE. I'm in my c...
Forum Discussion
In the past, hosted servers required official hosts. And license deals. And rcon. And leaks. And pirate servers.
None of these things would be an issue. The entire network infrastructure has been abstracted away by cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services. EA could act as an intermediary, just like they do right now with Portal. The only difference is that they'd have to expand the tools to manage the server in-game. You know, the usual stuff like the ability to ban, kick, votekick, manage teams and spectate.
The portal servers already give you the ability to kick, ban, restart map, and start next map.
The only real things missing is the ability to add more admins, and manage teams. I don't think it would be hard for them to add those features to portal and in-game.
Spectating was always a game design thing; they should consider adding it either way. Screenshots were useless since people used cheats as an overlay, so that isn't missed. Team balance was a plugin, if admins didn't want to move players manually. Theoretically, we already have the ability to team balance by adding it as a script or block program; only problem is the performance implications and the generally bugginess that sometimes happens with rules not triggering or terminating randomly in the middle of a triggered rule.
