[Tyrant]

This has come up before, and at one point Shrapnel said that they were looking into it and asked for some advice from veteran hosts about how much hardware they would need etc. My impression was that they were going to hang back and see if it was really needed or if we would handle it on our own, and that they concluded that it wasn't really needed.

Though i would love to see a pro hosting service, i think they were right, I hardly ever have to wait long when i'm looking for a new game. (Though if Velusian is leaving us that might not continue to be true.)

On the flip side, it's such an easy thing to do i'm not sure why they don't. From Gandalf's posts and my own hosting experience it seems like you can run really quite few games on pretty modest hardware. My frakenstein 1G Win 98 p.o.s. does not break a sweat on three games for instance.Perhaps i'll do an experiment and see how many it can handle. As far as the time commitment goes, well, it's a bit of pain for a volunteer, but as an extra duty for an employee it would seem to be trivial. I do not know anything about the particulars of Shrapnel's business and i'm sure they have good reasons. <shrug>

There was also some general gaming site (Battlefield?) that tried to get a community going once, but i'm not sure if they actually provided hosting. They did not quite get Dominions and were focused on a ladder thing for 2 or 4 player games so it kinda just died on the vine.