The support cost for online distribution, I was under the impression, is mainly in people having various and sundry issues with the process. Otherwise, it's just a matter of infrastructure, and that's why you see less of the smaller outfits doing downloads, as the cost per unit goes down very fast once you have invested enough time and effort to get a system that "almost always" functions flawlessly for most customers.
I've noted Llama stating repeatedly that he has no qualms about hosting games for whoever asks, because it only takes him a couple of minutes to set them up. The largest drain is when people do blitzes, and for some reason people like to restart blitzes a lot, which leaves a lot of games needing resets, for nothing. Otherwise, the few minutes taken for a game that will last a month at least, is kind of trivial. And again, that's why I suggested that rather than this "part time job" system of paying a guy to hang around doing nothing all day, cooperation could be gained from people who already actively donate time to get extra games up, and who are trusted by the people in charge, to operate a more powerful system that requires even less effort on a per game basis.
I am sure that Llama, and Gandalf, would be happy to do the same service that they willfully already give the community, if they had the opportunity to do so without tying up their own hardware. Reasonably sure, that is.
Obviously it's not my decision to make, I was mostly just proposing that if someone in said position looked into it, I'd bet the project would have a very good chance of resolving in a way that led to faster, more powerful, and ultimately more reliable hosting, which should hopefully translate into a more robust MP community that would attract new customers by virtue of its existence. That's all.
(Edit: Especially if it were a larger "Shrapnel" server rather than just a Dom3 server, and could host other games as well.)
Re: Shrapnel game server
Threaded Mode