As I have reported recently, I've been giving this whole "guild" thing in World of Warcraft a more concerted effort than I have done previously. I've been running instances more regularly and "raiding" as the kids say and I have actually been enjoying it. The guild I joined is half of a larger guild that split into two groups after reaching critical mass, so the majority of people I play with are friends (many in real life) and the atmosphere is really relaxed and enjoyable. One of the issues we've been having however is that the server they used for voice (via Ventrilo, a popular piece of software used for voice communication in games like WoW) was owned by another guild on a different server and we had no control over administration of it, so our runs routinely have to deal with griefers from outside our guild joining up and being obnoxious.
I run this website on a way-too-overpowered dedicated server (shoutout to cari.net!) which I initially bought to do OpenSim development last year. Even with that and this site I don't come close to utilizing the extent of my bandwidth so I was more than happy to offer to set up a Ventrilo server for our guild to use. I'd never done it before but going through the setup documentation didn't look like it would be difficult in the least. After about an hour of work I was finished, the server was running, and I'd begun passing login information out to the guild. Pretty quickly members started posting in chat that they weren't able to log in, the server was full. I didn't think that was possible and certainly hadn't set any limits to keep anyone out so I began investigating, soon discovering that the "free" version of the server software was hard-coded with a limit of eight simultaneous connections.
To give you an idea, while most instances in WoW are five-man affairs, the first raid tier requires ten participants. Eight people wouldn't even let us run one of them, much less let guild members who weren't in the raid run their own instances and use the server to communicate with one another. Annoyed, I started looking into what it would cost for the pro license; if it wasn't too expensive I was happy to buy it since our guild was already extremely excited at the chance to have a server to itself without the interference of kids we didn't even play with.
No sooner had I clicked the "purchase" link on Flagship Industries' website than I realized that a pro license was completely outside the realm of possibilities.
Let me break it down:
The Pro version of the Ventrilo server can not be downloaded. It requires that we accept your application and that you sign and return the Ventrilo license. However, we do not license everyone.
In order for an applicant to be considered you must meet the following minimum requirements.
1) You must have a legitimate business license in your state, country or jurisdiction. Please be prepared to provide proof when requested.
2) You agree to a 1000 slot minimum. Slot counts greater then 1000 are billed at the per slot rate for the total number of slots hosted. Slot counts below 1000 are billed at the per slot rate with the required minimum of 1000 slots.
3) Licensee's slot counts are expected to grow on a regular basis.
We do not license individuals or businesses who wish only to run one or two standalone servers. In these cases you will need to rent a server from one of our official licensees on the hosting page.
It makes no difference that here I was, an individual with a dedicated server and an open wallet with my credit card falling out; they had no interest in dealing with me unless I put forth an application and an agreement to purchase a minimum of a thousand licenses (at what cost I don't know, because there's no pricing mentioned for one license anywhere) as well as a commitment that I would need more than a thousand licenses on a "regular basis." Frankly I have had very few examples of a company being so unwilling to take my money, throwing up so many barriers for my currency, and this floored me. And on top of it they make it perfectly clear that this is absolutely meant to throw a finger to people who want one or two servers for themselves, spelling out that it's against their license agreement to resell individual licenses or host the server software or anything else. Given the fact that their website spells out how litigious they are and to what lengths they will go to ensure their license is followed these don't look like people I want to give my money to in the first place.
But you know what hostile policies like this do? Upon searching for an explanation to the eight-user limit, these were the search results that came up. Crack upon crack upon crack upon crack of torrented software and illicit downloads for people who want to run their own server without these absurd restrictions. Now I'm not going to put cracked software on my machine to begin with, even though I hadn't been considering it at all (again, I wanted to pay for the pro license and I was happy to do so), but the fact of the matter is if you are this unwilling to provide for customers who want your product, this is the sort of result you get. People will just steal it. You see it in video games, it's a constant response to DRM, this is just reality. Create enough difficulty for your customer and they won't bother trying to be your customer, whether they go to a competitor or flip you off and take your product.
In the end in order to do this I'm going to have to rent access from one of the qualified hosting companies who provide this service (begrudgingly, because frankly if Ventrilo were not the only piece of software that people use I would try TeamSpeak or something else after this just on principle); but when I had the money and I had the machine already set up, it burns me up to need to do that because of "asshole" business models.
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anonymous
4 Nov 2009 · 1:58 PM anonymous[quote this]
Oh it's much worse than that. First of all, the cracks are all for version 2.x of the server software. In response to all of those cracks, he made these bizarre restrictions on purchasing a license for the pro version. And that's the good news.
The bad news is that the client, before connection, will make a call-home request to a Flagship to see if the server has a valid license. And it does this *every time* you connect to a server. So if you stop paying for the server license, they can shut your server down from their own network.
The flip side of designing it that way is that a good DDoS attack on those 4 license servers will turn off every single Ventrilo 3.x server on the planet (not that I would advocate doing such a thing).
So in order to even use the client, you first have to be allowed to by Flagship.
Frankly, I can't figure out why people use that horrible program. Use mumble or teamspeak instead.
=)
22 Dec 2009 · 8:54 PM =)[quote this]
Okay.. that's for a permanent, unlimited server, mainly for business use.
You can pay monthly fees for 10, 15, 20 etc servers. Fairly cheap, honestly.
All depends on how important the event you are using it for is to you.
Joshua Meadows
22 Dec 2009 · 9:29 PM Joshua Meadows[quote this]
I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to; if you mean Ventrilo's licensing system, it's not intended for that at all. Ventrilo licenses out their software only to companies who are going to turn around and then rent out those servers to other customers. Their business model is very much based on licensing hosting companies with thousands of servers to then resell slots to other customers. Ventrilo directly doesn't sell monthly fees of anything to anyone; you have to license at least a thousand machines at once, with the contractual obligation that you'll be increasing the number of machines you need licenses for (and then buying those licenses accordingly) over time.
You may be thinking of other companies who rent out Ventrilo servers to other users on a per-connection basis. That was what I went with in the end for my guild; I rented something with gameservers.com and while the price wasn't expensive, that wasn't exactly the point. I would have preferred to host the Ventrilo server on the machine I already had, instead of renting out another server. Even though I was willing to pay for it, Flagship Industries wasn't interested.
Justin
12 Nov 2011 · 12:41 AM Justin[quote this]
I know this is way old, but you can try opensource too. Check out Mumble: http://mumble.sourceforge.net/
The server side application is named "Murmur" and the client side is named "Mumble".
I used to run Murmur for while (actually, even before this article was written). It worked fine for 50+ concurrent users. The only issue was really figuring out how to configure the security/accounts and then migrating the settings on upgrades.