Server socialism: Valve's fumbles mar Left 4 Dead demo

Yesterday, Valve released the Left 4 Dead demo to players who had preordered the game, and gamers flooded the servers for the much-anticipated zombie-killing co-op experience. One problem: it didn't work very well. The game quickly became a maze of glitches that Valve scrambled to fix, but even worse was the way the game handled the dedicated servers. In short, you had very little control over where you played. Even more galling to users who ran their own servers, the game wouldn't allow you to create a private server; you basically donated your bandwidth to the overall community with no mechanisms to keep your slots private.

Valve detailed the server strategy in an e-mail from Valve's Eric Smith. "By running a public dedicated server your server will be added to a list of servers available for clients to use when playing. Games are started from a Game Lobby by clients, who are then connected to a dedicated server when they start the game. When they're done, your server is added back to the list of available servers."

This caused outrage on the message boards and community sites. No one buys a private server to have it added to a list of available servers for random strangers to play on—they keep private servers so they can play with their friends while being able to kick annoying strangers. Valve simply offered no way for you to control your server, or to keep players out if you wanted to host your own game.

The good news is that Valve listened to angry gamers, and in a matter of hours had released a patch to enable a server browser through the developer console. Simply enable the console under options, hit the "tilde" key, and type "openserverbrowser" to take a look at the available servers and bypass the match-making service.

Unfortunately this solution caused even more problems, as gamers began receiving error messages when trying to connect directly to servers, or experiencing freezing issues with the game. To add insult to injury, if you ran a password-protected server, the password was in effect via the server browser, but not via match-making. Even if you restarted your server and tried to join directly, Valve's matchmaking system had most likely already filled your server for you—even if you applied a password.

In the wee hours of the morning, Valve released yet another patch with a few workarounds for creating a private server and to fix the rampant server issues, making the demo somewhat playable for a larger number of people. More updates are expected today.

The demo was only available to PC gamers who had preordered the game through Steam, and yesterday some wondered about the reasoning behind that decision in the comments for our hands-on impressions; why give gamers who are already buying the game a taste first? Shouldn't Valve be trying to convince fence-sitters? In hindsight the early demo felt much more like a beta for Valve to try out its new match-making methods, and the company apparently had no idea how much PC gamers resent having control of their servers taken from them.

To Valve's credit, the issues are being resolved quickly, but the lesson has been learned: PC gamers do not want a console-style blind match-making system. We think the game is wonderful based on our experience after four hours of wrestling with the glitches, but Valve needs to make sure the infrastructure is in place for the public launch of the demo on November 11.

Valve's Erik Johnson sent an e-mail responding to some of these concerns. "Part of getting this demo out ahead of time was to see what kinds of concerns server administrators had, and we hear what you are all saying," he wrote. It's hard to believe that Valve didn't realize ahead of time that keeping administrators from controlling their own servers was a bad idea.