Servers are not eternal creatures. They are born, they live, and they die. It's sad when they get shut down, but it often feels like it's just their time. When nobody is playing anymore, the severs wither away. But death brings forth new life. It always has, it always will. Studios can only support so many servers at once, and the servers that are killed aren't taken behind the shed and shot - they're repurposed for newer, more popular games that can benefit from them. But 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 is being forced through a slow, painful death for no reaso♑n at all.
As we move towards an all-digital, always-online future, server death is a major risk. There will be single-player games that require online connections (or even just be forced through updates) that will one day be robbed of them, rendering them inert. But the death of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1+2 Remastered is far stranger than that. If you want to go on THPS and play through the two campaigns, you still can, no issues. It was a solo game primarily, and can still be played in this fashion with no issues. Ditto the local multiplayer for that classic nostalgia. But playing online is a mess of odd countermeasures and confusion, and for a game this recent and this popular, it cannot be acceptable.
I tried to play with some folks from TheGamer recently, and naturally went to the online multiplayer tab. The game froze, but I figured no big deal, games freeze sometimes. I tried again. It froze again. This is getting weird, but still I'm thinking this is a me problem. Someone else tried. They froze. This was no longer a me problem.
But the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater servers are not down. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Activision might have slurped up developers Vicarious Visions first to assist on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Call of Duty, before transforming it into 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Blizzard Albany and putting it to support work on Diablo, but the servers have not been killed. Ostensibly, THPS is rolling on as it always did. Except it's impossible to get an online game going. Here's where it gets a little weird though - it's not impossible. It just requires very specific steps.
First, you need to disconnect from the internet on your console. Then you need to reconnect specifically to your phone's hotspot. Once that's done - which can be difficult in itself, as many people live in areas with spotty 4G connections and rely on the stability of WiFi - you go back into THPS and wait until you're fully connected online. Once that's done, keep the game running and switch back to your more stable WiFi. Now when you look for an online game, it should work. But that's a silly workaround which only proves that the servers are still up, they're just broken.
A popular fan theory suggests it's to do with the type of connection. Your internet across 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayStation, Xbox, and PC is split into NAT 1, NAT 2, and NAT 3. NAT stands for Network address translation, and if this sounds too complicated, don't worry. This is only a theory, and knowing the logic behind it doesn't change the fact that a phone hotspot is the best way to connect to THPS.
What most people have is a NAT 2 connection. That's the best type of connection for online gaming. A NAT 1 connection means your console is directly connected to the internet without the use of a router at all, and is by far the least secure method. It's such a complicated process that Sony has not revealed how to get a NAT 1 connection on PS, but the 'best' method is to bridge your router, a system which tricks your PlayStation into thinking there is no router. Doing this means nothing else can connect to that router at all - essentially taking all the internet out of your house and putting it into the PlayStation. It's not a good idea.
A NAT 2 connection means you're connected via a router, either through an ethernet cable or WiFi. That's the normal way, and the way you will almost certainly have if you've never messed around with your internet connection. Unfortunately, it's also the connection that THPS doesn't like. A NAT 3 connection is connected behind a router (not physically), which means you can connect to other players, but they can't connect to you. This means you can never host an online game and limits your ability to chat. It's not good for online gaming... except it seems to be the only way to connect to the working version of the servers in THPS. As you might have guessed, hotspots typically work on NAT 3 connections.
You don't need to understand any of that. I don't understand all of it. But what the theory suggests is for whatever reason, only NAT 3 connections work to get onto the servers, but switching to NAT 2 won't kick you out. That's why the fix, finicky as it is, is to connect on your phone's hotspot then switch out to your regular NAT 2 connection which is more stable and has full functionality. What that means in practice is you need a phone hotspot to start a THPS multiplayer game, but need to immediately switch out of the hotspot to actually play said multiplayer game.
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2 was the fastest selling game in the series’ history. It has an iconic online mode. It is less than three years old, and was made by a company that cost $70 billion to acquire, at a ෴price that was considere𝓰d dirt-cheap. It is unacceptable that a game like that is unplayable online, and feels even worse that they haven't had the guts to kill it outright, merely to throttle it so that the only way to connect is to jump through a flaming hoop backwards while blindfolded. So here I am, doing everything I can, holding on to what I am, pretending I might one day be able to play Tony Hawk's Pro Skater with friends again.