This thread is an attempt to provide a list of problems the community has encountered with Descent 1, 2, and 3; and suggestions for gamesas should they choose to develop a Descent 4.

To start:
Multiplayer Server Tracker
Problem:
Descent 3's had 2 centralized game tracking systems built in.
Descent 3 was released in June 1999.
Heat.net was shut down October 2000.
PXO.net was shut down June 2004.
After only 5 years, both in-game multiplayer tracking systems were gone, this hurt the multiplayer community greatly, at least 1/2 the players stopped playing Descent online after this failure.

Solution:
Develop a multiplayer game tracker that is not centralized. Technologies already exist in areas such as P2P that can be successfully leveraged to game tracking. An example is Gnutella. There are no single points of failure in a Gnutella network. Instead of searching for files to download; the network would be used to search for and provide an index of gameservers to connect to.

Benefits:
Using a P2P approach will benefit gamesas because they would not need large servers to coordinate the tracking system. It would also benefit the players by keeping the in-game browsers working indefinitely, keeping the game alive longer. Also, a quick search on Google does not yield any results for "decentralized game tracker". This technology can be applied to any gamesas game, and gamesas can license this technology to other Development Studios and Publishers.

There are already server trackers. Check the thread "Descent 3 still alive" for links.

There are server trackers, but they are not in-game.

When PXO died, the amount of people playing Descent online was instantly cut in half.

Also, none of the current trackers are peer-peer. Adopting peer to peer in game tracking in Descent 3 could have kept the community together much longer.

Well I dont think they had dropping the servers in mind, so they didn't see a need for anything like that. So when it did happen there was nothing that could have been done.

Peer to Peer in D3 never worked very well.

This isn't peer to peer gameplay im talking about.

Im talking about an in-game tracker that keeps track of all the servers and does chat.

This can be accomplished using P2P technology.

Umm... How is this really any different then what PXO was? It listed all the servers and had a chat system and all those goodies. People could put up thier servers up there and whatnot. but when PXO went down, it was like BitTorrent just stopped working for everyone. Program dont work, no one can connect, so what your suggesting really isnt "revolutionary" and doesnt save really much of anything.

their original tracker was perfectly fine.