Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear - Multiplayer

Multiplayer

Rogue Spear's multiplayer mode consisted of three main playing fields: GameSpy Arcade, MSN Gaming Zone and MPlayer.com. MPlayer.com was later purchased by Gamespy. The multiplayer game achieved a certain degree of success boasting several thousand players playing at once. After the acquisition of MPlayer.com by GameSpy Arcade, MSN Games became the more popular of the two until Microsoft shut down the MSN Gaming Zone's CD-ROM match-making service on June 19, 2006. As well as pick up games, a higher level of play was reached by players who participated in ladder play. Several websites throughout the game's lifespan provided this service with the three most notable being Close Quarters Combat League (CQC) hosted by Starlance.com, Clanladder (CL) and Xtreme Gaming Network (XGN), which is currently still active.

These ladder systems provided both one on one deathmatch as well as team deathmatch where players banded together in clans and fought matches which ranged anywhere from two-on-two to eight-on-eight. However, eight-on-eight often posed lag problems due to the way game hosting worked. One player would act as the host of the game (rather than a designated third party server) and all others would connect to the host's one computer over a specified port. This format caused two problems. Firstly, it was prone to causing lag, a delay in the sending and receiving of packets, which caused for time and spatial distortion in game physics. Secondly, in the opinion of many players, the host had an advantage because of this. Many times a player would be shot and killed without ever seeing his enemy due to high latency times. It was noticed that the hosts of the game were much more prone to do this. This was referred to as "hosting" or "getting hosted." Often, teams would take turns, allowing a member from each team to host their team's map. Sometimes, especially during tournament matches, a neutral host would be called upon to host the entirety of the match. A neutral host would be a person hosting the game with a good connection and this person would not be a player in the match, when the round began the neutral host would kill his or her character with a grenade.