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It has been announced that GLU Mobile, the company that took over the Powered By GameSpy matching service from IGN, will be shutting down on May 31, 2014. This affects on-line play for hundreds of games. I have long noted that servers for Descent 3, even after the demise of Parallax Online (PXO), were still being listed on GameSpy Arcade and various GameSpy trackers.

I know we use Vortex as a tracker and matching service, but I don't know the mechanics behind it. Is Vortex dependent on querying the GameSpy server master list? Is Decent Valhalla?

Is this going to be a problem for Descent 3 on-line play when they shut it down?

Hi PJ!

Potentially it is going to affect us, yes...

However: Our community / gameplay does NOT depend on GameSpy.

Thanks to "esa" we've got a second tracker at http://d3.descent.cx/tracker.d3 and there is another one from "coolchris" (which is going to be released shortly).

Vortex will then only be able to use the one tracker from descent.cx but there is also an option to fiddle with HOSTS files to enable the coolchris tracker for Vortex and other tools.

Thanks!

Author of DescentValhalla.com here. Great question! Since they closed PlanetDescent years ago, I figured they'd eventually close the master game tracker as well. So I developed DescentValhalla.com as a D3 tracker. We do not depend on the old GS Tracker. It's especially easy if server ops use Thomas' D3 Server Tool. The tracker URLs are built in and as long as you check the tracker option, servers will be posted to all trackers, not just GS.

So when the closure happens, some unprepared servers may drop off but eventually they'll post to the remaining trackers and all will be back to normal.

Hope this helps. If you get a chance, be sure to thank the site and D3 server operators for doing their part to keep things going for this long!