Just to add my tuppence ha'penny worth here, I'm kinda in agreement with winty here. (/me goes off to examine head and drink some more).
This is the whole reason why the -)BiB(- clan rule is "all our matches are played on official league servers".
The simple fact is, it is entirely possible, and very easy, for the home team to do things with their private server to give themselves the advantage.
Note to the morons who don't read my post: I'm not saying anyone cheats, or that it actually happens. I'm saying it is
possible. By playing on league servers, there is a level playing field, it is a known situation, and there is one less reason for argument or suspicion of cheating by playing on a league server.
The last time -)BiB(- had a match with ]UAS[ (which was a *long* time ago
), I remember "wellst0ned" nagging on at me for
ages to agree to playing the match on their server, giving me all sorts of abuse for not acceding to his wishes. This just made me all the more suspicious and made me dig my heels in further.
Especially if your clanserver is with gameservers.nl, I can't see why you would want to insist on playing the match on a private clanserver, and have such a major problem with playing on league servers 4/5, which are also with gameservers.nl.
League servers 1/2/3 are often wank for most non-UK players, but servers 4/5 generally offer perfectly playable pings for most players, most of the time, irrespective of their geographical location.
As winty points out, commercial game server hosters are in the game to make
money. Very few actually give much of a damn if you get ping-spikes or whatnot. And far too many server hosters are running too many processes on insufficient hardware - and the reason is because it is simply uneconomical for them to have one P4 Xeon @ 3Ghz with 1GB of 1066 RDRAM and u320 SCSI drive sitting on a 1G/bit link at a major internet hub doing nothing but running a single instance of a UT server.
Having said that, the new public iAS server by Digifrag is
currently running fantastically for me.
Stable F6 ping of 50 during a game yesterday with about 7 other players. I've not seen that kind of ping on
any other Assault server. And I wonder how long it will last