Epic have decided to remove the Unreal series from the online stores and switch off the network for online play.

https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/epic-is-turning-off-online-services-and-servers-for-some-older-games

Do not panic, as there is help at hand with community hosted masterservers.
For UT200x head over to http://openspy.org for instructions
(OpenSpy is an open source project)

Something is confusing. In your footer you advertise yet another Master Server 333networks which also has a UT2k4 masterlist. Servers can only advertise on one list. Since the UT2k4 community is so small shouldn't we be consolidating everybody onto OpenSpy?

macintoxicated wrote:
Servers can only advertise on one list.

This is just the half truth.

Question: What will happen, if there is only one masterserver and it goes down?
Answer: You are not able to uplink and not able to get the serverlist.


So, what is the reason, epicgames already had 2 entries, if that would not work?

The gameserver will choose one of them. Game Client does the same. If one master can't be reached, the game server will choose the next masterserver in the configuration and uplink to the available master. For the game client, you have to hit the refresh button. Since the masterservers allow sharing the gameservers, they will syncronize the lists. By that, the other has the same server list. That means, players can find online servers and game servers will uplink to the available master server.

As a fact: it is best practice to use at least 2 masterservers. Additionally, you can have up to 3 entries.

If you use only 1 masterserver and this is not available, it will definitely break the online gaming. So the best thing to do is, spreading the list between these masters, have a good number of masters and online functionality will be granted,