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Worse. All games used to let you create your own servers to play with friends. That’s basically gone.
Not just that. People wonder why online games are so toxic, overly competitive and filled with cheaters. Matchmaking is the reason.
You don’t have to be nice because chances are you’re never going to play with those people again. All other matchmade players are just glorified bots, they’re completely dehumanized. That means shitheads can act like shitheads without any repercussions. Compare that to community servers where the admin will ban you if you’re an asshole. You even end up making friends because the same people will visit the same server.
And what’s your purpose for playing when everyone you’re playing with are glorified bots? Well your focus turns on you which in turn means your main metric of fun becomes your own skill. Since you can directly measure your own skill you look a things like wins/losses and kdr. You start to focus on things that correlate to competitive play and if the matchmaking is skill-based the game actually pushes you into sweats as the goal is to get you to a statistical 50% winrate. Now compare that to community servers where you’re not pushed into sweats, the overall skill of players stays largely the same and because you’ll be playing with people you know there no need to focus on being the best you can be, you can just mess around with others.
And of course cheating is a huge issue, but again it’s one of those things where having an admin to vet sus players make a huge difference. The admin isn’t infallible but cheating is less of an issue if you’re playing with people you know.
But people would much rather give it all up and deal with toxicity, sweats and cheating because the server admin could be a badmin. But maybe I’m just old and am remembering the good old days when you could make friends playing on the same server.
Jesus. I hadn’t thought about it.
I never make friends in games these days. I just drone around and quit when I get tired of it. I don’t even like multiplayer anymore. This is why.
Back in Counter-Strike/CS: Source days I made a ton of real friends. I knew what was going on in their lives. I congratulated them when they got married and had kids.
My clan server was always full of regulars just laughing and telling jokes and making changes to the server to see what worked for us. We had it perfect. Vote for knife fights, fun sounds like “gotchya bitch” for a knife kill. We built it together and we all stumbled into the server by accident and it just fit who were so we stayed. We had a rotation of maps that we all agreed on.
They’re still on my friends list. Last online 11 years ago, 7 years ago, 13 years ago, 12 years ago.
Damn, looking at that hurt a little bit.
It’s sad just how fast time goes. I have no idea where they are now or what they’re doing. That sucks.
The last time I talked to the one dude he had overdosed on heroin and was trying to get his life together. He might not even be alive anymore.
For nearly 5 years I hung out with those dudes every night.
I meet people now that I could see myself being friends with, but there’s no incentive to talk to them again. Random lobby, play game, the end.
I was hoping GO (now 2) would have an active user base in the servers. Nope. No gungame, no endless custom maps, no fun sounds, just base shit.
As sad as it was, I’m glad you made me think about this tonight.
If you want to make friends playing games, these days it’s done on Discord
To me personally it isn’t about meeting people to play with is more of getting long life friends from playing games, it’s pretty much just play a couple of games and be done without much reconnect after, being an introverted person also doesn’t help.
Yeah you can make lifelong friends on discord
Spot on!
Sometimes even cheaters could be dealt with without an admin in those days. Servers would have fun game settings and odd maps that would break cheating gameplay.
My brother and I often played CS in the same room, on opposing teams because we didn’t like being cheated and didn’t want to be cheaters. We found an empty server with a sniping-only map. Made for great fun and someone joined in about 15 minutes later. They seemed really good, so we joined together to see if we could make it challenging. The new guy was just too good, so we decided to swap back and forth with the new guy to see if one of us could make a 1v2 miracle happen. That’s when we figured out he was impossibly aim hacking. Bummer, our fun game was toasted.
Then we realized the map settings had friendly fire on and a 5 second start delay. Aim hacks don’t target your own teammates. A perfect trap was available: we’d headshot TK the cheater at game start and then 1v1 each other. The cheater tried swapping to the other team only to find my brother using the same TK tactic. Our cheating friend found himself without a chance to grift. Needless to say, he didn’t hang around for long.
Holy fuck I miss community servers
I posted this above, but I really want to emphasize the point. The is not new, it’s not rare, but we need to demand it and be angry when we don’t get it. Dedicated servers should be the norm.
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dedicated_Servers_List
I miss the days of opening Steam and being able to search a million servers to find the specific niche type of game I wanted in CS. Warcraft, custom maps, zombie… So fun
There’s people actively working on bringing those to cs2, but you wouldn’t know by the massive shitshow that the server browser is with thousands of redirects currently, which is why the community also built a server browser if you search CS2Browser you’ll find it, you can go back to enjoying it ^^
Zombie escape is the best 🏃♂️ 🧟♀️
I don’t doubt this this is generally the case, but most of the games I enjoy playing with friends offer their own servers. Which got me thinking about it, and they tend to be indie games.
So it’s not gone. Niche, perhaps.
it just reinforces the fact that the only games worth playing are indies and like 5 AAA ones
AKA dedicated servers. They exist now for games now, but are… well not rare, but very specific. Factorio has a dedicated server. Ark has a dedicated server. Valheim, Space Engineers (windows only), Satisfactory, to name a few that I’ve dealt with myself. Demand them. Punish devs who don’t accommodate them with your wallets. No user dedicated servers, no purchase. Fuck you and the distributed info-scraping service you rode in on.
I have a list of games I will never buy because they have succumbed to the lure of hosted services with no user control, no dedicated server support. Those devs want control; they want to control you, how you play and how you interact with those you play with.
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dedicated_Servers_List
Just posting this here. No Reason.
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Tinnitus?
Not to be confused with EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Translation for Latin languages: IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
Stop making me more jealous.
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Are we really going to convince ourselves now that Sony wouldn’t have introduced a subscription at some point? Realistically the only reason Microsoft where the ones to popularise it is because Sony didn’t get there first
Nostradamus much?
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Gates had a point. Everyone was spending thousands on hardware but wouldn’t spend a little more for Basic. There were free options, they weren’t poor ( computer hardware was very expensive in the 70’s), but everyone was using Basic without buying it.
It’s like today where people will spend thousands for a gaming PC, then complain about Windows when they should be using Linux.
But it’s literally reversed now? Windows is the only consumer-grade paid OS and it’s also the worst consumer-grade OS.
Bill Gates promised higher software quality and then delivered an OS, which has pretty much as its only quality that other software targets it.
This is why I exclusively play indie offline games. Also because my PC is getting old lol.
It was never going to be free forever, because that would be leaving free money on the table, which is unacceptable to any evil megacorp (which is to say, all of the big three). I imagine PSN initially being free was mostly a result of trying to bridge the gap between PS3 and 360 sales, given the multi-year delay and huge price difference.
It was never going to be free forever, because that would be leaving free money on the table
So… When will playing online on PC require a subscription on top of the ISP?
Probably about 2 days after Valve becomes a publicly traded company. While GabeN is alive I don’t think that’s a risk but after that who knows.
The biggest threat to gaming is Gabe Newell’s eventual death. I really hope he figures out the whole brain connected interface thing so he can upload himself to the internet and become immortal.
Or just like, you know, break up Steam’s monopoly
They don’t have a monopoly. They don’t even have a natural monopoly like they did when it first launched and was the only digital store front for games.
Instead of trying to make the one good service shitty, how about the shitty services step up their game and stop being shitty?
I remember hearing it was originally gonna be paid, but Sony messed something up in their servers that made people angry and were forced to keep it free.
Funny, I remember the playstation’s online being dog shit and offline a ton.
Laughs in PC.
I enjoy PC gaming as much as anyone but the simple fact is you can’t do what a Series S does for $250 with a $250 PC. Plus with gamepass the math doesn’t even need a napkin. It’s simply the best deal in gaming right now, whether you’re paying for online play or not.
you can’t do what a Series S does for $250 with a $250 PC. Plus with gamepass the math doesn’t even need a napkin. It’s simply the best deal in gaming right now, whether you’re paying for online play or not.
The consoles themselves are often sold at a loss because they know they will make that money back on games. Which is a better value proposition is arguable, especially once you factor in how much more you’ll be paying per game relative to steam sales, the ability of PCs to do things other than gaming, and the inevitable obsolescence of consoles. I can still play games on a modern PC from when steam was new.
Microsoft also offers a game pass for PC, but I’d rather own my games.
I thought WoW, RuneScape and the like pioneered online subscriptions?
They were not the first, either. But definitely the biggest in their day.
Everquest had a subscription. I think subscription models were common back then for being a member of a forum or getting a magazine or news letter.
Ultima Online predates those too.
I haven’t played multiplayer since the PS3 days, before Sony joined the greed bleed
Reject modern gaming, return to quake 3 arena.
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If MS didn’t do it, someone else would have and it would have become the trend anyway. The problem isn’t the particular sins of a specific company (though to be clear, MS is heinous), the problem is the profit motive.
I don’t think folks remember how truly shitty Nintendo‘s online service was when it was free. The fact is these companies will not put meaningful resources into them unless they are directly generating revenue. I hate it, but that’s reality.
It’s still shitty even now that you pay for it. The free retro emulation doesn’t offset the connection issues and massive lag, nor does it excuse the god awful store.
I still think they’re 10 years behind but dude it was unplayable prior.
I played online on the Wii quite a lot, it was fine. Smash bros a ton, 007 Golden Eye and The Conduit, and good old MH Tri.
Literally a thousand hours in that last one alone most of which was spend online. Did you not use Ethernet? Wi-Fi was shitty for sure, because everybody had shitty wi-fi back then. (I’m also not saying it was amazing, but it was free and serviceable)
…It’s improved? Doesn’t it still handle communication weirdly (needing a separate app for voice chat), or is that on a game-by-game basis?
It was awful prior. The netcode was terrible, MP was a joke on virtually every game.
I really don’t see how this is any better, they are using the same peer to peer netcode they always have. Maybe the general quality of Internet has gone up, but there is nothing I can point to that Nintendo has fundamentally changed between previous free MP and NSO, except giving some ROMS and DLC occasionally. Smash bros is still a lag fest with wireless players, splatoon still delays collision detection, Mario kart still has weird rubber banding and desync… they just slapped a price tag on it.
Video games could have had a single version for the entire world which contains every localization that the user can freely choose between (you know, like every other software with an international market), but Nintendo popularized the geolocking model that other competitors also started using. (And no it’s not because it would take too much space, that might have been true in the ROM cartridge days but now most game cards are just overpriced proprietary SD cards with hundreds of gigabytes of storage, and it’s not like game studios are particularly conservative with file sizes nowadays.)
Phones also could have had removable batteries and could be disassembled, but Apple popularized the throw it in a dumpster and get a new one model that other competitors also started using.
The tech industry is especially brazen because two thirds of the users literally value convenience and “polish” above data ownership and device repair rights and literally anything else and the other third is just ignored and everyone calls them stuck in the past, paranoid, amish, etc.
I sleep like shit, but at least I’m happy with my PC.
