this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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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.
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 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.