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Comment by drorco | Hacker News Reader

This has been like that with many multiplayer games to some extent before the age of matchmaking. Someone sets up a dedicated server with certain mods/game configuration, and that would be yours and other randoms favorite server. Over time, you'd actually become a community.

I've gone back to play Unreal Tournament 2004 this past year in such dedicated servers, and it made me realize how badly matchmaking ruined the sense of community in MP games.

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That’s actually interesting—I used to really be into multiplayer games when I was a teenager into my early 20s, and have some great memories of virtual hangs with friends both real and offline. My interest in online gaming basically dropped to zero (or even negative) after that, which seems to coincidence with when matchmaking started becoming a thing. I think it was it Halo 2 that was the first big matchmaking game that I played and I just really couldn’t get into it at all, I just more or less assumed I was just getting older and losing interest in childhood hobbies but never connected it to the loss of community in my head. Thinking about all those multiplayer lobbies from yesteryear gives me pangs of nostalgia.

Interesting, I was just thinking Halo 2 was great for that sort of thing. I have some fond memories of joining private parties and goofing around for hours hunting for glitches

Maybe it was Halo 3? The one that focused heavily on matchmaking play (I played on Xbox if that makes a difference)

I used to play on a specific cod multi-player server back when cod was only a single title. Knew handles of people on the server even though I didn't socialize much (would say hi and the like but nothing much more than that).

My second year of college my roommate and I were chatting and found out we both frequented that server and knew each other by our handles.

Even though I didn't use the dedicated servers as a social mechanism, just hanging out and playing with/against each other for countless hours was enough to seed a lasting friendship when we did meet irl.

I follow the same arc. I grew up lugging network cables around to setup LAN parties for Warcraft and Command and Conquer. Then went to college and setup a Halflife server that our entire dorm got into. Even the non-gamers got into it creating their own characters (some of them naked... the characters not the players although you never know what's going on down the hall), and it was a source of bonding that I'll never forget.

Pretty soon after that World of Warcraft was introduced and games started getting more "massive" and I lost all interest in endless games with people I didn't know personally.

Almost 20 years later and when I'm able to sneak a game in, I only play single-player mode to follow the storyline.

> I've gone back to play Unreal Tournament 2004 this past year in such dedicated servers, and it made me realize how badly matchmaking ruined the sense of community in MP games.

I used to enjoy playing TF2 until 2013/14 or so. I settled into the No Heroes servers and after a while you get to know people. You pop on, see familiar names, say hello and you'd have a good time. It was like a small town which had a lot of other people passing through keeping things lively yet familiar.

Recently I tried to play TF2 again just for kicks. The community is dead. I played for maybe 30 min before exiting uninstalling and never looking back. Good job valve.

I still really like TF2 but you've got to stay away from the official servers. Community ones are still great e.g. https://uncletopia.com/servers, https://creators.tf/servers

In Valve's defense, not a ton of games make it past a decade with a healthy playerbase, right?

This is true, the game felt like it was waning in popularity around 2014. But I attribute that to the then new instant play and other UI changes which favored valves servers over community servers which were effectively on "page two". The communities dried up as a result.

Perhaps it isn't surprising that when interaction is designed to be disposable and replaceable, i.e. matchmaking, no real community can form.

This is what killed wow classic when dungeon signup was introduced

Successful, pleasant dungeon run? Added to friends.

This is rather bad news as an implication for Tinder.

Well, that's only true when you consider matchmaking for short interactions, which surely prevents community bonding. Longer interactions do not prevent bonding.

As for Tinder... I'm pretty sure you can find the equivalent of "dedicated servers" where to form a community, but I don't think that's what most people would want.

All dating sites have effectively two sets of users: people who use it until they get a long-term partner (A), and people who can use it forever because they are unlikely or unwilling to get a long-term partner (B). That is effectively intrinsic to the activity they are born to serve (dating). This said, there are enough people belonging to the B set to keep them in business pretty much forever.

There is also the option to provide ramps for people in A towards some other form of socialization (double dates? dinner parties?), but I don't think anyone really tried it yet.

There's also an influx of (A)s of course because it doesn't always work out :)

Even if it did work out, both (A)s and (B)s are constantly born and growing up.

Surely you meant UT99... ;-)

A sprawling list of servers to join. Ahhh the memories. headshots jumping off the upper area of deck16. Console gaming and auto joining servers like in CoD. Bleh. Zero sense of community. Before we all met on IRC quakenet in random clan channels.

Speaking of UT99... it's still getting patches https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches

> OldUnreal took over maintenance of the Unreal Tournament code base after reaching an agreement with Epic Games in 2019.

Thank you for the heads up!

Unreal Tournament is the best example I've seen of this too. I played on a server for a while before realizing a good chunk of the people were there just to socialize and the game was really secondary.

Ah, the earlier days of Counter Strike were my version of this. Custom maps galore created by the community, custom game modes. WarCraft mod was my favorite, building XP for abilities on the server - definitely had a good community as the skills for use in game were earned and contained on the individual server.

A shame this vibrant and creative element of the game was stamped out.

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