Now we get a company deciding it is not worth maintaining the infrastructure and an entire part of a game is gone forever.
Team Fortress matchmaking will match you to their official servers, and sometimes even on third party servers. TF also has a server browser where you can select which third or first party servers to join. You can also join directly via IP, if the matchmaking service ever goes offline.
As far as botting goes, it's still not fixed. There was an obvious aimbotter named 'Vinesauce' that went about for 2 weeks getting kicked out of every match (and sometimes rejoining). I can't fathom having this little moderation/development on a game that still must be making millions per year.
In my experience with Valve's servers in the eastern north american region, while the bots aren't completely gone, there are far fewer of them. Online discussion has indicated this isn't necessarily the case for non-NA regions.
I saw the vinesauce bots. It's my understanding that Valve bans any account kicked from an official server from rejoining that server for half an hour or so. Game harassers run small fleets of their bots. It's likely just another same-named bot joining rather than the same one rejoining, no?
The general population doesn't really "want" anything, they're satisfied with whatever they're fed and rarely think about it at all. Back in the server browser days you didn't hear constant complaints from people who wanted matchmaking instead, the switch to matchmaking happened because developers wanted to optimize engagement and increase their control over the game experience so they could monetize it more effectively, that's it.
Valve has always been community centered and it really shows in how all their development tools are pretty much available such as mapping tools, server tools etc.
With CSGO most of the matchmaking isn't even done in official servers, but with third party organizations like Faceit. If you want to be a professional CSGO player then you can't even rely on official servers. Nobody can go pro by playing official only when it comes to CSGO, you literally have to use third party services and their community servers.
And even worse, the ruddy thing doesn't even speak UPnP, so you have to do everything manually!
My personal favorite is Microsoft discouraging local Minecraft servers with the rational that anyone could type anything on them! Who knows what you and the people you explicitly allow on your server might type!
But your switch example is worse, I think.
I do understand where they're coming from, it's brand safety 101 - they don't want to risk the PR disaster from incompetent parents coming into their child's room and seeing n-bombs dropped into the Minecraft chat, leading to the parents shitstorming Microsoft for not moderating the chats when Microsoft for once isn't responsible for not moderating.
I think that legitimate fear is also why so many games removed self-hosting servers. I can remember from the UT2004 days that there were a lot of questionable things said in online chats... obviously sexism, but also lots and lots of racism and antisemitism.
Maybe, I’m misunderstanding the initial statement, but if this were case, why ban local servers and not public, internet accessible servers? I promise there’s a much higher chance of that hypothetical happening on those.
That's excusable though. The DS was released in 2004, with WEP being deprecated only in the same year [1] and most consumer routers / APs of the time not getting updates to WPA anyway.
I wonder what the fuck keeps Nintendo from operating their own STUN/TURN servers, at least for their own fucking games where I pay 35€ a year for their online service.
"Have you opened the right ports on your router? Okay, what kind of router do you have? Who provides your internet? Okay, go to http://192.168..."
Best of both worlds, community run, unique so communities would form around servers, and can't be obsoleted.
Downside is matchmaking isn't as good, but oh well.
I remember the first time someone built a dedicated server for WC3 custom games (dota) that supported players reconnecting after a dc. it was mindblowing
That is, perhaps something some can enjoy nostalgia for but ultimately not sustainable.
Oh, how the times have changed...
I would ssh in, start it up, login with the game, certify everything was working, then kill the ssh and be confused the game dropped.
The instructions mentioned screen but all it seemed to do was break the scroll buffer.
Eventually I learned. That was fun.
It doesn't get much easier to get quickly into a game with people ready to play than matchmaking usually. However, consistently playing with and against the same people is not as much a thing of course.
The upside of matchmaking hence is no scheduling and waiting, the downside is playing with whoever is online anywhere instead of a familiar group.
Or people that were too good.
Or people that weren't good enough.
Or people that were trying too hard.
Or people that didn't give up when they were the last one on the team alive, making the admin wait longer for the next round to start.
Or people they just plainly didn't like.
Some of the hosted server admins were the og "powerhungry moderators" of today. Many seemed to be okay though.
Still getting those vibes with some games like Hell Let Loose but it's a dying breed!
After a while, like everything else I moved on and didn't play for years. One day I decided to install TF2 for kicks and in its place was a different game. I played for maybe 15 minutes, lost interest and uninstalled the game. I wanted to see what happened to No Heroes and found that they had closed up shop a year prior. I was saddened and honestly very turned off to the game which is why it was uninstalled.
Its because of this loss of community that I have ZERO interest in modern multiplayer gaming. Now its all about ranking so its just an Ego/dopamine boosting machine. I just wanna play a game and have fun. I could care less about rankings, they mean nothing.
Whew, to me this was a strike against community servers. There was a period there where I couldn't join a single CS:Source game without a boatload of Simpsons sounds downloading preventing me from playing. I remember replacing the downloaded sounds with 0 byte files so I wouldn't need to hear them, but servers kept changing the paths so I'd have a bunch of redundant ones to clean up.
Thankfully in true Valve fashion they gave me an out, well after things had gone completely off the rails, with a command line (and later UI) option to block only sound downloads.
Oh well, you’ll never get to play with them again.
Killed all sense of community.
I know we recruited several people into a casual guild based on doing a few dungeons and getting on well with them. This was, ofc, before guild perks etc gamified that aspect in a shitty fashion.
Ofc you also got to learn people you never wanted to instance with again. Reputation mattered! As the Parent said, may as well be playing with NPCs.
I certainly don't have the time to spend on that sort of thing, so if it weren't for things like dungeon finder I wouldn't even play the game anymore. Same with other games, if there wasn't any matchmaking I probably just wouldn't play.
I'll take the shorter queue times thank you very much. Waiting for half a day for one battle was not acceptable.
When I was a teenager I remember playing on MapleStory private servers, and the backend was reverse engineered from the client. GTA private servers are also popular nowadays.
I don't really know where I'm going with this comment but you can always develop your own private server for a game if you have a team that's dedicated enough.
In many other games that have private servers: If there was no codebase leak, basically guessing what you can't know. That's why many private servers doesn't work 1:1 when compared to the official servers, people just tried to make the calculations as close as possible after reversing it.
MapleStory was also kind of an interesting case because the developers were careless enough to include debug symbols with their binaries on multiple occasions.
The client is typically just sending simple events (e.g., player moved left) to the server. The server collects events from all the connected clients to build a shared state, and pushes state updates to clients.
Edit: jpcrs makes a good point about this and their comment is worth reading.
Note that having the server do the calculation can solve some of the cheating problem, I remember a modified quake server that would not send location information if you could not see the player, which made wallhacks not work. I just got totally nerd sniped by the memory and while I can't find the demonstration video that impressed me so much at the time. I did find that it was darkplaces quake that added the option "sv_cullentities_trace" which prevents wallhacks.
www.icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/readme.html#ServerFeatures
By the end there was literally one CS server I trusted to be friendly and busy and not running "rpg-mod" or "zombie-mod" or a thousand other adjustments I didn't like, such as "no-awp", "price adjusted" etc.
Just finding a vanilla experience became difficult, doubly so if you wanted more than "dust/dust2 only".
Add in the fact that these servers could send your computer files (in theory just maps, sounds and decals, but difficult to secure of course), and you can see why companies shy away, not just to have greater control of the experience.
It's obvious why they stopped it eventually (pldecal.wad pretty much became obligatory porn sprays everywhere), but those were the days.
Dusty Dunes in Holland FTW :)
In retrospect it's hard to see how the game wasn't more plagued by cheats than it already was, but again it comes back to learning which servers were good servers and had active moderators who could ban people who were obviously cheating, and the less obvious probably just got away with it but were by definition less disruptive.
Of course, that also led to third party tools like PunkBuster in the end whose function then was later centralised with VAC.
GoldSrc games/mods were the golden age, and I will die on this hill. I preferred Natural Selection over CS, and it was just as moddable. It was the best. I was suited up in Mjolnir armor, wielding the pulse rifle from Aliens, blasting the soldier bugs from Starship Troopers.
Oh please. That's corporate apologia.
I mean, yeah, those concerns are real but 99.9% of the reasons they aren't doing it anymore is that having a monopoly over servers give them better control over monetization.
I honestly think it's kinda fucked up that this is legal. It shouldn't be.
Maybe the big developers wouldn't have incentive to develop billion-dollar cosmetic-powered games anymore, but someone would make it work financially.
You'd still have hugely popular multiplayer games, and maybe they would be somewhat less ambitious in scope and features (i.e. dev cost), but they would still be fun, and have strong communities built around them.
Maybe they sell DLC map packs (which would not have the "community fragmentation" problem from today's centralized matchmaking if private servers exist), or figure out other ways to generate incremental revenue.
Or maybe they don't, and just sell the base game, and are still successful because it's not a 5,000 person team and a nine-figure budget.
Today's games don't exist because of the business model, it's the other way around.
Tower defenses and AoS/Dota/ARPG/Mobas as examples of the above from 90s and early 2000s. Maybe “gliding” is a genre too from counterstrike now seen outside in games like trackmania, and probably Gary’s mod is it’s own genre too. Then only genres and modes which live within the original games since (though amazing and well done).
I really think Blizzard had an opportunity with StarCraft 2 to rewrite gaming history if it’s modding tools were up to par. Instead we got custom games less sophisticated than ones 20 years younger from it. I don’t think the modding community ever really recovered being left empty handed in that era. Maybe it’s recovered, modders were left without adequate tools for a while. Modders really did produce hundred million to billion dollar genres in the past, I’m not sure if that is still happening.
It's not 2012 anymore, 90% of players play casual where sv_pure is always enabled so you can't mod almost anything.
The original pre-matchmaking TF2 experience is dead. Modern casual is nothing like it and often feels indistinguishable from playing vs bots.
And (as with several other things being discussed in the comments) of course Valve has already done this, and offers it as a service: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/inventory
I suppose not — to the degree that the backend doesn't just act as message/traffic coordinator but also has game logic. (Although I can imagine an architecture where the back end indeed just manages message sending ... and one of those recipients is the host app that handles the game logic.)
Funny enough, there's a Google for Games github org that has some good open source projects for things like matchmaking, cloud saves, etc https://github.com/googleforgames
No skin off your back other than "cutting into sales of thatsamegame, butnextversion", which people are going to buy anyway.
Should it have been illegal for them to add characters to the game? It's not what I originally paid for. They took away the original Overwatch the second they rebalanced or added characters.
Sure, why not? Or at least illegal to forcefully change my game without giving me an option of not updating (at the cost of maybe not having anyone to play with). One could argue that I as the customer should be allowed to decide when to patch my game client and server.
There obviously needs to be consensus between players so some version is going to be more popular than others, probably the latest version, and the developer has an interest in keeping the game fresh so as to sell more copies (or lately, skins), so as a customer I'm driven towards the latest version, but I don't see why I should be forced to it.
I honestly don't see the problem you seem to see.
Like cool, you've now put the force of law into making them continue to manage old versions, versions that practically nobody plays on. By adding a single new character they've now changed the game, and if you didn't like that addition, it's an unplayable game even if you had the option to not update. This is fundamentally the same as Overwatch getting shut down (the old version becomes effectively unplayable).
If anything, they shouldn't be legally allowed to modify the game at all, because making a modification to it makes the original effectively unplayable because there'd be effectively no player base. Or maybe they should be allowed to make updates to their game platform...
If the release of Overwatch 2 was effectively taking Overwatch away from the people who paid for it, every update to the game was effectively taking away that edition of Overwatch from people. But people didn't care until the launcher got updated to say "Overwatch 2", suddenly now that's a travesty and Blizzard is somehow taking it away.
I got Overwatch on release day. I still can play Overwatch today. I don't get why one would say they took it away from people unless you agree every update to the game is taking the old game away from people.
Or rather, so that when they eventually do, a potentially still popular game isn't rendered unplayable since there are no official servers and no software for me to use to host my own.
It's more aptly fit to use CoD as an example to be honest, I just used Overwatch because I'd read some were unhappy how they just killed it and replaced it with "sort of but not really the same game".
Since I'm not in the Overwatch scene, can you answer something I'd been wondering? Did they migrate cosmetics from 1 to 2? Cosmetics seems to be the big cash cow these days so if the new one has similar characters, but they kill the old one off and don't let me bring my hard earned or bought cosmetics then I'd be pretty pissed personally.
Yes. Your whole account got migrated.
> I simply want there to be some accountability for mega corps so they can't just abandon games, release the new iteration for $60, and then kill the old version off.
Well then definitely don't point to Overwatch for that, because they released the new version for $0 and migrated everyone's equipment.
> It's more aptly fit to use CoD as an example to be honest
You mean the game where I can play multiplayer for games released well over a decade ago? I haven't heard of an instance where they shut down the old servers for that series yet at all. Other than that they'll be doing that for their free to play platform, but that's practically the same argument as Overwatch to Overwatch 2. You should be able to import accounts, it's no cost for the new version, etc.
EDIT: I guess some CoD versions ran on GameSpy which shut down a while ago. That was a third party system not made by the publisher though, dunno if you can really hold the publisher responsible for that third party service going offline.
Not thanks.
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...
Something like this can be compared to torrents, where the data is distributed, so as long as someone hosts the data it will be available.
I've not seen any web3 projects tout themselves as free data storage, perhaps you could point me to some so I can be better informed?
Well, of course, because the main reason for building blockchains is currently to make big bucks by selling the attached cryptocurrency. Also, storage isn't free, so fee data storage can't exist. That also isn't what I was describing.
There's no need for there to be payments involved in a blockchain, however. What blockchain does is provide a medium to store data that is signed by someone and can be read by others. It also allows this data to be stored in a distributed fashion on the devices of anyone who wants to store it, without there being a possibility that someone changes the data without anyone knowing.
The commenter I responded to wrote: > which was a barcode reader plus online DB. Until the company went bust, and the device magically transformed into a brick.
Hypothetically, if you were to use a blockchain to store the data, in stead of a centralized DB, anyone could run a copy of that blockchain and become a peer in the network. Users who still want to use the product after the company disappears can become a peers in the network to keep it running and prevent the device from becoming obsolete.
There have already been large organizations that experimented with blockchain in somewhat similar scenarios. They all run an instance of the blockchain and any data that has to be tracked between them is written to that blockchain. It's completely private to those companies, but nobody directly owns the data and there are no currency transactions involved in these blockchains.
I understand that there's confusion about this, because blockchain in the public eye means cryptocurrency. But cryptocurrency is just an implementation of the blockchain technology. And that technology works really well without any form of micro transaction involved.
On the more practicable side, I guess more automation for preserving stuff is also used. Making it a bit more comfortable to achieve those goals.
https://www.security.org/home-security-systems/z-wave-vs-zig...
That being said, I do have some 'cloud' IoT devices too, most of which were purchased because they were:
A) Cheap
B) Made by large companies
C) that weren't Google
This makes me _reasonably_ comfortable that the device and service will likely run for a while. I have some WeMo plugs that work great, and I also bought some second-hand Amazon plugs for $5/pp at a thrift store.
I want to get some z-wave light switches and scene controllers and make the actual light outlets smart, rather than putting the intelligence into the bulbs themselves. Unless you're going to be using the RGB abilities, putting the intelligence into the disposable part doesn't make a bunch of sense to me.
To arrange it all, I use Home Assistant, which I don't love, but it's just the best of the open source solutions available.
Take a look at projects such as Home Assistant, they enable a fully local experience.
It's just that gamers in the past have voted too weakly against the managed MP infrastructure in some subgenres and triple A moats... Don't know whether anyone is still protesting this or whether newer generations don't even know what's happened here.
Unfortunately a big chunk of unopinionated consumers will eat what they're served (FIFA, BF lol) and this encourages publishers to push P2W, gambling or fast iteration, which splits communities. And long-lived community-owned MP infrastructure is not particularly profitable either...
That said, a more major driver of not offering dedicated servers may simply be the lack of necessity because using cloud infrastructure is pretty sophisticated nowadays and controlling it yourself simplifies development and deployment.
Luckily the market is diverse, so overall I'm not too worried. I trust that organic discovery and good stewards keep MP gaming (and modded gaming) as I have known it alive.
Also, when the playerbase was declining, it felt harder to find servers that you enjoyed to play on.
Overall I felt it was a great experience. I hope more games take this approach in the future.
I hear you, but several of the games in this particular announcement seem like they're from that era:
* Unreal Gold
* Unreal II: The Awakening
* Unreal Tournament 2003
* Unreal Tournament 2004
* Unreal Tournament 3
* Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition
Since those directory servers were so simple, I think I seen cases where someone cloned them, then batched the binary to just to go a different address for the directory.
Not true, having to pick a server to join by yourself out of a list was an essential part of the classic online experience and the existence of any kind of matchmaking system harms it.
Team Fortress 2 is a prime example of this, originally it only had a server browser and the community felt most "alive" during this time. Then they added a basic matchmaking system that could place you on community servers, but only if they ran stock maps and settings, which heavily discouraged running any kind of modded or customized server, and significantly harmed any servers with a strong sense of community since you had random players, often fresh F2P installs that were barely distinguishable from bots, joining servers with no intention of ever playing on them more than once. Then they replaced that with the full official-only matchmaking we have today, which killed most of the remaining servers and associated communities.
No, you can't, because in any multiplayer game with microtransactions (which almost all multiplayer games released in recent years have), any servers controlled by the community would be in direct competition with the developers, which is why the option is rarely provided in the first place. If matchmaking exists, developers have an inherent motivation to lead players to it and away from any experience they don't fully control. So why would they even allow it?
ARK, Valheim, etc. If games come out and I have to rely on their server or rent one, it's a pass for me, especially if I can't play privately with my group of friends.
I've been using Battle.net though... for about 15 years, I'd only do LAN, or LAN over VPN (Hamachi), but the ease of use was, of course, much better on Battle.net.
yeah, lazy devs or they're just herding everyone to their own servers where they can mine data for more profits? Either way, looks like a prime business opportunity to test out a recent addition to DMCA exemptions to allow supporting "abandoned" servers. If the users are there and willing to pay.
~~You can only buy from DRM-free suppliers, like GOG.com.~~