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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

Having admins is the best way of ensuring a good experience. Play on servers with the same people coming back so there is a community. Play on servers where there are admins. If your game doesn’t allow communities to form for multiplayer games then vote with your wallet. “Casual” gaming where anyone jumps into a game with 63 unknown randos is never going to be pleasant as it will need to rely on automatic measures and reports only.

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I rather miss this style.

Back in my younger days, I had admin privileges on a UT2k4 server. There was usually a nice group of regulars around. If I was playing and one of the regulars reported someone suspicious I could go into spectator mode, watch through their point-of-view to make sure, record it to a demo file for evidence, and then immediately ban them.

Beyond the community of regulars on our own server, we had good contacts with admins on other servers that catered to a similar gamestyle. We'd regularly exchange ban-lists with them. (I.e., there was kind of a meta community of server operators.)

I realize that that doesn't scale the same way as modern approaches, but the modern approaches also feel like they're trying to use technical means to solve a social problem.

Do any games that aren't Valve games even have this anymore?

I very rarely play multiplayer but don't indies still do this?

There are Minecraft servers like that.

I’ve been getting back into starcraft 1, and although there’s automatic matchmaking now there are still several old-style communities

Not sure I still play the ones that do (And there are still lots of active servers for them). Example: Battlefield 4 still has quite a lot of activity.

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