Before I wasn't so sure but now I'm very sympathetic to the idea of playing only co-op games and PVE stuff and I completely understand now where you guys are coming from when you've decided to take that stance. I honestly think a big part of my change in attitude are the cheat whiners who now completely infest steam.
Some of these complaints may or may not be legitimate with Chinese hackers. However we've reached a new level of retard in the games industry generally where it seems normies are being driven out of games by autists who can play well and they're genuinely too stupid to know the difference between a hacker and somebody who is actually good at the game.
Take Battlebit Remastered as an example because that's a game I played to death when it came out and I sort of hop in the servers that are still active. I don't even necessarily think it's the bullshit chat moderation that has killed off the game's playerbase I think too many people potentially got scared away from all the negative review hack accusation spam that's going about the place and it's completely ridiculous. I maybe encountered one actual hacker in the wild and he ended up getting banned to the credit of the devs and this was on an official server. Recently had a game of battlebit and sure enough there was an actual retard accusing someone of hacking but he did get completely roasted by everybody in chat.
Do you remember when hack accusations were just for the lulz? These guys clearly mean it because they're that bad at the game. It's like a bunch of polygon journalists have taken over everything and they whine constantly about how many cheaters there are and want the game balance changed so they can have an advantage. Obvious smurfing on matchmaking style games is one thing but that's something you can identify properly and when you make these guys try and justify themselves they really are complete morons.
RIP Halo and CoD style lobbies, that's a thing of the past now that the normies have found gaming unless we all get community servers and private them big time.
In my thousands of hours of PvP gaming, I've maybe met like 2 or 3 actual hackers. It was always an overblown issue. I was reported by several players once because I did the impossible thing of doing, not 1, but 2 headshots in a raw. Yes, apparently, for some players, it's impossible to just do 2 good hits in a raw, it has to be hack. Luckily the admin realised it was bullshit and nothing happened. That was like 10 years ago, now it's probably much worse.
Personally, I'm more tired of everyone going "Please add full kernel-level anti-cheat in my games I can't stand cheaters", and they even want this in cooperative games (the reason why I didn't get Helldivers 2, I was waiting for that game for a long time, until they announced they are using a kernel-level anticheat).
With cheats now using AI, and built at hardware level, even kernel-level anti-cheats are completely powerless against that. My personal wish: Bring back community servers, bring back the feeling of actually playing together with online friends and not just random people with a matchmaker that you're never going to play against in your life, and with admins kicking out whoever stirs up drama for no reason (either because he cheated, or because he's complaining everyone is hacking).
Community servers would save PVP gaming for me. The community part was fun too. You start to recognize people. I remember a MoH:Allied Assault server I played on, there was a guy that would chill in a certain tower and snipe. Once you played there a lot you just knew he was there. He was quiet but would banter a bit if you managed to get up into his tower and kill him. All in fun. Players that whined too much or were just generally annoying were removed and banned. It didn't take anything more than "you aren't any fun to have around." After a while you'd recognize the different players, because everyone came back to the same servers.
I'd run a server or multiple servers today if there was a game that supported it I liked. I don't think it will come back unless the right indie game comes around to do it, with people that are really worried about gameplay stats along with the devs needing more money grabs, it's just not going to happen.
Yeah, I loved community servers. Even met some people in real life from that server. Was something like a 2 hour drive and we spend an evening drinking & grilling.
What could potentially happen is you have some kind of cloud based community server setup where you have standard multiplayer but private instances and some games already do that to a degree but you could potentially do more in terms of support.
You're right though in that too many people care about maintaining stats/rankings these days than playing the game. You have this setup and it's inevitably going to be filled with people whining about how shit it is community servers don't count towards matchmaking rank or some other bollocks then cue the mass negative reviews from these arseholes.
I hate it and it's become really noticeable lately so singleplayer only it is.
Once again, what are you on?
Do open a network book, cloud based community? Do you even get what that is?
He doesn't. He has Bluestorm level of IQ.
What I mean in English is having cloud based gaming like we usually do but slotting features that have it as a more decentralised experience. It's already been done to a certain degree but I would advocate having more private instances available for players and even modding support depending. It's something I've been pondering about when it comes to multiplayer generally.
Ideally I feel like you should be able to create your own master server if you want and host multiple games on there depending on the type of game it is. Yes, some people will create total echo chambers but that allows players to split off and form their own communities properly rather than be at the mercy of matchmaking. Hope that explains things a bit more of what I meant because I realised that seemed like gibberish initially.
Using cloud servers would potentially make it more affordable at the indie level and still accessible enough you don't need to know how to operate anything silly like your own server to do it. It's being done to a degree already, I feel like cloud servers generally are something that's underutilised in this sort of area.
Battlebit supports a server browser, but have you seen their terms of service: https://agreements.battlebit.cloud/GameServerTos.pdf
Everything must be whitelisted and you are required to moderate it for speech, cheating, etc. It's even more ridiculous if you want to run an "official" server. If they had a Linux server I might still make a server with the game set up to my liking and throw it up and see how long before they ban it--because I've barely played that game at all and I certainly wouldn't be moderating much of anything.
That game might survive if it allowed wide open anyone run a server at all with nothing more than just pinging an API to list it on the browser. I wouldn't care if there was a "cheating is allowed" server even.
Yep, and you must get approved which is done in batches, and so for can't find any setting to even point to another serverlist so that there can be unoffical ones.
I mean classic cs and the hl engine and their modded server, I was the glorious days in which we shall not see untill it all falls apart.
Community death is what happened to WoW with the introduction of LFG at the end of Wrath of the Lich King. Cataclysm adding LFR just cemented the issue.
Before either you were only ever going to interact with those on your server, so anyone who fucked around would soon find out a reputation of their actions would follow them about.
Be a twat in dungeons, you'd start getting blacklisted by various guilds.
Spam chat channels and harass others, you'd end up on a lot of ignore lists.
LFG however meant you could join 4 randoms you might never, ever see again no matter how long you all played so why bother being polite when the prisoner's dilemma was presented? While many issues have been addressed over the years there are still many present as there is only so much the devs can do to avoid the implemented fixes from then also being abused
The less said about Looking For Retards the better because even for something that is meant to be the ultimate easy mode in WoW there are still far too many that can and will fuck it up.
I almost got curious enough to get "new" WoW whatever it was at the time about a year ago just to see. I imagine it's a shell of it's former self. I quit right around the Crusader Arena Trial or whatever in Lich King, came back to kill the then nerfed LK, played into Cata a bit and quit for good. That 2006-2009 run though was the only time in my life I ever played just one game.
All their reasons for begging for all those features was just asshats wanting to be asshats freely with no recourse. It was never that hard for me to build rapport with people in top guilds and get to join in on things occasionally even though I was never going to be able to invest enough time to be anything more than a second-tier raider.
Community servers are the answer, especially old days where you could mod the servers and not the pseudo servers they try today in which you can host the servers but only through affiliated hosting company.
But modern gaming is all about breaking people down for greed and creed. And what we will find at the end is streaming of games and damn the plausibility of it.
Yep, game devs releasing server binaries the community can run themselves is the only answer. Just like the old days of Team Fortress Classic, Quake3, Tribes 2, Counterstrike 1.6, and Battlefield 1942.
Get good enough at any multiplayer game, and the hack accusations will flow. I saw it when I was regularly pulling #1 on the scoreboard in Team Fortress Classic.