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.
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.