15 years ago
(media.scored.co)
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I have said it for a very long time, but public servers/matchmaking have been the single worst thing to have ever happened to online gaming, and I will die on this hill. Lootboxes, MTX, even pay-to-win is all irrelevant compared to the damage that matchmaking has done to the social structure of online multiplayer gaming. And that isn't to say that those things haven't done a lot of damage, but they're nothing compared to the damage matchmaking has caused.
I was once murdered in Runescape by Alq, an infamous PK. Still my greatest achievement. I also saw Bluerose13x forge the best items in the game. I made a lifelong friend in Conquer Online and remember many people I played Guild Wars and vanilla WoW with.
Then matchmaking and realm phasing arrived and I never talked to anyone again, nor do I remember anyone.
EverQuest will always have a place in my heart, actually traveling to the entrance of dungeons (pretty dangerous journey itself), and hanging out until there was enough people to go in. Plenty of time to get to know people, make friends, work on casual skills like fishing, drinking, and racial languages. It would be some kind of hell for today's zero attention span ADHD kids.
Final Fantasy XI had a similar vibe for a long time. I think it's broken all of that now, but I haven't logged in for probably ten years at this point. There's something about a game in which even getting the party together was an ordeal that made the whole experience more fulfilling. You couldn't just solo your way through the game, you were forced to learn to interact with all the other persistent inhabitants of your server.
I still remember playing various Quake1 mods and I'm a little sad I lost contact with the players from my usual server.
yeah i still talk to people from my vanilla wow guild to this day. almost 20 years later.
The worst part is they design games around a shit ton of teamwork and coordination, and expect you to just develop those skills with a group of random people.
Which is funny because as the OP alludes to, by the very nature of persistent private servers you can play with a pool of players that is mostly the same and actually learn to develop your teamwork through continued play.
That is a REALLY controversial take if you ask people who play warcraft these days :
https://old.reddit.com/r/worldofpvp/comments/1gcpnpo/trying_to_do_m_after_playing_pvp_feels_like_im/
The game currently has manual matchmaking and automatic matchmaking. (for some dungeons vs for pvp) and holy shit is the manual matchmaking toxic - people use addons that can see your history and use it to gatekeep what you will be able to do. (if you haven’t done 500 +9s, you won’t get invited to a +10)
That thread is from a salty guy who only plays solo pvp. He is the exemplar of modern random gaming, and wants that for the last remaining place in wow where your name can earn a reputation.
WoW is a shitty game with shitty problems, but their mythic plus dungeon system was one of the few places where you could actually meet and interact with real people who you will see again like the old days.
WoW was always instanced trash, a shadow of older MMOs
Sounds like some kind of a cartel has developed in the bottlenecked player base for manual matchmaking
Wouldn't be the first
he's full of shit though. no one gives a shit about your spec in a +4.
yes, you won't be invited to a +10 if you haven't done +9s. Why? Cause there are 50 people applying to the +10 who have done +11/12. why not take those?
Nothing stops him from creating his own group and running his own key. Will take him 3-4 bricked keys at most before he gatekeeps people as well.
Two things. First, public servers have always been the default for MMOs, and by their nature it makes sense to have it. Only today did I learn about things like "realm shifting", and I find that even more cancerous. So there is some level of exemption that MMOs garner by their very nature.
Secondly, why would I care about people from "these days"? Most people "these days" are morons who either weren't playing back then, or they got used to the cancer and forgot how much better it used to be.
It's been like this for over a decade.
What do you mean, don't you like automated dungeon finder with zero communication?!
I don't think that's fair.
The point is that there was no social experience for anyone if you couldn't pre-arrange it ahead of time, sometimes in physical space, or by having someone smart enough to build a server.
LAN parties were fun, but they were an egregious amount of work and co-ordination.
Matchmaking allowed people to play games with others, rather than with no one at all.
All of what's in OP's post can still be done, but it still requires a level of co-ordination or time dedication that most people simply do not have.
Your typical modern "live service" game does not allow dedicated player servers or even local network multiplayer. If you can hack together a workaround at all it will likely be incomplete, glitchy and poorly accommodated by the game's other systems.
You can argue that the lack of those original options is the true evil rather than the matchmaking itself, but the two coincided and it's understandable why people will conflate the two. Saying they can still do things they just can't anymore isn't exactly going to help anyone unconflate them.
I accept that.
I don't think it's fair that you ignore pretty much the entirety of the 2000s where private servers were the default for gaming, with LAN parties being more a thing of the late 90s and early 2000s. Games like CS thrived on private servers, and the social ecosystem was fucking awesome because of it. It was a renaissance of gaming communities AND a thriving online modding community, with some mods actually becoming full blown games in and of themselves, like Killing Floor for example (and in tragic irony, the devs now don't support modding, but that's a different story).
Even now, private servers are still a thing, but they're a hollow shell of what they once were thanks to the insidious cancer of matchmaking and the mentality that helps promote.
You're thinking too far back, and forgetting that sweet spot that is more than still viable but is actively dis-incentivised by publishers and developers that seek that live service model.
I didn't ignore it, as much as I simply didn't experience it. What I'm relaying is effectively my own experience. Due to the difficulty of online gaming, I just typically played single player games until match-making actually became a real thing. Not with COD2, but with Halo CE.
But all games had public dedicated servers run by random people.
When you got a game you hopped around those until you found 3-4 servers where you liked the people. Then whenever you came online you checked your favourites if there were people playing / a spot open and joined them. No pre-arrangement necessary.
Public matchmaking was completely unnecessary for that.
I think as I said to AccountWasFree, I never experienced that period of online gaming. Only early "online" gaming, and then match-making. I think for a while I was purchasing older games which were cheaper, and in addition to not knowing anyone who played the game (let alone had a server), 3-4 servers is about all I would find running if I cared to go looking.
Couple all of this with in game communication filters and auto bans for saying the wrongthink, and you've basically destroyed the gaming sphere. And it's by Design. Gaming communities were one of the few places left for men to get together and socialize over a shared activity.
Now you get more globohomo.
and it's done nothing to stop cheaters.
It's honestly worse. Back in CS dedicated server days you almost always had an admin on the server or could contact an admin on irc if you were a regular. A cheater would be banned within 5min.
Now you have to play the whole match and hope the cheater gets banned after that. Not like you would ever be matched with him again.
I still remember guys I played games with 20 years ago and I couldn't tell you the name of a single person I played Space Marine 2 with yesterday.
Thank Infinity Ward, they started the matchmaking/lobby trend with Modern Warfare 2 circa 2009. It raised a minor uproar at the time, and I haven't bought a Modern Warfare title since them.
They were doing it before MW2 came out. Mw2 was a case of pushing console behaviors on PC players.
The last game where I really clicked with the entirety of a gaming group was MW1. I actually got recruited by a clan and played competitive with them.
I used to be a pretty prolific multiplayer gamer back in the days of server browsers. I met some good friends across many different games. Nowadays I pretty much only play single player games, with the exception of racing games, in which I don't talk to anyone. Matchmaking is the main culprit for this. It's so much more difficult to make friends in online games than it used to be, because you're only together with the same people for one game at a time.
Never knew my enjoyment of Team Fortress 2 would correlate with the best time of online gaming.
I sometimes go to a 64-player server to decompress. It's enjoyable chaos all around; including the global voice chat where people are trolling each other or just making ridiculous idle conversation that would probably result in a ban in most other games.
TF2 was still a good time, but the absolute peak time period was HL1 / WC3TFT era modded multiplayer.
just say counter strike and dota :p
Heh, yeah they were the titans back then.
But also I enjoyed the variety too. Day of Defeat, Natural selection, The Specialists. All the tower defence, kaiju/zombie survival and Risk evolution style maps for WC3. It was just great to have so many options, all built purely for fun instead of monetization.
It's control. The walled garden matchmaking allows them to prevent mods, and control the player experience - to the detriment of the players. If they allowed you to leave they couldn't own you.
Intentionally manipulating matchmaking to try to psychologically damage players into buying microtransactions was patented as a technique years ago, people found out about it during the original GG era.
They're lying about the second part and they know it. They don't believe that, that's the lie used to push matchmaking and pretend they're not vile for doing it.
This is roughly the approach FromSoftware used for Armored Core 6, though the private lobbies are hosted on Steam/Sony/Microsoft servers. Alongside the private lobbies is a ranked mode with random matchmaking. The result is a community much like a 90's/00's game, where you recognize people all the time and the best players have a reputation.
That hits hard.
Fucking this. The controlled environment where you have no freedom of association and no community echoes what the goblins have been doing to real life, and it's detrimental in exactly the same ways.
No teamspeak, no forums, no servers, only controlled faggot discords and random matchmaking designed to fuck with your head and make you buy things.
I miss the roleplay levels for the Specialists. Actually, I just miss the Specialists and wish it had a modern version.
Most fun I had playing with ''online friends'' was on Starcraft and T4C ( La Quatrième Prophétie ).
I still remember people from these days. The fact Starcraft had channels you could hang around in while not in a game was great for keeping in touch with online friends. With today's hypersensitive SJWs, that's a no. Retards would demand extensive moderation and bans.
The Use Map Settings scene of Starcraft was crazy good. You had several totally different games inside Starcraft.
RPGs, costum war games ( duh ), a dozen types of Tower Defense, DOTA, Puzzles/Party games, extremely varied survival games ( Starship Trooper ones were so good ), Cat and Mouse, Archon Tag, etc.
The Map Editor tortured to Hell and back to do things it wasen't supposed to be able to do.
There are still good games. But I just don't relate to players the same in modern games.
My TF2 days in a nutshell
Yup - everything is fake and gay so they can make their socialist utopian interactions
It was longer than 15 years ago for my old ass playing TFC but I was a beast at soldier.
> 2019
*20 years ago
Like the man said, the years start coming and they don't stop coming