15 years ago
(media.scored.co)
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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.