Game companies have definitely done their best to try and make multiplayer gaming more and more lonely. I settled in quick to single player cause at least I could have fun and not simultaneously be lonely and dominated by some hyper competitive toxic game matched tryharding BS.
Team fortress 2
Don’t be silly, if you want to get dominated by another random person in tf2 then you need to first buy bot immunity
What. Haven’t seen a single bot since a few of hosters were imprisoned and fined gigantic sums.
I haven’t seen any bots for 2 years now. I no longer play on casual servers. Community servers are more featureful and more fun.
Yes i have a community server that fits the top half of the green text,
24/7 Quick spawn dustbowl(with teams that are balanced 😅) is p much the best fun i have when gaming
Lol I don’t follow the situation very closely, I’m just lamenting the state of modern gaming
As other posters have mentioned, at least for about a year now the bot crisis is pretty much over :)
Or at least its rare to find cheater/bots, i more often join dead lobbies over bot lobbies (which a quick reque fixes)
Pretty solid. Explains why i stopped liking online-games which i was so damn passionate about 20yrs ago.
Beside being unable to compete with the youngsters 😁
For me other than the lack of time it’s the toxicity, if you have say one hour to play, do you really want to listen to some no-life cunt who has been playing all day screaming at you because they are tilted as fuck and need to blame everyone else but themselves? Well I certainly don’t need that shit in my life.
Honestly there second someone starts talking during a game I just go and mute them. 99.9% of the time it’s really annoying. Once in a while you get someone who actually knows what they’re doing and talking about, isn’t a dick, and actually gives good advice or help. But that happens so rarely it’s not worth it
Adding a bit of an anecdote, I’m not good at games but when someone (be it friend or foe) is leagues worse than me I give them advice
For example I’ve been getting back into planetside and this level 7 was trying to kill me as an infantry unit with a rocket launcher (anti tank weapon, can’t one shot infantry) so even with my crappy aim I dispatch him without so much as a nick to my shields. So I send him a direct message that the rocket launcher is for tanks and he should use his LMG for infantry battle
Basically help your newbies
How is Planetside in 2024? I never was really good at it, but I liked the coordination or when a full platoon was assembled and dropped on a hot spot.
I’ve been playing for about a few days since I stopped playing about a year ago and it’s decent
I have a few alright fights and some good ones, standard planetside stuff. If you ever wanna hit me up here’s my abomination of a name and flop is spelled with a zero not an O if your on Connery (us west)
Thanks for the info. I will save that comment and hit you up if I decide to start again.
Oh right… I totally forgot about the toxicity. That also was very different “back then”. Even though we weren’t much less anonymous. Being decent and honourable just meant something.
We even played in a league with one player who sucked major ass and brought us down. But she had so much fun and that’s what counted. Noone cared. Winning was great, but having fun and having a fair competition was greater.
I don’t listen to any cunts in online games, voice chat is off. For some reason the kids these days think you can’t play a game without a headset and mic on. I don’t even own one of those dumbass headsets. I can still be competitive in FPS games without any of that too.
Removed by mod
I remember playing TacOps back in the day. Some Sundays were literally just me team speaking with the guys (and some girls) while sipping a beer and casually playing our doing team practice. I learned a lot about the different international cultures before I set my own feet out of the country.
You can still still be competitive, you just have to be a bit clever about it.
I recently started playing mobile shooters… in an Android emulator with a mouse and keyboard. Destroying touchscreen kiddos with a proper input device never gets boring.
Some games are even smart enough to detect the mouse and keyboard and only match you with other players using external input devices, like CoD Mobile. That’s one of my favorites because it’s basically CoD: Greatest Hits. All the best maps from the old games are there. And new modes come out every week. It’s so much better than modern CoD; takes me back to the days of playing CoD4 and MWII on the Xbox 360 when I was a teenager.
You know it’s not really competition when you give yourself a massive advantage, right?
You know that you’re a grownup cheating to beat children, right?
You know that’s sadder than playing a fair game and losing, right?
Right?
You know that what I’m doing is not only allowed by the CoD Mobile developers, but they even made an official emulator for this very purpose? Google “Gameloop”.
Regardless, I play games to have fun; so knock it off with the guilt tripping. The players know that I’m using a mouse and keyboard. They don’t know how old I am because in-game mic usage is rare these days. I’m playing within the rules. Not my fault that they’re using the touchscreen or plugged in a controller instead of a mouse.
If it bothers you so much, then just stick to ranked and you’ll only get matched with other mouse and keyboard players. But again, I don’t give a fuck because I’m having fun again, just like I used to when I was young. Mobile gaming in an emulator rekindled my interest in gaming overall.
Gonna have to disagree on this. Input parity is a big issue for multiplayer games.
Look at Apex, roller players complain about m&k being able to do certain movement tech, m&k players complain about the ridiculous aim assist on roller. People sometimes cheat by using the roller to have aim assist, while using macros to achieve certain movement tech.
Touchscreen vs m&k isnt even close to roller vs m&k. It’s really only fun for the person who has that advantage at that point. You essentially make it so that you get to have fun while everyone else doesn’t. Sure, it might allowed by the devs, doesn’t make it any less fun to play against.
To your point on ranked, not everyone wants to play that. Sometimes they just want to turn on their phone for a quick match.
Controller has gotten a lot better. I have friends on console that come play on PC with their controllers and destroy every lobby. There are people who play in FPs tournaments with controllers. With gyro aiming you can do anything a mouse player can do.
I don’t even want to be competitive, but stat tracking forces the issue. When you found a regular hangout place for a some team based game, you didn’t need to worry about tracking every kill. You could just be helpful to your team in ways that K/D ratios can’t track like throwing yourself at the opposite team when they’re chasing your team member who has the flag for instance. Just not being a ragging asshole could get you a positive reputation.
Oh yes. We never gave a rats ass about k/d. Defending a flag numerous times and ending up with 5/100 was a big win. Oh man i really miss those times. Except the dialup and crt and that shit…
Winning this way wouldn’t give me something. It’s like fighting unarmed babies in full gear No judging here. As long as it’s allowed.
Being accused of being a cheater (while ypu aren’t) or people dropping the server when you show up, that’s fun 😁
Great, the loss of community now extends to video games as well
Removed by mod
You ate being isolated so no one will miss you when the government/corporations/they/whoever get you
we have successfully urbanized online games. the days of a small town feeling in new online games are over
I don’t think urbanised is a good word to describe that alienation. The urbanism movement has as one of its key goals the creation of more vibrant local communities. It’s more like suburbanism.
what i meant by “urbanized” is that these days, playing online games feels like living in a big city where there are a ton of people but it’s hard to feel like you know everyone. you can still make a group of friends and find “local communities”, but i think that’s distinctly different from the feeling of a small town where you know a lot of the people there.
all that being said, there are advantages to living in a big city instead of a small town. in this context, that would look like faster matchmaking times, making it easier to find a full server, etc. but i still wish games gave you the option of picking a community server. i miss having the option of joining custom servers and getting to know the locals.
IMO games should support picking a community server if only for archival purposes once the official servers are taken offline.
The urbanism movement exists to help remedy some of the downsides of urban living. One of which is social alienation and isolation as a result of the scale and diversity of cities.
No, it exists to fix the problems caused by car-dependent suburbia. Inner cities can have problems too, but a lot of those are created by cities wanting to support suburban commuters rather than the local community.
Suburbia came into being as a result of urban dysfunction. Cities have existed and had problems since long before cars were invented. People nowadays really love to blame everything on cars lmao, if only it were that simple
Cities were literally demolished to run highways through them, cutting right through vibrant communities to do so. Auto companies lobbied governments and ran public relations campaigns to change the law and societal mores to make car-centric infrastructure and norms the only way things are done. Ripping up public transport, inventing the concept of “jaywalking” (itself just a form of car-centric victim blaming), and banning the building of more people-friendly communities through strict Euclidean zoning.
Lmao started reading not loving yr usage of urbanized (still probs not the best term…), however you really are outlining much of what was so classist, and very much racist, about city development. I wouldnt justify the guy you’re replying to with a reply
Did you forget to respond to my point? Are you suggesting that cities were happy, egalitarian communes prior to the invention of the automobile? Slums and tenement housing would seem to indicate otherwise.
Highways were constructed because it provided an economic advantage to do so. A city without car infrastructure is not economically viable. With more advanced transportation and communication technology, we will eventually supercede the automobile, but to delude yourself into thinking that it was an arbitrary development is silly. There are many negative externalities caused by automobiles, just as there are many negative externalities caused by electricity. That doesn’t negate the advantages.
But regardless, the social dynamics of cities predate such problems; even if we reverted to a pre-car culture cities would still be lonely, violent places for some. They would still be the engines of inequality and hierarchy, because they are the hubs of the economic system.
Did you forget to respond to my point?
You seem to be having your own entire argument completely divorced from what I said to start this off. Which is very simple: that city living is not at all at odds with strong communities, and that the biggest thing that hurts local community feeling is car-dependent infrastructure. Because people driving kilometres away to big megastores where they load their groceries into a car and drive home, and have their leisure time at home in large private yards, with few of the local stores, cafes, parks, and other community spaces where people might randomly meet others in their local community, is what causes the alienation the parent comment seemed to be alluding to.
For years I had thought I got old and don’t have friends who play games as much anymore but this meme made me realize it’s that I wasn’t making new gaming friends.
One of the last good public multiplayer experiences I had was DiRT 3. Simple lobbies, small player count, people randomly joining and leaving and everyone was chill. You’d occasionally get that guy who was stupidly good, perfect lines through every corner, and the entire lobby would try so hard to keep up. Loved it.
One time I stumbled into a lobby where the host was “hacking” but instead of cheating for an advantage, he was selecting weird car class and track combinations for the entire lobby. Stuff that the game wouldn’t normally allow. Shit like trailblazer cars on rallycross circuits. So much fucking fun, one of my favorite memories from that game.
That must’ve been what, 4, 5 years ago? DiRT 3 released in 2011, so…oh my god DiRT 3 came out 13 years ago…
deleted by creator
nice observation by anon.
i miss making friends in games and couldnt quite put my finger on why matchmaking was much worse and unfun than old multiplayer and this is it.
They’ve abstracted away the social element. It takes so much work now to make a friend. After a game ends there’s perhaps a summary screen or lobby, so you can add another player to your friends list, but you have no way of discussing that with them. Anytime I get a friend request, I think, who is this? Why are they friending me
Half the time a friend request comes just so someone can continue to flame you after the match is over
I see you play League of Legends
I wish this behavior was limited to a single playerbase. I haven’t played league in a million years and this still happens sometimes
Can’t we all just get along? We’re here to play games darn it
flame
Oh, is that still a thing people say? Been a long time since I remember seeing it.
Well sure, old people do
i tried just adding random people and once some japanese guy accepted and would play with me for a few days and speak words i did not understand
One of the cool things about lobbies in VR is fist bumping to make friends, it’s a beautiful mechanic
…what game is that
Population One, and a few others I think
That first bit is a pretty accurate description of a lot of early online gaming.
I knew most of the experienced bards on my EQ server in '03. Half the reason I bothered to develop my character was to try and keep up with them. Now pretty much the only thing that’ll keep me playing online multiplayer is casino gamification, so I don’t start.
long live (classic) EQ :)
Definitely describes my early Team Fortress Classic/TF2 time back in college. I’m actually still steam friends with folks from that time and I definitely still rock my “clan tag”! Sort of lame if kids don’t have a chance at the same thing…
kids are missing out on a lot simply because the number of PCs in private households has shrunk by ca. 90% - consoles just don’t give the same gaming experience / definitely not the sense of immersion.
That’s a huge bummer - didn’t realize the numbers were that high.
Having a PC in my house in the 90s with games led me to learn about computers… to play better games. Which has absolutely contributed to my having a successful career.
Glad I’m putting together a Linux box for my oldest to wreck/play with!
That was a big pull of WoW. You type “lfg” once in all chat and that could send you on a 20 year relationship with a guild with people who end up becoming your best friends.
yup, sounds like my experience playing Unreal 2:XMP back in the day
I’m playing a mobile game that’s pretty much exactly like that first part.
“but my community used to be made out of 12 people!”
Well too bad. That’s why you’re here on Lemmy now. You dislike strangers and love familiarity. I on the other hand love strangers and chaos. That’s why I was on Reddit.
I mean, we can have both. Community servers and official matchmaking servers.
But for the sake of money, community servers are gone.
Enshittification is very real, but also, some games just aren’t feasible as community servers. Lol?
Removed by mod
That’s because humans are trash. Trolls will do anything to destroy an actual conversation.
As someone leveling in anniversary wow through Barrens right now. It earned its reputation and a self fulfilling one, people shit in chat there all day just to try and one up each other.
Edit: leaving “shit” it fits in this case…
How can you question if you are laughing out loud? What does it even mean?
Leagues of legends is a game.
I, too, read it as such.
Which aren’t? League could be fun of there weren’t a ladder and competition being the only thing people care about. You could do fun things like Aram but like, all sonas or shacos. Something wacky. Oops all fiddlesticks. Any shooter is going to work for community shooters, mods and CS proved that… Shit even MMOs have private servers with tweaked rules .
There are some. For example extraction shooters kinda lose a core aspect of its genre because the player interactions are built on the idea that you don’t know who the other groups in the server are. Are they hostile? Are they friendly? Will they stab me in the back or help me out? How many are in a group? Technically it would be possible to set up community servers (if you had access to the server software) but if your community plays on the same server you kinda lose that uncertainty of who you’re going to meet, because you know the people you’re playing with.
Another one IMO that benefit from matchmaking are 1v1 games. Chess or fighting games or anything of the sorts. Community servers would be moot because you can only have 2 people in a match. You could probably build a tournament style community server but it wouldn’t add much value. I think matchmaking makes much more sense there.
There might be more but I think that list will be relatively short and in general most games would probably benefit more from having community servers.
My point is mobas aren’t really that feasible with community servers, are they?
There’s still a bunch of customs. Most are private.
I really don’t understand what one sees bad with a central server, because the function those community servers served is now served by discord servers, basically, to which you can go to find gaming company at the drop of a hat. But there’s not the same limitation of “oh we’re not on the same server”, except for ofc zones which still exist, America, Europe, Asia, etc.
Oh “even mmos”? Those have existed since I can remember. And I started online in about 2003.
Why’d you’d want a private server for League for example?
This is everything I meant to convey with my “lol?” but I realised it wouldn’t be conveyed and still did it because I was too lazy to write this
Why wouldn’t it be? You can already make custom games with pretty much anyone.
Yeah, custom lobbies on a central server. Which is what I think is superior to community servers.
And I don’t think so, like many other people expressed in this thread.
The biggest advantage of self-hosting is that the game will be forever playable even if the company that makes the game goes belly up.
Yup. Matchmaking is very lonely.
Quake ]I[ was the last real multiplayer game.
Fite me.
Counterstrike Source was later and still had these tight knit communities on the gun game and surf community servers. There wasn’t any matchmaking in the client either. And we voice chatted in game for the non-competitive modes.
Surf servers were the best, especially with actual rounds and weapons. Pure surf got boring, bit cs mechanics in a surf world was pretty fun.
I think Rainbow Six 3 might also qualify.
Then again, nothing will ever compare to the Rocket Arena 3 scene where every kill was due to skill. You’re a complete noob who got a few lucky hits with the rocket launcher? Skill. The other guy jumps in front of you just as you happen to pull the trigger? Nice air rail, well played. I never saw anyone ever complain about losing.
That community was just so refreshingly positive and welcoming, probably because there were no stakes. A match was over in maybe thirty seconds and then you’d watch until your next turn. And that was it.
In modern competitive games people have a ranking and they feel stressed when a game goes badly because they might lose precious Elo. This goes to the point where you get yelled at by your own teammates for not knowing the meta because they can’t make it to the next rank if you pay like it’s a game.
Cpm mids for days
I’ve been playing it VR lately. Feels like old times. There’s only a handful of players, of course (unless you play with flatscreen people which is possible, but too scary for me).
I HIGHLY recommend Holdfast: Nations At War for the same experience nowadays. There’s usually 1-2 full 150 player servers running in the browser, and you start to recognize the slaughterers and shitters over time.
It’s a Napoleonic era musket shooting game with locational open VC that gives bonuses for teamwork and line-firing. Recently I’ve been talking mad shit in a ridiculous accent matching whatever faction I’m playing at the time, and people are now recognizing my name, which is kinda warming :)
Cannot upvote this enough. That nostalgia OP is on about is alive and well in holdfast.
The last bit is what killed world of Warcraft for me. When it changed from a world with the same people in it everytime, to automated group finders combining every possible world anyone could be in.
Not only will you never see those people again, for a while it was literally impossible to talk to them or friend them.
When they put out classic wow again, they updated it to have all these “new quality of life” features.
Thank god for private servers.
There’s some rose-tinted goblin welding goggles there.
Pugs for 5-mans used to be a huge pain in the ass. Especially for lower-level dungeons or for DPS classes (and especially the boomkins, the fury warriors, and the ret pallys).
Remember spamming city chat, LFG BFD?
And if you were a warlock, you were expected to run all the way there (remember not getting mounts until 40?), and wait for two other people, so you could summon the last two?
I haven’t really played much since TBC, or at all since LK. LFG was a huge improvement. It had flaws, for sure…it did break the community a bit, as you said…but it made the game playable for people who didn’t have hours to commit to getting ready for a 5 man dungeon.
As a solo player in the early wow era, lfg was a massive pain in my backside. I literally couldn’t progress without completing certain dungeons, and I couldn’t complete those dungeons unless I grouped up. So I was painfully and perpetually stuck in a never ending loop of LFG.
It’s the reason I left.
If you don’t have a group to play with, or preferred to play solo, utilizing pick up groups when necessary, the game became an unplayable mess halfway through the level progressions.
They’ve “fixed” most of this now, but I have a hard time caring about the game now. I went back to it for a short while a few years ago, and while it’s easier to nab a group for progression, the onslaught of go-fer quests numbed my brain to any lore that was being spouted by the quest givers, and it became a grind fest.
No sorry, just action.
ESPECIALLY when things like the DPS Priest build was the best for leveling but the HEALING Priest is the one everyone needed for dungeons.
Oh as a shadow priest in TBC you hit me right in the feels.
Shadow was so great for levelling but shit for healing. And holy was great for healing but shit for solo play.
Towards the end of TBC I was doing disc and having a blast as a squishy healer in PvP.
To be fair thats sort of the point of RPGs, people fill different roles but not all roles.
Yeah…wish they would’ve come out with dual specs earlier. Would’ve made leveling my priest much more fun…a holy priest was a slow and boring process in solo PvE but a shadow priest was boring in dungeons. And I liked doing both.
I think the punishment for changing specs was just unbalanced. In vanilla it was an absurd amount of gold. We had funds for our healers and tanks, and many of them just played alts outside of raids.
Something about the difficulty of it all I think breeds companionship. Whatever we have now is pretty broken.
Yeah I don’t miss the days of trying to get a group to do Scarlet Monestary then running the gauntlet of griefing assholes.
SM was the worst for it.
And there were so many quests.
And there was so much lore inside.
But if you were an alliance player on a PvP realm you were guaranteed to get ganked waiting for the rest of your party to show.
Everybody has different experiences. For me the game was okay but it was secondary to the friends that I met and played with. That shitty LFG experience pushed people to make and join guilds.
There’s definitely a way works both ways.
Yup and if you were on a low pop server or mature one with not many leveling. Forget doing dungeons at all.
DF and RF have their issues but it wasn’t all fun before.
As a feral who needed random blues, I spent days trying to get groups for less popular dungeons, just to have the item not drop or get ninja’d
WoW FEELS super fragmented right now.
I mean, when they finally gave in and released Classic I had no idea they would release 10 different versions of it. But that’s mostly a different topic.
The shattered world of the main game is the big problem, cities and raids and events that exist only conditionally, like Undercity and Ny’Alotha with the attatched invasion.
Being able to meet and talk with players you can’t trade with or craft for, whether they’re Horde while you’re Alliance, or they’re from an unconnected server to yours. When you tell the latter they can send you a personal crafting order for the sword they keep asking for in Trade Chat, they can’t.
And as a Blacksmith/Miner main, I get to experience the shattered state of instanced zoning more regularly, every time I fly out to get ore, with several ore deposits simply disappearing as I approach them or start mining them. I see them from the other side of a fracture in the world. When I cross over, the illusion fades away.
I haven’t logged on to WoW in a few years, but it’s really interesting to hear what’s become of instance handling. I was on the fence about it in '03-'04, when the discussion was about whether or not instanced dungeons (Lost Dungeons of Norrath for EQ) were a good idea long-term. At the time the discussion sounded a lot the discussions about fast travel. Or maps, for that matter.
Use to play alot on a CS:Source minigame server, such good times. Was exactly like this, where you’d recognize players and make friends. I’m glad i was able to live this.
I had a very similar experience a few years ago with Tannenberg. An eastern front WW1 shooter that, at least at the time, I don’t know the current status, had just enough players in the evening to fill up one server, so I’d play with the same people night after night. It never felt empty because of that and it was great fun.
Isonzo is the newer one. I haven’t played it in a few months, but it’s similarly small but I never felt close to anyone there.
I play Squad fairly frequently, and it’s got a similar feel to what the OP is about. You choose your server with a server browser, and it’s frequently got a lot of the same people there all the time. There’s some servers that are more casual, and they end up cycling players more so you don’t recognize anyone. The more experienced focused servers draw from a much smaller group though, and they play more consistently.
What is the skill curve for Squad? Is it easy to get into and be useful? Or there is a period where you are just cannon fodder?
Very easy to get into I’d say. Just listen to your squad leader, and don’t start a squad until you know what you’re doing.
