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.
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.
This basically describes my experience with counter strike pre-1.6.... like 1.3 thru 1.5, circa 2002-2005. Lost thousands of hours of my youth negotiating knives-only rounds and doing stupid totem pole camping on de_dust while 1 guy on the other team tried to AWP everybody. Am I old?
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.
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...
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
That first bit is a pretty accurate description of a lot of early online gaming.
Nostalgia might be pushing a bit hard here. Even playing obsessively on relatively small games on a limited number of servers for hours every day, I never got to recognize people just by being there. Occasionally someone would friend you, but otherwise, you knew people for 4-5 rounds at a time, and then never saw them again. Internet, even back then, was a big place.
Well the post is 6 years old so it's actually referencingthe internet 21 years ago. This kind of thing did happen back then. I'm remembering Halo 1 pc servers and recognizing names.
Naaah. I made like 40 longtime steam friends because of playing on the same gmod server. Was lucky to find a server that had the most insane creators on it. You went onto any other server, they used what we made on that one. Drunk Combine, tanks, jets (including working VTOL), we had artillery that worked the same way it did in World of Tanks. 95% of the players there were insane at Expression 2 - which was a scripting / programming language that let you interact with the physics of the game in awesome ways.
I put the best 750hrs of my life into that server. It was called "Unsmart's" after the dude that hosted it. Closed down after a few years when the people moved onto other games. There was a shortlived revival, but it was more of a "reunion" than anything else. Still have everyone as friends and could probably get them together by pinging the group if I wanted to.
It was pretty regular for me. You find a server and usually the people hosting were usually always in there. Especially if it was a clan. That’s how I got into ever clan I ever joined.
You join a server and get to know the usuals and become friends. Still play with people I met back with the OG call of duty came out. We still play games together today. Never met half of em in real life.
"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.
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.
Yup. Matchmaking is very lonely.
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 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 :)
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.
Man I should boot up TF2 again
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.
:(
New Feature Idea: A New Subscription to bring back those features.
Stop paying? Well you lose access to your friend list.
CEO Be Like: 🤑
Private servers are good for building a community (I know, we all have fond memories, mine is SWJKA, especially in the later, JK+ times), but they fail to put players into skill brackets, meaning that if you enter the game later or don't spend your entire life playing it, you'll eventually fall off as pros will insta-kill you everywhere.
i was having lots of fun talking to people on call of duty until the game ended and it put in a completely new lobby. what the fuck happened?
Hmm, it's pretty much the same as 15 years ago if you stay away from the smallest common denominator popular AAA games.
I've started playing squad again after my last try in 2020. I just favourited a couple of low ping well populated servers and have been playing on the same three or four that are working well.
War of rights only has around 150 players in the evening on public servers and they all enter the same one as this game is meant to be played in large squads as well.
Both games are great fun.
I'd say Minecraft's multiplayer experience is close to what Anon describes as "good multiplayer", probably because it hasn't changed much in 15 years - there's not even an in game server browser (at least on the Java edition), and playing Minecraft in and of itself is usually a big time commitment so you're more encouraged to find a couple of servers you like and stick to them.
However, the last time that I feel like I integrated into a server's community was 4 years ago - a blank server list doesn't really encourage you to go looking for more, and it's been harder to commit time as I get older and have more responsibilities (that I ignore anyways, but still).
I think Lethal Company also has a lobby system without matchmaking, but I haven't played it so I don't really know.
I used to roleplay as a pirate, pickpocket, swindler, and ladies man; laughably incompetent at them all, under this username in a tiny, indie RPG called Rubies of Eventide. I was never a strong player, but I got a reputation for funny in-game banter. Playing a different kind of person enabled me to punch above my weight in social skills.
There are definitely games that allow the first scenario to happen(by allowing people to host servers or by not having many players)
COD 2 Rifle only 🫡
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