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 😁
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.
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.
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.
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.
When is “back then” for you?
I played counter-strike during the beta days and team fortress when it was “classic” not “2”
I definitely had a handful of favourite servers (1-2 favourites, 2-3 backups) that I would play on and knew the regulars like an old country pub.
Now things are set up so that it’s almost impossible to develop relationships with random folks online. Not just matchmaking but also more closed-off (hard to discover) groups on Discord etc…
CS1.6 and TFC was the golden age of online gaming and it’s been downhill since then. Literally nothing has been improved upon and the community has become immeasurably more toxic.
We’ve lost IRC and dedicated servers and replaced it with matchmaking and Discord. Both objectively worse.
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.
My dad (would be 71 if he were still alive) used to play an online flight simulator WW2 game back in the late 90s / 2000s until he passed in 2012. He made a bunch of online friends through that game who he’d have long phone convos with outside of the game. My mom had to call them up to let them know he passed. I think he might of met a couple in person over the years too.
I was never a gamer, although during covid I put an emulator on my Mac so I can play PS2 and N64 games. Last night for the first time in a long time I played THPS2 on my Mac. I’ve beat the game multiple times but it’s just fun to play. Never got into online gaming.
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.
Idk that was pretty frequent for me on TF2 community servers
I also actively remember seeing someone from the same “clan” as you in a random free for all or capture the flag game. Always a great feeling.
This absolutely happened to me in Battlefield 1942.
Yeah, the early BF games were where I found servers that were communities. We’d even host events like stunt flying or trick shot challenges where we’d throw a pssword on the server for a few hours so nobody could troll us.
Or for certain days of the week, we’d be running the Desert Combat mod. It was a different time in online gaming.
Another thing I miss from those days is friendly fire. I get why it had to be removed, but it allowed for big, overpowered thing like artillery strikes and naval bombardment that were as likely to wipe your own team as help without coordination.
Oh man. Desert Combat was incredible.
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.
Online gaming in 2004 indeed had much less people available overall. On the FPS front, it was mostly Counter Strike and Battlefield 1942 I guess.
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.
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.
This is happening to me now in squad.
Yes, I find this too. Especially if you play on the same servers.
Day of Defeat <3
Well, atleast for the very top it’s still the same. The best 100 players of nearly every game do still know each other.
However fuck what they’ve done to PUBG, fuck bots give map bans.
I had a very similar experience a few years ago with Tannenberg. And easter 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.
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.
Man, Jedi Outcast was when my noob ass would get relentlessly kicked on saber duels. Good times as I was taught some common online decency
I can’t say I share exactly this experience, but I did have some experiences of old that I miss.
The only non-MMO I ever played multiplayer prior to ~2013 was Age of Mythology. I never played ranked or competitive, but I did play a shit tonne of fun custom scenarios. Escape maps. Arenas. One really fun Helm’s Deep map that would always slow to a crawl once a larger number of units hit the field. I’d browse through the open lobbies and find something that struck my fancy, or create my own lobby and wait for people to join. Hours spent browsing the Age of Mythology Heaven forums for scenarios and reading people talk about them.
I do mind miss those custom scenarios. The new Age of Mythology: Retold feels much more focused on the ranked mode. Which I do also really enjoy. But there doesn’t seem the same culture of custom scenarios that there was back in the day.
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 :)
honestly for the amount of people on those servers, i’ve had surprisingly few bad experiences, everyone is always either roleplaying or just being ridiculous and it’s always a great time. 10/10 would recommend holdfast
It’s the same sort of spirit with Chivalry.
“HAVE AT THE”
halberd spins intensify
“ARRRRRRGGG”
Honestly it’s fantastic, hearing other people’s Voice Chat by default (you can mute people) results in amazing moments of both heroism and clownery.
Even when there’s that occasional shitwit taking advantage of unmoderated VC, I’ve noticed just calling them out and mocking them has a great chunk of the server join in on dunking on them.
Great game, great community, VC makes it fantastic.
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.
Lol I don’t follow the situation very closely, I’m just lamenting the state of modern gaming
