Private servers were so much better than matchmaking in my opinion, there was a sense of community to the game and you would make friends. Now playing with randoms (all of them in their own private discord parties) feels like playing with NPCs.
"Have you opened the right ports on your router? Okay, what kind of router do you have? Who provides your internet? Okay, go to http://192.168..."
Best of both worlds, community run, unique so communities would form around servers, and can't be obsoleted.
Downside is matchmaking isn't as good, but oh well.
I remember the first time someone built a dedicated server for WC3 custom games (dota) that supported players reconnecting after a dc. it was mindblowing
That is, perhaps something some can enjoy nostalgia for but ultimately not sustainable.
Oh, how the times have changed...
I would ssh in, start it up, login with the game, certify everything was working, then kill the ssh and be confused the game dropped.
The instructions mentioned screen but all it seemed to do was break the scroll buffer.
Eventually I learned. That was fun.
And even worse, the ruddy thing doesn't even speak UPnP, so you have to do everything manually!
My personal favorite is Microsoft discouraging local Minecraft servers with the rational that anyone could type anything on them! Who knows what you and the people you explicitly allow on your server might type!
But your switch example is worse, I think.
I do understand where they're coming from, it's brand safety 101 - they don't want to risk the PR disaster from incompetent parents coming into their child's room and seeing n-bombs dropped into the Minecraft chat, leading to the parents shitstorming Microsoft for not moderating the chats when Microsoft for once isn't responsible for not moderating.
I think that legitimate fear is also why so many games removed self-hosting servers. I can remember from the UT2004 days that there were a lot of questionable things said in online chats... obviously sexism, but also lots and lots of racism and antisemitism.
Maybe, I’m misunderstanding the initial statement, but if this were case, why ban local servers and not public, internet accessible servers? I promise there’s a much higher chance of that hypothetical happening on those.
That's excusable though. The DS was released in 2004, with WEP being deprecated only in the same year [1] and most consumer routers / APs of the time not getting updates to WPA anyway.
I wonder what the fuck keeps Nintendo from operating their own STUN/TURN servers, at least for their own fucking games where I pay 35€ a year for their online service.
After a while, like everything else I moved on and didn't play for years. One day I decided to install TF2 for kicks and in its place was a different game. I played for maybe 15 minutes, lost interest and uninstalled the game. I wanted to see what happened to No Heroes and found that they had closed up shop a year prior. I was saddened and honestly very turned off to the game which is why it was uninstalled.
Its because of this loss of community that I have ZERO interest in modern multiplayer gaming. Now its all about ranking so its just an Ego/dopamine boosting machine. I just wanna play a game and have fun. I could care less about rankings, they mean nothing.
Whew, to me this was a strike against community servers. There was a period there where I couldn't join a single CS:Source game without a boatload of Simpsons sounds downloading preventing me from playing. I remember replacing the downloaded sounds with 0 byte files so I wouldn't need to hear them, but servers kept changing the paths so I'd have a bunch of redundant ones to clean up.
Thankfully in true Valve fashion they gave me an out, well after things had gone completely off the rails, with a command line (and later UI) option to block only sound downloads.
When I was a teenager I remember playing on MapleStory private servers, and the backend was reverse engineered from the client. GTA private servers are also popular nowadays.
I don't really know where I'm going with this comment but you can always develop your own private server for a game if you have a team that's dedicated enough.
In many other games that have private servers: If there was no codebase leak, basically guessing what you can't know. That's why many private servers doesn't work 1:1 when compared to the official servers, people just tried to make the calculations as close as possible after reversing it.
MapleStory was also kind of an interesting case because the developers were careless enough to include debug symbols with their binaries on multiple occasions.
The client is typically just sending simple events (e.g., player moved left) to the server. The server collects events from all the connected clients to build a shared state, and pushes state updates to clients.
Edit: jpcrs makes a good point about this and their comment is worth reading.
Note that having the server do the calculation can solve some of the cheating problem, I remember a modified quake server that would not send location information if you could not see the player, which made wallhacks not work. I just got totally nerd sniped by the memory and while I can't find the demonstration video that impressed me so much at the time. I did find that it was darkplaces quake that added the option "sv_cullentities_trace" which prevents wallhacks.
www.icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/readme.html#ServerFeatures
Team Fortress matchmaking will match you to their official servers, and sometimes even on third party servers. TF also has a server browser where you can select which third or first party servers to join. You can also join directly via IP, if the matchmaking service ever goes offline.
As far as botting goes, it's still not fixed. There was an obvious aimbotter named 'Vinesauce' that went about for 2 weeks getting kicked out of every match (and sometimes rejoining). I can't fathom having this little moderation/development on a game that still must be making millions per year.
In my experience with Valve's servers in the eastern north american region, while the bots aren't completely gone, there are far fewer of them. Online discussion has indicated this isn't necessarily the case for non-NA regions.
I saw the vinesauce bots. It's my understanding that Valve bans any account kicked from an official server from rejoining that server for half an hour or so. Game harassers run small fleets of their bots. It's likely just another same-named bot joining rather than the same one rejoining, no?
The general population doesn't really "want" anything, they're satisfied with whatever they're fed and rarely think about it at all. Back in the server browser days you didn't hear constant complaints from people who wanted matchmaking instead, the switch to matchmaking happened because developers wanted to optimize engagement and increase their control over the game experience so they could monetize it more effectively, that's it.
Valve has always been community centered and it really shows in how all their development tools are pretty much available such as mapping tools, server tools etc.
With CSGO most of the matchmaking isn't even done in official servers, but with third party organizations like Faceit. If you want to be a professional CSGO player then you can't even rely on official servers. Nobody can go pro by playing official only when it comes to CSGO, you literally have to use third party services and their community servers.
Still getting those vibes with some games like Hell Let Loose but it's a dying breed!
Or people that were too good.
Or people that weren't good enough.
Or people that were trying too hard.
Or people that didn't give up when they were the last one on the team alive, making the admin wait longer for the next round to start.
Or people they just plainly didn't like.
Some of the hosted server admins were the og "powerhungry moderators" of today. Many seemed to be okay though.
It doesn't get much easier to get quickly into a game with people ready to play than matchmaking usually. However, consistently playing with and against the same people is not as much a thing of course.
The upside of matchmaking hence is no scheduling and waiting, the downside is playing with whoever is online anywhere instead of a familiar group.
Oh well, you’ll never get to play with them again.
Killed all sense of community.
I know we recruited several people into a casual guild based on doing a few dungeons and getting on well with them. This was, ofc, before guild perks etc gamified that aspect in a shitty fashion.
Ofc you also got to learn people you never wanted to instance with again. Reputation mattered! As the Parent said, may as well be playing with NPCs.
I certainly don't have the time to spend on that sort of thing, so if it weren't for things like dungeon finder I wouldn't even play the game anymore. Same with other games, if there wasn't any matchmaking I probably just wouldn't play.
I'll take the shorter queue times thank you very much. Waiting for half a day for one battle was not acceptable.