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Comment by Terr_ | Hacker News Reader

I feel this is incomplete because it omits some cases where the publisher is the "bad guy" and their interests oppose the community.

For example, the players may want to wants to mod the game-server with features, bug-fixes, or moderation-tools, while the publisher wants a strict lockdown to their artificial monopoly on "digital goods."

> Now remember that online gaming is an extremely low-trust environment.

Tied to the above point, I believe this trust was slightly-but-meaningfully higher when people could form their own servers/communities and be "regulars".

However publishers didn't like that arrangement, because it threatened their ability to sell cosmetics, collectibles, and sometimes outright gameplay advantages.

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Absolutely. This ties in to the whole Stop Killing Games saga, and my comment was long enough. Suffice it to say widespread push of cryptographically locked-down gaming clients and distros will not make that battle any easier for the little guy in the Linux world.

A more federated future for online gaming is theoretically possible, but seeing how much the Fediverse struggles with the adoption of alternatives to software that most people consider bare basics, I don't think it's the future that the arrow of entropy points to.

> For example, the players may want to wants to mod the game-server with features, bug-fixes, or moderation-tools, while the publisher wants a strict lockdown to their artificial monopoly on "digital goods."

Then the mod must be loaded & run on the server's end, with its logic enforced on all players on that server. The client shouldn't have free reign over the server's internal logic & state.

The one exception to this are visual mods that modify the presentation. But even then I'm skeptical, as modifying the presentation layer can affect the decisions that X makes, or even worse, give them an unfair advantage that other players should also have if X has them.

> When the mod must be loaded & run on the server's end

Yes, I know, I'm already talking about that scenario.

Even with well-behaved clients, publishers have moved away from allowing server-mods because the operator could just as easily mod-in "players can equip stuff without paying the publisher $50 for the privilege of skipping hundreds of hours of artificial grind."

Or, in other words, skipping on "their sense of pride and accomplishment." [0]

[0] https://massivelyop.com/2017/11/13/ea-claims-star-wars-battl...

Sorry, I don't see your point. There are plenty of mods that require modification of both the server and the client software, e.g. if new items or game modes are added and the client needs to be able to recognize them. As long as all players on a server agree on the acceptable configurations of both, I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to implement it for their own community.

Moreover, restricting mods to only the server side doesn't solve the trust issue: if you don't trust your players, your only option is still to try and enforce their local configuration somehow. The problem with big publishers trying to centralize this authority is their audience will always be too big to trust without enforcing compliance, and relying solely on behavour report and review system will not scale.

Even without any mods, there's a lot of trust required between the client and the server in pretty much any online game. The client has more information that it is allowed to show, and the server often trusts it reports the user's actions faithfully, because enforcing all of that on the server side would be prohibitively expensive performance-wise.

It looks like we are not talking about the same things. you are talking about a casual minecraft server where a group of user want to mod their experience and the person you are replying with is talking about CSGO or League of Legends where only one environnement is tolerated (the one created with the publisher) and custom experience are not tolerated because its virtually identical to a cheating attempt

yes monetizing a video game (or any piece of software) is almost always opposed to allowing the user to freely modify the software

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