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I miss server browsers. I remember (in the days before it completely turned to trash) when Black Ops 2 went to a lobby system, even on PC. It was the last CoD I ever bought. (I was gifted mw3 later, put like 4ish hours in and never went back)
Then around that time (I forget what year that was exactly, I wanna say about 2014) every other game started doing the same thing as that generation of console started to mature and really take off in the DLC world, and the land of MTX started to become an issue, choking innovation and value. Gone were the days of just buying a game and having it, and I’m came the era of splitting it up and charging for every little piece.
Personally, I’m completely against extra skins and cosmetics being sold at all, in any way, period.
Adding a huge chunk of a new campaign or new missions or something sure, but just buying different jpegs to slap over a gun model should be highly discouraged, if not outright illegalized. (insert obligatory “fuck capitalism”)
Anyway lemme get off my soap box. I forgot I still had that rage about how the industry went in that time period.
But yeah, official servers are fine, and even having a lobby thing is fine, but server browsers are how you build community in the games. Back then clans and guilds could rent (or own) their own dedicated servers that could set their own rules and such. You would find rules and maps and gametypes you liked and just hang out there, and organically get to know the other people that frequent that niche.
Now you just get randomized groups and (at least in my experience) rarely ever run into the same people more than once. I think this promotes anger and negativity, since (again, my experience) players rarely blame themselves ever, and if they have no emotional stake in treating the person at the other end of the connection, it turns into total blame game. Somebody will then leave in a huff (often in the middle of a game) and even the even tempered, relaxed players will get upset that “is happening again”. But if you (using the royal “you” here) know at least some of them, you tend to treat them as humans more often.
It’s just a better system overall.
I never felt like I formed a community on servers out of a server browser. I did get that years later on Discord. Matchmaking was always a far better experience, but the population will drop eventually, so you need the server browser.
If you only wanna play by default rules, then matchmaking is probably great for you.
Otherwise, hard disagree with that. I always like playing with community rules. Like, for instance, back on the first CoDs (1, UO, and 2) my favorite way was to play with only bolt action guns (got those not in the know, they mostly had small clips (5 shots (10 in 2 loaded clips on the British gun)), and each shot was fired singularly, and had to be manually rechambered, meaning there was a delay between shots as well. So it wasn’t just run in and hold down the trigger and hope everyone was dead before you gun stopped shooting kinda game (felt super lame), but actually required aim and accuracy.
That was never a default rule, and while I could still pick that gun on almost any server, the bullet spam (especially against players on the Russian team, og CoD players know exactly what I’m talking about) made it a voluntary nerf unless they were really bad.
So everyone playing with those guns was highly preferable IMO, and that couldn’t happen with matchmaking.
Or for a different example, while “gun game” is a fairly popular mod now (the one where everyone starts with the same gun, and when you get a kill you move on to a new gun, and have to complete a set list of kills first, and usually the last few weapons are harder to get a kill with, and getting a melee kill would set the victim back a weapon), but back during Counter Strike: Source’s era, it was fairly new (not sure where it actually started, but that was the first game I experienced it) and was only available on community servers.
Maybe you’re fine with the “default” experience, but even with a browser list, most servers run default (or very close to), but I like seeing what mods get traction and seeing if any of them are something I like.
But everything has a battle pass now, and lots of battle pass progress is tied to it.
I wanna go back to a world with zero overall progression and battle pass stuff. Hell, I don’t even want achievements. They can release skins, but should probably be just all free, it maaaaybe tied to playing and doing a version number of things that you would commonly do, maybe with a time window. But really, all DLC should be free extra content. Absolute zero cost to all DLC.
Games should not be put out with intent to continue profiting from MTX. There shouldn’t be any MTX.
I can rant all day, but zoomers will never know the peak of online gaming. It’s already history.
My experience was, 99 times out of 100, the default rules were the default for a reason and tended to be more fun, yes. Battlefield with maximum tickets was a slog. Counter-Strike with 20v20 is utter chaos. When they give you the ability to change the rules (which I’m totally in favor of!), the average person, and the servers you’re able to find, tend to be the ones with the numbers and sliders all set to max. You also end up with people coming and going mid-match, meaning the teams at the end of a round are rarely the ones you started with, and it makes me question what the point of that match was. Just my perspective.
Same, but that stuff tends to go hand in hand with live service, since they try to keep you hooked with extrinsic rewards. If the multiplayer game is released as a product that you own and isn’t expected to be a money printer with long-term additional content, there’s rarely a need for any kind of progression mechanic.
Nah, it’s worse in some genres than others, but you can still find good old-fashioned multiplayer without the nonsense. And this article is a sign of the hunger for it, so there will be more. Plus, those old games have a tendency to still work to this day.
I hate live service as well. The existence of it is kinda due to people that need keys jangling to post attention to anything.
Creating fomo should be cause to shut your company down. Period.
As for the first part of the reply, I’ve never played BF so I don’t really know exactly what tickets are. I know it has something to do with respawns, but given that they use a different word I assume there’s more to it. But for counter strike, I’ve never even seen a 40 player game.
But yeah, a lot of servers would run maxed out player slots and bad time limits and such, but good server browsers have filters to pare down to settings you wanna see play.
Or what I usually do is just sort by lowest ping and just go down til I find one that I think looks good. For a fps, anything above double digit ping is almost unplayable. Anything above above 70 or so is already annoying af, but much higher than that and it just gets worse.
Sorting by ping does cut down a lot of choices tho. Once you consistently can’t find any games you want with an acceptable ping, the game is basically dead for you. Or you start dealing with worse pings until you can’t enjoy the game any more. Keeping the game playable is great, but it only matters as long as there are games available. But even with “dead” games, they can be resurrected any time there’s a community push. That’s rare tho, but for preservation reasons, I like the idea that a game is only ever as dead as the desire to play it.
Tickets in Battlefield are respawns, but the team with more capture points causes the opposing team to “bleed” tickets, and it’s faster when the difference in capture points is greater. 500 ticket servers take forever for a game to end.