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.

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.

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.

Today’s generations are gonna have more and more of them to look at now, so these lil Gen A’ers are just gonna be able to relive their entire life just about.

Back when I crawled out into the world (80s) pictures were a lot more work than “point phone, tap glass”. You had to carry an entire, dedicated (aka “extra” compared to your regular everyday stuff), device around, point that and hope it came out the way it looked like it did, because you wouldn’t have a clue until you got it developed, which you had to pay to have done (unless you had a special room in your house where you could pay for additional equipment to do it yourself), and then see it.

Growing up in the 90s the process hadn’t changed, and as it finally started to get somewhere in the aughts, but still needed a separate device even if you could see it immediately (or relatively immediately- those images still usually took a while to generate for a while).

All to say that photos went from just not being possible (for some types, like random selfies out funny things you see around you), to being usually only worth the effort for events (family portraits, birthday parties, vacations), to bring fairly easy but still annoying to have to carry around with you, then up to now where we can document entire days with almost zero effort at any given moment.

Babies these days are being photographed constantly, and being seen by their entire extended families within hours of existing, and having entire moments video’d all through their life.

Which just brings up how terrifying AI and capitalism is. There is almost no evidence made or preserved of a lot of my existence prior to the aughts, but now kids can just go “man, this scab on my knee is annoying af- how long has it been there now?” and have a decent chance of looking up the exact moment that happened.

But for us oldies, we get glimpses of moments or eras (like old hairstyles) and being so startled by that forgotten relic, instead of seeing the entire continuity of their hair evolution journey.

Millennials can see this evolution happen through our lifespan, a bridge between boomers and zoomers, and I always get reminded of it when you’ve like this come up.

Depends on how much time I have to think about it. At least back to 04, but probably earlier. I have at least one life to save, one to ruin a little earlier, and money to make, and to tell myself Jesus is total bullshit way earlier than I figured it out the first time. But 04 is when I have to save the life, so definitely at least that far. Probably would like earlier for the other stuff tho.

But it would be hard to make money before that (by predictive means) because being 18 makes having a bank account a lot simpler.

Obligatory “bofa deez nuts”