- If you were too good on some server, you'd get banned.
- If the admin doesn't know well cheating, he could tolerate something that was obvious cheating.
- Cheaters could just change server often.
It used to be easy to just ban peoples yes, and it was as easy to switch servers.
Plus on most competitive game today, you have custom lobbies, which do exactly what you want, and there is a reason why only a minority of players uses it.
Custom lobbies don't meet the same need. That's for playing with your friends, or at least, people you vet yourself. Community servers are a sub-community in of themselves: people tend to play on the same servers on a regular basis, allowing you to build rapport, community norms, and have substantially more direct moderation than company-run servers.
Yes, sometimes you run into power-tripping moderators. That comes with the territory of having moderators. But the upsides, of being embedded in a usefully-sized community, and having nearly constant human moderation, not to mention the whole "stop killing games" of it all, far outweigh the need to shop around a bit for a good server.
I think the ideal middle ground is something like Squad's server system: The developers offer a contract to server owners, establishing basic standards that must be met to be a recommended server. Rules forbidding the crazy bigotry that milsims tend to attract, minimum server specs to ensure smooth gameplay, an effective appeals process. If a server meets those requirements, and signs the agreement to keep meeting those standards, they get put on a "recommended" server list (which 90%+ of the playerbase exclusively use). Other servers go on the "custom" server list, which can be modded, or spun up for certain events, or whatever.
two or three months ago, I played a game that did exactly what you proposed, V-Rising, it have a server browser, I played a week with friend on a busy server.
Then the server was gone for two weeks. When it was back, mosts of the bases were gone due to inactivity.
That's the kind of things that were common too, maybe you forgot about it.
All the multiplayer games I play today are either community server based, or I exclusively interact with private lobbies.
My negative experiences with community servers represent a pretty short list. Sometimes servers die, but games die sometimes, too. That's obviously only an issue with persistent-state games, like Minecraft, but it's unfortunate when it happens. Can't say it was so frequent that it impacted my enjoyment of any games as a whole.
All true, but of course you're missing the player agency component that renders those issues moot. If any of the above happens, you can simply find another server.
Private games (now called "custom lobbies") were available back then too, they're not equivalent to a public server browser.
They are functionally equivalent for the player.
The problem with player hosted servers is that it was very hard to get a fair and balanced competitive match, where now it's extremely common with matchmaking on servers hosted by the game company.
Back then at least you could do something about it. Now if there's an obvious cheater you just kinda sit there and take your L, and ask people to make reports.
If you were playing on a server you owned or for which you had ban permissions, you could do something about it. Otherwise, you had to hope that an admin was online to ban the cheater. If no one was around to take action, your option was to... sit there, take your L, and ask people to make reports (to the admins). You had the option to hop around between servers until you found one that didn't have cheaters, but is that all that different from just quitting back to matchmaking and hoping you find a match without cheaters?
Edit to add: I'm not disputing that kernel-level anticheat is bad; I agree that it is. I don't think it helps to try and hearken back to a golden age of PC gaming that didn't really exist. Maybe it was easier for server admins to manage because player populations were smaller back then, but that's about all that would have made things "better."
This is drudging up some formative memories. In the counter-strike / TF2 communities you'd have servers that would grant vote kick rights with more playtime and some of those regulars would then apply for mod rights. It worked quite well.
It still doesn't solve the unfair votekick problem. People with more play time, doesn't have necessarly the abilities nor tools to judge if someone is cheating.
Take a look at the trackmania community, some cheaters are caught years later, because they played it smart.
Some cheating can't only be observed by looking at the statistics, or hard proof of cheating being ran.
It's a pub. It doesn't matter as long as it's not obvious aim bots and people are having fun. Besides when it's a 32 player instant respawn death match server you have like 200-300 regulars. That type of cheating was never an issue in those because the servers were always full during peak times and everyone kinda knows each other.
They are not functionally equivalent, unless there are games I'm not familiar with where custom lobbies are published in a list for strangers to join. Normally a custom lobby implies invite only.
Not everyone is interested in a "fair and balanced competitive match" where you're guaranteed to win no more and no less than 50% of the time. I actually find that intolerably boring.
> They are not functionally equivalent, unless there are games I'm not familiar with where custom lobbies are published in a list for strangers to join.
Lots of the mosts played competitive games have that, or third party websites/discords that have links to custom lobbies.
> I have to conclude you're unfamiliar with what multiplayer gaming was like when servers were the norm.
Did you even played a single game competitively ? The fact you keep pushing for server browser tell me that no, you need communities on something else.
You likely forgot the hassle that server browser were, and forgot that lots of games didn't had a server browser.
LFG communities were important and excluding this shows you were only playing casually, forgot all the problems servers browser had.
Do you even remember, that you could get malware by joining servers in a server list ?!?
No, I used to play multiplayer games for fun, which was the norm until that option was removed and replaced with derisive "casual" and "competitive" modes.
99% of people who played CS1.x/tf/Q3A/bf1942/cod/etc booted up the game, found a server in the browser with low ping to play on, and if they liked it they favorited it. They came back the next day, and the next, and started to recognized other players. That is the server browser experience.
If you were in the tiny minority of players trying to be "competitive" back then, you're right I don't know what it looked like for you. Sounds like it sucked, honestly, and maybe competitive matchmaking solved some of those problems, but in the bargain we lost a lot of what made those games fun for "casuals" as you smugly call us.
> ...you needed to sink in a lot of time to get the few quality time you wrote about.
Sounds like you've got a skill issue. That doesn't match my experience, like, at all.
But a really, really easy shortcut was to find servers that indicated that they were furry-friendly. This all but guaranteed that
1) The folks on there would be fairly even-keeled and reasonable, and folks who weren't would be rapidly banned forever.
2) The folks on there would generally be good at the game. [0]
3) If you're lucky -and the game is one that permits custom "sprays" (as HL1 and Source engine did)- you might get to see some high-quality-but-thumbnail-sized furry porn.
[0] Seriously, at least back when both server browsers and user-hosted game servers were commonplace, I found a 1:1 correlation between "Are they a furry?" and "Are they particularly good at the game?". It was wild.
> The problem with player hosted servers is that it was very hard to get a fair and balanced competitive match
Playing against overwhelming odds has its own kind of charm. I once spend days just sabotaging the top players on some gun game servers, only wining myself once or twice. Games against friends with various fun handicaps and flat out abuse of any knowledge you could gain from playing against the same people repeatedly - what good is a hidding spot when everyone knows you will be there 50% of the time.
"Fair and balanced" games against completely random people are just missing something for me.
This is something matchmaking games totally miss which keeps them from being truly competitive in the way sports or old games were: a competitive community. You need other players with known identities to compare yourself against on a consistent basis.
Of course, classic competitive institutions had problems as well (“he’s very competitive” is not necessarily a nice description of a person!), but they seemed more enjoyable that this matchmaking stuff.
I did indeed play in the era LanceH is talking about, and I agree with them! We had many thriving communities with no serious cheating problems because of community moderation.
Yes, there were poorly moderated servers, but you could simply leave and try a different community until you found one that clicked for you. When you require equal moderation everywhere, you throw the baby out with the bath water.
Initially, until you found the right community run ones? I don't see the issue. Today is worse, especially when there is no server browser but just a blackbox that drops you in a random match.
- If you were too good on some server, you'd get banned.
- If the admin doesn't know well cheating, he could tolerate something that was obvious cheating.
- Cheaters could just change server often.
It used to be easy to just ban peoples yes, and it was as easy to switch servers.
Plus on most competitive game today, you have custom lobbies, which do exactly what you want, and there is a reason why only a minority of players uses it.