• Kaity@leminal.spaceEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    Game companies have definitely done their best to try and make multiplayer gaming more and more lonely. I settled in quick to single player cause at least I could have fun and not simultaneously be lonely and dominated by some hyper competitive toxic game matched tryharding BS. Me

      • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
        0·
        5 months ago

        Don’t be silly, if you want to get dominated by another random person in tf2 then you need to first buy bot immunity

        • ma1w4re@lemm.ee
          0·
          5 months ago

          What. Haven’t seen a single bot since a few of hosters were imprisoned and fined gigantic sums.

          • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
            0·
            5 months ago

            Lol I don’t follow the situation very closely, I’m just lamenting the state of modern gaming

          • asudox@discuss.tchncs.de
            0·
            5 months ago

            I haven’t seen any bots for 2 years now. I no longer play on casual servers. Community servers are more featureful and more fun.

            • PhatInferno@midwest.socialEnglish
              0·
              5 months ago

              Yes i have a community server that fits the top half of the green text,

              24/7 Quick spawn dustbowl(with teams that are balanced 😅) is p much the best fun i have when gaming

        • PhatInferno@midwest.socialEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          As other posters have mentioned, at least for about a year now the bot crisis is pretty much over :)

          Or at least its rare to find cheater/bots, i more often join dead lobbies over bot lobbies (which a quick reque fixes)

  • atmur@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    One of the last good public multiplayer experiences I had was DiRT 3. Simple lobbies, small player count, people randomly joining and leaving and everyone was chill. You’d occasionally get that guy who was stupidly good, perfect lines through every corner, and the entire lobby would try so hard to keep up. Loved it.

    One time I stumbled into a lobby where the host was “hacking” but instead of cheating for an advantage, he was selecting weird car class and track combinations for the entire lobby. Stuff that the game wouldn’t normally allow. Shit like trailblazer cars on rallycross circuits. So much fucking fun, one of my favorite memories from that game.

    That must’ve been what, 4, 5 years ago? DiRT 3 released in 2011, so…oh my god DiRT 3 came out 13 years ago…

  • GenitalHurricane@lemmy.world
    0·
    5 months ago

    This basically describes my experience with counter strike pre-1.6… like 1.3 thru 1.5, circa 2002-2005. Lost thousands of hours of my youth negotiating knives-only rounds and doing stupid totem pole camping on de_dust while 1 guy on the other team tried to AWP everybody. Am I old?

    • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
      0·
      5 months ago

      I am a bit younger so chicken & waffels and a few other CS:S servers were that for me. Also Day of Defeat Source was underrated.

      Also, the minigame servers… The mini games people came up with!

      1 person shooting cubes at platforms whole others had to stay up, The prison, Piratewars, Multigames (the original fall guys), Prop wars, The one where there were like different power ups behind walls and then have different abilities.

      But also battlefront 2 was like that for me. SMD clan with its almost mythical figurehead. Glitching servers, shooting the shit with other people trying to find new glitches. Those were the days.

      While matchmaking is good for some games like Rocket League, it has really broken a ton of communities. I think that’s why there aren’t really "clans’ anymore, because people aren’t together enough to organize.

    • Jesus_666@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 months ago

      I think Rainbow Six 3 might also qualify.

      Then again, nothing will ever compare to the Rocket Arena 3 scene where every kill was due to skill. You’re a complete noob who got a few lucky hits with the rocket launcher? Skill. The other guy jumps in front of you just as you happen to pull the trigger? Nice air rail, well played. I never saw anyone ever complain about losing.

      That community was just so refreshingly positive and welcoming, probably because there were no stakes. A match was over in maybe thirty seconds and then you’d watch until your next turn. And that was it.

      In modern competitive games people have a ranking and they feel stressed when a game goes badly because they might lose precious Elo. This goes to the point where you get yelled at by your own teammates for not knowing the meta because they can’t make it to the next rank if you pay like it’s a game.

    • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      5 months ago

      Counterstrike Source was later and still had these tight knit communities on the gun game and surf community servers. There wasn’t any matchmaking in the client either. And we voice chatted in game for the non-competitive modes.

    • Klear@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      I’ve been playing it VR lately. Feels like old times. There’s only a handful of players, of course (unless you play with flatscreen people which is possible, but too scary for me).

  • ArgentRaven@lemmy.world
    0·
    5 months ago

    Anecdotal, you still learn people and you can build a community reputation playing PvP in FFXIV. We don’t get to choose the map, and you’ll still see some people only once, but you get to know who’s who. The problem is, it’s not as fast as fortnite or other games. Which is a large turn off for many. But the slower (just barely slower) pace is more forgiving towards people that are middle aged and can’t compete with top tier fortnite/ League of Legends, etc types.

    • Rolder@reddthat.com
      0·
      5 months ago

      That’s more because few people seriously PvP in FFXIV, so you naturally end up randomly queued with the same people repeatedly.

  • GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml
    0·
    5 months ago

    So this was definitely not my experience in the pre-matchmaking era of online multiplayer. Possible case of rose-tinted glasses?

    I agree that matchmaking has problems, but going back to what was there before are unlikely to be a net positive I think

    • ECB@feddit.org
      0·
      5 months ago

      I don’t think it’s necessarily rose-tinted glasses, but rather not the experience that everyone had.

      I was never super social in servers, so I didn’t make random friends or anything. Even for me though, servers contributed to a better overall experience.

      Much less toxicity: assholes just get kicked or eventually find their fellow assholes on the ‘asshole server’ that you know to avoid.

      Much easier to have a chill/casual atmosphere: you can hop in and out, so nobody feels ‘trapped’ in an unfun game. Additionally, since you often jump into games that are in-progress, people tend to care less about winning or losing.

      Easier to play with friends of different skill levels: every server would be a mix of skills, so joining with a mixed-skill party doesn’t throw everything out of balance. Since people don’t care as much about winning/losing it’s much easier to fuck-around with your mates without anyone getting upset.

      Matchmaking on the other hand is more convenient, but in my opinion a net loss for most people.

      • HeroHelck@lemm.ee
        0·
        5 months ago

        so nobody feels ‘trapped’ in an unfun game.

        I think this is an understated problem. It’s simply awful to be in a slowly losing multiplayer game that you feel you have no control over, and when you also simultaneously feel that you aren’t playing with people you care about. It’s pretty easy to start not caring about monitoring your behavior. After all, who cares if everyone in this lobby thinks you’re annoying or awful to deal with, you will never see them again, and if you do they won’t recognize you, so act out your frustration without fear of real consequences. I also don’t think bans for “bad behavior” actually address the reason people behave this way, it just encourages them to hide it in more subtle ways that automated scripts can’t detect, or that give them some plausible deniability.

    • aski3252@lemmy.ml
      0·
      5 months ago

      Obviously both approaches had advantages and disadvantages, but OPs experience was definitely possible if you had the patience and luck to find a good community/server. But this also means there is a certain barrier because you have to do some work to find a good community/experience and can’t just click one button to start.

      And there are still modern games that have server browsers and they mostly tend to be less toxic imo, in part because people tend to know eachother a bit better and in part because servers generally have harsh rules, so toxic players often get kicked quickly.

      And this is also where the disadvantages come in because there are admins who just kick anyone they don’t like for whatever reason.

  • knatschus@discuss.tchncs.de
    0·
    5 months ago

    Well, atleast for the very top it’s still the same. The best 100 players of nearly every game do still know each other.

    However fuck what they’ve done to PUBG, fuck bots give map bans.

  • RinseDrizzle@midwest.socialEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    Anyone remember PlayStations All-stars, Sony’s shitty answer to Smash Bros? My lame claim to fame is I had one of the nastiest Heihachis in the scene. Always played in purple thong. Saw people mention me a few times in forums.

    Game was bad and hachi kinda busted, but seemingly only a few of us who ever got real nasty with it. Kinda fun just being a monster on that silly game and showing off maximum old man butt.

  • hector@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    5 months ago

    There’s this guy so damn good with the Kraber on Titanfall l 2 Northstar on my server I never was able to kill him …