Unfortunately we gave up our right to own software when we let companies own the servers. Back in the day you could get banned from a server and go find somewhere else to play. Now you'll get banned for life, and in some cases, even banned from the single player mode. Sorry, no refunds!
There's a reason pirate crews are hailed as heroes...and it's not the free software. Games legitimately work better when they are cracked almost 100% of the time.
Having community hosted servers with their own moderation was just so much better. Sure, the moderation level would vary from server to server, sometimes with immature admins giving out bans for no reasons, but you would ultimately find your way to servers that match you the best. And often, people would become regulars, finding the same players on the same servers, that was the best aspect of online gaming, finding a community.
Games stopping to provide self-hosted servers is also what made LAN parties increasingly difficult. Having to rent game servers, provide decent bandwidth and not being able to run third party tools (for recording scores or set modifiers) made it impossible to use modern games in a 50 people LAN party with a low budget.
I really can't blame them entirely. Perhaps you could blame companies for not using a hybrid model where players can host privately plus maintaining their public servers.
Why? Because in a similar vein to how social media needs to be moderated to prevent the bad apples from spoiling the bunch, games now need to be moderated to maintain reputation among the community. If a player hearing about CSGO for the first time has no idea what they're getting into finds only a public server running 24/7 CS_OFFICE with Warcraft Mods they might get a bad impression of what the game is. Having consistency in user experience is highly important, and public servers being maintained and moderated by the developer is probably the most important part of that. What about all those servers that have massive latency issues? That's a bad look on the game because most players won't recognize community run servers are the reason the game behaves buggy.
Do I dislike it? Yes. I think it has created irreparable harm to the ability for gaming communities to build organically but so long as central hubs like Reddit or Discord continue to pop up I figure they've just offloaded the community aspect to external sources. Is that better? I'm not sure. Partially yes. Losing contact with a friend because they stopped logging into your preferred server isn't really a thing if you're Discord friends or Steam friends.
As long as there's a clear UI separation, there's no harm in providing both first and third party servers for brand perception & user experience. A similar issue is content provenance. In StarCraft II, for example, official maps and custom maps live in separate tabs. No one expects a Dragon Ball-themed map to be made with the same standard as an official Blizzard map.
I suspect it's simply to control monetization and without the extra engineering cost of private server releases.
And, tbh, wtf does it matter if I wanted to "cheat" in single player mode? Oh no - it would be unfair to some AI NPCs? At one point "cheating" in single player mode was called modding -- and it drove communities and made software publishers money by keeping games fresher longer.
I agree. What I find unfortunate is that most single player games are now designed to be incredibly grindy: the developers want player retention so there’s more buzz about the game, resulting in more purchases.
I’m in my mid thirties, and I have career ambitions and hobbies and relationships that I want to nurture. While I would love something I can play and enjoy for 15-30 minutes every other day, I don’t have time for something that takes 5+ hours just to feel the slightest amount of reward. Cheats can take a game that’s designed to be grindy and addictive and instead make it something that can be enjoyed in smaller chunks.
An excellent example of this is Breath of the Wild. BotW requires a ton of slow terrain traversal (at least until you’ve unlocked more fast travel points, and even then the walking/gliding takes quite a while). Playing the game with a mod to enable 5x movement speed makes it a game that I can actually enjoy playing for 15 minutes at a time. Also, it takes something like 45-60 seconds for the game to reload when you die, so temporarily having an invincibility cheat on makes it feasible for me to figure out an enemy’s move set, whereas without I would either have to cheese the enemies or give up on the game entirely: what I’m not going to do is sit down with a hard cap of 15 minutes, die fifteen times, getting a total play time of maybe a minute of actual game play plus 14 minutes or so of loading screen, and then come back the next couple nights to do same thing over again.
A touch of cheats make modern games actually playable to someone who has a busy schedule, but still wants something to decompress with.
I vehemently disagree - single player games are generally far less grindy than they used to be (with significant exceptions such as Genshin Impact). Basically all single player games now have a story and a rather linear path through it, and tend to carefully design their progression such that completing that main story itself is enough to be able to take on the next steps in it, with at most a small amount of side-content. Even difficulty and saving options are usually tuned such that it is very rarely necessary to re-do the same content, you will almost always be able to finish it in the first try, or 2-3 at most.
A good example is in comparing the newer Final Fantasy games with the older ones. In the older ones, it was 100% required to occasionally run around the map and just fight random encounters to level up and be able to face the next bit of the story. The newer ones eschew this completely, and some don't even have random encounters for most of the time. Save points were also placed such that you would often have to redo an entire gauntlet of fights if you failed once, which is a thing of the past as well.
Also, your example of BotW is not an example of what is normally called grinding. The exploration, the terrain traversal, is, to most people I've seen praise it, the core appeal of BotW, not some repetitive grind the games makes you go through to enjoy the good bits.
On the other hand, I'm not trying to say "you're playing the game wrong". I fully agree that we all have a right to "cheat" in single-player (or LAN) games to make them fit our preferences, regardless of the designer's intentions or the preferences of other gamers.
Yeah. And it becomes silly the other way around as well. Take the WadjetEye adventures. People complain that the games are just 4 - 8 hours long. But on the flip side, it's 4 - 8 hours filled with charm, content and gameplay. It doesn't contain 30 minute dry stretches every once in a while. And for 10 - 20 euros, it's entirely fairly priced.
And the games tend to be structured by acts, so it's easy to play it for half an hour to an hour until an act is completed. Then it can sit for a day or two and then you continue through the next act.
Many roguelikes feel like they have a similar time structure in mind. Sigil of the Magi, Slay the Spire, Peglin and such have an hour run time generally and that's it. Game sizes like Witcher 3 have grown kind of disheartening to me, as much as I want to like it.
Breath of the Wild has probably in part been designed the way it was because Nintendo knew you could take your switch with you during travel; 15mn seems like a difficult goal to achieve for an exploration-focused game.
That said, I agree that anyone should be able to modify a local (that is, local coop/multiplayer or singleplayer) game's behavior to suit their needs.
Some metric on the steam marketplace used to put games on the front page include concurrent users and hours played. I've seen people actively coordinating their customer base to boost concurrent users. It's madness that games are falling in the advertisement trap and even indie need to play the ball to survive
I was with you and imagining you were talking about Ubisoft-style games (the last of which I played in 2014, but apparently they've been reskinning the same game since!). But Breath of the Wild's appeal to me is precisely the exploration! Why would you want to skip that x)
You can save anywhere, so you can make sessions as short as you'd like anyway. There aren't even classic Zelda dungeons anymore! Just 5-10min challenges in the form of a shrine.
Claiming that you can’t get to places quickly in breath of the wild before you’ve unlocked the warp towers implies to me you’re complaining that you can’t zip through new areas that you’ve never even explored before.
In a world where content is locked behind actual repetitive grinds of the same content for numbers to go up, this strikes me as a preposterous example.
I also can’t think of any game that asks for 5+ hours for any payoff for anything tbh.
> I also can’t think of any game that asks for 5+ hours for any payoff for anything tbh.
MMOs are usually an example of this, where there is rarely any true fun to be had in the opening hours (where either gameplay is extremely slow, many people are zipping through power-levelling, etc.). They're hardly an example of a modern game though.
Well, the argument with Diablo 3 was that the game had an in-game auction house on launch, where you could sell in-game items for real money. So the game had to be fully online to make sure items are only generated when really earned. Of course the auction house disappeared and the requirement to always be online didn't(having said that, the console versions of diablo 3 don't require being online - but from what I understand significant portion of the game was rewritten to allow the game to work online, on consoles, and with a gamepad)
> Unfortunately we gave up our right to own software when we let companies own the servers.
Some games managed to balance this quite well despite no self-hosted servers, for example BF4 which allows community managed "rented" servers.
But one thing to note though is that nearly all of them will very quickly adopt global blacklists with cheaters. So for a community BF server you'd hook your server to a global anti cheat database, and any bans from the server would end up on the global cheater blacklist. While the choice of using a global blacklist was of course up to the administrators, it wouldn't be very easy to find a server that didn't use this type of system if you happened to be blacklisted.
So the community will invent exactly the same kind global bans that the game studio has. I never saw a problem with that (likely because I wasn't a false positive).
Generally speaking, if you are a suspected cheater, I can see why you would be barred from online-play.
There's always going to be false-positives though. How often that happens and what means of recourse one has (or should have) is IMO another discussion. And in this particular case, it seems Activision is doing pretty much all the wrong things(tm) though.
> even banned from the single player mode.
The fact that an account (and a server) is required to play a game you've bought in single-player mode is on another level outragious.
That itself should be illegal.
> Sorry, no refunds!
Again. Clearly this needs to be illegal.
If you take away a product you've allowed someone to "buy", then you've broken your end of the bargain.
> If you take away a product you've allowed someone to "buy", then you've broken your end of the bargain.
Obviously doing it for no valid reason is a breach of contract, but I'm sure the legalese is pretty thick. No one "buys" anything obviously and the license agreement will clearly say you forfeit your license if you cheat. And here I'm pretty sure the legalese would say "Whether or not you actually cheated is up to us to decide so we define it as when our tools say you did".
So basically: you have a license, and that license is valid until their tools say it isn't.
Now, will such a license agreement hold up if tested legally? Maybe not. But it's likely what I clicked "Accept" on.
Lol we were lucky we had the ability to host our own servers back in the day. The IP owners have always had to full right and power to do whatever they want to extract as much profit as possible. We have never had any power over what they do.
Keep in mind that there wasn't flexible infrastructure on demand in those days. User run servers was sort of a low cost market based demand scaler for IP owners. If the game is really a dud, they didn't buy N servers and M bandwidth. If it's a hit, they can add an official hosted distinction if it makes sense.
Stop buying the games. It's really that simple. I can't understand the people who say "well, I'll try this game out but I hope they fix it next time". That's not how business works.
Like we just stopped buying toys with lead paint? Or just stopped buying cars that voided warranty if you used an independent mechanic? Or just stopped patronizing businesses that have a willfully unsafe working environment?
There's a tested solution to these issues, and it's not "act as isolated consumers".
Or like we stopped buying huge phones to encourage the manufacturers to produce smaller models, right. Voting with your wallet doesn't work when everything on the market is equally bad.
I lament this as well. I wish I could get something shaped like an iPhone 4 again.
While I was initially excited about the release of the iPhone mini, I ended up not buying one because I had bad experiences in the past using apps that were clearly never tested on the smaller screen sizes, and I couldn't trust that it wouldn't happen again.
Add to that the fact that I can't stand iOS. I currently use a Pixel 4a because that was literally the smallest Android phone money could buy at the time, and one that still had a headphone jack.
Toys with lead paint is a sad example since we did ban lead paint in toys, then Mattel was caught selling Chinese toys with lead paint and then a law was passed to requiring 3rd party inspections to prevent lead paint which created a burden for small toy sellers. And then Mattel was made exempt from having to test (could use their own in house testing) even though they were the whole reason the law was created.
Or to ensure that consumers get at least a refund when denied the goods they paid for. Or you can insist on the most uncharitable interpretation of my comment, sure.
It’s true people should just stop. I like the idea that people who like content will stick with it as it gets worse and worse, but once they go over the cliff of being done with it, they never come back. It takes time though.
Only a handful of games in the history of gaming have had open source / openly available multiplayer servers. Nobody is playing multiplayer games if users vote with their wallets like you want them to.
And the reason for this is because multiplayer games are hard to maintain and without a profit motive it becomes long-term unviable.
I used to play a lot of a game called BZFlag, which was fully open-source etc, but it always struggled to keep up with any amount of advancement in the gaming world because it was entirely built by volunteers with limited time on their hands.
Well, for some time, the biggest titles in the industry had openly available multiplayer servers (Quake, UT, basically everything on QuakeSpy/GameSpy). I ran a Quake 3 server on my VPS for years on end (I forgot it was even running at one point) for a grand total of $15/year. Effectively zero maintenance and it was set up during a single afternoon of config. Friends and I played on it and it just.. worked...
Eventually "players actually getting to do what they want with the software they paid for" somehow became a thing of the past, though I don't really know why. I mean, I can think of reasons, but most of those reasons suck.
> Eventually "players actually getting to do what they want with the software they paid for" somehow became a thing of the past, though I don't really know why.
- Making servers that are somewhat resilient to getting hacked is difficult enough if you control the servers and the code and no one can see it, but publicly available server binaries? There are more than enough eyeballs from cheaters, griefers and other abusers to discover exploits.
- If you offer server binaries to people and people get hacked by cheaters, griefers and other abusers as a result, they may hold you liable for damages
- Giving away server binaries also means giving away leverage and income. With UT99-2003-2004-3, everyone can simply set up servers and you as a publisher have no way of forcing people to pay up (or to take down central servers so that people are forced to buy the successor game).
- Giving away servers also means you give away a significant amount of brand control. Parents won't care that pedophiles or Nazis can target their children because some random server admin doesn't give a shit about moderating, they will associate it with your brand.
- In a related vein, modding is also in the crossfire. Just remember the GTA San Andreas Hot Coffee mod and the parental outrage over a decade ago - and today the influence of "concerned parents" groups has gotten even worse, not to mention legitimate concerns about people distributing pedophile or hate mods. As a publisher you can't really afford people replacing e.g. every opponent with the image of Black people.
In the end, most of the reasons boil down to people (and, at least for pedophilia and pornographic content, also governments) expecting game publishers to pick up the slack of educating people that it's not OK to distribute or spread such content, or that it's not OK to DDoS server admins because they decided to ban players for spreading hate content.
This is all a canard because things like Roblox are a far more efficient means of connecting children to both undue sexual and economic exploitation than any of the old, distributed server methods.
All of those old games were rated for teenagers or adults. Some of the worst actual threats to young children come from things like Roblox that give parents a false sense that the company is moderating the content effectively.
Unfortunately, most of the industry has chosen to support two bad models: either pure P2P or the uni-corporate-server-farm model. Neither of them really provide the best experience for consumers. While the distributed dedicated server model does have its own problems, it also has many advantages, including that of outsourcing server management to small businesses and hobbyists rather than absorbing all those costs to the software maintainer.
> - Giving away servers also means you give away a significant amount of brand control. Parents won't care that pedophiles or Nazis can target their children because some random server admin doesn't give a shit about moderating, they will associate it with your brand.
Ah yes, Argumentum ad Pearl Clutchum. It never fails.
You don't need the server to be open source. You just need to be able to run it yourself without any central server involved.
This has been very much the norm from the nineties up until fairly recently. I spent my childhood and teens playing games over LAN or the Internet with self-hosted servers (Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Half-Life, GTA, Dungeon Siege, Red Alert, Warcraft 2, ...)
Every game that had a LAN mode could generally be played either via a software VPN, or other methods. More often than not games (especially FPSes) would ship with dedicated server software. You still needed to buy the game, but then you could run the dedicated server on your favorite hosting platform and play.
I think it was the xbox-ification of shooters that changed everything. 2009 or so, if I had to guess. MW2 was the first game that I remember really pushed company owned servers hard. Coincidentally this was also used to sell overpriced, often useless, DLC. At least back then the DLC was maps though.
It might be my age but I find it easier to remember games that DID have dedicated servers, rather than those that don't.
As I recall MW2 was the first game that did away with servers entirely, so you were always served P2P by someone’s PC, leading to constant multiplayer issues (unlike MW1, which had dedicated servers)
Minecraft (the best selling game of all time) lets your self-host servers. You can also bypass their user authentication system on your own servers fairly easily, but you generally don't need to.
There are also many hosting companies that let you create and manage Minecraft servers via a web interface and take care of stuff like rotating backups so even the most incompetent users can self-host.
> Only a handful of games in the history of gaming have had open source / openly available multiplayer servers.
It was actually the norm in the 90s. Other comments have cited examples but it’s worth noting that consoles supported running local servers too.
What changed was subscription based online services and stupid loot (et al) boxes meant companies could extract a continuous stream of money from gamers without having to put out much, if any, additional content. So everything became online first.
Source: I ran several games servers in the 90s and early 00. (Still do in fact but only for Minecraft these days).
That’s an unfairly dismissive comment given we are still talking about thousands of multiplayer games throughout the 90s and early 00s.
In fact I’d go further than that and say: to old timers like me, this practice of locking multiplayer games to the studios servers feels more like a recent trend than what used to be the norm.
Oh man, I remember BZFlag. I loved that game. Even with the poor graphics it was still so much fun because the gameplay was slow paced enough that text chat was possible along the chaos. It felt like competitive battles over IRC. Haven’t experienced anything quite like it since.
This is one of the main reasons Minecraft is still one of the most popular games to this day, after over a decade. Open-source third-party servers and their development contribute to development of new fun plugins, which allows more and more independent server creators to build cool unique servers.
And best of all: you can only get yourself banned from individual servers.
This isn't the case anymore since version 1.19.1 [1], where "reported players can now be banned from online play and Realms after moderator review": https://i.redd.it/hoyh22jsh9791.png
There's a reason pirate crews are hailed as heroes...and it's not the free software. Games legitimately work better when they are cracked almost 100% of the time.