6 ms·

The model is this: Let players run their own servers and host their own playgroups as they did before game servers were monetized. Then when someone cheats yo

by RunSet 2y ago

The model is this: Let players run their own servers and host their own playgroups as they did before game servers were monetized. Then when someone cheats you ban them until they apologize in person and sing the Very Sorry Song. This has been proven to work time and again. The only reason it is not the default is that some value extractor just has to feed their kids.

mulmen 2y ago
Feed their kids… on a yacht.
mjr00 2y ago
How do dedicated servers work with skill-based matchmaking and ranking systems?
- cherryteastain 2y ago
  You go on a server. You're getting smoked. They kick you or you leave because the people there are way above you. Alternatively, you're too pro and you get bored and look for a server with higher average skill.
- VyseofArcadia 2y ago
  I think they are orthogonal models. With dedicated servers, people sort of self-organize into groups of people they want to play with, maybe based on skill or fun or something else. Maybe you know who runs the server IRL, or you just randomly tried the server. Maybe you just get along with that group of people, maybe they're a group that is dedicated to improving and that's exactly what you want. I think parent's point is that you don't need skill-based matchmaking and ranking systems if you give players the ability to self-organize.
  - mjr00 2y ago
    The question was somewhat facetious. Being able to click "Find Match" and be able to match up against someone close to your skill level in a few seconds is a feature that players want. A ranked leaderboard that's somewhat legitimate and has prestige in climbing is a feature that players want. You don't need this stuff, of course, but people (who don't play games) love to dismiss these things as if they don't matter.
    - VyseofArcadia 2y ago
      So, then, why not both? The players that want to just jump into a match can deal with the kernel anticheat, and the players that are willing to find a dedicated server don't have to deal with rootkits. I mean, I know the answer, it's because doing both would be significantly more work for unproven returns, but still, a guy can dream.
      - cortesoft 2y ago
        We do have both… some games have centralized servers, some games have player hosted ones. You are free to play either kind.
    - surgical_fire 2y ago
      People want the weirdest things. The rise of those things you describe matched the decline of my interest in any form of online multiplayer.
      - azemetre 2y ago
        Yeah I use to play a lot of CS:S and when I got CS:GO the lack of community servers killed me interests and never picked it up again
      - cortesoft 2y ago
        I honestly feel the exact opposite of you, and think your desire is strange. I want to find games quickly and experience good, fair competition - which seems to me what most people would want.
        surgical_fire 2y ago
        The problem is that your solution to find "good, fair competition" (whatever that means to you) involves some form of ranking. The problems start when everyone cares about their damn ranking. And yes, even casuals care about that crap. Everybody follows the same strategies, everyone is whiny and annoying because losing means your ranking is damaged. Back in the day nobody cared. A match went awry because someone did a completely retarded build on their toon, or didn't know how to play with the class they picked? Oh well, game is over, you find a new one.
- Spunkie 2y ago
  Ranking/competitive systems truly are a cancer on games. So many quality of life standards have been sacrificed just to let jackasses feel superior to others in what is supposed to be a fun game.
  - mjr00 2y ago
    On the contrary, skill-based matchmaking is a godsend for casual players, as long as they don't care about their rank. If you're a bottom 50% player, you really don't want to get matched up against a Challenger League of Legends player or Master Street Fighter 6 player or The Wazzler in Marvel vs Capcom 2.
    - Spunkie 2y ago
      I played plenty of unranked LoL back in the day, it was generally a better over all experience. Mostly because ranked games were full of tryhards that raged constantly and in general didn't actually treat the game like a game. ___ In fact now that I think about it... some of my funnest LoL games back in the day was when I got paired with someone way out of my league in unranked and they would spend a lot of the game mentoring teammates. And when the opposite happened, we would get stomped quickly and would be able to into a new match quickly. No one felt the need to drag out a unfun/mismatched game because their ranking would get hurt. Wasn't really an issue.
      - valval 2y ago
        Yes, people of competitive nature like competing.
    - surgical_fire 2y ago
      This does not match my experience. By far, the best time I had in online multiplayer was playing Dota (the WC3 map, not the standalone atrocity that exists nowadays). No ranked whatever. Every game was a blank slate. Nobody really cared, everyone was having fun. People tried weird builds, odd team composition, etc. You sometimes played with nice people and added them to friends. With ranked matchmaking everybody is pissy if you are not playing optimally, everyone moans and hisses when they lose, etc.
- valval 2y ago
  I played a game called Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory at the pro level (of course making small amounts of money even as a teenager like things were back then). A lot of the time in the game was spent scrimming on private servers against other teams. Public games were played on the team’s public server, where people of all skill levels would meet. The highest skilled players would always look to be challenged and would switch to the weaker team all the time. Of course on the scoreboard you’d have people who had a K/D of 40/2 and people who were 1/12. People who weren’t looking to improve and got stomped would of course leave. After a while of playing on a server you’d know the good players and they’d also self select to form teams with each other and move to private servers.
extr 2y ago
No. This model doesn't really work for Battle Royale games, plus the userbase of modern gaming is so much larger and more casual than it was back in CS2 days or whatever you're imagining. People who only have time to play a couple matches at the end of the day do not want to spend half the time available hunting around for a "good server" appropriate to their interest/skill level or develop a personal relationship with the mods.
thot_experiment 2y ago
Correct. 1000% correct. This is also how you build community. Also the f2p model isn't doing us any favors by making new accounts cost zero, though iirc cheats can cost like $100/mo so I assume dedicated cheaters would still cheat if games all cost money.
Notatheist 2y ago
Any community smaller than 200 people is going to have you typing !add in an mIRC channel and waiting 20 minutes during prime-time for a pickup game between 10 mismatched players. Any community larger than 200 people is going to be unmanageable cheat wise. If I had the option of Quake 3 Arena-style "matchmaking" and no cheats, or 2024 matchmaking and cheats I'd choose option 2 every time.
cortesoft 2y ago
I have been playing online games for 30 years, and you are leaving out a TON of the value you get from centralized hosting and matchmaking. At any time of day or night, I can just sign in and immediately find a match. In addition, it can match me against players that are close to my skill level so the games I play are fair and challenging. I can keep my statistics to see how I do over time in those fair and challenging games. This is a very valuable service. I have played on plenty of community hosted servers, and the experience is hit or miss. Sometimes, you will get power hungry mods who ban anyone who is better than them, or won’t ban the cheaters because they are friends. Without the anti cheat tools, it is often very hard to distinguish people who are really good and people who are cheating, so you leave it up to the whims of the moderators. Yes, you could tell me to just go and find a different server, but I don’t want to spend my time trying to find a good server I just want to play… and who knows if the good server I find will still be around the next time I play. I have thousands of hours on both types of games, and for any sort of competing games (whether FPS, RTS, or sports), I get a lot more enjoyment out of centralized matchmaking with anticheat.
ThatPlayer 2y ago
It doesn't because server operators don't want a unpaid full time job moderating a server. If anything, community servers have more anti-cheat not less. ESEA and FaceIt servers for CS2 have additional anti-cheat. FiveV community servers for GTAV rolled their own anti-cheat before Rockstar added one recently. I even remember ICCUP for Starcraft 1 had 'anti-hack'. Being able to host your own playgroups is generally possible in modern games still. Private lobbies on their public servers exist, but that's still more effort than people are willing to do versus hitting the 'play game' button. We used to call those PUGs.

by RunSet 2y ago

mulmen 2y ago

Feed their kids… on a yacht.

mjr00 2y ago

How do dedicated servers work with skill-based matchmaking and ranking systems?

cherryteastain 2y ago
You go on a server. You're getting smoked. They kick you or you leave because the people there are way above you. Alternatively, you're too pro and you get bored and look for a server with higher average skill.
VyseofArcadia 2y ago
I think they are orthogonal models. With dedicated servers, people sort of self-organize into groups of people they want to play with, maybe based on skill or fun or something else. Maybe you know who runs the server IRL, or you just randomly tried the server. Maybe you just get along with that group of people, maybe they're a group that is dedicated to improving and that's exactly what you want. I think parent's point is that you don't need skill-based matchmaking and ranking systems if you give players the ability to self-organize.
- mjr00 2y ago
  The question was somewhat facetious. Being able to click "Find Match" and be able to match up against someone close to your skill level in a few seconds is a feature that players want. A ranked leaderboard that's somewhat legitimate and has prestige in climbing is a feature that players want. You don't need this stuff, of course, but people (who don't play games) love to dismiss these things as if they don't matter.
  - VyseofArcadia 2y ago
    So, then, why not both? The players that want to just jump into a match can deal with the kernel anticheat, and the players that are willing to find a dedicated server don't have to deal with rootkits. I mean, I know the answer, it's because doing both would be significantly more work for unproven returns, but still, a guy can dream.
    - cortesoft 2y ago
      We do have both… some games have centralized servers, some games have player hosted ones. You are free to play either kind.
  - surgical_fire 2y ago
    People want the weirdest things. The rise of those things you describe matched the decline of my interest in any form of online multiplayer.
    - azemetre 2y ago
      Yeah I use to play a lot of CS:S and when I got CS:GO the lack of community servers killed me interests and never picked it up again
    - cortesoft 2y ago
      I honestly feel the exact opposite of you, and think your desire is strange. I want to find games quickly and experience good, fair competition - which seems to me what most people would want.
      - surgical_fire 2y ago
        The problem is that your solution to find "good, fair competition" (whatever that means to you) involves some form of ranking. The problems start when everyone cares about their damn ranking. And yes, even casuals care about that crap. Everybody follows the same strategies, everyone is whiny and annoying because losing means your ranking is damaged. Back in the day nobody cared. A match went awry because someone did a completely retarded build on their toon, or didn't know how to play with the class they picked? Oh well, game is over, you find a new one.
Spunkie 2y ago
Ranking/competitive systems truly are a cancer on games. So many quality of life standards have been sacrificed just to let jackasses feel superior to others in what is supposed to be a fun game.
- mjr00 2y ago
  On the contrary, skill-based matchmaking is a godsend for casual players, as long as they don't care about their rank. If you're a bottom 50% player, you really don't want to get matched up against a Challenger League of Legends player or Master Street Fighter 6 player or The Wazzler in Marvel vs Capcom 2.
  - Spunkie 2y ago
    I played plenty of unranked LoL back in the day, it was generally a better over all experience. Mostly because ranked games were full of tryhards that raged constantly and in general didn't actually treat the game like a game. ___ In fact now that I think about it... some of my funnest LoL games back in the day was when I got paired with someone way out of my league in unranked and they would spend a lot of the game mentoring teammates. And when the opposite happened, we would get stomped quickly and would be able to into a new match quickly. No one felt the need to drag out a unfun/mismatched game because their ranking would get hurt. Wasn't really an issue.
    - valval 2y ago
      Yes, people of competitive nature like competing.
  - surgical_fire 2y ago
    This does not match my experience. By far, the best time I had in online multiplayer was playing Dota (the WC3 map, not the standalone atrocity that exists nowadays). No ranked whatever. Every game was a blank slate. Nobody really cared, everyone was having fun. People tried weird builds, odd team composition, etc. You sometimes played with nice people and added them to friends. With ranked matchmaking everybody is pissy if you are not playing optimally, everyone moans and hisses when they lose, etc.
valval 2y ago
I played a game called Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory at the pro level (of course making small amounts of money even as a teenager like things were back then). A lot of the time in the game was spent scrimming on private servers against other teams. Public games were played on the team’s public server, where people of all skill levels would meet. The highest skilled players would always look to be challenged and would switch to the weaker team all the time. Of course on the scoreboard you’d have people who had a K/D of 40/2 and people who were 1/12. People who weren’t looking to improve and got stomped would of course leave. After a while of playing on a server you’d know the good players and they’d also self select to form teams with each other and move to private servers.

extr 2y ago

No. This model doesn't really work for Battle Royale games, plus the userbase of modern gaming is so much larger and more casual than it was back in CS2 days or whatever you're imagining. People who only have time to play a couple matches at the end of the day do not want to spend half the time available hunting around for a "good server" appropriate to their interest/skill level or develop a personal relationship with the mods.

thot_experiment 2y ago

Correct. 1000% correct. This is also how you build community. Also the f2p model isn't doing us any favors by making new accounts cost zero, though iirc cheats can cost like $100/mo so I assume dedicated cheaters would still cheat if games all cost money.

Notatheist 2y ago

Any community smaller than 200 people is going to have you typing !add in an mIRC channel and waiting 20 minutes during prime-time for a pickup game between 10 mismatched players. Any community larger than 200 people is going to be unmanageable cheat wise. If I had the option of Quake 3 Arena-style "matchmaking" and no cheats, or 2024 matchmaking and cheats I'd choose option 2 every time.

cortesoft 2y ago

I have been playing online games for 30 years, and you are leaving out a TON of the value you get from centralized hosting and matchmaking. At any time of day or night, I can just sign in and immediately find a match. In addition, it can match me against players that are close to my skill level so the games I play are fair and challenging. I can keep my statistics to see how I do over time in those fair and challenging games. This is a very valuable service. I have played on plenty of community hosted servers, and the experience is hit or miss. Sometimes, you will get power hungry mods who ban anyone who is better than them, or won’t ban the cheaters because they are friends. Without the anti cheat tools, it is often very hard to distinguish people who are really good and people who are cheating, so you leave it up to the whims of the moderators. Yes, you could tell me to just go and find a different server, but I don’t want to spend my time trying to find a good server I just want to play… and who knows if the good server I find will still be around the next time I play. I have thousands of hours on both types of games, and for any sort of competing games (whether FPS, RTS, or sports), I get a lot more enjoyment out of centralized matchmaking with anticheat.

ThatPlayer 2y ago

It doesn't because server operators don't want a unpaid full time job moderating a server. If anything, community servers have more anti-cheat not less. ESEA and FaceIt servers for CS2 have additional anti-cheat. FiveV community servers for GTAV rolled their own anti-cheat before Rockstar added one recently. I even remember ICCUP for Starcraft 1 had 'anti-hack'. Being able to host your own playgroups is generally possible in modern games still. Private lobbies on their public servers exist, but that's still more effort than people are willing to do versus hitting the 'play game' button. We used to call those PUGs.