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.
Team fortress 2
Don’t be silly, if you want to get dominated by another random person in tf2 then you need to first buy bot immunity
What. Haven’t seen a single bot since a few of hosters were imprisoned and fined gigantic sums.
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.
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
Lol I don’t follow the situation very closely, I’m just lamenting the state of modern gaming
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)
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…
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This was dota in 2008 basically.
Now I’m sad.
Just play Mordhau. Playerbase is small enough that you’ll see the same people over and over again.
Do you still actively play? I used to play a lot a few years ago. I’ve been debating getting back into it but I’m not sure I have the patience to relearn the combat and I’m sure those who still play are monsters at this point.
Yep! I don’t get the chance as often as I’d like, plus Helldivers 2 fever has hit, but I still enjoy when I can.
The modded servers are insane. There’s new horde mode options as well.
The skill ceiling is higher than ever before, but there is still a good distribution of newbs. I’ve been training my 1vX by concentrating the practice against bot. Do a local deathmatch, spawn a bot and ToggleDamage and ToggleStamina in the console and just play around without pressure. After that, do local Team Deathmatch in Arena, join Red, spawn in training sword and then “AddBotsTeam 2 1”, then since the bots are quite good at circling, run to the side of a supply box and practice 1vX parrying. It’s helping me not always commit to a riposte and keeping myself aware of multiple more things on the screen at once.
That is very accurate. I play in spurts every 3-6 months and thankfully was at a baseline level to not get totally stomped every game but it’s probably at least as bad as you’d expect.
This is happening to me now in squad.
Yes, I find this too. Especially if you play on the same servers.
Gamespy back in the day. Could make core friends and join the same servers across games.
Before that…QuakeSpy.
Quake kicked ass and defined my childhood and my adulthood. I was like 10 when that game came out.
I wanted to play that game so bad but my dad was hogging the phone line all the time!
So…I did some reading online. Found out how to build a simple network. Went to the computer fair and got some network cards that did 10BaseT or 10Base2. Went to RadioShack and got some coax, bnc ends, and terminators. Installed WinRoute on my dad’s computer. Set it up to share his internet so we could both be online. Set it up so his computer would automatically dial when I wanted internet if he wasn’t online yet.
Nearly 30 years later and now I’m a Network Architect.
My experience playing Call of Duty: United Offensive. The community was so much better than online games today. Some times if I wasn’t in to it we’d just chat via text chat. Felt like an extended lan party almost
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?
Nothing wrong with getting older
Except for my knees
And my back!
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.
So much scoutzknivez and iceworld
he_glass
I hit the bnet friends cap playing overwatch. It can be done if you pay attention to who’s playing and be friendly.
Yeah. Overwatch was pretty social back in the day. It’s a different beat now.
The last bit is what killed world of Warcraft for me. When it changed from a world with the same people in it everytime, to automated group finders combining every possible world anyone could be in.
Not only will you never see those people again, for a while it was literally impossible to talk to them or friend them.
When they put out classic wow again, they updated it to have all these “new quality of life” features.
Thank god for private servers.
WoW FEELS super fragmented right now.
I mean, when they finally gave in and released Classic I had no idea they would release 10 different versions of it. But that’s mostly a different topic.
The shattered world of the main game is the big problem, cities and raids and events that exist only conditionally, like Undercity and Ny’Alotha with the attatched invasion.
Being able to meet and talk with players you can’t trade with or craft for, whether they’re Horde while you’re Alliance, or they’re from an unconnected server to yours. When you tell the latter they can send you a personal crafting order for the sword they keep asking for in Trade Chat, they can’t.
And as a Blacksmith/Miner main, I get to experience the shattered state of instanced zoning more regularly, every time I fly out to get ore, with several ore deposits simply disappearing as I approach them or start mining them. I see them from the other side of a fracture in the world. When I cross over, the illusion fades away.
I haven’t logged on to WoW in a few years, but it’s really interesting to hear what’s become of instance handling. I was on the fence about it in '03-'04, when the discussion was about whether or not instanced dungeons (Lost Dungeons of Norrath for EQ) were a good idea long-term. At the time the discussion sounded a lot the discussions about fast travel. Or maps, for that matter.
There’s some rose-tinted goblin welding goggles there.
Pugs for 5-mans used to be a huge pain in the ass. Especially for lower-level dungeons or for DPS classes (and especially the boomkins, the fury warriors, and the ret pallys).
Remember spamming city chat, LFG BFD?
And if you were a warlock, you were expected to run all the way there (remember not getting mounts until 40?), and wait for two other people, so you could summon the last two?
I haven’t really played much since TBC, or at all since LK. LFG was a huge improvement. It had flaws, for sure…it did break the community a bit, as you said…but it made the game playable for people who didn’t have hours to commit to getting ready for a 5 man dungeon.
As a solo player in the early wow era, lfg was a massive pain in my backside. I literally couldn’t progress without completing certain dungeons, and I couldn’t complete those dungeons unless I grouped up. So I was painfully and perpetually stuck in a never ending loop of LFG.
It’s the reason I left.
If you don’t have a group to play with, or preferred to play solo, utilizing pick up groups when necessary, the game became an unplayable mess halfway through the level progressions.
They’ve “fixed” most of this now, but I have a hard time caring about the game now. I went back to it for a short while a few years ago, and while it’s easier to nab a group for progression, the onslaught of go-fer quests numbed my brain to any lore that was being spouted by the quest givers, and it became a grind fest.
No sorry, just action.
ESPECIALLY when things like the DPS Priest build was the best for leveling but the HEALING Priest is the one everyone needed for dungeons.
Oh as a shadow priest in TBC you hit me right in the feels.
Shadow was so great for levelling but shit for healing. And holy was great for healing but shit for solo play.
Towards the end of TBC I was doing disc and having a blast as a squishy healer in PvP.
To be fair thats sort of the point of RPGs, people fill different roles but not all roles.
Yeah…wish they would’ve come out with dual specs earlier. Would’ve made leveling my priest much more fun…a holy priest was a slow and boring process in solo PvE but a shadow priest was boring in dungeons. And I liked doing both.
I think the punishment for changing specs was just unbalanced. In vanilla it was an absurd amount of gold. We had funds for our healers and tanks, and many of them just played alts outside of raids.
Something about the difficulty of it all I think breeds companionship. Whatever we have now is pretty broken.
Everybody has different experiences. For me the game was okay but it was secondary to the friends that I met and played with. That shitty LFG experience pushed people to make and join guilds.
There’s definitely a way works both ways.
Yeah I don’t miss the days of trying to get a group to do Scarlet Monestary then running the gauntlet of griefing assholes.
SM was the worst for it.
And there were so many quests.
And there was so much lore inside.
But if you were an alliance player on a PvP realm you were guaranteed to get ganked waiting for the rest of your party to show.
Yup and if you were on a low pop server or mature one with not many leveling. Forget doing dungeons at all.
DF and RF have their issues but it wasn’t all fun before.
As a feral who needed random blues, I spent days trying to get groups for less popular dungeons, just to have the item not drop or get ninja’d
COD 2 Rifle only 🫡
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 …
Ready gaming fires away in this Kraber g200 montage!
You can still play old games! TF2 still exists (istg if I die to that one soldier nolife in the 2fort sewers 1 more time)
Also SCP:SL is gonna get a big update soon and it only has serversI definitely feel this way about gaming online. I miss Microsoft Ants.
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.
