9 ms·

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 somewhe

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.

fastball 4y ago
How would we have "not let them"?
- blue039 4y ago
  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.
  - fastball 4y ago
    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.
    - amatecha 4y ago
      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.
      - deafpolygon 4y ago
        cries in UT99
        Haga 4y ago
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        > 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.
        mountainb 4y ago
        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.
    - Agentlien 4y ago
      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, ...)
    - NavinF 4y ago
      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.
    - blue039 4y ago
      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.
      - Aeolun 4y ago
        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)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - cassonmars 4y ago
      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.
    - hnlmorg 4y ago
      > 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).
      - fastball 4y ago
        Well, the vast majority of multiplayer games were made after the 90s.
        hnlmorg 4y ago
        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.
  - fullsend 4y ago
    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.
  - pannSun 4y ago
    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".
    - hanafudafan 4y ago
      Yes let's form another government bureau to make sure that VIDEO GAMES are LESS BUGGY lol. Or, you can just do without your bing bing wahoo.
      - pannSun 4y ago
        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.
    - grishka 4y ago
      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.
      - RulerOf 4y ago
        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.
        grishka 4y ago
        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.
Agent766 4y ago
It's pretty ridiculous for companies ban the alleged cheaters in single player modes too which shouldn't require any server dependencies.
- phone8675309 4y ago
  Blizzard's PC games, since Diablo III, all require an online connection to play even single player specifically to prevent privacy.
  - blue039 4y ago
    > specifically to prevent privacy. I appreciate this typo on a spiritual level.
    - intelVISA 4y ago
      Freudian keyboard
  - gambiting 4y ago
    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)
- incongruity 4y ago
  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.
  - 4y ago
makotech221 4y ago
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.
- brendank310 4y ago
  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.
eikenberry 4y ago
> Unfortunately we gave up our right to own software when we let companies own the servers. People gave up on software ownership when they stopped demanding the source code. The source code is the software, not the binary.
- iwillbenice 4y ago
keraf 4y ago
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.
josteink 4y ago
> Now you'll get banned for life 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.
- alkonaut 4y ago
  > 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.
alkonaut 4y ago
> 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).
TheCapn 4y ago
Regarding the "ownership" of servers: 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.
- pradn 4y ago
  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.
- hardware2win 4y ago
  Your csgo example is weird Because they allow it And it was great part of their cs 1.6 succesa I bet devs are scares that too many people would play private servers
seanw444 4y ago
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.
- Goz3rr 4y ago
  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 https://i.redd.it/hoyh22jsh9791.png [1]: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-1-19-1-pre-release-1 https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-1-19-1-pre...
  - seanw444 4y ago
    Fascinating. I can always rely on Microsoft to ruin what good remains in anything.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

fastball 4y ago

How would we have "not let them"?

blue039 4y ago
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.
- fastball 4y ago
  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.
  - amatecha 4y ago
    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.
    - deafpolygon 4y ago
      cries in UT99
      - Haga 4y ago
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      > 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.
      - mountainb 4y ago
        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.
  - Agentlien 4y ago
    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, ...)
  - NavinF 4y ago
    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.
  - blue039 4y ago
    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.
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      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)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - cassonmars 4y ago
    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.
  - hnlmorg 4y ago
    > 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).
    - fastball 4y ago
      Well, the vast majority of multiplayer games were made after the 90s.
      - hnlmorg 4y ago
        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.
- fullsend 4y ago
  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.
- pannSun 4y ago
  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".
  - hanafudafan 4y ago
    Yes let's form another government bureau to make sure that VIDEO GAMES are LESS BUGGY lol. Or, you can just do without your bing bing wahoo.
    - pannSun 4y ago
      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.
  - grishka 4y ago
    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.
    - RulerOf 4y ago
      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.
      - grishka 4y ago
        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.

Agent766 4y ago

It's pretty ridiculous for companies ban the alleged cheaters in single player modes too which shouldn't require any server dependencies.

phone8675309 4y ago
Blizzard's PC games, since Diablo III, all require an online connection to play even single player specifically to prevent privacy.
- blue039 4y ago
  > specifically to prevent privacy. I appreciate this typo on a spiritual level.
  - intelVISA 4y ago
    Freudian keyboard
- gambiting 4y ago
  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)
incongruity 4y ago
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.
- 4y ago

makotech221 4y ago

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.

brendank310 4y ago
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.

eikenberry 4y ago

> Unfortunately we gave up our right to own software when we let companies own the servers. People gave up on software ownership when they stopped demanding the source code. The source code is the software, not the binary.

iwillbenice 4y ago

keraf 4y ago

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.

josteink 4y ago

> Now you'll get banned for life 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.

alkonaut 4y ago
> 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.

alkonaut 4y ago

> 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).

TheCapn 4y ago

Regarding the "ownership" of servers: 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.

pradn 4y ago
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.
hardware2win 4y ago
Your csgo example is weird Because they allow it And it was great part of their cs 1.6 succesa I bet devs are scares that too many people would play private servers

seanw444 4y ago

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.

Goz3rr 4y ago
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 https://i.redd.it/hoyh22jsh9791.png [1]: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-1-19-1-pre-release-1 https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-1-19-1-pre...
- seanw444 4y ago
  Fascinating. I can always rely on Microsoft to ruin what good remains in anything.
deleted 4y ago
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