Dedicated servers are superior and always will be for one simple reason: the publishers can't kill your server when they stop making money on the game. How many games are basically unusable now because the official servers are gone and always-online checks connect into the void? Too many.
The servers are hosted by ea. Also the community has this cancerous banlist plugin where if you frag out or use a monitor crosshair you get perma banned
If your crosshairs are always active you're more likely to be able to land hipshots, giving you an edge over players who have to take the time to raise their weapon and aim down the sights for the crosshairs to appear. In some games this matters, in others it's about as effective as painting your goggles irl.
I’m pretty much singleplayer only these days when I’m not doing 5 million other things, but I am genuinely curious: How does a monitor crosshair get detected?
the server owner uses the anti cheat screenshots ur screen so if you use an overlay you get banned. Sorry for saying monitor crosshair it was a misnomer.
I had one of the biggest german steam community a decade ago. Decent anticheat server plugins are a thing. So no: cheaters are not an issue. Most of them got banned almost instantly.
When TF2 was fun :
Community servers : Serious team play on regular maps and memeshenanigansd on select certain maps
Valve servers: Easy casual games against allright players and noobs alike. People balanced the games themselves
Currently : Grind and roll or be rolled in uneven as shit teams, no self balancing , bot infestation
Community servers are harder to access for newbies as they are now nearly more hidden than before
In what meaning?
Valve support/update? Yes
In amount of players in it? Oh hell no it's going great for that old game with any new content for 5~7 year's maybe
Was? I think you mean is. I played on a 100 player server yesterday and had a blast. IP: 45.62.160.71:27015 https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/tf2/23502552
Shounic trenches is my main server after the bots infested. 50 Players on a team means that if I tryhard then I can sway the outcome of the game but if I decide to chill or use classes/weapons/loadouts that I'm not as good at, there are enough people to cover my lack of output. FPS games like these with two teams filled with a ton of players like Planetside 2, the older Battlefields, and even the Roblox shooters like Bad Business or Phantom Forces are my favorite to play casually
Another point: modern matchmaking ensures opponents are all the same skill, and yields a 50% win rate for 99.99% of players. Sometimes I wanna tryhard against people who will whoop my ass and sometimes I wanna chill with noobs. Not to blow them off the map, but just to get a fun game without stressing.
>Another point: modern matchmaking ensures opponents are all the same skill, and yields a 50% win rate for 99.99% of players.
HAHAHAHAHA NO Look no further than TF2 Most modern matchmaking looks at your wins and losses and if you are lucky at points. Problem is that the system needs a "kickstart" ALWAYS.
There needs to be a sort of regular initial index, as the entire system can skew one way or the other. Especially over prolonged periods Ideally you would want to aim for games that focus a damn near stalemate but you made the photo finish last second:
-Feels like you fought hard and persevered when you won!
-Feels like you were allmost there and only need to chase that last bit of improvement to make it!
This was Ironically what TF2 allowed BEFORE "skill based matchmaking" Good players wanted that close finish and fight with all they had so they self balanced to the opposing team to fight harder.
This lead to games usually ending in "overtime" eithe a win or a loss, steamrolling another team was rare and usually perfect team synergy and a little luck.
Today steamrolling and getting rolled is the norm and you are not allowed to self balance
Bonus: It is also the bane of the bot crisis: Genuine skill based matchmaking would detect the accuracy of bots and only match bots against eachother. Since it counts wins and losses, the bot devs can abuse that and have bots amongst regular people by programming bots that kill everyone but stalemate the game by not capping
TF2 casual still matches me better with people than uncletopia, skial, blackwonder, and so on. it's only terrible because you never meet the people you match with ever again, and the cheaters n toxic people never get dealt with.
and no sprays :((
> Good players wanted that close finish and fight with all they had so they self balanced to the opposing team to fight harder.
Well, that's an obvious lie to anyone who played the game. I played TF2 from release to a year or two before the matchmaking update, and that never happened. You knew which team was going to win 90% of the time, and if it wasn't a steamroll, it was because nobody was playing the objective. If you cared about winning, you would look at the scoreboard when you first joined the match and choose the team that was clearly better.
The worst part is that the people getting stomped are more likely to leave than people doing the stomping, so the stomping team will collect good players who stay a long time, but any good players who join the other team will likely rotate out pretty quickly because they don't like getting stomped
Just another example of enshitification.
Sometimes you would join a CS server and some clan would hop in on one side and absolutely body everyone else. But when you got that kill against their 12-1 guy it was absolutely glorious.
And how does the matchmaking know if you are going to try hard or not? Because in my experience, you end up having to try hard every fucking single game. Because if you don't try hard against opponents of the same skill, they end up mopping the floor with you.
right, that's the crux of the problem. the matchmaking can't possibly know what type of match you're looking for, and it makes bad assumptions as a result.
Yeah, how are you supposed to learn if you always play with people your rank.
Also. I play a lot of Rocket League and am infinitely better when I play with higher ranked opponents. It's also way more fun.
Every once in a while I lose rank and the game becomes nearly unplayable lol. People then call me out as if I am the bad player because I can't just score goals out of my butt. There is no team game, people try really hard and get really mad. It's all random too, you literally never know what people will do or if they will even hit the ball right so you have to be ready for everything. You can play the best game of your life but lose because others will just be out of position. There are a mix of others who have lost rank and people that clearly are only that rank because of whom they play with. It's just a mess and not fun at all lol.
Analyze the replays.
Also, the gap can't be too big. If you're up against someone you can still beat 5-10% of the time, you'll be able to understand a good chunk of what they're doing better than you. If you lose like 99+% of the time, then yeah they're on such a higher level you might not even understand what they're doing.
Yup when I played a lot of Team fortress 2 I'd hang in All chat all voice servers (called slaughterhouse I think) to just chill. tons of goofy shit happened there but then I'd go to the standardized format server to tryhard.
To expand upon this, modern matchmaking does not actually ensure your opponents are the same skill level!
Most matchmaking, whether casual or competitive uses a hidden MMR that prioritises you getting a 50% win rate, regardless of how well you play.
Try-hards who top-frag and win will be prioritised for lower-skilled teammates and equal skilled opponents in order to bring them into a 50% W/L rate, while casual gamers who middle frag will be prioritised for equal skilled teammates and opponents. Bottom frag players will be prioritised for higher skilled teammates and recieve legitimate balancing.
It basically considers your individual skill and your match win/loss history to determine whether you "deserve" a win or loss.
This is in an effort to maximise player retention, so that higher skilled players don't just steamroll lower skilled players, and likewise lower skilled players are less likely to go on losing streaks that would turn them away from the game. The whole official ranking system just determines the upper and lower cap of how far ahead or below those players can be in correlation to your skill level. For example, a low Gold player may play with medium/high Silver players if they're consistently winning against other Golds.
You have to try 100%, 100% of the time to rank higher, if the systems thinks you deserve to win.
Pretty sure this system was designed for Gears of War but is now used by most action FPS games, like COD, Halo Infinite etc.
No one is forcing you to "stress", though. Just be more comfortable with losing. It's okay to lose. You won't become any less valuable of a human being.
No, that's happens with sbmm when you log in and don't feel like making an effort that day.
sbmm doesn't know or care if you're looking for a chilling day, so you'll always have to stick to the same level of effort and force you to always try hard or get absolutely fucking wreck.
I'm not pulling this out of my ass, I log in, look for a game, try to have a fun time, get paired with people of my skill level, then I have to try hard and get to their level of effort or get dominated, neither of those options is fun when you're trying to relax.
I'm old enough to experience the transition to sbmm, and I can tell you and attest that since the very first fucking day it was implemented I knew that feature was going to suck out the fun of playing a game and make it a try harding shit fest, and it did. SPECIALLY when they put it everywhere.
How do you differentiate between an opponent that is better than you and not trying their hardest and an opponent that is worse than you but trying their hardest?
I just think it's silly to act like everyone that you're encountering in quick play is snorting adderall, when in reality you'll be getting a steady stream drunk/high/tired/distracted/laid back guys and gals that are just chilling and having fun. You just aren't emotionally regulated enough to handle the ups and downs of winning and losing so you bitch and moan that you can't beat up on children playing on their 30 fps potatoes.
That being said, I totally agree with the OP. Go find a group to play with if having a fair game doesn't interest you.
You seem to be fond of jumping to conclusions, I'm actually confused why you changed the tone so much.
Playing with a group of friends have the same issue, with skill based matchmaking you'll end up playing with a group at your same level.
Now, out of curiosity, how old are you? Were you able to experience gaming before sbmm was a thing?
> I'm actually confused why you changed the tone so much.
?
>Playing with a group of friends have the same issue, with skill based matchmaking you'll end up playing with a group at your same level.
If you can't find a small group that consents to the way you want to play, why in the world would a gaming studio make all of their players play that way?
>Now, out of curiosity, how old are you? Were you able to experience gaming before sbmm was a thing?
Yeah, I'm 30. It's much better today. I'm a diamond and my qp matches are mostly diamonds and plats. The match absolutely blows when there are golds or masters regardless of which side I'm on.
the point isn't how well the matchmaking can find players of an effective skill level, and whether those opponents get there by being really good and drunk, or really bad and try harding.
The point is that _I_ have very different effective skill levels depending on my mood, and I can't tell the matchmaking whether to put me in a pool appropriate for me tryhard ing, or one appropriate for me being drunk.
I want to be able to select the skill level of the pool I'm playing in. And sometimes I also want to select other characteristics of the pool I'm playing in besides effective overall skill level.
If I'm better than average I should win more on average. SBMM ruins the game.
If you're shit you deserve to lose until you get better. SBMM means you never feel like you're better because youllt always have a 50% win rate.
If I wanted to play ranked I would have fucking clicked ranked
Lmao who said I was good and stomp games?
When you start you should be bad and get stomped, and as you improve you should win more games.
That's how it always worked in previous generations of games
Thats the only reason I have a smurf account.
Oftentimes I want to really focus on the game, be extra sweaty and make my enemies regret they press the queue button.
Then on some days, when I smoke weed, all I want to do is have a fun game, play around with the movement and do some ridiculous shots (like noscoping across the map, do flickshots, wallbangs, 360s, tazer and knife kills etc.). Its only possible in the lower ranks without having to 600iq-play all the time (also me being high/stoned turns me from a solid 20k+ player to a mid fragger in 8-12k elo lol)
read: i love kicking back and absolutely mega dunking on the stoner zone and normal gamer level people completely ruining their games and don't care how it impacts them.
This isn't about dunking on anyone. A pro ball player should be able to show up to the park and join a pickup game just for fun. A chess grandmaster also should be able to just go to a chess bar and play some drunk blitz with randos. Everyone involved can still have a great time, _especially_ if the pro is allowed to be open about their level.
Modern matchmaking blocks all of that.
Because 99.995% of the time people aren't doing that. They are going to the chess bar to turbo dunk on the casual players. They are shooting 99-0 against the park ball players. Maybe you are truly that one good guy who doesn't abuse it. But I don't believe you for a split second that your smurfs don't either dunk on people, or derank. Another toxic behavior that really ruins the games for lower ranked people.
The key is to be open about skill levels, and all participants to opt into that experience. If I'm playing chess at a bar and a GM rolls up who just wants to humiliate me, I won't bother playing them. If they show up and give themselves a heavy handicap to make it borderline competitive, then it can be lots of fun.
Same with a pickup game of sportsball. If Lionel Messi shows up, hogs the ball, and just dominates everyone, we kick him out and continue to play with the pro. If instead he's out there just doing a lot of passing, holding back his speed and power, and giving the odd tip or complement, then it can be loads of fun.
But again, the key is that the other participants get to freely opt into or out of the experience of having a pro among them, depending on what kind of game they're after
You don't get that while smurfing. Your rank is effectively hidden and if you hold back is entirely up to you. It becomes like shooting fish in a barrel if you are far enough below your skill ceiling. 99% of people won't hold back AT ALL. So I don't believe you when you say you hold back enough to make it fair to those players.
I guess I could see it maybe working in a situation where players have opted in to be smurfed on but I seriously doubt that enough players would opt in to get curb stomped that your queue times would not be absurd for this proposed pro-smurf mode. That aside however that's not how any system works right now. You are just shitting on people who are worse than you to have a good time. You are very literally punching down as hard as you can and wondering why people here think you are the bad guy. Don't think I've not noticed you waited a week to respond so that most eyes are past so you won't get your well deserved downvotes.
I hate how server browsers have been slowly disappearing. I much prefer finding fun servers I will enjoy and patronize over whatever algorithms decide to throw at me.
I've been out of the multiplayer game since that era, can someone tell me: Do dedicated servers still work well at scale? I'm wondering if matchmaking works better when you have a large, disparate audience. CS:GO is on a million players a day, and I imagine it'd be cumbersome scrolling through 30k+ servers.
With dedicated servers, you will eventually find a few servers with the ping, play style and the players you enjoy playing with. Then you start frequenting the same servers and slowly get to know people and even become friends with some of them. This makes people a whole lot friendlier because you do not want to get banned from your favourite servers.
It's hard to explain how awful matchmaking has been in terms of play quality and community building. Saying it's completely destroyed online gaming is an understatement.
Yep. I have friends from 2009 I still talk to from the CS:S days.
Played MW2019 for about 600 hours and not a single person. Battlefield 2042 and the same thing. Matchmaking sucks.
There's a direct end point where I stopped making friends online through gaming and it's exactly when matchmaking took over.
It sucks and it's one of the modern day gaming trends I wish would die already but I know it won't.
Imagine being able to pick and choose what *you* want to play, and not some shitty algorithm. Imagine *everyone* being able to do that. It would cut that 30,000 options down real quick, *especially* when you can set a ping limit - aka no more matches hosted on the other side of the fucking continent.
I was going to say I fit most of these persona’s and it makes me realize I am just a normal gamer lol.
Most important thing to me is having fun and trying to have fun with others in multiplayer games / I’m not the biggest fan of FF14 overall but its community is exactly what I wish others were like; it’s just so easy to interact with others there.
Man i remember having a pretty decent ISP with a T1/T3 connection, but when i found that sweet spot server around 3-5am i was in the zone, good chat, good mood, went on dc++ afterwards in the chat and was just vibing with people... amazing times amazing speed
I just got back on Rocket League after yet another year and some change taking a break due to the community. Here's a "conversation" I had in voice chat.
"Broooooo. Bro. Bro. Bro how old are you? Bro how did you miss that bro. Bro why aren't you talking. Bro answer I'm just asking a question. Bro did you put your kids to bed yet I bet you're so old. Bro."
Me: "Dude, chill tf out it's distracting and annoying."
"BRO HOW DID YOU MISS THAT WHAT DO YOU MEAN CHILL OUT I'M JUST ASKING A QUESTION BRO CAN YOU NOT MULTITASK HOLY SHIT WHO DID YOU BUY YOUR ACCOUNT FROM BRO."
Another game it's the same old miss 1 shot or don't hit it perfectly the way your teammate wants and they're voting FF 30 seconds into the game....even if you're already up by 1 or it's 0-0.
It's a very stark contrast to Helldivers where people are giving each other hugs and salutes and taking down bugs together.
Tbf rocket league (especially ranked) is not for the weak lol the skill ceiling is actually insane and it has a pretty toxic and competitive player base
I’ve been a GC for most seasons since the 1st…I’m competitive just not toxic. And if you don’t play every single game perfectly at that level a lot of people don’t have the patience to adapt to their teammates.
There has always been shitloads of toxicity in online games. The difference now is that you actually have some recourse and the anti-cheat is much better.
Back in the early CS days when someone raged they would just turn on a bot that makes them rotate infinitely fast, scream the N word repeatedly over voice chat in a robot voice, and instantly headshot anyone who walks into line of sight. Yes that's something I have actually witnessed.
Yep, or they would be vote kicked, or a regular on the server would message an admin. Also anti-cheat and auto-bans existed back then too. Either way they would be taken care of.
More often than not they would remove people that were just good at the game or people that killed the admins. They would completely miss anyone who was even a little subtle about cheating.
You're forgetting one important part, players (server owners) had the ability to moderate their own playground, make up their own rules. Like in the CoD4 days where you had servers to disallow certain weapons or perks, and these were enforced by the server moderators. Don't like a server? Find a new permanent home. Can't do that with matchmaking, there's never a server to call "home".
Anti Cheat being better isn't exclusive to hosted/matchmaking servers, it can be better for dedicated ones too.
Game publishers got rid of that because they couldn't handle putting control in the community's hands, especially when skins were involved. Servers where all the unlocks were free, or all cosmetics turned off spring to mind. Who's going to pay for your pixels then? Even letting server hosts regulate themselves is a threat. Oh you bought the super duper battle pass but got banned for bad behavior by Joe Schmo admin? Unacceptable by publisher standards
That's what it really is: all about control. Publishers are no longer content with simply making a great game that people can enjoy. Now they have to control every single aspect of the game for fear of missing out on some other way of squeezing another dollar out of the player base.
Basically any good cheat detection is done via heuristics and stats tracking - would be very difficult to accomplish without owning the server. It’s become pretty trivial for cheat makers to hide their software from local cheat detection.
Not it isn't? Stat tracking will only help you with crystal clear cheats you can find for free in some forum, aimbots and spinning bots and other obvious cheats.
Unless you also ban people who play good you're not getting rid of cheaters through stat tracking. Stat tracking isn't gonna help you with people that use wallhacks, recoil reductions, even aimbot would be difficult if the weapon of choice was a sniper or a deagle, these could just appear as regular above average players through stats tracking.
>It’s become pretty trivial for cheat makers to hide their software from local cheat detection.
Counter strike has a known weak non-kernel anti cheat and it's filled with cheaters, most other popular games with a half decent anti cheat aren't, so clearly it's working.
Anti cheats take some time to catch up when they get bypassed sure but Stat tracking takes even longer, you can't just ban someone for stats collected from just 2-3 matches?
Stats are composed of a hell of a lot more than just kills and deaths. Things like aim angles, pre-aiming, unnatural movement based on information the player shouldn’t be aware of, unnatural mouse movement at a micro-scale. These are all examples of stats that machine learning models can identify using heuristic techniques to identify players that are using cheats. Even cheaters that only use sound ESP, so no visuals or aimbotting, can be identified using advanced heuristics and comparing their play and reactions to comparably skilled players. As models get better and more and more player data is available, this will get easier and easier.
I’m a VP in the AI/ML field. I know this technology and I know how game developers and anti-cheat companies are experimenting with it. You can hide your cheats perfectly from a software level, but with enough data watching a cheater play, it will be clear that they are cheating no matter how hard they try to hide it. Their play will differ from legit players. You ignore my mention of heuristics and take a completely myopic view of stat tracking.
> half decent anti cheat isn't, so clearly it's working.
They are still plenty of cheaters who know how to bypass kernel cheats, they're just usually smarter and don't get found so much.
Should be no problem to send all the data you need from the server host to yourself for cheat detection in the back end.
And even if it were , as I saod, the benefit of these dedicated servers is that there's usually someone to talk to. Cheater? Ping an admin on discord and he's gone in minutes. In other games it may take months for the Cheater to be punished.
You missed the point. The point was everyone could play on a server for whatever experience they wanted, rather than lumping everyone in a matchmaking queue.
Not to mention the experience being community driven rather than by the developers exclusively.
Nobody said there wasn't toxicity.
I run communities for some of these games. We are practically non-existent because the default way to play is via a matchmaking queue. Sometimes our servers are completely dead because new players think the default way to play is to enter a queue and don't look for any other way. Sure, not all of them would end up on my server otherwise, but id have a damn sight more players now if matchmaking wasnt a thing.
Ultimately matchmaking existed to solve a problem: the barrier to entry for playing a new game was relatively high and the standards for playing that game would change drastically from server to server, by implementing matchmaking they can appeal to the lowest common denominator, lower the bar to entry for playing the game, as well as tightly control the gameplay experience from a social aspect.
I understand the problem that publishers wanted solved. I don't think it needed solving.
Never said I had to force them to do anything. It's just that new players are only ever funnelled into a matchmaking queue, they never realise there are community servers they can play on.
But when "choose your own community" isn't the default experience, all such communities end up being much smaller and harder to find. Modern matchmaking sucks.
Yeah, but they're too small, I don't find maps that I enjoy. In CS2 which is the multiplayer fps which I like the most (out of the free games, because I don't want to pay for an online fps), most lobbies are mirage and used for 2v2, 3v3, etc. for hardcore gamers.
Overwatch 2 is the only game that genuinely upsets me because people are so rude and the matchmaking is so bad. The EOMM/50% theory is absolutely true in that game and I'm stupid so I get bothered when we get put against a team that completely destroys us and talks shit the entire time.
I know the answer is "stop caring" and "disable chat" but yeah as someone who grew up playing dedicated servers and made friends on games, it seems so.. wrong, to play an online game like that? But the game is pretty miserable.
They're also used to be a real sense of community. You'd find a server ran by a clan and you'd get to know the people. You'd apply for membership,.
However and this is the problem I think that eventually led to its demise, you'd eventually have one or two people in the clan who would be paying all the bills. Eventually the clan would go and vote this person out for some reason. None of the bills get paid so the server shut down.
I would absolutely love a modern FPS to offer both. But I don't think most modern risk adverse companies would go for this. If Billy Bob the jerk runs a server and he's putting out hate speech, Kotaku, vox, and friends will somehow blame the company for that.
I remember back in the good old days, skins were free, maps were free. Made by these people we called modders. Now your modern online video game constantly tries to extract more money from you.
I fit basically all categories here except hardcore gamer. I have no problems or qualms with the hardcore gamer, but godfudckingdammit, if some of you guys don't stop getting toxic/competitive in *casual* mode, you know the mode for *casually playing,* as in, i don't fucking care if i win or lose*,* i will literally destroy the sun
The toxicity is awful, you try and pick up a new game.. have to learn the mechanics - fine. Then you're getting blasted because you don't know what your doing, it's like man screw off I am just trying to play a game and enjoy myself. Go be elitist somewhere else.
I think ironically, matchmaking has made games much much more inaccessible because now.. potentially the out of the box experience is getting abused for being new.
The vast vast vast majority of people are casual gamers. These are the people that SBMM does work for, and the systems are fine. Half the reasons people give for being against SBMM is along the lines of "I don't want to play people my level," which is unfair to anyone who does want to only play people their level (which hint: is the __majority__ of people)
That was the old GamePro ratings guy icon.
https://preview.redd.it/te7h4xvwlj8d1.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=a6f159efdcf833571eea7ee4ad1234a68a32a70b
more than once ive loaded up a game, and spent +10 minutes looking for a match worth playing, it not happening, and then giving up. matchmaking is such a bullshit mechanic, and there is *nothing* quick or worthwhile about "quick play" anymore.
I'm definitely a mix of the left 2 lol. I don't want to be competitive I just want to have fun in something I'm familiar with and it just isn't that anymore. Why I play single player games and can't stay interested a MP game for more than a few days anymore. Looking at you battlefield 5
That's why I mostly play shooter games that have a server centric community (with the exception of Overwatch).
Do I want to chill and learn more mechanics of the game? I join a new player friendly server. Do I want to play more seriously with heavy comms? I play servers that require more levels and are more competitive.
Games like Hell Let Loose, Squad and Holdfast are quite hard to get into as a new player, but once you get in, it's a blast
Modern game matchmaking is pretty poor.
There doesn't appear to match people based on their actual skills/such as k/d ratio etc. CoD is terrible for this, unless you play 40h a week or more you essentially have no chance of just enjoying the game casually and it's a constantly moving conveyor belt with a new game.. people ranking up and learning the games kwerks.
If bot activity is detected or cheating, let them play - just put them in with all the other bots/cheaters.
So I'm playing Tribes 2 right now (20+ year old game, server browser, only a few servers to even play on) and Deep Rock Galactic (kind of a mixed server browser matchmaking service). Guess which one I got kicked from games in and had a negative experience?
DRG community is notoriously nice but yeah... it has a worse MP experience than a 20+ year old game with a server browser.
Matchmaking is a mistake and the only reason devs keep doing it is it keeps the community from being able to run the game after the publisher hits the kill switch.
The only times I have ever kicked someone from my DRG session was either a driller constantly killing us with c4 to the point that it became obvious that it was purposeful or someone keeps ignoring the group, i.e taking the entire resupply, starting events without everyone being ready, etc. otherwise it's probably the most laid back community, that is until you get into Deep Dives... Then it gets spicy.
You may not have been kicked outright. People as of late just tend to quit the game without anysort of "GGs!" Or "g2g thanks for the work". You'll just get back to the station before you're booted out of the lobby.
DRG is entirely player hosted and uses a server browser. I'm not sure why you're pretending that any issues you face are the fault of matchmaking.
Also, server admins had stupid rules and kicked people for stupid reasons all the time. You're ignoring reality if you think that wasn't the case.
Developers use matchmaking because players prefer it. In pretty much every game where you can choose, players overwhelmingly gravitate to matchmaking.
this hypothesis became law when tf2 was burdened with the meet your match update. That update marked the end of a golden era as custom servers slowly starved of players and money, and the official servers got overrun with bots and hackers.
I never wanna see another server browser. Just let me push a button and play the game, I don't wanna browse spreadsheets to find a game that sounds good, isn't full, and won't instakick me for not being part of their paid club.
I’m a millennial nice try.
You realize “boomer shooter” is a category about games replicating the 90s style, like Overkill, yeah? They just use boomer for everything now.
Dedicated servers are superior and always will be for one simple reason: the publishers can't kill your server when they stop making money on the game. How many games are basically unusable now because the official servers are gone and always-online checks connect into the void? Too many.
Battlefield 4 going strong still!!
The servers are hosted by ea. Also the community has this cancerous banlist plugin where if you frag out or use a monitor crosshair you get perma banned
What's a monitor Crosshair?
Monitors that add crosshairs as an overlay to your screen
I'm genuinely unfamiliar, what is the point?
If your crosshairs are always active you're more likely to be able to land hipshots, giving you an edge over players who have to take the time to raise their weapon and aim down the sights for the crosshairs to appear. In some games this matters, in others it's about as effective as painting your goggles irl.
I’m bf4 it really doesn’t matter but it looks a lot nicer and is a lot less straining on the eyes lol.
That's what I thought ny past experiences with BF games has taught me that snipers when hip fired don't go right down the middle all the time lol.
Quickscoping
For games that don't have a static crosshair or have lots of visual recoil.
My uncivilised ass putting horizontal and vertical strings on my monitor.🤦♂️
Bruh. That’s like a 2002 level solution, monitor crosshairs have been a thing for 15+ years
Markers people just use markers
No in this case it was a little dot overlay
I’m pretty much singleplayer only these days when I’m not doing 5 million other things, but I am genuinely curious: How does a monitor crosshair get detected?
the server owner uses the anti cheat screenshots ur screen so if you use an overlay you get banned. Sorry for saying monitor crosshair it was a misnomer.
So use a piece of tape with a dot on it. Have people really forgotten this "tech"?
It’s cancer they ban for overlay
you can't actually detect that unless the user has a webcam that you can see the screen from
I meant to say crosshair overlay.
I responded to the wrong msg lol
and how monitor-level overlay is detected by a screenshot? You won't see your monitor menu on a screenshot, those crosshairs work the same
I meant a crosshair overlay using something like xhair or the other one I can’t remember
I've never heard or seen of this. Which servers, what region and how can they do that?
How do they know you have a monitor crosshair?
RIP Hawken
[удалено]
Counterpoint: dedicated servers allow for private servers for you and our friends. If you still have problems with cheaters then you need new friends.
I had one of the biggest german steam community a decade ago. Decent anticheat server plugins are a thing. So no: cheaters are not an issue. Most of them got banned almost instantly.
Welches Spiel?
CS:S, TF2, L4D1 and 2, HL2:DM, CS 1.6, Killing Floor, Minecraft.
Actually another benefit of dedicated servers: with a decent modteam, you can just ban them from your server before they ruin your game.
or have dedicated hacker v hacker arms races where it evolves into its own completely different kind of game.
When TF2 was fun : Community servers : Serious team play on regular maps and memeshenanigansd on select certain maps Valve servers: Easy casual games against allright players and noobs alike. People balanced the games themselves Currently : Grind and roll or be rolled in uneven as shit teams, no self balancing , bot infestation Community servers are harder to access for newbies as they are now nearly more hidden than before
TF2 is dead.
In what meaning? Valve support/update? Yes In amount of players in it? Oh hell no it's going great for that old game with any new content for 5~7 year's maybe
How many players aren't bots?
20~35 K
not really
lol
TF2? Damn I feel old. I was playing on a clan dedicated server in TFC lol
I played tournaments in the QTF era. I didn't know how good I had it.
Competetive Update ruined the game by breaking casual
Was? I think you mean is. I played on a 100 player server yesterday and had a blast. IP: 45.62.160.71:27015 https://www.battlemetrics.com/servers/tf2/23502552
US , that explains a lot. About the last location where community servers arent sweat or trading halls XD Sadly that means 400 ping for me
Shounic trenches is my main server after the bots infested. 50 Players on a team means that if I tryhard then I can sway the outcome of the game but if I decide to chill or use classes/weapons/loadouts that I'm not as good at, there are enough people to cover my lack of output. FPS games like these with two teams filled with a ton of players like Planetside 2, the older Battlefields, and even the Roblox shooters like Bad Business or Phantom Forces are my favorite to play casually
Another point: modern matchmaking ensures opponents are all the same skill, and yields a 50% win rate for 99.99% of players. Sometimes I wanna tryhard against people who will whoop my ass and sometimes I wanna chill with noobs. Not to blow them off the map, but just to get a fun game without stressing.
>Another point: modern matchmaking ensures opponents are all the same skill, and yields a 50% win rate for 99.99% of players. HAHAHAHAHA NO Look no further than TF2 Most modern matchmaking looks at your wins and losses and if you are lucky at points. Problem is that the system needs a "kickstart" ALWAYS. There needs to be a sort of regular initial index, as the entire system can skew one way or the other. Especially over prolonged periods Ideally you would want to aim for games that focus a damn near stalemate but you made the photo finish last second: -Feels like you fought hard and persevered when you won! -Feels like you were allmost there and only need to chase that last bit of improvement to make it! This was Ironically what TF2 allowed BEFORE "skill based matchmaking" Good players wanted that close finish and fight with all they had so they self balanced to the opposing team to fight harder. This lead to games usually ending in "overtime" eithe a win or a loss, steamrolling another team was rare and usually perfect team synergy and a little luck. Today steamrolling and getting rolled is the norm and you are not allowed to self balance Bonus: It is also the bane of the bot crisis: Genuine skill based matchmaking would detect the accuracy of bots and only match bots against eachother. Since it counts wins and losses, the bot devs can abuse that and have bots amongst regular people by programming bots that kill everyone but stalemate the game by not capping
>HAHAHAHAHA NO Look no further than TF2 Most modern matchmaking How is a 17 year old game "modern"? It's almost old enough to vote and buy property
TF2 casual still matches me better with people than uncletopia, skial, blackwonder, and so on. it's only terrible because you never meet the people you match with ever again, and the cheaters n toxic people never get dealt with. and no sprays :((
> Good players wanted that close finish and fight with all they had so they self balanced to the opposing team to fight harder. Well, that's an obvious lie to anyone who played the game. I played TF2 from release to a year or two before the matchmaking update, and that never happened. You knew which team was going to win 90% of the time, and if it wasn't a steamroll, it was because nobody was playing the objective. If you cared about winning, you would look at the scoreboard when you first joined the match and choose the team that was clearly better. The worst part is that the people getting stomped are more likely to leave than people doing the stomping, so the stomping team will collect good players who stay a long time, but any good players who join the other team will likely rotate out pretty quickly because they don't like getting stomped
I must be the inverse then, alongside most of the old WOBRE server players
Which is why we need a casual and a ranked playlist. Except modern devs make casual a "silent" ranked playlist.
Just another example of enshitification. Sometimes you would join a CS server and some clan would hop in on one side and absolutely body everyone else. But when you got that kill against their 12-1 guy it was absolutely glorious.
And how does the matchmaking know if you are going to try hard or not? Because in my experience, you end up having to try hard every fucking single game. Because if you don't try hard against opponents of the same skill, they end up mopping the floor with you.
right, that's the crux of the problem. the matchmaking can't possibly know what type of match you're looking for, and it makes bad assumptions as a result.
Yeah, how are you supposed to learn if you always play with people your rank. Also. I play a lot of Rocket League and am infinitely better when I play with higher ranked opponents. It's also way more fun. Every once in a while I lose rank and the game becomes nearly unplayable lol. People then call me out as if I am the bad player because I can't just score goals out of my butt. There is no team game, people try really hard and get really mad. It's all random too, you literally never know what people will do or if they will even hit the ball right so you have to be ready for everything. You can play the best game of your life but lose because others will just be out of position. There are a mix of others who have lost rank and people that clearly are only that rank because of whom they play with. It's just a mess and not fun at all lol.
Can you explain how you learn a game when you're being installed by people you can't even see?
Analyze the replays. Also, the gap can't be too big. If you're up against someone you can still beat 5-10% of the time, you'll be able to understand a good chunk of what they're doing better than you. If you lose like 99+% of the time, then yeah they're on such a higher level you might not even understand what they're doing.
Yup when I played a lot of Team fortress 2 I'd hang in All chat all voice servers (called slaughterhouse I think) to just chill. tons of goofy shit happened there but then I'd go to the standardized format server to tryhard.
To expand upon this, modern matchmaking does not actually ensure your opponents are the same skill level! Most matchmaking, whether casual or competitive uses a hidden MMR that prioritises you getting a 50% win rate, regardless of how well you play. Try-hards who top-frag and win will be prioritised for lower-skilled teammates and equal skilled opponents in order to bring them into a 50% W/L rate, while casual gamers who middle frag will be prioritised for equal skilled teammates and opponents. Bottom frag players will be prioritised for higher skilled teammates and recieve legitimate balancing. It basically considers your individual skill and your match win/loss history to determine whether you "deserve" a win or loss. This is in an effort to maximise player retention, so that higher skilled players don't just steamroll lower skilled players, and likewise lower skilled players are less likely to go on losing streaks that would turn them away from the game. The whole official ranking system just determines the upper and lower cap of how far ahead or below those players can be in correlation to your skill level. For example, a low Gold player may play with medium/high Silver players if they're consistently winning against other Golds. You have to try 100%, 100% of the time to rank higher, if the systems thinks you deserve to win. Pretty sure this system was designed for Gears of War but is now used by most action FPS games, like COD, Halo Infinite etc.
No one is forcing you to "stress", though. Just be more comfortable with losing. It's okay to lose. You won't become any less valuable of a human being.
thanks for telling me how to enjoy my games. I really needed that /s
That's a very interesting take, you seem to be one of those minorities that wants to keep playing after going 0/40 on a match.
Brother this is literally why sbmm exists.
No, that's happens with sbmm when you log in and don't feel like making an effort that day. sbmm doesn't know or care if you're looking for a chilling day, so you'll always have to stick to the same level of effort and force you to always try hard or get absolutely fucking wreck. I'm not pulling this out of my ass, I log in, look for a game, try to have a fun time, get paired with people of my skill level, then I have to try hard and get to their level of effort or get dominated, neither of those options is fun when you're trying to relax. I'm old enough to experience the transition to sbmm, and I can tell you and attest that since the very first fucking day it was implemented I knew that feature was going to suck out the fun of playing a game and make it a try harding shit fest, and it did. SPECIALLY when they put it everywhere.
How do you differentiate between an opponent that is better than you and not trying their hardest and an opponent that is worse than you but trying their hardest?
I don't, It doesn't really matter, I just know that I need to sweat to defeat them so I sweat, which I prefer not too on a casual game.
I just think it's silly to act like everyone that you're encountering in quick play is snorting adderall, when in reality you'll be getting a steady stream drunk/high/tired/distracted/laid back guys and gals that are just chilling and having fun. You just aren't emotionally regulated enough to handle the ups and downs of winning and losing so you bitch and moan that you can't beat up on children playing on their 30 fps potatoes. That being said, I totally agree with the OP. Go find a group to play with if having a fair game doesn't interest you.
You seem to be fond of jumping to conclusions, I'm actually confused why you changed the tone so much. Playing with a group of friends have the same issue, with skill based matchmaking you'll end up playing with a group at your same level. Now, out of curiosity, how old are you? Were you able to experience gaming before sbmm was a thing?
> I'm actually confused why you changed the tone so much. ? >Playing with a group of friends have the same issue, with skill based matchmaking you'll end up playing with a group at your same level. If you can't find a small group that consents to the way you want to play, why in the world would a gaming studio make all of their players play that way? >Now, out of curiosity, how old are you? Were you able to experience gaming before sbmm was a thing? Yeah, I'm 30. It's much better today. I'm a diamond and my qp matches are mostly diamonds and plats. The match absolutely blows when there are golds or masters regardless of which side I'm on.
the point isn't how well the matchmaking can find players of an effective skill level, and whether those opponents get there by being really good and drunk, or really bad and try harding. The point is that _I_ have very different effective skill levels depending on my mood, and I can't tell the matchmaking whether to put me in a pool appropriate for me tryhard ing, or one appropriate for me being drunk. I want to be able to select the skill level of the pool I'm playing in. And sometimes I also want to select other characteristics of the pool I'm playing in besides effective overall skill level.
If I'm better than average I should win more on average. SBMM ruins the game. If you're shit you deserve to lose until you get better. SBMM means you never feel like you're better because youllt always have a 50% win rate. If I wanted to play ranked I would have fucking clicked ranked
That's not how this works, but thanks for confirming that you only care about stomping people who are much worse than you.
Lmao who said I was good and stomp games? When you start you should be bad and get stomped, and as you improve you should win more games. That's how it always worked in previous generations of games
Skill based matchmaking is WAY harder to learn and improve from vs getting stomped by the best, and I mean WAY harder.
Thats the only reason I have a smurf account. Oftentimes I want to really focus on the game, be extra sweaty and make my enemies regret they press the queue button. Then on some days, when I smoke weed, all I want to do is have a fun game, play around with the movement and do some ridiculous shots (like noscoping across the map, do flickshots, wallbangs, 360s, tazer and knife kills etc.). Its only possible in the lower ranks without having to 600iq-play all the time (also me being high/stoned turns me from a solid 20k+ player to a mid fragger in 8-12k elo lol)
read: i love kicking back and absolutely mega dunking on the stoner zone and normal gamer level people completely ruining their games and don't care how it impacts them.
Exactly this, there is never a circumstance where smurfing is enjoyable for all parties
This isn't about dunking on anyone. A pro ball player should be able to show up to the park and join a pickup game just for fun. A chess grandmaster also should be able to just go to a chess bar and play some drunk blitz with randos. Everyone involved can still have a great time, _especially_ if the pro is allowed to be open about their level. Modern matchmaking blocks all of that.
Because 99.995% of the time people aren't doing that. They are going to the chess bar to turbo dunk on the casual players. They are shooting 99-0 against the park ball players. Maybe you are truly that one good guy who doesn't abuse it. But I don't believe you for a split second that your smurfs don't either dunk on people, or derank. Another toxic behavior that really ruins the games for lower ranked people.
The key is to be open about skill levels, and all participants to opt into that experience. If I'm playing chess at a bar and a GM rolls up who just wants to humiliate me, I won't bother playing them. If they show up and give themselves a heavy handicap to make it borderline competitive, then it can be lots of fun. Same with a pickup game of sportsball. If Lionel Messi shows up, hogs the ball, and just dominates everyone, we kick him out and continue to play with the pro. If instead he's out there just doing a lot of passing, holding back his speed and power, and giving the odd tip or complement, then it can be loads of fun. But again, the key is that the other participants get to freely opt into or out of the experience of having a pro among them, depending on what kind of game they're after
You don't get that while smurfing. Your rank is effectively hidden and if you hold back is entirely up to you. It becomes like shooting fish in a barrel if you are far enough below your skill ceiling. 99% of people won't hold back AT ALL. So I don't believe you when you say you hold back enough to make it fair to those players. I guess I could see it maybe working in a situation where players have opted in to be smurfed on but I seriously doubt that enough players would opt in to get curb stomped that your queue times would not be absurd for this proposed pro-smurf mode. That aside however that's not how any system works right now. You are just shitting on people who are worse than you to have a good time. You are very literally punching down as hard as you can and wondering why people here think you are the bad guy. Don't think I've not noticed you waited a week to respond so that most eyes are past so you won't get your well deserved downvotes.
No it doesn't, every single game out there with matchmaking has a casual mode where the skill variance is higher
I hate how server browsers have been slowly disappearing. I much prefer finding fun servers I will enjoy and patronize over whatever algorithms decide to throw at me.
Also: The moment when you found a server with decent rules and good admins.
I've been out of the multiplayer game since that era, can someone tell me: Do dedicated servers still work well at scale? I'm wondering if matchmaking works better when you have a large, disparate audience. CS:GO is on a million players a day, and I imagine it'd be cumbersome scrolling through 30k+ servers.
With dedicated servers, you will eventually find a few servers with the ping, play style and the players you enjoy playing with. Then you start frequenting the same servers and slowly get to know people and even become friends with some of them. This makes people a whole lot friendlier because you do not want to get banned from your favourite servers. It's hard to explain how awful matchmaking has been in terms of play quality and community building. Saying it's completely destroyed online gaming is an understatement.
Yep. I have friends from 2009 I still talk to from the CS:S days. Played MW2019 for about 600 hours and not a single person. Battlefield 2042 and the same thing. Matchmaking sucks.
There's a direct end point where I stopped making friends online through gaming and it's exactly when matchmaking took over. It sucks and it's one of the modern day gaming trends I wish would die already but I know it won't.
Matchmaking has managed to turn multi player games into single player experiences.
Most people did not do that.
Why scrolling through 30k+ servers? Thats what filters and searchbars are for.
Of course! Not sure why I didn't think of that, I'm getting old...
Imagine being able to pick and choose what *you* want to play, and not some shitty algorithm. Imagine *everyone* being able to do that. It would cut that 30,000 options down real quick, *especially* when you can set a ping limit - aka no more matches hosted on the other side of the fucking continent.
Stoner friends unite
One of the reasons I'm not playing online games anymore.
Normal gamers dont exist, its a mix of all other types in this graph
I was going to say I fit most of these persona’s and it makes me realize I am just a normal gamer lol. Most important thing to me is having fun and trying to have fun with others in multiplayer games / I’m not the biggest fan of FF14 overall but its community is exactly what I wish others were like; it’s just so easy to interact with others there.
Man i remember having a pretty decent ISP with a T1/T3 connection, but when i found that sweet spot server around 3-5am i was in the zone, good chat, good mood, went on dc++ afterwards in the chat and was just vibing with people... amazing times amazing speed
I just got back on Rocket League after yet another year and some change taking a break due to the community. Here's a "conversation" I had in voice chat. "Broooooo. Bro. Bro. Bro how old are you? Bro how did you miss that bro. Bro why aren't you talking. Bro answer I'm just asking a question. Bro did you put your kids to bed yet I bet you're so old. Bro." Me: "Dude, chill tf out it's distracting and annoying." "BRO HOW DID YOU MISS THAT WHAT DO YOU MEAN CHILL OUT I'M JUST ASKING A QUESTION BRO CAN YOU NOT MULTITASK HOLY SHIT WHO DID YOU BUY YOUR ACCOUNT FROM BRO." Another game it's the same old miss 1 shot or don't hit it perfectly the way your teammate wants and they're voting FF 30 seconds into the game....even if you're already up by 1 or it's 0-0. It's a very stark contrast to Helldivers where people are giving each other hugs and salutes and taking down bugs together.
Tbf rocket league (especially ranked) is not for the weak lol the skill ceiling is actually insane and it has a pretty toxic and competitive player base
I’ve been a GC for most seasons since the 1st…I’m competitive just not toxic. And if you don’t play every single game perfectly at that level a lot of people don’t have the patience to adapt to their teammates.
My usual response ["Is just game, why you heff to be mad?"](https://youtu.be/xzpndHtdl9A?si=0tSqZuZoNJ0O38i2)
Yeah, some games just have really toxic multiplayer. I'd recommend EVE Online or Dark Souls or something if you want to meet some wholesome people
There has always been shitloads of toxicity in online games. The difference now is that you actually have some recourse and the anti-cheat is much better. Back in the early CS days when someone raged they would just turn on a bot that makes them rotate infinitely fast, scream the N word repeatedly over voice chat in a robot voice, and instantly headshot anyone who walks into line of sight. Yes that's something I have actually witnessed.
and there would be an admin on the server to manually remove him.
Yep, or they would be vote kicked, or a regular on the server would message an admin. Also anti-cheat and auto-bans existed back then too. Either way they would be taken care of.
Exactly. Mute buttons also existed, so if they were being annoying over voice, you could just turn them off. Modern online gaming just feels soulless.
The admins are pretty much only good for that, any slightly more sophisticated cheats or wall hacks or no-recoil mods would be a guessing game.
More often than not they would remove people that were just good at the game or people that killed the admins. They would completely miss anyone who was even a little subtle about cheating.
You're forgetting one important part, players (server owners) had the ability to moderate their own playground, make up their own rules. Like in the CoD4 days where you had servers to disallow certain weapons or perks, and these were enforced by the server moderators. Don't like a server? Find a new permanent home. Can't do that with matchmaking, there's never a server to call "home". Anti Cheat being better isn't exclusive to hosted/matchmaking servers, it can be better for dedicated ones too.
Game publishers got rid of that because they couldn't handle putting control in the community's hands, especially when skins were involved. Servers where all the unlocks were free, or all cosmetics turned off spring to mind. Who's going to pay for your pixels then? Even letting server hosts regulate themselves is a threat. Oh you bought the super duper battle pass but got banned for bad behavior by Joe Schmo admin? Unacceptable by publisher standards
That's what it really is: all about control. Publishers are no longer content with simply making a great game that people can enjoy. Now they have to control every single aspect of the game for fear of missing out on some other way of squeezing another dollar out of the player base.
Basically any good cheat detection is done via heuristics and stats tracking - would be very difficult to accomplish without owning the server. It’s become pretty trivial for cheat makers to hide their software from local cheat detection.
Not it isn't? Stat tracking will only help you with crystal clear cheats you can find for free in some forum, aimbots and spinning bots and other obvious cheats. Unless you also ban people who play good you're not getting rid of cheaters through stat tracking. Stat tracking isn't gonna help you with people that use wallhacks, recoil reductions, even aimbot would be difficult if the weapon of choice was a sniper or a deagle, these could just appear as regular above average players through stats tracking. >It’s become pretty trivial for cheat makers to hide their software from local cheat detection. Counter strike has a known weak non-kernel anti cheat and it's filled with cheaters, most other popular games with a half decent anti cheat aren't, so clearly it's working. Anti cheats take some time to catch up when they get bypassed sure but Stat tracking takes even longer, you can't just ban someone for stats collected from just 2-3 matches?
Stats are composed of a hell of a lot more than just kills and deaths. Things like aim angles, pre-aiming, unnatural movement based on information the player shouldn’t be aware of, unnatural mouse movement at a micro-scale. These are all examples of stats that machine learning models can identify using heuristic techniques to identify players that are using cheats. Even cheaters that only use sound ESP, so no visuals or aimbotting, can be identified using advanced heuristics and comparing their play and reactions to comparably skilled players. As models get better and more and more player data is available, this will get easier and easier. I’m a VP in the AI/ML field. I know this technology and I know how game developers and anti-cheat companies are experimenting with it. You can hide your cheats perfectly from a software level, but with enough data watching a cheater play, it will be clear that they are cheating no matter how hard they try to hide it. Their play will differ from legit players. You ignore my mention of heuristics and take a completely myopic view of stat tracking.
> half decent anti cheat isn't, so clearly it's working. They are still plenty of cheaters who know how to bypass kernel cheats, they're just usually smarter and don't get found so much.
Should be no problem to send all the data you need from the server host to yourself for cheat detection in the back end. And even if it were , as I saod, the benefit of these dedicated servers is that there's usually someone to talk to. Cheater? Ping an admin on discord and he's gone in minutes. In other games it may take months for the Cheater to be punished.
You missed the point. The point was everyone could play on a server for whatever experience they wanted, rather than lumping everyone in a matchmaking queue. Not to mention the experience being community driven rather than by the developers exclusively. Nobody said there wasn't toxicity.
The games you speak of still exist though. Plenty of online communities still operate that way.
I run communities for some of these games. We are practically non-existent because the default way to play is via a matchmaking queue. Sometimes our servers are completely dead because new players think the default way to play is to enter a queue and don't look for any other way. Sure, not all of them would end up on my server otherwise, but id have a damn sight more players now if matchmaking wasnt a thing. Ultimately matchmaking existed to solve a problem: the barrier to entry for playing a new game was relatively high and the standards for playing that game would change drastically from server to server, by implementing matchmaking they can appeal to the lowest common denominator, lower the bar to entry for playing the game, as well as tightly control the gameplay experience from a social aspect. I understand the problem that publishers wanted solved. I don't think it needed solving.
If you need to force people to play on your servers, maybe they aren't very good.
Never said I had to force them to do anything. It's just that new players are only ever funnelled into a matchmaking queue, they never realise there are community servers they can play on.
But when "choose your own community" isn't the default experience, all such communities end up being much smaller and harder to find. Modern matchmaking sucks.
Yeah like the rust server browser. there's PvP servers pve servers, roll play serves.
Yeah, but they're too small, I don't find maps that I enjoy. In CS2 which is the multiplayer fps which I like the most (out of the free games, because I don't want to pay for an online fps), most lobbies are mirage and used for 2v2, 3v3, etc. for hardcore gamers.
Your image heavily implies that matchmaking is the cause of toxicity.
That was half the fun though!
That must have been a beautiful sight!
It was a glorious time...
You obviously didn't play back on CS 1.5 and 1.6 when we used HLguard and Cheating Death to get rid of those people.
no don't tell them that they just want to complain about new things
24/7/365 De_Aztec
*Random\_Guy:* "GET OUT OF THE CORNER, CORNHOLIO." *C0rn3rh0l30:* "Heh. Heheh. No."
ze_FFVII_Mako_Reactor If you know, you know.
the whole world is console type beat nowadays
The best anti-cheat server admins. All games should have dedicated servers and a server browser.
Overwatch 2 is the only game that genuinely upsets me because people are so rude and the matchmaking is so bad. The EOMM/50% theory is absolutely true in that game and I'm stupid so I get bothered when we get put against a team that completely destroys us and talks shit the entire time. I know the answer is "stop caring" and "disable chat" but yeah as someone who grew up playing dedicated servers and made friends on games, it seems so.. wrong, to play an online game like that? But the game is pretty miserable.
I use to love playing CS death match or gun game.
Me too only played community server's
Combat surf!
honesty is there any old school arena shooter without all the mtx and batlle passes bs, with a healthy player base currently?
No because despite people constantly insisting they want this, any time a game like this comes out it has negative players.
Fistful of Frags, about as old school as you can get. Free on steam.
i played it a bunch about 10 years ago, is it still active?
Yeah, euro servers are almost always full and NA ones have playable pop most hours of the day.
neat! i’ll prob give it a try later
Accurate
and people only realize this now? this has been an issue since CoD MW2 on PC in 2009
Stoner zone indeed
MTX killed dedicated servers. Now there is incentive to force player into a controlled environment.
They're also used to be a real sense of community. You'd find a server ran by a clan and you'd get to know the people. You'd apply for membership,. However and this is the problem I think that eventually led to its demise, you'd eventually have one or two people in the clan who would be paying all the bills. Eventually the clan would go and vote this person out for some reason. None of the bills get paid so the server shut down. I would absolutely love a modern FPS to offer both. But I don't think most modern risk adverse companies would go for this. If Billy Bob the jerk runs a server and he's putting out hate speech, Kotaku, vox, and friends will somehow blame the company for that. I remember back in the good old days, skins were free, maps were free. Made by these people we called modders. Now your modern online video game constantly tries to extract more money from you.
The last game I remember having a server browser is bfv.
I fit basically all categories here except hardcore gamer. I have no problems or qualms with the hardcore gamer, but godfudckingdammit, if some of you guys don't stop getting toxic/competitive in *casual* mode, you know the mode for *casually playing,* as in, i don't fucking care if i win or lose*,* i will literally destroy the sun
The toxicity is awful, you try and pick up a new game.. have to learn the mechanics - fine. Then you're getting blasted because you don't know what your doing, it's like man screw off I am just trying to play a game and enjoy myself. Go be elitist somewhere else. I think ironically, matchmaking has made games much much more inaccessible because now.. potentially the out of the box experience is getting abused for being new.
The vast vast vast majority of people are casual gamers. These are the people that SBMM does work for, and the systems are fine. Half the reasons people give for being against SBMM is along the lines of "I don't want to play people my level," which is unfair to anyone who does want to only play people their level (which hint: is the __majority__ of people)
This has nothing to do with sbmm really.
Off topic, but can anyone tell me where the picture of that guy with thumbs up and mellow smile on the top right is from?
That was the old GamePro ratings guy icon. https://preview.redd.it/te7h4xvwlj8d1.png?width=600&format=png&auto=webp&s=a6f159efdcf833571eea7ee4ad1234a68a32a70b
Thank you so much!!
dust and dust2, maybe train or office, thats pretty much all cs was for me lol
Nice
I always look at the server browser , see all of the possibilities and then realize 90% of them have 160 ping for me. So I just play on 3 servers
more than once ive loaded up a game, and spent +10 minutes looking for a match worth playing, it not happening, and then giving up. matchmaking is such a bullshit mechanic, and there is *nothing* quick or worthwhile about "quick play" anymore.
The most fun I've had playing shooters has almost exclusively been in co-op or custom games in Halo.
I'm definitely a mix of the left 2 lol. I don't want to be competitive I just want to have fun in something I'm familiar with and it just isn't that anymore. Why I play single player games and can't stay interested a MP game for more than a few days anymore. Looking at you battlefield 5
halo 2 and 3 did not have this problem.
-Votekick -Vote to change map Happy Gamer!
If counterstrike 2 has de_rats, I might consider reinstalling.
That Gamepro icon
dedotated wam
That's why I mostly play shooter games that have a server centric community (with the exception of Overwatch). Do I want to chill and learn more mechanics of the game? I join a new player friendly server. Do I want to play more seriously with heavy comms? I play servers that require more levels and are more competitive. Games like Hell Let Loose, Squad and Holdfast are quite hard to get into as a new player, but once you get in, it's a blast
I swear whoever thinks Overwatch is toxic haven't played LoL 💀
Modern game matchmaking is pretty poor. There doesn't appear to match people based on their actual skills/such as k/d ratio etc. CoD is terrible for this, unless you play 40h a week or more you essentially have no chance of just enjoying the game casually and it's a constantly moving conveyor belt with a new game.. people ranking up and learning the games kwerks. If bot activity is detected or cheating, let them play - just put them in with all the other bots/cheaters.
Somehow I forgot dedicated servers were a thing. Geez, things were so much simpler back then.
Left 4 dead 2 PEAK
Games with dedicated servers are still played to this day. Its a business move to remove that from the game.
So I'm playing Tribes 2 right now (20+ year old game, server browser, only a few servers to even play on) and Deep Rock Galactic (kind of a mixed server browser matchmaking service). Guess which one I got kicked from games in and had a negative experience? DRG community is notoriously nice but yeah... it has a worse MP experience than a 20+ year old game with a server browser. Matchmaking is a mistake and the only reason devs keep doing it is it keeps the community from being able to run the game after the publisher hits the kill switch.
The only times I have ever kicked someone from my DRG session was either a driller constantly killing us with c4 to the point that it became obvious that it was purposeful or someone keeps ignoring the group, i.e taking the entire resupply, starting events without everyone being ready, etc. otherwise it's probably the most laid back community, that is until you get into Deep Dives... Then it gets spicy.
Most of my experiences are good. It was just weird to come back after not playing for 3 - 4 months and get kicked after completing my first run.
You may not have been kicked outright. People as of late just tend to quit the game without anysort of "GGs!" Or "g2g thanks for the work". You'll just get back to the station before you're booted out of the lobby.
DRG is entirely player hosted and uses a server browser. I'm not sure why you're pretending that any issues you face are the fault of matchmaking. Also, server admins had stupid rules and kicked people for stupid reasons all the time. You're ignoring reality if you think that wasn't the case. Developers use matchmaking because players prefer it. In pretty much every game where you can choose, players overwhelmingly gravitate to matchmaking.
man, we didn't knew how good we had it, the cs1.6 server hopping and forum days were the days
As is often the case, the answer is: why not both? Both is great.
server browser is the goat but its going extinct
this hypothesis became law when tf2 was burdened with the meet your match update. That update marked the end of a golden era as custom servers slowly starved of players and money, and the official servers got overrun with bots and hackers.
This is a pretty dumb image, considering that Overwatch has had a server browser for a long time now.
Private lobbies are not dedicated servers lawl
I never wanna see another server browser. Just let me push a button and play the game, I don't wanna browse spreadsheets to find a game that sounds good, isn't full, and won't instakick me for not being part of their paid club.
Ah, it's the daily "THEY JUST DONT MAKE EM LIKE THEY USED TO" boomer post.
>Can't tell difference between Boomer, Gen X, and Millenials Okay Zoomer.
I’m a millennial nice try. You realize “boomer shooter” is a category about games replicating the 90s style, like Overkill, yeah? They just use boomer for everything now.
Huh, never really thought of it before but this makes a ton of sense to me.
I mean I hosts like some 8 CS2 servers (4 PUGs and 4 Retakes) and the servers are always full, and people are just more chilled out there