Comment by hamdingers 2 days ago
All true, but of course you're missing the player agency component that renders those issues moot. If any of the above happens, you can simply find another server.
Private games (now called "custom lobbies") were available back then too, they're not equivalent to a public server browser.
Back then at least you could do something about it. Now if there's an obvious cheater you just kinda sit there and take your L, and ask people to make reports.
Something you are explicitly punished for in modern matchmaking. Unless you want to be downranked or even temp banned you must suffer the cheater.
If you were playing on a server you owned or for which you had ban permissions, you could do something about it. Otherwise, you had to hope that an admin was online to ban the cheater. If no one was around to take action, your option was to... sit there, take your L, and ask people to make reports (to the admins). You had the option to hop around between servers until you found one that didn't have cheaters, but is that all that different from just quitting back to matchmaking and hoping you find a match without cheaters?
Edit to add: I'm not disputing that kernel-level anticheat is bad; I agree that it is. I don't think it helps to try and hearken back to a golden age of PC gaming that didn't really exist. Maybe it was easier for server admins to manage because player populations were smaller back then, but that's about all that would have made things "better."
You were not helpless if the admin wasn't on, votekick has existed for 25+ years.
Believe it or not us old folks who played during this time had ways to address these issues.
They are not functionally equivalent, unless there are games I'm not familiar with where custom lobbies are published in a list for strangers to join. Normally a custom lobby implies invite only.
Not everyone is interested in a "fair and balanced competitive match" where you're guaranteed to win no more and no less than 50% of the time. I actually find that intolerably boring.
> They are not functionally equivalent, unless there are games I'm not familiar with where custom lobbies are published in a list for strangers to join.
Lots of the mosts played competitive games have that, or third party websites/discords that have links to custom lobbies.
Being able to make friends off-platform and then play with them is obviously not what we're talking about.
I have to conclude you're unfamiliar with what multiplayer gaming was like when servers were the norm.
> The problem with player hosted servers is that it was very hard to get a fair and balanced competitive match
Playing against overwhelming odds has its own kind of charm. I once spend days just sabotaging the top players on some gun game servers, only wining myself once or twice. Games against friends with various fun handicaps and flat out abuse of any knowledge you could gain from playing against the same people repeatedly - what good is a hidding spot when everyone knows you will be there 50% of the time.
"Fair and balanced" games against completely random people are just missing something for me.
This is something matchmaking games totally miss which keeps them from being truly competitive in the way sports or old games were: a competitive community. You need other players with known identities to compare yourself against on a consistent basis.
Of course, classic competitive institutions had problems as well (“he’s very competitive” is not necessarily a nice description of a person!), but they seemed more enjoyable that this matchmaking stuff.
I hated wasting a whole half hour server hopping until I found one that didn't suck
They are functionally equivalent for the player. The problem with player hosted servers is that it was very hard to get a fair and balanced competitive match, where now it's extremely common with matchmaking on servers hosted by the game company.