[LMYahooTFY]

This isn't the reason.

The reason it's necessary is because players want to be able to play with/against other players around the world. Matchmaking requires some form of anti-cheat. Running your own server as admin can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking that players enjoy today.

And cheating is an arms race. It's just hacking. You either preserve game integrity or you're going to have cheaters.

[LanceH]

We lost a lot of other things as well. Like modding and especially maps.

It doesn't matter how good the game developers are, someone out there is could make a better map.

The studios took control of everything, and their answer is to rootkit our computers, and to buy more DLC if we want another map.

Personally, I don't accept the premise that such studio control is necessary for me to have fun playing a game.

I especially miss custom maps.

[Rohansi]

This has nothing to do with anti-cheat. I work on Rust and most servers are hosted by the community and there is a good modding+custom map scene. The game has an anti-cheat because it's a big target for cheaters.

[autoexec]

This is the truth of it. If you can unlock all the on-disc DLC or create and use your own maps, mods, skins, etc. it risks the money companies want to take from you after you've already paid the $60-$80 for the incomplete game itself.

Anti-cheat is about protecting DLC profits as much as it is anything else.

It's a shame too because we got so much good content from random people who just loved the games and wanted to create neat things for them. It was one way that some people started their careers in the video game industry and it spawned a lot of other websites and communities around sharing, reviewing, and creating all that free content.

[pnw]

There are hundreds of popular games with mod support. See https://mod.io/g

If anything, we are in a golden age of mods!

[LMYahooTFY]

I agree with you in sentiment and am very nostalgic for the pre-monoculture days, but I also acknowledge that competitive games are a multi-billion dollar industry, and trying to moderate a game with millions of players in a distributed environment is just a non-starter.

You reject the premise that such control is necessary for your idea of fun.

But millions of players enjoy ranked matchmaking enough that without aggressive anti cheat you will wind up with cheaters.

I hate the root kits as well, but if you spend any time playing Valorant vs CS, you will see the difference. If I play CS consistently I'll get cheaters once or twice a week. In Valorant it's almost unheard of by comparison. It sucks, but that's just what's happening.

Do I wish I at least had the option in Valorant or whatever to host a server? Absolutely. Do I think they use the rootkits maliciously? No, generally not. Do I think studios are disincentivized to provide server hosting due to DLC or microtransactions? Definitely. But I also think there's often also a game integrity component. All of these things can be true simultaneously.

[ikekkdcjkfke]

Make a list of all game genres and modes that sprung out of player modification

[jsheard]

> The reason it's necessary is because players want to be able to play with/against other players around the world. Matchmaking requires some form of anti-cheat. Running your own server as admin can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking that players enjoy today.

Case in point, Counter Strike is a rare example of a popular game which supports both the "modern" matchmaking paradigm and the classic community server paradigm... and for better or worse the playerbase overwhelmingly prefers matchmaking.

[hamdingers]

> and the playerbase overwhelmingly prefers matchmaking

The server browser is buried under a couple layers of obtuse menus (and, at present, is completely broken on my SteamOS machine) while matchmaking is obvious and straightforward. You cannot come to any reasonable conclusions about player preference given the way the UI drives players towards matchmaking and away from servers. If they were presented on equal footing you might have a point.

Consider also TF2. It launched as a server-based game, and in the years after matchmaking was added Valve went through many UX iterations designed to drive traffic to it before it was more popular.

[kartoffelsaft]

Counter Strike makes matchmaking far more prominent than community servers, so I don't think this is that good of an example. For a game like Team Fortress 2 where the options are presented more equally, It seems the players are closer to a 50/50 split. The reality is that most people follow the light patterns that get them in a game, which most modern multiplayer games make that matchmaking.

[thomastjeffery]

People are still playing Battlefield 4 (2013) on user-hosted servers. Right now.

The only way that "around the world" can be relevant is ping, and the best way to manage ping is by sorting a list of servers by ping.

Cheating is an arms race that no one needs to participate in. Moderation was a perfectly good workaround until major game studios decided to monopolize server hosting.

[LMYahooTFY]

What, 2000 players? 5000?

Moderating that game is multiple orders of magnitude off of major titles.

No Battlefield game is even in the top 100 of esports earnings.

[MetaWhirledPeas]

> can't give you the degree of competitive global ranking that players enjoy today

I'm curious to know how player stats and global rankings truly affect game adoption (not that you can accurately measure what I'm asking for). It seems to me the more popular the game the less it matters because everyone becomes a small fish in a big pond. Rank one billion out of a gajillion. The games where it matters more would be the smaller games, which have less of a cheating problem to begin with.

I do agree however that you won't get the adoption without centralization, if only because centralization is exactly where all the money resides, via DLC and other nonsense. Therefore centralization is exactly where all the marketing money goes. And without marketing you don't usually get blockbuster games. So expecting the rootkits to go away is a lost cause, until client-side rendering goes away, at least.

That may be the answer to playing these rootkit titles on Linux: just stream it. I know it's somewhat lame, and I know it adds latency, but I seem to recall a recent demonstrate of a service where the latency is very minimal. Clearly I'm a bit out of touch with the state of the art, heh.

[ItsMonkk]

Yeah, this is pretty clear. The community for any competitive game if you are a member of the top 100 players is always amazing. These players play the most, they end of seeing each other over and over, and you build up a rapport with the other players and can start to play against specific peoples play-styles.

However, for the vast vast majority of the player-base who is top 50% in skill, the fat normal distribution nearly guarantees that most of the people they play against will never be seen again. And therefore there is no harm for them not to be toxic to them, so most people only ever experience toxicity in online competitive games.

Server browser games solve this because players end up with "home" servers where they come back to over and over, and over time build communities who do the same. This was taken away from the players when we moved to matchmaking, and many in the player-base have a bias against matchmaking because of it.

But this is in no way required, and merely a result of gaming companies to do any work on this front. It would be extremely easy for these games to add an arbitrary community tag to the matchmaker that would attempt to put people in games with players that they have not previously reported. The matchmaker might take a little bit more time, but since these players are in the fat normal distribution, their average matchmaking times will still be incredibly low.

[duskwuff]

WRT player stats and rankings: I'm inclined to disagree. Rankings in small team-based game communities tend to be pretty noisy. Matchmaking often ends up constrained by the number of online players searching for a game at the same time, so the teams may not be well balanced, and the outcome of the match can be decided by the presence of a single highly skilled player who happened to be searching for a match at the right moment. The resulting rankings aren't necessarily a good measure of player skill.

Larger games have the luxury of being able to place players into teams consisting entirely of other players of similar skill levels, against teams of similar composition. The results of those games are a better reflection of those players' skill.

[beeflet]

The "players run their own servers" model has worked fine in TF2. If you played community-run servers, you never ran into the bot issue.

There are even ranked, private competitive leagues like TF2Center

[t-writescode]

How did it work in the early Steam (CS 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, CS:S) and GameSpy days?

[organsnyder]

I think a big part of it is the stakes were just lower. There wasn't money and careers in it the same way there is with egaming now.

[LMYahooTFY]

More distributed and more manual. More administrative overhead. More localized culture we all get nostalgic for. Much more effort to play against peer competitors.

It's the same phenomenon you see in many sectors.

Access is democratized and the friction/barrier to play is dramatically lowered/free, and the localization is diluted or non existent and just a monoculture.

[babypuncher]

PunkBuster and later VAC were commonplace. Anti-cheat middleware is not new by any stretch.

[salawat]

Matchmaking isn't worth rooting my machine. Give me a dedicated server to host for folks, and we'll work out an equilibrium eventually.

[JulianHC]

Not necessary, case in point skill-based-matchmaking got a lot of blow back when studios want to implement it.

[thayne]

> Matchmaking requires some form of anti-cheat.

Does it though? Unless winning has real-world rewards, does it really matter that much if you are playing against someone who is cheating, if with cheating, they are evenly matched against you? Assuming the matchmaking works well, people who cheat would end up getting matched with either other people who cheat, or people who are good enough to compete against cheaters.

[LMYahooTFY]

Not sure how to understand these questions. Have you ever played in a competitive game of any type, virtual or real?

A cheater isn't evenly matched against you. No one is good enough to compete against wallhacks/aimbots, never mind that it shouldn't matter. It ruins the experience, ruins games, ruins the spirit of competition and sport.

[0x1ch]

UGC Highlander and the countless CS pug servers show otherwise, to some extent.