This is a thing that's bugged me for a long time: the death of dedicated game servers. Game servers had to be run by communities, and they were gateways and feeding grounds for those communities.

However, games don't typically use dedicated servers anymore; they use matchmaking. You're right -- matchmaking means you gather your friends first. More insidiously, it means you probably won't see the same players again, and even if you did, there's nowhere to find them again later. There's no community to join.

> More insidiously, it means you probably won't see the same players again, and even if you did, there's nowhere to find them again later. There's no community to join.

This actually reflects a change I remember WoW making and finding really hard to accept. They changed the rules for "find a dungeon" such that you didn't match people on your own server. Which seems great - because now there's no need to wait 10 mins for a group to accumulate! No spamming in regional chats to see if anyone is interested. Brilliant non?

Except when you made groups with people on your own server, you bumped into them again. You were probably a similar level/gear. You might add them as a friend and then ping them for instances because they were competent (especially if tank/healer). Heck, if they're in a guild maybe you think it'd be a cool group of people to play with or vice versa you might try and add them to your guild.

When every person you meet in game is a "single serving friend" there's no point making an effort. People will treat those they play with as essentially NPCs helping towards a quest because why wouldn't you?

I refuse to believe that it made people more engaged (considering the friends I made were a good chunk of the motivation to keep playing)

I quit WOW at about that time, I played from release, the golden days were TBC && WoTLK, but the rot set in when 40 mans were retired. Doing a 40 man and getting the gear from a 40 man was a defining ambition of guilds, not many guilds managed to set themselves up to do regular 40 man runs and you had to ladder up the 40 man content when you did - molten core and on and up. This pressure and ambition drove really strong social behaviour; act up and you'd be kicked, and that's your chance of the end game gone. Tolerate idiots in the guild and risk a split or a leak of defectors. The problem was that the spreadsheets at Blizzard showed that only about 5% of the players were getting to experience the end game. So... they went to 25 man, then they opened 25 man to pickup queues and the drivers for pve guilds faded.

I readily agree that old school WoW was much more social and fun, but personally, most of the enjoyment of the game for me was only possible because I was a 20-something with no spouse, no kids, and no real responsibilities outside of showing up to work during the day.

Now that I'm a practicing Adult®, I still kinda dream of WoW Classic being what we all remember the original game being, but I also know that if I got that involved in planning and running raids now, people who rely on me to be responsible would suffer. I'm content with being part of the 95% that don't have that kind of free time to commit to planning before actually playing a game.

Yes - there's no going back, life changes! It's like Rugby.

I used to enjoy Rugby, but I was 17, if I played Rugby now I would enjoy it. But I am glad it's available for 17 year olds who want a go.

One thought though, my guild has actually re-awoken in the last few months. I'm still on the mail list - as apparently was everyone else, and now people are talking about doing instances and so on. I couldn't have done it until recently, because I had small children - so as everybody knows, fugetaboutit. But, if WOW was in TBC state with some interesting new content I'm pretty sure I would jump in.

Part of this is the access to engagement within the game. As games rely more and more on multiplayer (think LoL/DotA, Overwatch, WoW Raids requiring a group), to get to the actual content you want you need to assemble a team, either programmatically via matchmaking or by existing friends.

And the waits can be very long in competitive scopes to have a good match. I can only speak from LoL as an example, but our group like most had people bounding around all levels of play, so matchmaking could take a long time. The team's MMR undoubtedly was an accurate representation, but this also probably meant there was a very narrow set of ready to go teams that were reasonably fair matches. Prior to Riot's heavy handed overhaul of the Matchmaking, this sometimes would result in some absolutely uneven matches (a bunch of Diamonds getting piled onto a group with 1 Diamond and several bronzes/unranked.

Pre-overhaul, it often mean a 20 minute stomp. Post-overhaul, it means waiting, sometimes 20 minutes+ to get a simple game, when most of us only have an hour or two spare.

It's a difficult balance for designers, and I don't envy what they have, but the nature of a lot of games has changed to require the participation. The logistical challenges of providing fair/balanced as well as fast matchmaking while still letting players play with their friends (however many they have) is a real hellish problem to solve, as the solutions are often at odds with one another.

“Convenience” or getting the player to get the next dopa hit, is not the way the real world is built.

The real world has slow periods and other issues which are usually where the various other aspects of humanity play out.

By definition, games and social media optimize for whatever measurables are measurable AND accretive to the bottom line.

On top of it, most of this current tech world is built on American sensibilities in terms of optimization and business models.

The rest of the human part of existence is.... not optimized for in this universe.

Also do note, people still figure out a way to make friends.

People end up recognizing each other even through random match making, or due to local lobbies.

It’s not all doom and gloom.

Yeah I was talking with some people about this a few days ago actually. The change is not entirely bad, though. For example, in my own case, I actually like the change. I'm not 22 years old anymore (as I was when Burning Crusade came out and I was at the height of my 'raiding career'). I don't have the time to join a raiding guild to see end-game content, and I don't have the time to sit in Stormwind spamming Trade to form groups for things. I like how the group finder makes it easier to just do the content and get some gear and experience the game without time commitment.

Of course nothing is free and as you've rightly pointed out it has come at the expense of the cohesion of individual server communities. The WoW Forums, back in the old days, were full of inter-server rivalries for raiders and when they brought in cross-realm matchmaking in the patch prior to BC there was some nice rivalry for PvP within server groups -- you could still only group with people from your own server but you would be matched against other servers. That's all gone now. It seems like it's impossible to know if you're even on your "own" server because of the way the phasing works now.

Anyway not sure where I'm going with this. tl;dr I agree with you but the change isn't entirely bad.

If you friend them through whatever walled-garden chat system that game has, then you might have a chance. But good luck getting conversions to a proper gaming community.

I think a lot of this has to do with how casual the gaming community has become. Not that there are fewer hardcore players, just that the very games that killed the dedicated servers (call of duty) also onboarded millions of casual gamers who felt like using gamespy to find "good" servers was too much effort.

Now there are so many casual gamers that you have almost no chance to find someone who deeply appreciates a game enough to join a community you are in. My internet statistics generator says that 1-in-10 is a good ratio for number of conversions 20 years ago. Now it's maybe 1-in-500.

And if the game is popular enough, then everyone's just going to use the subreddit to chat by default, and that's a clusterfuck of a topic all on its own.

I remember playing at a single server on CoD4 online. Because you went to the same server you didn't flame, because you would be playing with the same people the next time...

And lots came from that. I went to two LAN parties eventually with people from that server, after playing together and talking on TS for hours. It was a lot of fun and I miss that sense of community in games.

Now I click a button in League or Fortnite and they throw me in a lobby... Everyone is shit to each other because you never see the others again anyways.

Maybe it's just nostalgia though

It has kinda taken the fun out of video games for me, at least multiplayer. I used to have a few games where there was a server that I could join and find people I know but I don't even know where I'd begin to look these days.

And yeah I've tried games with matchmaking, mostly Dota and CS:GO but they are only good fun if you have friends going into a game, otherwise it feels like 9/10 times you end up with as you said, people that are awful to eachother.

I miss this so much. I used to play TF2 on a server that ran a single, somewhat obscure, map. Lots of randoms would drop by to try the map; some would stay and become regulars, some wouldn't. I did. The same regulars would be there every week, many of them every day. Some players were good, some not so good, nobody took it too seriously - we tried hard, but nobody got salty. There was the odd feud, but no griefing. They had alltalk voice chat on, and there was a constant stream of entertaining chit-chat. One guy would come on half-cut and start lecturing about physics. We had a half-joking clan tag, someone set up a website with a forum, there was a challenge match against an American clan at some point. Good times.

It's been rubbish since matchmaking came in.

I used to run a TF2 server that ran some stupid hack I found that played shitty music nonstop (GBS.fm) through a widget that loaded on the welcome screen. Lots of people hated it, but everyone kept coming back for how fun the vibe was.

So fun. I miss it too.

I feel like the death of dedicated servers has in part led to the rise in toxicity in games. In community servers, if someone was being rude or annoying they would get kicked. Nowadays you just hit the report button and hope eventually they are dealt with. In the meantime you're stuck with them until the next game.

They are not dead, but their numbers certainly diminished. There are still UT99, Jedi Knight II servers out there.

That's good and bad.

Good: You can finally play the game as it was meant to be. You could not find a decent server in CS 1.6 where you could play 5v5. You need additional sites/communities/XYZ (e.g. ESL) to play it. Similar with TF2 in the early days. Also, bad admins can't kick you anymore because you use a weapon they don't like. I could forgive such behaviour, but as games introduced some leveling or other statistic stuff, I can't. Just make your server unranked (nobody playing on these).

Bad: No sense of community. Like you said, you need friends first. Reports for cheating are useless, as you won't see that person again anyway.

The leveling and statistical stuff is so lame anyway. I feel like CS and TF, the point was to dick around and shoot people. It was cool because you bought half-life and could play these two totally different games (we referred to them as “total conversions” at the time).

The ranking stuff is all just trying to capitalize on esports, which is weird because the vast majority will never be that good anyway. It’s a big part of what makes various communities toxic rather than fun. Playing a game where winning doesn’t really matter vs. people dreaming of being paid to play video games. It’s turning something that was a fun sort of power fantasy to kill time in, into something misconstrued as a profession. (In the same way an average guy might believe Himself of the quality to play DB for the colts, without the ability to discern the obvious physical differences between himself and a guy who is 6’5”, can bench 450 pounds and run 30 miles an hour. It actively creates these sort of mean/ delusional types who are harder to laugh off than they would be in another arena.

What was the first thing to be called a "total conversion"? The Aliens: Total Conversion mod of Doom?

Yeah, definitely one of the doom mods.

I'm not familiar enough with the history as I was pretty young when doom came out. Hacking on Doom and Marathon mods was my first experience with programming of any sort.

FYI- MidAir is a new TRIBES like game that is using dedicated servers.

Same experience with TF2 and older games of course. You would get to know the regulars to particular servers. Internode #14 was my TF2 haunt, and it was always fun to have friends popping in and out.

Some of my favourite moments in Star Wars Galaxies were waiting for shuttles and just chatting with whoever was around.

That spontaneity with strangers is gone, but also the places you go regulalrly to just "be there" and enjoy others company seem to be gone too. Even going to a pub you find people are specifically with a small friendship circle and when they aren't they are on their phones trying to avoid the pang of solitude until their friends come back.

I think the contrast is most striking when you come from really community focused areas like university or even school, to realise that those kinds of communal situations are actually quite uncommon in an ordinary life.

To borrow a gaming term, I sometimes wonder if people haven't become too preoccupied min-maxing their social metrics and as such feel they don't have time for strangers. Everyone is content with having one or two okay friends and a few dozen more acquaintances they never speak to as a substitute for community.

TL;DR strong communities are hard to foster and hard to find, perhaps thanks to isolating technologies that undermine some of the common ground, such as matchmaking and groupless/roomless social tools.

I think the key distinction is the concept of "place".

TF2 has (or had) a concept of "place" in the form of named servers. That made it possible to encounter the same stranger repeatedly over time.

In contrast, Overwatch wants you to already know and specify your friends into their social-media graph and group up before going to a random/anonymous/ephemeral location. So you seldom knowingly encounter the same stranger twice.

> FFXIV

Thinking about an MMO, a "placeless" MMO would randomly assign you to a one of a great many small instances every time you log in. Eugh.

That's what I was imagining as well. There is no spatial link to see as common ground, and because you can't count on seeing them again you can't get to know them organically over time.

I notice it with stores I go to, I am horribly predictable with food places but because of that I can form good relationships with the people working there. They know I will be in again so they can afford to care more and get to know me.

Even here, I notice familiar name tags and I get to look forward to people's responses on certain topics I can guess they will be interested in.

Those experiences are harder to find online now and especially in games.

Fun annecdote, I found my first software job through Counter Strike Source, I played the same server for months and one guy would knofe me in th same spot at least once a session. He ended up having a software company and gave me an opportunity.

With games like Destiny, "placeless" MMOs are already starting to become a thing.

Same with GTA Online.

“Places” is exactly how I think of making new friends in adulthood irl.

Meatspace, the new spatially aware social networking site. No installation required. Make friends where your feet are!

I'd like to make a complaint that Meatspace is inaccessible for n00bs and amputee character classes. Also, higher level characters seem to be stopping new players from leveling up.

Once again, Reddit has beat us to the punch:

https://www.reddit.com/r/outside/

The smallness and novelty of the internet made it more of a community. If you played TF2 in 2008, I would say the interests of each player is more homogenous and compatible compared to Overwatch in 2018.

I think this is one factor at play. The other is the shift from desktop to mobile, from community participation to content creation or consumption - almost mutually exclusive.

Finally, deprioritization of the identity (Reddit, Hacker News, many forums, even Medium to some extent) doesn't help either.

In terms of gaming, it's also the result of a shift from dedicated servers to matchmaking algorithms.

On dedicated servers, a community of 'regulars' forms through repeated interactions.

Modern matchmaking is a more disposable approach - here's a set of players that you'll be up against for 10 minutes, and then you'll never see them again.

And leads to "toxic" behavior. If you behaved poorly in a dedicated server environment you could be banned from multiple servers in one go as each clan might host multiple servers. Eventually all that would be left for those people would be a handful of lawless servers, enough threat of punishment to deter shitty behavior, not enough of an impetus to buy a new cd key and reimpose yourself on others. In practice, most people just behaved better.

It is bizarre to see riot and blizzard run around in circles trying to combat their toxicity problem... its your meat grinder matchmaking system.

As it turns out, matching people against those who are exactly their skill level isn't what you want to do.

Going down the rabbit hole a bit further, I was always a bit pissed off with the 'match at exact skill level' method.

The best thing I ever did to progress in skill in a game was to play with/against people far better than me. I don't want to learn how to beat people who are only as good as I am; I want to learn the techniques and skills to beat the people who are at the top of the game.

And lets be honest — thinking back to how a typical game in Team Fortress 2 went — sometimes just the complete and utter satisfaction of having an awesome killing streak at the expense of a bunch of n00bs (and after such a round the server would automatically rebalance the teams, so everyone gets a chance to meet their match).

I agree with this idea. The problem, I think, is that you can't choose what kind of game you get. Lots of times I want to have a reasonable chance at winning, but now and then I want to play really good people and see how they play. You can't ever choose to do this in current matchmaking schemes, and there should be a way to do that.

I agree with you for the most part about the matchmaking stuff, but one lucky thing I've found while playing Heroes of the Storm is that if you play consistently at a certain time of day that isn't common like 7am-noon EST you can start to see a number of names over and over more frequently both on your team and opposing team. Eventually you start adding people as friends who did awesome and then they invite their friends and you add them if they were good and now I've got a slew of people who are as serious and/or as skilled about the game as I am, whereas for the longest time I played solo.

It's still not the same, but it's cool when you start to see the same names over and over, it makes you feel like the world went from an endless mass to something with size boundaries and you can tell who some of the other hardcore players are. You can hate them for always being too good or playing the same character and know what to expect, and then eventually they are a friend of a friend and then a friend.

In a similar vein, now that voice chat is there by default it can be easier to get to know people and connect or be repelled. People you respected as good players turned out to be super annoying weiners on mic, while others just regular dudes or gals talking about their life. It definitely feels like it brought a new angle to things.

I’ve also felt this experience when it comes to content creation for games.

I missed the modding communities in the late 90s/early 00s that had a sense of place and community. Things tended to gravitate around their IRC channels and those of the actual game. Was great to develop relationships online with not only the modders but the people developing the games.

As an example, Epic Games were super-accessible back in the Unreal Tournament 99/2003/2004 days to chat with on IRC and not just about modding or stuff related to their products. There were also some game servers where you know certain employees made it their haunt.

But now everything is hyper-optimized so both Epic and customers waste the least amount of time talking to each other to solve a problem. It definitely feels more like you’re talking to a corporation than engaging with a community of creators now.

You mention UT99/2003/2004, did you play competitively by chance? I miss the good old days of gaming, clans, ladders, forums & IRC.

If it weren't for UT's modding & hacking community I wouldn't have got in to this industry. A lot of people I know have similar stories.

Nope I wasn’t part of the competitive scene. I was just an active participant in some of the fansite communities (BeyondUnreal, Planet Unreal) and the various mods like The Third Reich and Red Orchestra.

The only artifact of that era I still carry is still hanging around the neotokyo IRC channel after 15 years.

Like you said, the modding community helped a lot of people get in this industry. I wonder if it’s still the same now that it’s less about modding/hacking a game with a group of people and more about contributing content piecemeal (Elder Scrolls/Fallout) or working on an actual game from nearly scratch.

TF2 was my world back in early college. I ran a number of online communities, and a number of modded servers. I also think back to enemy territory wolfenstein as well. Back then you joined a server and played on a community. I really miss the derth of dedicated servers now a days.

I agree with the sentiment but the servers I played on are either gone, or drastically changed.

Join a discord channel for whatever game you're playing. You can voice chat with people and make new friends that way.

I'm in the League of Legends discord and party up with strangers all the time. If the game goes well or people are just particularly friendly we usually play a few rounds and sometimes friend requests are sent and we end up playing more often. I've met a fair amount of people this way.

I do agree though, love MMOs for community. Some of my oldest friends are from my MMO days, but those games often get grindy and take up too much time.

I never got into TF2 because I was all into TFC and found the lack of accompanying grenades in TF2 a kind of dumbing down of the game. Nades and concs were crucial to use along side your main weapon and it was no fun without them. Sadly there are only 2-3 active TFC servers left :'(

Internet's been all downhill since Westwood Chat got shutdown.

It's all relative. There are some that think the Internet has been all downhill since September of 1993 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Or April 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...