It was a sense of community borne of the shared trauma of getting those servers working.

"Have you opened the right ports on your router? Okay, what kind of router do you have? Who provides your internet? Okay, go to http://192.168..."

With Microsoft's DirectPlay, it was even worse, since only the lobby functioned in a client-server mode. Once the game started, it went full P2P and all players without port forwarding timed out.

I recall kali.net worked pretty good with Warcraft 2 way back in the day.

That's just taking bad parts of client-server and P2P modes.

Huh ? The only thing that does not work well is AoE on different windows versions. But this is excelence in action at Microsoft.

I get what you are saying, I remember the days struggling with firewalls and NAT, with tools like hamachi... but I think you were responding to the stage of online games that came after that - private servers you generally had hosted by a provider.

Best of both worlds, community run, unique so communities would form around servers, and can't be obsoleted.

Downside is matchmaking isn't as good, but oh well.

Communities often formed "leagues" you could compete in. You could join teams for team games and teams were ranked, had matches, competed. For more single oriented things you were your own matchmaker: choose the servers with more skilled players. Different skillsets naturally tended to gravitate to specific servers because they knew they could compete with other skilled players.

But you could find a group you enjoyed playing with and learn from them. I spent hundreds of hours in a UT2k4 server in Team Arena Mode warmup just practicing air rockets, shock combos, and flick lightning gun headshots. RIP UT2k4

Matchmaking feels like it's a really effective optimisation, but of the wrong metric. It's trying to match you up with players of the same skill level in a reasonably short amount of time. I think I place higher value on seeing a familiar set of players, and gain a greater sense of achievement from rising in skill within that set than from rising in global rank.

That's how I learnt that stuff, another reason I love it.

but also amazing things built by community

I remember the first time someone built a dedicated server for WC3 custom games (dota) that supported players reconnecting after a dc. it was mindblowing

This sounds like an Eternal September kind of deal.

That is, perhaps something some can enjoy nostalgia for but ultimately not sustainable.

The more modern version is what Minecraft is doing: give people a server they can run, but also offer your own server hosting service. Any seven year old can buy a Minecraft Realm for their friends (if they get their parent's credit card), but you can also rent an instance from a number of other providers if you want something with more freedom (and mods) but still some hand-holding and a dashboard, or host it on your own hardware if that's your thing.

That was fun though! Back when even the lowliest noob was editing a config file for one reason or another.

And that's when we all learned about Hamachi... and now here we all are with our tailnets instead.

Oh, how the times have changed...

And that's when I learned some real world IPs overlapped w/ Hamachi's and random sites/services stopped working! Wtf! Took me forever to figure it out.

Using the word 'trauma' to describe networking configuration is a huge exaggeration.

Lol I learned about 'screen' (like tmux) from running a server.

I would ssh in, start it up, login with the game, certify everything was working, then kill the ssh and be confused the game dropped.

The instructions mentioned screen but all it seemed to do was break the scroll buffer.

Eventually I learned. That was fun.

Same experience here, as a GTA SA:MP operator. That's probably how I started with commandline Linux

Very same. SA:MP servers taught me to run a Linux server and to make gamemodes in Pawn (C-like). I got my first C++ game development job a few years later, and it has been a successful career since. Thank you, SA:MP.

What always pissed me off is when they didn't have private servers and in fact charged you a monthly fee for multiplayer and still made one of the players act as host, giving that person a massive latency advantage.

This is how Nintendo does online gaming currently.

Yeah, and you can't have two people independently playing Animal Crossing in one single household since you have to expose the Switch as a DMZ host with all ports on your provider's NAT IP forwarded to it. If your provider doesn't offer you a publicly routed IP (aka CGNAT), you're completely out of luck being the host for Animal Crossing.

And even worse, the ruddy thing doesn't even speak UPnP, so you have to do everything manually!

That's appalling. We've gone from running internal on local networks to forcing a potential security issue to allow for multiplayer.

My personal favorite is Microsoft discouraging local Minecraft servers with the rational that anyone could type anything on them! Who knows what you and the people you explicitly allow on your server might type!

But your switch example is worse, I think.

> My personal favorite is Microsoft discouraging local Minecraft servers with the rational that anyone could type anything on them! Who knows what you and the people you explicitly allow on your server might type!

I do understand where they're coming from, it's brand safety 101 - they don't want to risk the PR disaster from incompetent parents coming into their child's room and seeing n-bombs dropped into the Minecraft chat, leading to the parents shitstorming Microsoft for not moderating the chats when Microsoft for once isn't responsible for not moderating.

I think that legitimate fear is also why so many games removed self-hosting servers. I can remember from the UT2004 days that there were a lot of questionable things said in online chats... obviously sexism, but also lots and lots of racism and antisemitism.

> I do understand where they're coming from, it's brand safety 101 - they don't want to risk the PR disaster from incompetent parents coming into their child's room and seeing n-bombs dropped into the Minecraft chat

Maybe, I’m misunderstanding the initial statement, but if this were case, why ban local servers and not public, internet accessible servers? I promise there’s a much higher chance of that hypothetical happening on those.

Nintendo has required you to compromise your network security for online play since the DS and Wii. They often required you to set up "DMZ" and port forwarding and still wouldn't work, and the original DS could only do WEP wifi security.

> and the original DS could only do WEP wifi security.

That's excusable though. The DS was released in 2004, with WEP being deprecated only in the same year [1] and most consumer routers / APs of the time not getting updates to WPA anyway.

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

I know Nintendo includes this step in their hole-punching troubleshooting guide, but it's just not necessary. I've never met anybody who needed to do this to get their NAT traversal working, it's worked out of the box for every Switch game I've used for everybody I know. I'm sure there are people with weird or bizarre enough networks that standard STUN techniques don't work, but in my ~4 years of playing switch online games with my friends I've never met any of them.

you assume that Nintendo knows what they're doing, which is pretty bold if I may say.

STUN seems like an important technique to get right for their core business, and should boil down to sending a few UDP packets back and forth with a server. As long as they have a dozen engineers that have a clue, it seems reasonable to expect NAT traversal to just work on a switch in most setups.

I have an AVM FritzBox router with UPnP enabled, easily Germany's most-used and most-loved router model. Everything that uses UPnP works out of the box, but I've never seen the Switch create UPnP rules on its own.

I wonder what the fuck keeps Nintendo from operating their own STUN/TURN servers, at least for their own fucking games where I pay 35€ a year for their online service.

whynotboth.jpeg

Team Fortress matchmaking will match you to their official servers, and sometimes even on third party servers. TF also has a server browser where you can select which third or first party servers to join. You can also join directly via IP, if the matchmaking service ever goes offline.

TF2 hasn't matched to 3rd party servers or allowed directly connecting to Valve servers in 6 years, since the introduction of a matchmaking service. They did, however, let a bot flood on official servers get so bad for so a few years that community servers took off and became popular again. It's only been this year that they finally started to effectively fight back against the bots, making casual usable again.

I have recently joined a modded server using matchmaking in the MvM mode, so either Valve allows that, or they run modded servers.

As far as botting goes, it's still not fixed. There was an obvious aimbotter named 'Vinesauce' that went about for 2 weeks getting kicked out of every match (and sometimes rejoining). I can't fathom having this little moderation/development on a game that still must be making millions per year.

Ah, fair enough, I generally don't play the MvM mode. Strange that they allow community servers for the matchmaking service on that after pulling it from the standard mode.

In my experience with Valve's servers in the eastern north american region, while the bots aren't completely gone, there are far fewer of them. Online discussion has indicated this isn't necessarily the case for non-NA regions.

I saw the vinesauce bots. It's my understanding that Valve bans any account kicked from an official server from rejoining that server for half an hour or so. Game harassers run small fleets of their bots. It's likely just another same-named bot joining rather than the same one rejoining, no?

As already mentioned, the matchmaking will not put you on community servers, and its existence has pretty much killed the majority of the community server scene. The game has more players than ever but less community servers than ever and most server mods that used to be very popular have been abandoned as a result.

I mean isnt that an indictment against the system by the community at large? People favor quick, normalized matchmaking. Having the option is amazing, but I dont think the general population really wants that, even if they would say they want the choice. Hard to justify the effort for the company then IMO.

Yes, most people are lazy and will always pick the most obvious and convenient option. No, that doesn't mean that the most obvious and convenient option is better.

The general population doesn't really "want" anything, they're satisfied with whatever they're fed and rarely think about it at all. Back in the server browser days you didn't hear constant complaints from people who wanted matchmaking instead, the switch to matchmaking happened because developers wanted to optimize engagement and increase their control over the game experience so they could monetize it more effectively, that's it.

Valve has always done it right IMO. CSGO is the same, you can start a server yourself or you can play on official servers.

Valve has always been community centered and it really shows in how all their development tools are pretty much available such as mapping tools, server tools etc.

With CSGO most of the matchmaking isn't even done in official servers, but with third party organizations like Faceit. If you want to be a professional CSGO player then you can't even rely on official servers. Nobody can go pro by playing official only when it comes to CSGO, you literally have to use third party services and their community servers.

They are better in some regards, not others.

It doesn't get much easier to get quickly into a game with people ready to play than matchmaking usually. However, consistently playing with and against the same people is not as much a thing of course.

The upside of matchmaking hence is no scheduling and waiting, the downside is playing with whoever is online anywhere instead of a familiar group.

Even public servers, where you log in because of the vibe /community and know who you're gonna find there.

Still getting those vibes with some games like Hell Let Loose but it's a dying breed!

And there would be admins, that actually cared and banned cheaters.

Ohhhhh I miss those days.

Or the admin banned people that killed the admin.

Or people that were too good.

Or people that weren't good enough.

Or people that were trying too hard.

Or people that didn't give up when they were the last one on the team alive, making the admin wait longer for the next round to start.

Or people they just plainly didn't like.

Some of the hosted server admins were the og "powerhungry moderators" of today. Many seemed to be okay though.

And none of that was a problem because you could just leave and join another server. Meanwhile in modern games, if the admins (aka devs) don't like you, you get punished across the entire game.

Ahhhh, the days when you could get a certain weapon or loadout banned on the server for blowing away an admin one time too many. I kinda miss em.

Also you would have some shared values about how you enjoy playing the game from hardcore competitive to just goofing around, instead of throwing everyone into one or two queues and letting them rage at each other for ruining each other's fun.

You could also have multiple servers. We had a competitive and casual server.

You also wouldn't be forced into near guaranteed loss games to keep your W/L near 50/50. When one team was clearly overmatched compared to the other, the mods (you know, that other great reason to private servers) would turn on autobalance.

I always said Starcraft Broodwar Got big in spite of Blizzard. The way they locked Starcraft 2 made it clear it'll die sooner than later, now the moment they decide to plug the plug on the SC2 servers it's gone.

Is there no new bnetd?

None that I know of.

Agreed. I played TF2 for a while, found the No Heroes servers, liked the community, paid the $4/month for an account. You got guaranteed slots and they had over a dozen servers for different maps. They used their own sound effects so if someone was stacking kills or whatever it would play announcer or musical clips. It was fun and added a bit of excitement. Of course you get to know the regulars, say hello and even make friends and chat on Steam. I've lost contact with all of them but its okay, what we had during the time it existed was nice.

After a while, like everything else I moved on and didn't play for years. One day I decided to install TF2 for kicks and in its place was a different game. I played for maybe 15 minutes, lost interest and uninstalled the game. I wanted to see what happened to No Heroes and found that they had closed up shop a year prior. I was saddened and honestly very turned off to the game which is why it was uninstalled.

Its because of this loss of community that I have ZERO interest in modern multiplayer gaming. Now its all about ranking so its just an Ego/dopamine boosting machine. I just wanna play a game and have fun. I could care less about rankings, they mean nothing.

> They used their own sound effects so if someone was stacking kills or whatever it would play announcer or musical clips.

Whew, to me this was a strike against community servers. There was a period there where I couldn't join a single CS:Source game without a boatload of Simpsons sounds downloading preventing me from playing. I remember replacing the downloaded sounds with 0 byte files so I wouldn't need to hear them, but servers kept changing the paths so I'd have a bunch of redundant ones to clean up.

Thankfully in true Valve fashion they gave me an out, well after things had gone completely off the rails, with a command line (and later UI) option to block only sound downloads.

When WoW added cross realms to PvP battlegrounds it was an eye opener as to how good our realm's community was. Queue times got better, but the enjoyment dropped through the floor.

Meet someone that you worked well with in a battleground?

Oh well, you’ll never get to play with them again.

Killed all sense of community.

Cross Server dungeons/raids had the exact same consequence. In the early expansions you would play with people and get to know them. Sometimes you'd be levelling at a similar pace and cross paths on a few of the instances/quests. Maybe you'd get to chatting?

I know we recruited several people into a casual guild based on doing a few dungeons and getting on well with them. This was, ofc, before guild perks etc gamified that aspect in a shitty fashion.

Ofc you also got to learn people you never wanted to instance with again. Reputation mattered! As the Parent said, may as well be playing with NPCs.

Everybody talks about this part with rose colored glasses and nostalgia, conveniently forgetting trying to put a group together for a dungeon and spending upwards of an hour before you even start, not even knowing if your team members are good enough.

I certainly don't have the time to spend on that sort of thing, so if it weren't for things like dungeon finder I wouldn't even play the game anymore. Same with other games, if there wasn't any matchmaking I probably just wouldn't play.

> Queue times got better

I'll take the shorter queue times thank you very much. Waiting for half a day for one battle was not acceptable.

Nowadays, those private servers earn you a cease & desist letter. At least in the US.

A lot of private servers are actually reverse engineered from game binaries. It takes a lot of dedication and a lot of time in IDA/Ghidra to accomplish. You basically run your own copy of the backend and a patched client that connects to your backend.

When I was a teenager I remember playing on MapleStory private servers, and the backend was reverse engineered from the client. GTA private servers are also popular nowadays.

I don't really know where I'm going with this comment but you can always develop your own private server for a game if you have a team that's dedicated enough.

How do you do that when most of the calculations (and data required for those) happen on the backend?

In the case of MapleStory, in the past much of the game logic used to happen in the client side, that's why it was easier to reverse it (And create cheats for it).

In many other games that have private servers: If there was no codebase leak, basically guessing what you can't know. That's why many private servers doesn't work 1:1 when compared to the official servers, people just tried to make the calculations as close as possible after reversing it.

GTA 5 has private servers as well, and it has a similar fat client architecture. It also uses P2P for a lot of things which was probably helpful for the FiveM developers.

MapleStory was also kind of an interesting case because the developers were careless enough to include debug symbols with their binaries on multiple occasions.

These sorts of games are usually not implementing sophisticated algorithms on the server side.

The client is typically just sending simple events (e.g., player moved left) to the server. The server collects events from all the connected clients to build a shared state, and pushes state updates to clients.

Edit: jpcrs makes a good point about this and their comment is worth reading.

It is because doing the calculations on the server does not scale well, so no one wants to do it, usually what happens is that all the clients have to run the simulation anyway so the devs make sure it is the same simulation and all the server does is ship what are effectively the keypresses around. this is why desyncs are such a problem.

Note that having the server do the calculation can solve some of the cheating problem, I remember a modified quake server that would not send location information if you could not see the player, which made wallhacks not work. I just got totally nerd sniped by the memory and while I can't find the demonstration video that impressed me so much at the time. I did find that it was darkplaces quake that added the option "sv_cullentities_trace" which prevents wallhacks.

www.icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/readme.html#ServerFeatures

sure, but almost any game built on the Steam engine or an id engine came with the server code, which was nearly any game that mattered for a decade. That was a huge library of games you could self host a server with.

Private/Community servers don't require self-hosting. E.g. in the Battlefield franchise the community for BF3 and BF4 is still going quite strong despite there being 3 successors since. And the reason is that people can play with the same people every night. The successors (BFI, BFV, BF20something) are completely uninteresting to me since there is simply no sense of community. I don't get the point in "matchmaking" even for casual gaming.

You mind sharing links? I would be interesting to try some bf again