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.