That doesn't happen in modern shooters. Heck, even MMORPGs rarely have that community feel anymore.
At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right?
Those were simpler times, I suppose. We were working with all the new frameworks of the day, and it was the grizzled old engineers alongside the young hotshots — and none of it mattered, because all anyone saw was your nick and your code.
I don't know how kids these days learn about dependency injection, the downsides of singleton architectures, or the nuanced tradeoffs of using an ORM to abstract over a relational model. But I rather enjoyed learning it all on the mean streets of IRC.
There was some .. lets just call it, rather encouraged rebranding to libra.chat. And there is something else namesquatting the freenode name.
It was a netsplit.
Freenode was sold to an heir of the former Korean monarchy. The idea that the network was even sellable did not resonate with several former staff calling it a hostile takeover, so Libera.Chat was formed as a moral successor.
The split caused a drop in user count from ~80k to ~45k. Some channels migrated to OFTC instead. See a user count history graph:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libera_Chat#History
https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2021
Since the decline of freenode, their user count statistics have looked unapologetically synthetic.
Man, with me on the edge to nuking or not nuking my reddit account with a couple of smaller communities, I didn't need more nostalgia back here. I was part of the "night crew" over on the old freenode in a few tech channels since I'm from europe and the times I have time ended up being when the US was asleep, haha. Learned to much about a couple of topics over that time as well. I still know way too many arcane weirdnesses and internals of python from stints on #python.
Or old TF2/Tremulous/CS1.6/Quake servers. Times when we could call truces over voice to get us another beer and the other guy wouldn't come 'round the corner. And then you'd discuss current brand choices for a second. Or when one of the local pros started to take you seriously and would start some impromptu coaching, which usually involved a lot of death on your side because now they were looking for you.