Wow you've captured well the feelings I have looking at modern gaming very well. In the 2000s I played on servers and chatted with people for weeks, over time we learnt how each other played and formed cooperative teams and had our own in jokes. Kind of like HN. Your description of "modern gaming" to get up a global ladder highlights the near equivalence of social media firms, facebook etc. with their likes, fllowers and doom scrolling. It makes me slightly sad if kids don't have those communities today.

This reminds me of Wildstar. The MMO was intentionally dedicated to hardcore players, making progression nearly impossible for casuals. They were pretty smug about it as I recall. It eventually died, as there weren't enough players paying micro-transactions to keep the servers online.

It declined remarkably quickly on release, as was completely predictable. Unfortunately, it had multiple problems, so difficulty fetishists could always point to the other problems.

There's actually a Wildstart server emulator for those who want to play after shutdown - https://www.emulator.ws/

I think my wife would love to explore the game again, and I think we could maybe tune some dungeons so they're doable by just two players, but we're parents now and some things are just not possible anymore.

Wildstar was the game that made me realize I was done with MMOs. Not only was I not really looking forward to the attunement flowchart (I love raiding but jeeze) but around level 12 I realized I didn't want to play the game you have to play before you can play the game. I've come to really appreciate round-based lobby games since then.

I don’t understand the relevance of this. Are you saying that aggressively targeting cheaters is pampering to wannabe pros or that not aggressively targeting them is pampering wannabe pros?

Another thing that has changed in FPS land is game modes making cheaters WAY more frustrating. It used to be that you get into a lobby, see someone cheating, and could leave and find a new lobby right away. Now with the extremely popular battle royale modes, you don’t encounter the cheater until 20 minutes into a match — via dying in a game mode where dying is “expensive.”

I'm saying is that it's a problem companies created themselves, and are subjecting customers to increasingly dystopian measures in a futile attempt to manage it.

Pro gaming and casual gaming don't mix well. Cheating is a self-solving (or at least self-regulating) problem if you let people freely associate and host games. Cheating is only a big problem in competitive gaming, where there are rewards (status, monetary, or both) for moving up the global ranking. It still can be solved in context of pro-gaming, but it requires some invasive means.

The right approach would be to treat casual and pro gaming as separate experiences. Casual players play casually without invasive anti-cheating measures; pro players sign up for the league, which comes with extra restrictions. This is exactly how it used to work in the past, and exactly how any non-computer competition works: casuals and pro players may be playing the same game, but their goals are different, and so the rules and experience is different too.

Unfortunately, as it always happened, the industry decided to do the exact opposite of the right thing, and is now forcing all players to play by the competitive pro-gaming rules. With the game designed around pro gaming, causal players no longer have means to host and moderate their own servers in a social fashion, thus losing the natural, non-invasive method of combating cheaters. The addition of match-making further prevents the kind of grouping casual players prefer. As a result, casual players (which tend to be the majority) become exposed to competitive cheaters, which obviously makes the game extremely frustrating for the former. And to mitigate that, companies are employing invasive anti-cheating methods - methods that make sense when dealing with clubs and official matches, but are plain abusive and dystopian when employed remotely at scale.

Again, the right way to solve cheating is to keep casual gaming and pro gaming entirely separate - the same way playing soccer with your friends is an entirely separate activity from playing it professionally in a local team. Unfortunately, I think companies figured out that pro gamers are where the money is made, so they're willing to screw the majority of the players to streamline costs and hopefully create more wannabe-pros that can be monetized.

So I agree with the overall thrust of your argument here in that I far preferred the world of casual servers you could hop on with your friends, make goofy rules, ban whoever you wanted, etc., and I see how dissolving that into shared servers with automated matchmaking makes certain anti-cheat measures infeasible.

What I’m not sure of is to what degree the new shared servers/auto-matchmaking pattern is due to catering to competitive gamers? Is that really the reason?

(I legitimately have no idea so I’m curious how you’ve come to this conclusion)

Several of the assumptions in your post are flawed, which undermines your whole argument.

> Cheating is only a big problem in competitive gaming, where there are rewards (status, monetary, or both) for moving up the global ranking

This is untrue, cheating was until recently a huge problem for team fortress 2 which hasn't been competitive for years.

See also the huge cheating problems in the CoD games from the Xbox 360 era, which was before they were competitive outside of small, grassroots tournaments.

> The addition of match-making further prevents the kind of grouping casual players prefer

Players overwhelmingly do not prefer server browsing. Games have consolidated on the matchmaking model because any game without it is dead on arrival.

The biggest example of a game with a foot still in both worlds is Counterstrike, where the overwhelming use of custom servers is for external matchmaking services with stricter anti cheat than Valves VAC.

> Unfortunately, I think companies figured out that pro gamers are where the money is made, so they're willing to screw the majority of the players to streamline costs and hopefully create more wannabe-pros that can be monetized.

Again this is just not true - the revenue and profit of casual games dwarfs competitive games. Check out a recent financial report from ActiBlizzard and see how much money they make from competitive games like Overwatch and CoD compared to their mobile sub company, King.

Pro circuits and pro game modes are advertising expenses, not revenue or profit centers. Arguably the biggest pro game in the world, Counterstrike, makes the vast ,majority of it's money selling lootboxes and taking a cut on skin trades.

> Again this is just not true - the revenue and profit of casual games dwarfs competitive games.

This is actually very, very true. Most esports departments are not incredibly profitable (I actually worked for one of the biggest esports gaming companies for a long time and it was a constant source of friction how much money was spent on esports versus the return on it).

At the end of the day, cheating is a dopamine hit: killing the whole lobby in 2-seconds by holding down a button makes people feel good and you can't fight against that without some pretty drastic measures.

This is why I largely play single player games, or games at least with the option of bots.

I booted up the computer to take a break from the assholes, not to get shot by them.

I really miss local multiplayer. Competitive gaming was other kids on your block. Good times, low stakes.

To add:

If you buy a game and receive only a client without a server, you only bought half a game. Expect to rent the other half.

The vast majority of players are likely using the stock controllers or controllers they picked up at a normal store stocking pretty much only OEM or approved 3rd party controllers.

The vast majority of players will never know this is a thing.