“We also have something really crazy in this game that’s gonna happen at the end, and I can guarantee you, you’ve never seen it in a video game before. It’s really fucked up."
It’s essentially a MonsterHunter clone, originally revealed 7 years ago, but based on what I’m hearing, since then it’s been riddled with horrible mismanagement issues, and players lost the vast majority of their earned items, for them to return as mtx later
One thing I took away from the article was I wish developers would stop with the whole matchmaking, company run server stuff and let us host our own like in the 90’s or at the very least make the server software available when you sunset.
While this sounds like a good idea, in the modern landscape of PvP games, it would never work.
Current player expectations for PvP games are now “click play, get into game”. Every layer of friction filters out players who don’t want to go through the hassle of being able to just play the game they bought.
It seems easy for you because you played multiplayer games in the 90s, but anyone born after that era will have to learn to filter through a megalist of servers with names like “BoB’s L33t S3rv3r”.
But let’s play devil’s advocate and say the devs could still add the self-hosted servers to their game in a couple different ways.
If devs added it to accompany the default matchmaking, there’s now the problem of their player base being siphoned away from the main matchmaking pool, which further destroys the default player experience.
If devs added self-hosted servers as a way to supplement their own matchmaking servers (e.g. officially hosted servers + player hosted servers), the player experience can now wildly vary depending on which server you connect to, especially since devs can’t guarantee the same experience on random Joe’s home ISP connection and server hardware.
There’s no winning for the devs. While your sentiment is valid, the practicality of doing it is not feasible anymore.
The sunsetting idea is good though and I wished that happened more too.
Great wall of text, defeated by the simple idea of adding a fucking optional LAN or Lobby based matchmaking based on IP can be for unranked and takes near 0 effort to add.
You want the main game mode with matchmaking? Official ranked server.
Wanna play 2 vs 30 AK-47 vs knives only? Private lobby.
Also, the latter was how the original devs accidentally invented Left 4 Dead by figuring out that was a ton of fun.
Sorry man, but the fundamental backend of IP based matchmaking is a prerequisite to skill based matchmaking. At a high level, the skill rankings make an ELO value or similar ranking and feed that alobg woth player status into the active player pool for the region. The active player pool then feeds the game client the ip sets for the current match.
Literally all these games are peer hosted, and require this. Once the match is setup they literally drop you into a lobby (this part is visible to you) and fill it with IPs (invisible). That is as old as DOOM.
So again, everything costs something as people aren’t free, but this is a function must exist to power the skill based matchmaking, and needs only be exposed in the shell.
Also, its not just valve, its literally every PC game ever made before the mid 2000s. Jedi Knight II? Unreal Tournament? Quake 3? Hell emulated PS3 and Switch titles have shown this off as well. All of these are still playable today thanks to not exclusively using skill based matchmaking.
You’re completely missing the point I’m making - it’s nothing to do with how matchmaking works or how to get self-hosted servers to work.
Your quote about “every game before the mid 2000s” is just reinforcing what I’m trying to tell you: no modern PvP game can get away with it anymore.
The current average player who’s played any modern PvP game in recent memory expects to be able to click a PLAY button that puts them into a match. That is your default user experience expectation.
If you require players to have to dig through a server list like people had to during the pre-mid-2000s, you lose players FAST.
You dilute your player base by allowing people to play in self-hosted servers because your default user experience of clicking PLAY and getting into a game gets worse (less players means less diversity of player skill and longer queue times).
For a game and studio that has no existing reputation and players who will jump on their stuff, you don’t have the luxury of splitting your already potentially small player base.
Modern PvP games that allow you to have custom games are all well-established and already have a healthy player base.
You don’t trade one for the other. You add this in the options menu, in a smaller font.
Then when The Crew, X-Defiant, Lawbreakers, or any of the 30 other games that AAA publishers end server support for this year go down, the people who bought it aren’t left unable to play at all. Theres a fallback. And it does not affect matchmaking because it’s down the menu out of the way, and not the default matchmaking method. L
Good. They took their time to create a masterpiece this time, plus a pretty great expansion in short order. I would be upset if they said they were rushing to put out something just to cash in.
That shouldn’t really be news to anyone. They’ve stretched themselves almost too thin with the scale of Elden Ring, and it’s a miracle, that it’s turned out this damn good.
But even besides that, I’d always take a well put together game every 5 years, than some uninspired yearly slop. Good games are still art
I am hopeful for this. Playing it on day one, I reported a garbage management bug on the official forum: only to be told it was “by design”, and yet still game-breaking.
The performance woes got all the press, but the game was fundamentally broken. It was nearly impossible to lose. Too many services for a small city? Here’s free “government subsidies” that you also can’t shut off when your city is successful. Don’t have garbage service? No problem, a neighboring city you have no control over is gonna handle your trash – for free.
I hope this is finally a step in the right direction, but I’ll never understand why it took a year to listen to day 1 issues. If the game had been released Early Access the response would have been better all around. Performance issues need to take second place: if the game isn’t fun, I don’t care how it performs.
I decided to test it even though I’m done with the game. On my 110k pop city I ran it for 2 hours and simulation speed pre patch was 1.2 and is now .06 - 0.8
The performance is back to where it was pre optimization patches.
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