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TheObviousSolution, 11 godzin temu (edited 11 godzin temu) do games w The signatures are still coming and it's already making an impact

Opted for large scaled systems. It’s more than just simple software. There is a ton of infrastructure and proprietary solutioning that goes into it. That’s likely used for other games as well.

Doesn’t mean it can’t be released, just that it might be difficult to reproduce. It would still be much, much easier to reverse engineer that than to reverse engineer everything from the client and network communication captures.

It may not even be possible to release the software because it is not just software and the resources to prepare it for releasing may not be available.

In other words, so you don’t know, and vague assumptions on a closed box because closed boxes allow you to make them.

Most MMOs usually have multiple instances running, each which need to be maintained separately. That means they have usually gone through the process of encapsulating the server functionality in a way that can be reproduced and recreated into new instances. They have to be maintained at the same time, so they need to be relatively standard. At one point those supposedly absent resources to duplicate the instance of a server have likely existed, and just need to be packaged for public release. Proprietary portions can simply be excluded - an incomplete release is preferable to an absent one. Can’t release databases, they can release schemas, etc. Incomplete > absent.

You largely seem to be giving MMO companies the excuse that if their server solution could theoretically be proprietary and convoluted enough, even if it really isn’t, that they not be subject to the Stop Killing Games initiative. MMOs, unlike single player games, have a far more notable sociable and persistence factor to them, a bigger cultural footprint within those communities, that makes the Stop Killing Games Initiative particularly applicable to them. There’s one simply way not to be subject to its demands - don’t kill the games.

Asetru, wczoraj do games w The UK Stop Killing Games petition has reached 100.000 signatures

Demanding cars transition to clean fuel alternatives is not the same as demanding game manufacturers design and implement systems that must be fully functional in an offline state. This would be akin to demanding nuclear reactors be retrofitted to use fusion by 2035. Despite it not being sustainable or commercially possible.

Are you even listening to yourself? I’m pretty sure it’s harder to redesign a car’s engine and fuel system than it is to have counter strike call myshittyhomeserver.com instead of valvesmoneygenerator.com - and just the thought that you think it’s about as complex to disable some stupid drm system (which has been done numerous times before by kids with too much time on their hands) as it is to design a fusion reactor is just insane.

But again: they do not have to be fully functional in an offline state. Just release the server if that’s what’s needed. You already sold me the game, you stopped providing the one part that you wanted to provide, now just give me that. Done.

How do you enforce that? Legally compel a company to publish the server binaries with every copy of the game?

No! No no no! It’s after the game reached its eol! The idea is that the companies keep doing what they do, but once they’re done they have some roadmap to leave the game in a functional state. Once they’re done!

I’m talking in 9/10 cases you’d get a physical copy of a game and that was it.

Actual updates that were delivered over the internet came around the same time as Steam and DRM programs.

Bullshit. For games that ran from their ROMs (like snes-era) that was true because there was literally no way to modify them. But ever since they were used on media with write access, they got patched. You should just download a patch, point it to the directory where you installed the game and be done. If your connection sucked you’d buy a magazine that had patches on its CD or something.

Also, steam doesn’t guarantee updates either. If a developer doesn’t want to update their game, that’s it. If a developer wants to update their game, great, that works without any such system as well. Can you force people to apply updates if the game isn’t online? No. Does all of this have anything to do with the initiative? Not at all. This isn’t about patching games that are still supported. This is about what happens long after the last patch was released.

Okay explain to me what happens when Final Fantasy XI reaches end of life and all services that authenticate and host player data shut down? Who hosts that?

That’s not the question! If a developer decided to release server binaries after they shut down the service, at least I could host it. I could just run it locally, the community could come together to run an instance or whatever. This is about having such options, not about forcing publishers to keep hosting their stuff.

Are developers who want massive open worlds going to be expected, by law, to program a world that plays itself? Bots for NPCs, taking the roles of players, pushing events automatically? I am begging for answers because it keeps feeling like I’m the only one trying to figure out what’s going to happen to the games I play regularly.

None of that is demanded! Nothing! And I have no idea where you’re pulling those ideas from!

Massively multiplayer online worlds don’t have to be populated by bots. Multiplayer games don’t have to be redesigned. If a player opened a game to see a barren land, filled with no players and only dead npcs, that’s fine. But hey, they could occasionally stroll through the forest that they met their spouse in or something. Just like looking at a painting in a museum with your friends is different from looking at it at home, this would be the case here, too. But at least you can still enjoy your painting, unlike the game that’s been remotely disabled.

Most online only games are online only because they focus on players interacting with other players on a grand scale. They’re a social experience. Demands that it be playable offline defeats the purpose of it existing and we went over the server binaries thing. Nobody is going to jump at the chance to reset their progress for most of these games just for the shot to play it for however long this specific server is alive.

This is true. Except it might not be nobody. We’re talking about culture. Just like thousands of songs have been written to be forgotten, occasionally there are pieces that become culturally relevant. Sometimes even after the author dies. Imagine Franz Kafka writing his stories just to have Max Brod not publish them but lock them behind a shitty service that shut down after he wasn’t profitable enough, immediately burning all copies that were sold so far.

This is not about keeping the original experience. This is about museums being able to show people works of art fifty years from now. This is about me showing my childhood memories to my kids. Would they see my old friend dragonhaxxor9999 run into battle with me? Certainly not. But would they get an idea and would I be nostalgic about it? Certainly. And why would the profitability of some stupid service be a reason not to have that? Just let me fucking run the software I paid money for! I own those bits! Have my processor execute them if I want to!

sp3ctr4l, 13 dni temu (edited 13 dni temu) do gaming w Killed the greatest gamer initiative out there for content

Just to correct the record on this more reasonably sized dose of surprisingly overt strawmanning, I don’t think it’s impossible for an end user to run a dedicated server.

Well then maybe you should have actually said that.

The way Scott presents the argument, even acknowledging that he argues that server code may need a dedicated server beyond the capabilities of end users, is just not feasible.

If you wanna say things that are, you know technical, complicated… maybe… do that?

But ok so you wanna be more technical now, let’s see.

I think it’s not feasible to require a version of a modern persistent game server infrastructure, from login to matchmaking to data storage, to be converted or provided to be run or financed by end users.

Ok, well, you are just objectively wrong on all of your clauses there.

Dedicated enthusiasts can and do build home servers, all the time.

People have been emulating and running long officially dead MMOs for almost 20 years.

Login, matchmaking, storage… yep, all of that stuff still works. Sometimes you have to figure out a bit of a workaround, or run your own little side shunt thing as I described via example of Battlefield 1942 in my post you didn’t read.

These days, its easier and cheaper than ever to just rent a virtual server to host… literally whatever you want.

The only real problem that would occur is if say, OverWatch 2 suddenly died… and… a group of enthusiastic OW2 players wanted to be able to support the entire current playerbase.

Yeah, that indeed would likely be unfeasible.

But uh… all you have to do is meet the base requirements for the server binary, the now incredibly cheap compared to 10, 20 years ago storage requirements for the base system… and then you scale up to meet the actual traffic from the number of regular players you want to be able to support.

Theoretically, you could set up a nonprofit to legally finance scaling up to huge player counts, and have a subscription to this nonprofit server provider…

Or you could just have many, many, smaller independent post EoL, enthusiast servers, capable of more or less doing it out of an informal amount of charity.

The fixed costs of standing up a server are almost always so small as to be manageable by one or a few people.

The variable cost, where things can really get expensive… is from scaling up massively.

But you don’t have to do that.

Especially not in a way that still allows pre-existing commercial clients to run normally.

TitanFall 2 has been dead for a decade. No more official servers.

Its got a community made custom launcher that hooks into the community modified servers they run.

Game is literally exactly the same.

You can go play this right now, if you have a legit copy of TitanFall2.

Basically its the same withing with StarWars Galaxies, to just give two examples right off the top of my head.

I mean, for one thing, would you be running one instance or several?

Could be either, depends on what the EoL game wants to do for its final shutdown server release.

Probably it would be much, much easier to both the business and enthusiast post EoL server operators to set things up for many smaller, distinct, divergent individual instances, instead of designing a lemmy like federation system.

You know, how like every major MMO ever basically has different realms or shards or whatever? Welp, now instead of 8 or 16 or 32… theres 456 smaller ones.

Who’s handling how to point the client at the right place?

Ideally this would be a very simple and minor patch to the client to enable this right before EoL, but as with examples I’ve already given, you can wrap the game in your own launcher, essentially ‘hijacking’ it in some sense, to be able to override the now defunct, default server address, and also include a server browser in that launcher.

Then, you have that custom community launcher open source, so everyone can verify it isn’t malware.

But, there are many other possible methods and variations on this that are very specific to each exact game, that will or could work, even if the business doesn’t bother to do a final patch on the EoL client.

Who’s responsible for the legal obligations regarding data storage and personal information?

Uh, the people running the servers? The enthusiasts?

Why would they have personal information beyond a UID, login and password for the player?

The business would have to be immensely, catastrophically stupid to not scrub all other PII and financial type information out of the player db before they made a EoL final release version of it available.

How do you handle monetization hooks in games where scarcity is baked into the design?

Well there’s many possible ways you could do this.

One would be… the business just rips em out, disables them entirely on EoL release.

Yep, that’d break shitty pay to win games that were designed with so much scarcity that obtaining game currency or items through gameplay alone is uh… unfeasible.

Or, you could, just quickly modify the giant basically ini file that describes all the loot drop rates for getting things in game by… 10, 100, 1000, whatever, or let the enthusiast server operators modify these drop rates on their own.

Or maybe its something like cosmetics you would normally have to pay real money for? They’re all free now, woohoo! Just put in a little overide in the ‘checks players real world bank account’ routine to just return TRUE, basically, haha.

There are an astounding number of ways this could be handled, either by the EoL final patch/release, you could just basically rip all that out, make everyone have as much of it as they want, or give the enthusiast post EoL server admins some gui or cli access to the already existing code in the server system to allow them to do a more fine tuned and tweaking approach to this… maybe everyone just gets an automatic allowance of whatever $50 real world dollars translates into in the game currency(ies) every month, who knows.

All you have to do is say ok enthusiast server admins, you are NOT allowed to make money off of our compiled binary we are releasing to you, you have no right to do that, and we will sue you into oblivion if we think we can prove you are.

Existing computer laws and liscenses already very well cover companies going after people who decompile their proprietary code and make money off of it.

Whatever, the technicalities have been deliberated…

Yes, now they have. I made many of these points I made here, and more, in my post you didn’t read, so, uh yeah, kind of a one sided discussion here with a person who’s already made up their mind, yeah.

donuts, 19 dni temu do games w Nintendo Is Already Punishing Switch 2 Users Over Piracy ‘Suspicions’

If you see personal insults you should report the comment. Instances and communities have rules. Downvotes aren’t insults though

Elevator7009, miesiąc temu do games w [Announcement] The community and its future

Thanks for adding community links!

At least for me, they shove me over to lemmy.world. I suspect you may have clicked the autofill suggestion, which includes the instance in the link and thus forces all users who click onto your instance. If you don’t do that and just write !communityname@instancename, it will let people click the link and go to the community on their instance, so they can interact instead of just browsing. I see you’re from Emmy.world.

!videogamesuggestions should let you see from lemmy.world and interact and comment and vote and the like. !videogamesuggestions (I clicked the autofill this time, it produced [!videogamesuggestions@lemmy.zip](https://lemmy.zip/c/videogamesuggestions)) will just toss you onto my instance, lemmy.zip.

MyNameIsAtticus, miesiąc temu do games w Day 318 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games l've been playing

Yep! It’s missing a lot of services I used regularly, but it’s a community maintained project (and one for a Nintendo console at that so progress is definitely going to be slow) so I get it, but it’s been a lifesaver in the few instances where I can use it with friends

A_Random_Idiot, miesiąc temu (edited miesiąc temu) do games w 70% of games that require internet get destroyed

I love lotro. I played it for 10 years. From release, until mordor.

I was madly inlove with lotro. It was a beautiful game. the only MMO where you actually read lore and quest text and anything else, because of how immersive it was all… and the game was perfect (before mordor). Casual, relaxing, but challenging in all the right places.

and the community was just absolutely amazing. Kind, considerate, helpful, generous. Like you said, i think the average age of lotro players was over 40… Until there was there was some issue with WoW that caused a lot of WoW players to immigrate to lotro… Then chat got less friendly, and more obnoxious, and the community got less kind, and less helpful… cause all the kind helpful people got burned by the jackholes being jackholes… Still a pleasant community overall, but no where near what it was before that WoWpocalypse.

My love and faith in the game changed with Mordor, though… Mordor broke me, It was just so pointlessly difficulty spiked on even the landscape mobs were slaughtering raid-ready players, that most of my kin, myself included, ended up just quitting the game. A few people eventually got the gang back together again for southern mirkwood, but that mordor level of difficulty was still there. No one in the kin, except for the hunters and the champions, seemed able to even 1v1 the landscape mobs. that also reflected group content… no one wanted anything but healers and hunters. was the same with mordor, but even worse with southern mirkwood. Mobs were so dumbly overpowered that only the lotro character equivalent of tactical nukes were wanted in groups… I, sadly, was not a tactical nuke class.

It really breaks my heart. I loved that game. I made great real life friends in that game… I met my Ex in that game (though in retrospect that probably shouldnt be viewed as part of the happy memories lol), Spent so many evenings bullshitting in voice chat while we did instances and group content, or just ground out old content for deeds. Was such a magical fucking experience, that I’ll probably never experience again for the rest of my life. The pre-mordor game was absolute perfection. Especially with the revamps to some less ideal/polished game areas like Moria.

And killed, to me, because devs listened to a vocal minority that wanted moar harderer.

I’m sad now.

Adalast, miesiąc temu do games w 70% of games that require internet get destroyed

That is not a rebuttal. A rebuttal requires evidentiary support of your stance. For instance, as support for saying it costs them nothing, one might offer the following:

• once released, users would distribute and maintain the file servers independently of the corporation, thus costing the company nothing.
• once released, users would maintain independent game servers and pay for their upkeep, thus costing the company nothing.
• once released, the modding community would take over the maintenance and development on the code base, thus costing the company nothing.

There, 3 salient points which support the position that releasing the codebase for the game when sunsetting it costs the company nothing. I could even make points about how it is actually profitable for the company, but I want to give you your turn to rebutt me now that you have a good example of how to provide a good argument.

lazorne, 2 miesiące temu do games w Reminder if you're leaving Discord for this Revolt server ( Linux + Steam Deck devs / creators)

For the record RetroDECK also got Matrix instance as well. But Revolt have so far been more active then Matrix (even tho we had that one for a long time).

But I do agree with that Discord is not a replacement for forums. You should not use Discord as your primary information hub.

For us our own wiki is the master of information. If something relevant is said in Revolt / Discord / Matrix we will add it to the wiki, people should not need to register various accounts to access the information.

Github is also where we handle “real” issues, while Discord / Matrix / Revolt is helpful for community members helping other with minor issues or general banter.

One reason why forums died out was the need for direct engagement and a sense of active community belonging, that they simply did not offer.

We also did not create all of these spaces from the beginning. Some community members did it, like the subreddit. Then you have a choice either you create it and own it, or a fan will.

Ronno, 2 miesiące temu do gaming w Discord confirms it's moving toward 'becoming a public company' as it hires a former Activision executive as its new CEO

It’s even become mandatory by communities in some games, which is something I hate with passion. For instance, many MMORPG communities are on Discord these days (e.g. Guild Wars 2, more specifically the raiding scene).

So I subscribed to these communities and started using Discord. I still don’t get the appeal, it’s a cluttered mess all over the place and it doesn’t feel intuitive to use. Maybe I’m getting old…

Elevator7009, 2 miesiące temu do games w Video game genre communities on the Threadiverse

You’re probably right, but most of these do exist already, so I figure not why not continue trying to use them (and to direct attention from this big community there)? Also probably doesn’t help a lot of instances have general games communities. We’re pretty splintered. Now that I think about it I should probably crosspost to some of the bigger ones.

Kolanaki, 2 miesiące temu do games w Video game genre communities on the Threadiverse

RPGs that don’t really fit in CRPG or JRPG

I was thinking it is weird that the generically named “RPGs” community (and RPGMemes) seems focused entirely on tabletop stuff, but I just noticed it’s literally on an instance dedicated to tabletop games so that explains that…

AAA, 2 miesiące temu do games w What is the best Sea based game out there in your opinion?

The developer is a cash hungry idiot, with no intention to ever listen to the community.

The community is great, battles intense, and the skill ceiling sky high. Sailing mechanisms second to none.

There’s a lot more ships than the DLC ships. But yes, it’s almost inevitable you will end up buying a couple of them, because the DLCs let you spawn a ship for free every day.

I stopped playing when the Dev decided to split the already low-populated PvP server into two separate instances, which is currently being reversed (to noones surprise).

gandolfini_the_grey, 3 miesiące temu do games w Should we boycott games with loot boxes?

Those projects look great! I will have to check both those out. My problem with a lot of community FPS games is that the community is just too small to play regularly (like Xonotic, for instance).