Robocraft was near and dear to me. It’s also the reason I don’t bother with live service games anymore. In 2017-2018-ish, Robocraft was one of my favorite games, ever. Then they were able to take that game away from me and replace it with something I liked far less. This is inevitable for any live service game; if not...
I started to fall off the game around when they reworked the chassis blocks to all be one tier. There was so much depth in balancing durability with trying to stay in the right tier. And having to actually protect your pilot seat.
Losing the specialization with the weapons and letting you out all of them in the same vehicle further removed any kind of tradeoffs and then the loot boxes completely ruined the progression system.
I wish they’d release server code, it would be sick to be able to run small community games
The first game that comes to mind for me is Civilizations 4. I’ve probably spent hundreds of hours playing but after getting used to 5 and 6 I have a really hard time going back. Going back and forth between 5 and 6 I need to rethink some strategies but with 4 I feel like I need to rethink everything. I don’t know if it’s...
Hit me right in the nostalgia with this one. Used to played the heck out of it on SEA and my local country server. The game is super grindy for my taste now but I still feel nostalgic about the community and people there.
It’s kinda supported - if you have your phone in your pocket you do get some steps, but it’s not as efficient as walking.
I’m Finnish myself and my German skills aren’t that great :D The translations for the game are made by the community, you can help correcting errors at translate.walkscape.app (the tool is currently hosted on a very underspecced server so it’s laggy, we’ll be moving it to a beefier one soon)
Edit: Well this was sooner than I thought, I’ve moved it to another server and should be very usable now.
Today’s game is Team Fortress 2. This one’s going to be a bit short, due to just not being able to get many screenshots for it. For years it’s been an annual tradition of mine to play this game on Christmas Eve. Though I’ve stopped playing it for a while, it’s fun to go and kick back in some matches and mess around,...
I haven’t been active in TF2 in years, but I have 2.9k hours, all without idling for items. That game was basically another life for me, around 2010-2016. In that timespan I picked up PC gaming, got into shooters, got into TF2, joined a community, started collecting strange weapons, got my first unusual and traded it, and captained a Highlander team as Pyro.
The game was and still is amazing; I only ever stopped because it was becoming detrimental to my life and schooling. Now, when I try to play, I mourn the loss of my old community servers, get frustrated with my worse skills, and despise the number of bots I run into on Valve servers.
I’m back for my annual month on FFXIV, but I honestly admit I’m growing a bit tired of the gameplay loop, the “omg you’re the main hero !!” story and the sometimes very weird community. I love the world setting though, so I usually stick around anyway....
Ultima Online the OG mmorpg. There’s a private run server that launched 6 years ago and took the community by storm. They’ve reworked almost everything and it’s amazing. Outlands is the name of the server. UO outlands is like the UO2 we never got.
Yes, that’s part of the StopKillingGames agenda as well. Allow us to control our own servers! For fuck’s sake, it’s CHEAPER for them, because WE’RE paying for hosting. A dedicated server costs money! And it keeps people buying into the ecosystem after the initial sales high because you form communities and then tell people IRL how awesome the game is. Assuming you have time for real life friends of course.
I’m not against the existence of a matchmaking system, or even against it being the default. Just give us a tiny menu item “Dedicated Servers” somewhere and keep that one around forever, even when the publisher is long bankrupt because the CEO blew all their profit on sculptures of oddly shaped penises or something.
In my experience with TF2, many popular community servers have common-sense rules like no slurs, cheats, etc. The great thing about a player-run server is that, if you want, it can be stricter than official guidelines, as Valve for example is pretty hands-off beyond the obvious in-game cheats. It allows pockets of the community to shape the experience they want to have more adeptly than official servers ever could.
Back in the day, I LOVED Unreal Tournament (… I still do actually). And a lot of that is because I found servers with people who became friends I still chat with (hell, one of them is even in the same Warframe clan as I am).
But that is INCREDIBLY unapproachable and I know plenty of people who never “got int” UT or Quake or TF2 because they never found those communities and instead got stuck with random pubs full of assholes.
That said: That is not about anti-cheat. That is about matchmaking versus player run servers. Which is a very different discussion with nuances in all directions.
I think the way to go about detecting cheats server-side would be primarily driven by statistics. For example, to counter wallhacks one might track how often a player is already targeting an enemy before they become visible. Or to counter aimbots one could check for humanly impossible amounts of changes in the direction of mouse movement, somewhat similar to how the community found out a bunch of cheaters using slowmo in Trackmania.
Add in a reputation system that actually requires a good amount of playtime to be put into the highest tier of trust for matchmaking and I think one could have a pretty solid system that wouldn’t have to rely on client-side anticheat at all.
This is a very strict bar with a limiting price requirement. As for the title of the post, I fully mean giving the enjoyable feeling 100% of the time. Put forth the niche games which do this, because I do not know of any popular AAA or popular/fairly big developer indie which does this. The game must be playable for 100 hours at...
For SR3, just do it, it’s a really well-made game and runs great and you don’t need any prior knowledge except to know that it’s kind of a GTA parody. I don’t think SR1 was even ported to PC, and SR2 is pretty buggy and unstable on modern machines (though fun aside from that). SR4 supposed to be pretty great (same engine as 3 I think) but I haven’t played it.
FH4 has a healthy playerbase and I’m pretty confident it’ll still be worth playing over the next year. However beyond that as the community slowly dwindles it will eventually become less fun with fewer people doing Forzathons or seasonal co-ops or using the auctions, even if the servers are still running.
Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy… and then it’s only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can’t it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It’s so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic… which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
-Valve didn’t kill ownership it was already dead. DLC has been pulled, and games delisted, as well as games made unplayable by server shutdowns. They just happened to be the platform who told you to your face what you were getting into while everyone else lied and said the game was yours until it wasn’t. They also say they’ll provide downloads for a time if they ever shut down, but if you want that long term guarantee you’re probably better off looking at GOG and some kind of data storage for the installers.
-Origin is shit and I hate EA/Origin exclusives too, but it’s basically a launcher for their own games which I understand, but still prefer steam to be included too, so much of the time I avoid EA games (i avoid them for a lot of reasons tbh)
-Battle.net started as a unified launcher for blizzard games, which sort of made sense as they never worked with or were involved with steam, and many of their games were disc based or had its own installer. Subscriptions specifically I don’t think existed with steam for a while so that was sort of a complicating factor. Still wish their games were on steam, but it sort of made sense at its inception.
-I don’t even use the microsoft store unless forced to, I find it annoying and bleh. They’re forcing more games to it and it’s shitty too.
-Epic is annoying, but it’s a special kind of annoying because for many games early on, they would announce steam as a supported platform, some even sold the game on steam, until they changed to Epic exclusives. I think Fall Guys was one example. The bait and switch really lost them trust with a lot of gamers and you’ll find the attitude towards them can be pretty bad because of that history.
Add in that many of the games aren’t published by them, they just threw money at the publisher or devs to make their games epic exclusive. This can be good for developers, like an upfront investment, but sucks for gamers who like to keep things somewhat unified in terms of a game library. Especially when you already have to deal with 5 other launchers, another arbitrary one is pretty annoying.
If you’re wondering why people want their games on steam, look at the features. Free cloud save backups, a decent amount of free screenshot backups, in game recording is new and pretty neat, achievements, community marketplaces, frequent sales, family sharing, steam workshop for easy integrated modding, discussions and guides for all your games, early access games, built in friends, text chat, voice chat, remote play together, game streaming, etc.
TLDR: It isn’t an “oh epic stinky just because” situation. The Epic game store simply doesn’t have feature parity, bait and switched gamers multiple times with exclusives after games were advertised as being on steam, and basically survived on throwing money at devs to put their games exclusively on EGS, at the expense of the people who want to play those games on their chosen platform. Doesn’t shock me that they don’t have a lot of positive PR in the community.
“Imagine you buy a pinball machine, and years later, you enter your den to go play it, only to discover that all the paddles are missing, the pinball and bumpers are gone, and the monitor that proudly displayed your unassailable high score is removed”. As reported by Polygon, that’s an argument put forth by a new lawsuit...
With games people used to setup their own servers. (And we liked it that way. Way more sense of a community.) So that could be an option. Allow people to run their own servers again.
World of Warcraft still exists in 2024. The game’s 10th expansion was released in August, and while it doesn’t command quite the same influence as it did during its early-millennium prime, millions of players still step through its portal every day. But the dynamic I’m describing—the complex social contract, the...
This is extremely dependent on which games you’re playing and how you’re playing them. Public servers or matchmaking seem to generally be pretty bad for making connections, because they tend not to require as much social interaction and when they do it’s of the throw-away variety. Raiding and PVP in MMOs, when it’s difficult enough, tends to lead to greater connection-building because you want to actually be able to rely on your teammates. For me, though, the greatest games for building community tend to be sandbox games on private RP servers.
The roleplaying community for any given game tends to be substantially smaller than the community at large. It’s a fairly small pool where you see the same people over and over again. There are new faces too, but you’ll usually recognize folks if you’ve been around for a few years. If I check out a new DayZ server or a new Conan server, I will invariably run into people I’ve met time and time again. These communities have a shared history spanning years and dozens of servers, and they tend to bubble out into hundreds of small discord servers for in-game groups and general friend groups that form. Roleplay is all about communication, so you don’t really have that same distance that you do when the game is just about playing out a game loop over and over again. To play the game is to make friends, whether your characters are allied or are enemies.
There’s toxicity, to be sure, and private servers introduce a whole new layer of drama with nepotism and staff abuse, but those problems actually have solutions other than turning off chat or hoping the developers do something. Most servers have some form of whitelisting process and will actively ban problem users, or may even have some form of mediation process. If you don’t like how a server is run, you can get together a group of friends, rent a VPS or a dedi, and host a new server yourselves. It happens over and over again. Arguably most new RP servers come about because somebody didn’t like something about some previous RP server they were playing on. This leads not just to new servers, but to people developing new skill sets. It gives people a reason to develop new social and leadership skills, to expand their artistic abilities, and to develop new technical prowess. I know quite a few people, myself included, who got back into making art or got into modding, hosting, or development because they wanted to make something different for the community; to show people how things could be.
For me, roleplay has been life-transforming. It’s helped me work my way through a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to see up close as easily if I were only seeing it through the context of my own real life. It’s given me artistic drive that I didn’t have before. And perhaps most vitally, it’s gotten me invested in community and led to meaningful friendships in a time where I haven’t really been super enthusiastic about getting out of the house in my free time. In an era where people are increasingly atomized, I’ve found it to be a great way to meet people that I care about.
It honestly blows my World of Warcraft raiding and PVP days completely out of the water. If you’re looking for community in video games, I definitely recommend getting invested in some RP. Immerse yourself and get wrapped up in some stories. Join some groups; make some friends. It’s a lot more interesting than toxic public lobbies full of people who don’t care about one another or any sense of community.
I think it’s community (and lack thereof). When you had to talk to others on your server only, sit in LFG and shout in Ironforge for a UBRS group, then all schlep to Blackrock Mountain, then spend an hour battling through the instance, that was a shared experience with players you’d see more or less often. Now, it’s get in a random queue, get teleported there, race behind some tank who can solo the whole thing, then everyone drops at the end before you can even say thanks.
And back when we had community hosted servers, evading a ban was so simple, change server or restart your dial-up connection to get a new IP and change nickname, yet it was incentive enough to behave, because people recognized you just through your text (voice chat was usually limited to clan games)
I think the guy is smart, and I used to hold his opinion in very high regard. But after he shat his opinion out and just doubled down and refusing to talk with Ross after calling him and his movement “scummy” I lost alot of respect for him. The dude can make 2 whole videos shitting on Ross and the movement but won’t talk to him about it? fuck off. Every time I watch a video of his he just sounds so pretentious to me now. And for someone that shines his “20 years of gamedev” purple heart badge every 15 mins, he acts willfully ignorant to the years of people self hosting reverse engineered WOW servers acting like its impossible for the community to keep these games preserved.
Imma break down their points and provide my own counter-arguments:
Client-Server model games can’t be client only because people could cheat
The publisher can provide the executable for the server portion of the client-server game at no cost to them.
The Crew was online only and had been running for 10 years, for it to continue running would cost Ubisoft more money and squeals provide the same experience with continued support
The publisher can provide the executable for the server portion of the client-server game at no cost to them.
Excessive red-tape / Government overreach
I like my government regulating massive corporations who exist in one of the largest industries, the move fast and break things mentality is detrimental to our society.
You bought a licence to the game not the game itself
That’s fucked up and shouldn’t happen. Why you ‘buy’ something, be it a game, movie, software, car, house. You should have the freedom to do whatever you want with it.
The initiative would damage live service games which provide value outside of just the game (online friendships).
Live service games can still do this under the initiative. Publishers might make less live service games but that’s their problem, not the consumers.
In the comments he adds counter-arguments to why publishers shouldn’t provide the server executable. Focusing on how monetisation would work:
If we don’t allow monetization - Who would be the party that enforces non-monetization of that server? If it’s the government I feel like we’re making an insane amount of red tape. If it’s the original company then this doesn’t work if they shut down.
If the company shuts down then it’s no longer an issue because no-one is losing money from the game servers now being monetised.
If we don’t allow monetization - Who is going to pay for the hosting if the servers cannot be monetized? If they cannot be monetized then these servers will also eventually shut down due to cost. We don’t up preserving games like this we just shift their death down the road.
The community, there are entire operating systems that are provided by volunteers for free with no advertisements. Providing the server executable does not shift their death down the road as anyone can run it going forward.
If we do allow monetization - This leads to a really weird attack potential if people can monetize the servers. You make an awesome game that has a small community. I want to monetize that game and run my own servers. I create a shitload of bots and constant exploits to erode the game and your business. Your business closes and you now have to give out server binaries to keep the game in a playable state. I can now profit off your work via private servers. This isn’t unlikely as we’ve seen mass attacks such as with TF2 We actually see echoes of this in the mobile market already as well. The only defense right now is DMCA or other takedown measures. Devs legitimately have very little protections as-is and this would erode that further. This creates an incentive for abuse where the abuser is protected as they are within their legal right to operate said “abandoned” games servers.
An odd straw-man, as for a small studio to develop a free to play, live service game to then have their game targeted by nefarious actors using a denial of service attack will only happed if the game is popular / good, in which case the developers should be making enough money to invest in protections against said actors, e.g. the IPs can be tracked and forwarded to the relevant authorities as orchestrating a denial of service attack is a crime.
That scenario isn’t anything like the TF2 situation, whose bots are ran by frustrated community members in an effort to have Valve continue updating TF2. Private servers can also be ran for TF2 as I write this, and the game is still being ran by Valve.
The only defence isn’t takedown measures, since the developer is running the game, as Thor said in the video, the developer can ban the bots.
It gives space to do servers based on specific interests if you want. I’m part of a game development server, and my “Local” tab has people on my server often talking about, and showing, things that are related to game development. And I can still follow anyone from any other Mastodon server too.
If you’re into video games, film, maybe a specific genre of music, you can have an instance dedicated to that. (It might already exist.) It’s like a virtual neighborhood, or forum. Remember forums? Those were nice. They cultivated a sense of community which made people a little more responsible in their attitudes, it feels like. Maybe that’s just nostalgia, but I like the server I’m on. It’s got friendly people I can talk to without feeling the need to fill my follows with them.
I never tried it. My only contact with the fediverse was through Lemmy.
When I became aware of lemmy it was first through the piracy subreddit doing the exodus and the head mod db0 mentioning the new piracy community. I wasnt aware of instances at the time and signed up on lemmy.ml because that was the first thing that popped up.
Later I realized I didnt want to be a part of ml and switched to my current instance.
Same goes for matrix. Signed up on element and now I dunno if I wanna stay there or leave. No special reason to do either.
Last time I heard about Mastodon it also doesnt inform about instances.
First google on mastodon leads me to mastodon.social.
A few links later (Info about an animal called mastodon, mastodon.social, google news widget, google info page widget and a “people also ask” section) I get to the joinmastodon.org page and first leads me to mastodon.social and a server selector.
My grandmother would be overwhelmed, my mother would ask me if the site is safe (I warned her to be wary about domains switching) and I assume other more tech iliterate would be just joining mastodon.social totally defeating the use case of deferedation.
I am thinking before 1.19.1 when chat reporting was added. 1.7 to 1.12 seem to have less requirements to run for lower end pcs. Its just some chill fun and not pvp focused so being newer than 1.9 shouldn’t matter. I am thinking 1.15 maybe since it added bees. I guess its a compromise between how well the game runs on lower...
I discovered this one recently. As the name implies, it’s a reverse-engineered clone of early versions of the game. It has extremely low hardware requirements, which allow the client to run on virtually anything.
Freejam studio closing with Robocraft and Robocraft 2 shutting down (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
Robocraft was near and dear to me. It’s also the reason I don’t bother with live service games anymore. In 2017-2018-ish, Robocraft was one of my favorite games, ever. Then they were able to take that game away from me and replace it with something I liked far less. This is inevitable for any live service game; if not...
What games are you nostalgic towards but wouldn't go back and play? angielski
The first game that comes to mind for me is Civilizations 4. I’ve probably spent hundreds of hours playing but after getting used to 5 and 6 I have a really hard time going back. Going back and forth between 5 and 6 I need to rethink some strategies but with 4 I feel like I need to rethink everything. I don’t know if it’s...
Developer of WalkScape (the fitness MMORPG where you progress by walking IRL) here again. We're accepting new players and have a Lemmy community! angielski
Hello again, Lemmy!...
Day 161 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I’ve been playing until I forget to post Screenshots (lemmy.world) angielski
Today’s game is Team Fortress 2. This one’s going to be a bit short, due to just not being able to get many screenshots for it. For years it’s been an annual tradition of mine to play this game on Christmas Eve. Though I’ve stopped playing it for a while, it’s fun to go and kick back in some matches and mess around,...
What games have you sunk the most time into? angielski
I was looking at my playtime for some games and realized I have over 450 hours in PlanetSide 2....
What MMORPG are you playing, and why? angielski
I’m back for my annual month on FFXIV, but I honestly admit I’m growing a bit tired of the gameplay loop, the “omg you’re the main hero !!” story and the sometimes very weird community. I love the world setting though, so I usually stick around anyway....
Is it time to start a campaign against kernel-level anticheat? angielski
Now that Stop Killing Games is actually being taken seriously - maybe we need to take a look at Stop Fucking Around In Our Kernels...
Is there any (single player playable) game with $10 which has made you point any go "haha" or given you an equivalent feeling because it was that enjoyable for every moment you played it? angielski
This is a very strict bar with a limiting price requirement. As for the title of the post, I fully mean giving the enjoyable feeling 100% of the time. Put forth the niche games which do this, because I do not know of any popular AAA or popular/fairly big developer indie which does this. The game must be playable for 100 hours at...
I hate when a PC game is ONLY available on Epic Games store (lemmy.world) angielski
Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy… and then it’s only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can’t it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It’s so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic… which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
Ubisoft is being sued over The Crew in a lawsuit that compares the server shutdown to a bumperless pinball machine (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
“Imagine you buy a pinball machine, and years later, you enter your den to go play it, only to discover that all the paddles are missing, the pinball and bumpers are gone, and the monitor that proudly displayed your unassailable high score is removed”. As reported by Polygon, that’s an argument put forth by a new lawsuit...
Silent but Deadly: I met some of my closest friends through multiplayer games. Then a strange happening turned everyone (literally) speechless. (slate.com) angielski
World of Warcraft still exists in 2024. The game’s 10th expansion was released in August, and while it doesn’t command quite the same influence as it did during its early-millennium prime, millions of players still step through its portal every day. But the dynamic I’m describing—the complex social contract, the...
7/7 of Required Countries Have Met the #StopKillingGames EU Petition Threshold. angielski
cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/33837279...
Valve has created a Steam Bluesky account (bsky.app) angielski
Thinking of starting a little beehaw minehut server for minecraft what version should I go with? (java)
I am thinking before 1.19.1 when chat reporting was added. 1.7 to 1.12 seem to have less requirements to run for lower end pcs. Its just some chill fun and not pvp focused so being newer than 1.9 shouldn’t matter. I am thinking 1.15 maybe since it added bees. I guess its a compromise between how well the game runs on lower...