Comment on Anon is a nostalgic gamer
ECB@feddit.org 3 weeks agoI don’t think it’s necessarily rose-tinted glasses, but rather not the experience that everyone had.
I was never super social in servers, so I didn’t make random friends or anything. Even for me though, servers contributed to a better overall experience.
Much less toxicity: assholes just get kicked or eventually find their fellow assholes on the ‘asshole server’ that you know to avoid.
Much easier to have a chill/casual atmosphere: you can hop in and out, so nobody feels ‘trapped’ in an unfun game. Additionally, since you often jump into games that are in-progress, people tend to care less about winning or losing.
Easier to play with friends of different skill levels: every server would be a mix of skills, so joining with a mixed-skill party doesn’t throw everything out of balance. Since people don’t care as much about winning/losing it’s much easier to fuck-around with your mates without anyone getting upset.
Matchmaking on the other hand is more convenient, but in my opinion a net loss for most people.
HeroHelck@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
I think this is an understated problem. It’s simply awful to be in a slowly losing multiplayer game that you feel you have no control over, and when you also simultaneously feel that you aren’t playing with people you care about. It’s pretty easy to start not caring about monitoring your behavior. After all, who cares if everyone in this lobby thinks you’re annoying or awful to deal with, you will never see them again, and if you do they won’t recognize you, so act out your frustration without fear of real consequences. I also don’t think bans for “bad behavior” actually address the reason people behave this way, it just encourages them to hide it in more subtle ways that automated scripts can’t detect, or that give them some plausible deniability.