Comment on Deceive Inc. Developer Sweet Bandits Shuts Down

inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

• RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Excuse me, what? And have good games actually survive over decades if people are interested in them? Surely not!

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  • sirico@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Or be able to create a mass of talented devs and admins through hosting and modifying said servers and games like they did?

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• chryan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  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.

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  • ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    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.

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    • chryan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      [deleted]

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      • ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        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.

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  • crestwave@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    These are good points, but modern PvP games still support custom matches and going from there to self-hosted servers isn’t really much of a leap.

    In fact, I believe Valve’s new game Deadlock does let you run your own dedicated servers.

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  • Xyloph@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Deep rock galactic is player hosted and that’s not really an issue. It’s only pve though.

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    • chryan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      That’s why I specifically pointed out PvP.

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