No it didn’t, and we still have user servers for some games. Such games typically have a few official servers run by the developer, with tons of community servers with a wide variety of gameplay.
The reason we don’t have them as much anymore is purely corporate greed. It’s the same reason most games don’t have mods, even though they stole their most popular gameplay modes from them.
We did, indeed. This is the entire reason for centralized servers existing. It turns out that trying to find the right server for a death match in Doom on a third party site wasn’t as fun as it sounds.
Sorry but what did “we” specifically move away from? Because user hosted servers are very much still a thing for a lot of games and none of the problems you mentioned are really inherent to the concept. Web technology and integration was just a lot… less mature in the nineties.
Back in the 90s, no one could afford a good computer that could run a game and serve it’s users.
It’s 30 years later and today, most people have a phone that’s hundreds of times more powerful. Not only that, many people now have dedicated Internet that is, again, hundreds of times faster than what most people who had computers in the 90s.
It’s even easier than ever to stand up a server with docker containers, which was not even possible back then. Virtual systems was still a niche development and was at least a few years away from regular use.
You are right that back then, it sucked ass. But today, it’s more possible than ever.
You are right that back then, it sucked ass. But today, it’s more possible than ever.
Right but this means that it was not, in fact, random acts of greed but rather offering services people want that made the switch happen, which is the topic of discussion here
No, that isn’t what happened. User run servers, particularly dedicated servers hosted by proper hosting companies, got good before they were taken away. Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Counterstrike 1.6, then all the Source games, hell even early EA’s Battlefield and Call of Duty had user servers. Communities formed on these servers along with innovative gameplay modes - I know this first hand running Counterstrike surf servers in the 00’s.
They also had mods. Valve hired the developers of the Counterstrike mod to help make source, and EA hired the developers of the BF1942 mod Desert Combat to make Battlefield 2. Then Activision stole the zombie mod from COD modders and then locked away modding so they could sell maps (which modders had been making for free, with better quality). EA followed suit not long after.
It was around this time that user servers started to be prohibited in new games. It was part of the same greed, with servers it gives the publisher more control - you’ll have to buy the new game to keep playing if they switch the servers off.
User servers being taken away was a business decision, it did not happen because the concept was flawed.
But finding servers, official or community, was never hard in any of the games I listed. Like I say, the game runs a simple server that catalogues them - when you run a server it tells the game server its details, then a player polls the game server for IPs and the player’s client then fetches the details and pings from each server. User servers are exactly the same as official servers in this regard.
The reason gaming grew is simply because more and more people had internet and computers/games consoles, and because young gamers got older such that it became more acceptable for adults to play.
Everything you’ve said hasn’t been true for more than 20 years.
CoD 4 didn’t come out in the late 90’s. We didn’t move away from dedicated servers, the dev’s disabled that option going forward and not because it sucked ass, but because people who did not pay for the game could connect to private servers.
CoD didn’t but Team Fortress Classic did, and helped popularize the dedicated server trend
Devs disabled it in modern games for a variety of reasons, and fighting piracy was indeed one of them.
If your problem is that you want to be able to pirate games, though, you should know that’s not a winning argument and will never happen. No company is going to voluntarily support you pirating their software
See if a very popular game came in the late 00’s had user ran servers we didn’t actually move away from them in the late 90s even if there were games in the late 90s that did not have user servers.
With no user ran servers it’s not only pirates who cannot play multiplayer games but even paying customers when the developer decides it’s not worth it anymore.
See if a very popular game came in the late 00’s had user ran servers we didn’t actually move away from them in the late 90s even if there were games in the late 90s that did not have user servers.
We did if it isn’t common. “Moving away” very specifically is a term used when something isn’t abandoned outright but is much less common than before
With no user ran servers it’s not only pirates who cannot play multiplayer games but even paying customers when the developer decides it’s not worth it anymore.
Yeah I’m not wholly in support of this, I’m just explaining how we got here. That seems to upset people quite a bit for reasons I cannot understand.
Let the users run servers. Then, all you really need to run is a simple connection server that lets people search for game servers.
We specifically moved away from this in the late 90s because it sucked ass.
No it didn’t, and we still have user servers for some games. Such games typically have a few official servers run by the developer, with tons of community servers with a wide variety of gameplay.
The reason we don’t have them as much anymore is purely corporate greed. It’s the same reason most games don’t have mods, even though they stole their most popular gameplay modes from them.
We did, indeed. This is the entire reason for centralized servers existing. It turns out that trying to find the right server for a death match in Doom on a third party site wasn’t as fun as it sounds.
Sorry but what did “we” specifically move away from? Because user hosted servers are very much still a thing for a lot of games and none of the problems you mentioned are really inherent to the concept. Web technology and integration was just a lot… less mature in the nineties.
Back in the 90s, no one could afford a good computer that could run a game and serve it’s users.
It’s 30 years later and today, most people have a phone that’s hundreds of times more powerful. Not only that, many people now have dedicated Internet that is, again, hundreds of times faster than what most people who had computers in the 90s.
It’s even easier than ever to stand up a server with docker containers, which was not even possible back then. Virtual systems was still a niche development and was at least a few years away from regular use.
You are right that back then, it sucked ass. But today, it’s more possible than ever.
Right but this means that it was not, in fact, random acts of greed but rather offering services people want that made the switch happen, which is the topic of discussion here
No, that isn’t what happened. User run servers, particularly dedicated servers hosted by proper hosting companies, got good before they were taken away. Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Counterstrike 1.6, then all the Source games, hell even early EA’s Battlefield and Call of Duty had user servers. Communities formed on these servers along with innovative gameplay modes - I know this first hand running Counterstrike surf servers in the 00’s.
They also had mods. Valve hired the developers of the Counterstrike mod to help make source, and EA hired the developers of the BF1942 mod Desert Combat to make Battlefield 2. Then Activision stole the zombie mod from COD modders and then locked away modding so they could sell maps (which modders had been making for free, with better quality). EA followed suit not long after.
It was around this time that user servers started to be prohibited in new games. It was part of the same greed, with servers it gives the publisher more control - you’ll have to buy the new game to keep playing if they switch the servers off.
User servers being taken away was a business decision, it did not happen because the concept was flawed.
I love how you talk about all these games with private servers, but not user numbers, because it cuts to the heart of this discussion immediately.
The reason the gaming community grew exponentially is that gaming was made significantly easier, especially PC gaming.
I understand you don’t like the change and pine for the old days, but we aren’t discussing things we like, were discussing events that happened
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But finding servers, official or community, was never hard in any of the games I listed. Like I say, the game runs a simple server that catalogues them - when you run a server it tells the game server its details, then a player polls the game server for IPs and the player’s client then fetches the details and pings from each server. User servers are exactly the same as official servers in this regard.
The reason gaming grew is simply because more and more people had internet and computers/games consoles, and because young gamers got older such that it became more acceptable for adults to play.
Everything you’ve said hasn’t been true for more than 20 years.
CoD 4 didn’t come out in the late 90’s. We didn’t move away from dedicated servers, the dev’s disabled that option going forward and not because it sucked ass, but because people who did not pay for the game could connect to private servers.
CoD didn’t but Team Fortress Classic did, and helped popularize the dedicated server trend
Devs disabled it in modern games for a variety of reasons, and fighting piracy was indeed one of them.
If your problem is that you want to be able to pirate games, though, you should know that’s not a winning argument and will never happen. No company is going to voluntarily support you pirating their software
See if a very popular game came in the late 00’s had user ran servers we didn’t actually move away from them in the late 90s even if there were games in the late 90s that did not have user servers.
With no user ran servers it’s not only pirates who cannot play multiplayer games but even paying customers when the developer decides it’s not worth it anymore.
We did if it isn’t common. “Moving away” very specifically is a term used when something isn’t abandoned outright but is much less common than before
Yeah I’m not wholly in support of this, I’m just explaining how we got here. That seems to upset people quite a bit for reasons I cannot understand.