One thing I took away from the article was I wish developers would stop with the whole matchmaking, company run server stuff and let us host our own like in the 90's or at the very least make the server software available when you sunset.
this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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Excuse me, what? And have good games actually survive over decades if people are interested in them? Surely not!
Or be able to create a mass of talented devs and admins through hosting and modifying said servers and games like they did?
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.
The sunsetting idea is good though and I wished that happened more too.
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.
I have no idea how any game client and server implementations work (outside of games I've actually worked on), and I'm pretty certain you don't either, so saying something is "zero effort to add" is presumptuous and naive.
None of what you've said solves any of the issues that I pointed out, only "look at how much extra gameplay you might get!", and that's assuming the devs took the time to make their game easily moddable.
For a primarily PvP game, the biggest challenge a studio (especially a small or mid-sized one) faces is gaining a large enough population of players early on. Without critical mass, the player base will rapidly dwindle because people get tired of waiting in queues for their games to start (whether it's by matchmaking or finding a custom server), or the quality of the games get worse because they're constantly getting matched outside their skill level (stomping or being stomped).
Providing examples of games from Valve doesn't prove anything because Valve is an extreme outlier. They can afford to put a game out with zero marketing on their part and achieve 170k player concurrency - what other studio has that?
I'm not disputing the potential advantages that you've brought up - I'm only trying to explain the rationale that devs without virtually infinite time, effort and money have to contend with when working on a PvP game.
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.
You're completely missing the point I'm making - it's nothing to do with how matchmaking works or how to get self-hosted servers to work.
Your quote about "every game before the mid 2000s" is just reinforcing what I'm trying to tell you: no modern PvP game can get away with it anymore.
The current average player who's played any modern PvP game in recent memory expects to be able to click a PLAY button that puts them into a match. That is your default user experience expectation.
If you require players to have to dig through a server list like people had to during the pre-mid-2000s, you lose players FAST.
You dilute your player base by allowing people to play in self-hosted servers because your default user experience of clicking PLAY and getting into a game gets worse (less players means less diversity of player skill and longer queue times).
For a game and studio that has no existing reputation and players who will jump on their stuff, you don't have the luxury of splitting your already potentially small player base.
Modern PvP games that allow you to have custom games are all well-established and already have a healthy player base.
And you are missing my point.
You don't trade one for the other. You add this in the options menu, in a smaller font.
Then when The Crew, X-Defiant, Lawbreakers, or any of the 30 other games that AAA publishers end server support for this year go down, the people who bought it aren't left unable to play at all. Theres a fallback. And it does not affect matchmaking because it's down the menu out of the way, and not the default matchmaking method. L
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.
I don't think it's fair to assume what is or isn't a leap for a developer. Unless you've worked on the game in question, we have no idea how easy or difficult it is to support any feature implementation.
Some would like to argue that "they should have thought about it!" and my answer to that is: that's not how game development works.
Making games is hard, and unless you're Valve with virtually infinite time and money, you have to make difficult decisions about what will get you to the finish line the fastest, while maintaining a minimum quality bar.
Every feature implementation takes time, and every added feature takes time away from something else, which takes you further away from shipping the game.
Deep rock galactic is player hosted and that's not really an issue. It's only pve though.
That's why I specifically pointed out PvP.
Why does the dude have his pinky out like he's aggressively english