I had a very similar experience a few years ago with Tannenberg. An eastern front WW1 shooter that, at least at the time, I don’t know the current status, had just enough players in the evening to fill up one server, so I’d play with the same people night after night. It never felt empty because of that and it was great fun.
Isonzo is the newer one. I haven’t played it in a few months, but it’s similarly small but I never felt close to anyone there.
I play Squad fairly frequently, and it’s got a similar feel to what the OP is about. You choose your server with a server browser, and it’s frequently got a lot of the same people there all the time. There’s some servers that are more casual, and they end up cycling players more so you don’t recognize anyone. The more experienced focused servers draw from a much smaller group though, and they play more consistently.
What is the skill curve for Squad? Is it easy to get into and be useful? Or there is a period where you are just cannon fodder?
Very easy to get into I’d say. Just listen to your squad leader, and don’t start a squad until you know what you’re doing.
The last bit is what killed world of Warcraft for me. When it changed from a world with the same people in it everytime, to automated group finders combining every possible world anyone could be in.
Not only will you never see those people again, for a while it was literally impossible to talk to them or friend them.
When they put out classic wow again, they updated it to have all these “new quality of life” features.
Thank god for private servers.
There’s some rose-tinted goblin welding goggles there.
Pugs for 5-mans used to be a huge pain in the ass. Especially for lower-level dungeons or for DPS classes (and especially the boomkins, the fury warriors, and the ret pallys).
Remember spamming city chat, LFG BFD?
And if you were a warlock, you were expected to run all the way there (remember not getting mounts until 40?), and wait for two other people, so you could summon the last two?
I haven’t really played much since TBC, or at all since LK. LFG was a huge improvement. It had flaws, for sure…it did break the community a bit, as you said…but it made the game playable for people who didn’t have hours to commit to getting ready for a 5 man dungeon.
Yeah I don’t miss the days of trying to get a group to do Scarlet Monestary then running the gauntlet of griefing assholes.
SM was the worst for it.
And there were so many quests.
And there was so much lore inside.
But if you were an alliance player on a PvP realm you were guaranteed to get ganked waiting for the rest of your party to show.
Everybody has different experiences. For me the game was okay but it was secondary to the friends that I met and played with. That shitty LFG experience pushed people to make and join guilds.
There’s definitely a way works both ways.
ESPECIALLY when things like the DPS Priest build was the best for leveling but the HEALING Priest is the one everyone needed for dungeons.
Oh as a shadow priest in TBC you hit me right in the feels.
Shadow was so great for levelling but shit for healing. And holy was great for healing but shit for solo play.
Towards the end of TBC I was doing disc and having a blast as a squishy healer in PvP.
To be fair thats sort of the point of RPGs, people fill different roles but not all roles.
Yeah…wish they would’ve come out with dual specs earlier. Would’ve made leveling my priest much more fun…a holy priest was a slow and boring process in solo PvE but a shadow priest was boring in dungeons. And I liked doing both.
I think the punishment for changing specs was just unbalanced. In vanilla it was an absurd amount of gold. We had funds for our healers and tanks, and many of them just played alts outside of raids.
Something about the difficulty of it all I think breeds companionship. Whatever we have now is pretty broken.
Yup and if you were on a low pop server or mature one with not many leveling. Forget doing dungeons at all.
DF and RF have their issues but it wasn’t all fun before.
As a feral who needed random blues, I spent days trying to get groups for less popular dungeons, just to have the item not drop or get ninja’d
As a solo player in the early wow era, lfg was a massive pain in my backside. I literally couldn’t progress without completing certain dungeons, and I couldn’t complete those dungeons unless I grouped up. So I was painfully and perpetually stuck in a never ending loop of LFG.
It’s the reason I left.
If you don’t have a group to play with, or preferred to play solo, utilizing pick up groups when necessary, the game became an unplayable mess halfway through the level progressions.
They’ve “fixed” most of this now, but I have a hard time caring about the game now. I went back to it for a short while a few years ago, and while it’s easier to nab a group for progression, the onslaught of go-fer quests numbed my brain to any lore that was being spouted by the quest givers, and it became a grind fest.
No sorry, just action.
WoW FEELS super fragmented right now.
I mean, when they finally gave in and released Classic I had no idea they would release 10 different versions of it. But that’s mostly a different topic.
The shattered world of the main game is the big problem, cities and raids and events that exist only conditionally, like Undercity and Ny’Alotha with the attatched invasion.
Being able to meet and talk with players you can’t trade with or craft for, whether they’re Horde while you’re Alliance, or they’re from an unconnected server to yours. When you tell the latter they can send you a personal crafting order for the sword they keep asking for in Trade Chat, they can’t.
And as a Blacksmith/Miner main, I get to experience the shattered state of instanced zoning more regularly, every time I fly out to get ore, with several ore deposits simply disappearing as I approach them or start mining them. I see them from the other side of a fracture in the world. When I cross over, the illusion fades away.
I haven’t logged on to WoW in a few years, but it’s really interesting to hear what’s become of instance handling. I was on the fence about it in '03-'04, when the discussion was about whether or not instanced dungeons (Lost Dungeons of Norrath for EQ) were a good idea long-term. At the time the discussion sounded a lot the discussions about fast travel. Or maps, for that matter.
dude, I miss lineage 2
Just play wow again, it still exists
But with raid and dungeon finder, guilds mean almost nothing and everything is just about grinding as fast as possible. I quit wow after matchmaking ruined the intimacy of raiding with a good guild.
Classic* my mistake
I dunno man my mythic raiding guild is still plenty tight knit. Has a heroic only team as well that I believe is also pretty tight.
You still need a solid raid group if you want solid raid progress. Not sure what else you are expecting exactly.
Sounds like you might enjoy WoW Classic
I do indeed
You know there’s 3 difficulties above LFR that you can’t queue for, right? Guilds do those
COD 2 Rifle only 🫡
Well, atleast for the very top it’s still the same. The best 100 players of nearly every game do still know each other.
However fuck what they’ve done to PUBG, fuck bots give map bans.
That first bit is a pretty accurate description of a lot of early online gaming.
I knew most of the experienced bards on my EQ server in '03. Half the reason I bothered to develop my character was to try and keep up with them. Now pretty much the only thing that’ll keep me playing online multiplayer is casino gamification, so I don’t start.
long live (classic) EQ :)
yup, sounds like my experience playing Unreal 2:XMP back in the day
Definitely describes my early Team Fortress Classic/TF2 time back in college. I’m actually still steam friends with folks from that time and I definitely still rock my “clan tag”! Sort of lame if kids don’t have a chance at the same thing…
kids are missing out on a lot simply because the number of PCs in private households has shrunk by ca. 90% - consoles just don’t give the same gaming experience / definitely not the sense of immersion.
That’s a huge bummer - didn’t realize the numbers were that high.
Having a PC in my house in the 90s with games led me to learn about computers… to play better games. Which has absolutely contributed to my having a successful career.
Glad I’m putting together a Linux box for my oldest to wreck/play with!
It’s a guess by me, but honestly I think it’s quite accurate - then again I just checked some statistics and those absolutely does not confirm my guess - however most unfortunately mix PCs and laptops (which are not the same in terms of how you learn with them, imo) and oftentimes even tablets (which are completely useless to learn anything about computers). The actual numbers as per the first statistic I found say that households with PCs are down from ca. 65% in the early 2000s to ca 43% in the 2022.
Thinking about it, that might actually be true, but I don’t think that anywhere close to 40% of children get exposure to computers & spend way too much time on mobile devices.
Glad I’m putting together a Linux box for my oldest to wreck/play with!
And that is absolutely the best you can offer them to find out if they have an interest in / a talent for anything IT. And playing games is a good motivator to try and start figuring out problems.
That was a big pull of WoW. You type “lfg” once in all chat and that could send you on a 20 year relationship with a guild with people who end up becoming your best friends.
I’m playing a mobile game that’s pretty much exactly like that first part.
I’ve been playing Lord of the Rings, Battle for Middle Earth lately (I believe the game came out in 2004?). Anyways, the small pool of players isn’t as fun as you remember. The greentext notes giving up based on team matchup, and oh boi is that a big problem.
I really wish BFME2 could get a remaster in the fashion of the Age of Empires Definitive Editions. I only ever played single player back in the day but I’d love to be able to easily install it and play some multiplayer games.
Shame the rights won’t allow that.
It’s unofficial but this is what everyone uses to play: http://bfmeladder.com/
Oh wow that’s cool, I had no idea that existed.
The problem for me is with the size of the player base though. Without a large enough community, it’s hard for a complete noob (which I am—as a kid I only ever played BFME2 against AI, almost exclusively siege maps, and at low difficulties) to enter and find a game at roughly their level. A remaster with a matchmaking queue is exactly what I needed to get into competitive Age of Empires/Mythology (where I’m a little better as I at least understand the basics of how to build an economy/what decent build orders are) and I would probably need something like that to get back into BFME for anything other than play with friends.
Had the same experience with AssaultCube last year.
CS2 still has server browser. Even I have my own dedicated server.
Had the same experience with AssaultCube last year.
Jesus, fuck, that’s still around?
I just spun up a server, and before I knew it, there were 16 players having the best time. I wonder if it could happen again, but I have no time to try it.
I’d say Minecraft’s multiplayer experience is close to what Anon describes as “good multiplayer”, probably because it hasn’t changed much in 15 years - there’s not even an in game server browser (at least on the Java edition), and playing Minecraft in and of itself is usually a big time commitment so you’re more encouraged to find a couple of servers you like and stick to them.
However, the last time that I feel like I integrated into a server’s community was 4 years ago - a blank server list doesn’t really encourage you to go looking for more, and it’s been harder to commit time as I get older and have more responsibilities (that I ignore anyways, but still).
I think Lethal Company also has a lobby system without matchmaking, but I haven’t played it so I don’t really know.
Joining a modded Minecraft server you’ll always make friends eventually because after like 20 hours of being onine with the same people they’ll eventually wonder what you are working on and ask to come see your base. Its a great social game.
Tribes 1 still like this. Always see the same dudes. They all killers too
Did you try the new netcode test? Just saw the discord announcement today
Not yet. Gonna get back on it though.
Well, tribes 1 is also a 26 years old game, so would go under the first part.
:(
deleted by creator
Nostalgia might be pushing a bit hard here. Even playing obsessively on relatively small games on a limited number of servers for hours every day, I never got to recognize people just by being there. Occasionally someone would friend you, but otherwise, you knew people for 4-5 rounds at a time, and then never saw them again. Internet, even back then, was a big place.
It was pretty regular for me. You find a server and usually the people hosting were usually always in there. Especially if it was a clan. That’s how I got into ever clan I ever joined.
You join a server and get to know the usuals and become friends. Still play with people I met back with the OG call of duty came out. We still play games together today. Never met half of em in real life.
Well the post is 6 years old so it’s actually referencingthe internet 21 years ago. This kind of thing did happen back then. I’m remembering Halo 1 pc servers and recognizing names.
Online gaming in 2004 indeed had much less people available overall. On the FPS front, it was mostly Counter Strike and Battlefield 1942 I guess.
For me it was counter strike and day of defeat. Guess I was fully on the valve train.
My dad (would be 71 if he were still alive) used to play an online flight simulator WW2 game back in the late 90s / 2000s until he passed in 2012. He made a bunch of online friends through that game who he’d have long phone convos with outside of the game. My mom had to call them up to let them know he passed. I think he might of met a couple in person over the years too.
I was never a gamer, although during covid I put an emulator on my Mac so I can play PS2 and N64 games. Last night for the first time in a long time I played THPS2 on my Mac. I’ve beat the game multiple times but it’s just fun to play. Never got into online gaming.
I also actively remember seeing someone from the same “clan” as you in a random free for all or capture the flag game. Always a great feeling.
Idk that was pretty frequent for me on TF2 community servers
I had basically one TF2 server I would play on because that’s the one I knew the people. It was like the community basketball hoop. If people weren’t playing then sometimes I would text a friend and try to get a game going or more often than not just try again later. It felt natural and low-stakes. This meme hits hard.
Hell, it still is pretty frequent for me to see a couple regulars on the TF2 servers i play on
When is “back then” for you?
I played counter-strike during the beta days and team fortress when it was “classic” not “2”
I definitely had a handful of favourite servers (1-2 favourites, 2-3 backups) that I would play on and knew the regulars like an old country pub.
Now things are set up so that it’s almost impossible to develop relationships with random folks online. Not just matchmaking but also more closed-off (hard to discover) groups on Discord etc…
CS1.6 and TFC was the golden age of online gaming and it’s been downhill since then. Literally nothing has been improved upon and the community has become immeasurably more toxic.
We’ve lost IRC and dedicated servers and replaced it with matchmaking and Discord. Both objectively worse.
Mid-late 2000s. Roughly 2005-2012.
Yeah…that was the end times.
This absolutely happened to me in Battlefield 1942.
Yeah, the early BF games were where I found servers that were communities. We’d even host events like stunt flying or trick shot challenges where we’d throw a pssword on the server for a few hours so nobody could troll us.
Or for certain days of the week, we’d be running the Desert Combat mod. It was a different time in online gaming.
Another thing I miss from those days is friendly fire. I get why it had to be removed, but it allowed for big, overpowered thing like artillery strikes and naval bombardment that were as likely to wipe your own team as help without coordination.
Oh man. Desert Combat was incredible.
I love that they basically just hired the Desert Vombat team to make BF2.
Though the AC 130 in Desert Combat is still my favorite game vehicle of all time.
Mobile, pilot-able spawn point for the entire team with awesome air-to-ground weaponry that had to be defended by fighters.
It could fly over an emeny base and rain troops and death, but if it got shot down or the pilot wasn’t amazing, it was a huge liability.
Naaah. I made like 40 longtime steam friends because of playing on the same gmod server. Was lucky to find a server that had the most insane creators on it. You went onto any other server, they used what we made on that one. Drunk Combine, tanks, jets (including working VTOL), we had artillery that worked the same way it did in World of Tanks. 95% of the players there were insane at Expression 2 - which was a scripting / programming language that let you interact with the physics of the game in awesome ways.
I put the best 750hrs of my life into that server. It was called “Unsmart’s” after the dude that hosted it. Closed down after a few years when the people moved onto other games. There was a shortlived revival, but it was more of a “reunion” than anything else. Still have everyone as friends and could probably get them together by pinging the group if I wanted to.
Anecdotal, you still learn people and you can build a community reputation playing PvP in FFXIV. We don’t get to choose the map, and you’ll still see some people only once, but you get to know who’s who. The problem is, it’s not as fast as fortnite or other games. Which is a large turn off for many. But the slower (just barely slower) pace is more forgiving towards people that are middle aged and can’t compete with top tier fortnite/ League of Legends, etc types.
That’s more because few people seriously PvP in FFXIV, so you naturally end up randomly queued with the same people repeatedly.
