Remember the days when the server component was included with the base game? Anyone could launch a server and play with friends and strangers online. I miss those days.
Now we get a company deciding it is not worth maintaining the infrastructure and an entire part of a game is gone forever.
Private servers were so much better than matchmaking in my opinion, there was a sense of community to the game and you would make friends. Now playing with randoms (all of them in their own private discord parties) feels like playing with NPCs.
I get what you are saying, I remember the days struggling with firewalls and NAT, with tools like hamachi... but I think you were responding to the stage of online games that came after that - private servers you generally had hosted by a provider.
Best of both worlds, community run, unique so communities would form around servers, and can't be obsoleted.
Downside is matchmaking isn't as good, but oh well.
Communities often formed "leagues" you could compete in. You could join teams for team games and teams were ranked, had matches, competed. For more single oriented things you were your own matchmaker: choose the servers with more skilled players. Different skillsets naturally tended to gravitate to specific servers because they knew they could compete with other skilled players.
But you could find a group you enjoyed playing with and learn from them. I spent hundreds of hours in a UT2k4 server in Team Arena Mode warmup just practicing air rockets, shock combos, and flick lightning gun headshots. RIP UT2k4
Matchmaking feels like it's a really effective optimisation, but of the wrong metric. It's trying to match you up with players of the same skill level in a reasonably short amount of time. I think I place higher value on seeing a familiar set of players, and gain a greater sense of achievement from rising in skill within that set than from rising in global rank.
With Microsoft's DirectPlay, it was even worse, since only the lobby functioned in a client-server mode. Once the game started, it went full P2P and all players without port forwarding timed out.
Very same. SA:MP servers taught me to run a Linux server and to make gamemodes in Pawn (C-like). I got my first C++ game development job a few years later, and it has been a successful career since. Thank you, SA:MP.
And that's when I learned some real world IPs overlapped w/ Hamachi's and random sites/services stopped working! Wtf! Took me forever to figure it out.
The more modern version is what Minecraft is doing: give people a server they can run, but also offer your own server hosting service. Any seven year old can buy a Minecraft Realm for their friends (if they get their parent's credit card), but you can also rent an instance from a number of other providers if you want something with more freedom (and mods) but still some hand-holding and a dashboard, or host it on your own hardware if that's your thing.
I remember the first time someone built a dedicated server for WC3 custom games (dota) that supported players reconnecting after a dc. it was mindblowing
What always pissed me off is when they didn't have private servers and in fact charged you a monthly fee for multiplayer and still made one of the players act as host, giving that person a massive latency advantage.
Yeah, and you can't have two people independently playing Animal Crossing in one single household since you have to expose the Switch as a DMZ host with all ports on your provider's NAT IP forwarded to it. If your provider doesn't offer you a publicly routed IP (aka CGNAT), you're completely out of luck being the host for Animal Crossing.
And even worse, the ruddy thing doesn't even speak UPnP, so you have to do everything manually!
That's appalling. We've gone from running internal on local networks to forcing a potential security issue to allow for multiplayer.
My personal favorite is Microsoft discouraging local Minecraft servers with the rational that anyone could type anything on them! Who knows what you and the people you explicitly allow on your server might type!
Nintendo has required you to compromise your network security for online play since the DS and Wii. They often required you to set up "DMZ" and port forwarding and still wouldn't work, and the original DS could only do WEP wifi security.
> and the original DS could only do WEP wifi security.
That's excusable though. The DS was released in 2004, with WEP being deprecated only in the same year [1] and most consumer routers / APs of the time not getting updates to WPA anyway.
> My personal favorite is Microsoft discouraging local Minecraft servers with the rational that anyone could type anything on them! Who knows what you and the people you explicitly allow on your server might type!
I do understand where they're coming from, it's brand safety 101 - they don't want to risk the PR disaster from incompetent parents coming into their child's room and seeing n-bombs dropped into the Minecraft chat, leading to the parents shitstorming Microsoft for not moderating the chats when Microsoft for once isn't responsible for not moderating.
I think that legitimate fear is also why so many games removed self-hosting servers. I can remember from the UT2004 days that there were a lot of questionable things said in online chats... obviously sexism, but also lots and lots of racism and antisemitism.
> I do understand where they're coming from, it's brand safety 101 - they don't want to risk the PR disaster from incompetent parents coming into their child's room and seeing n-bombs dropped into the Minecraft chat
Maybe, I’m misunderstanding the initial statement, but if this were case, why ban local servers and not public, internet accessible servers? I promise there’s a much higher chance of that hypothetical happening on those.
I know Nintendo includes this step in their hole-punching troubleshooting guide, but it's just not necessary. I've never met anybody who needed to do this to get their NAT traversal working, it's worked out of the box for every Switch game I've used for everybody I know. I'm sure there are people with weird or bizarre enough networks that standard STUN techniques don't work, but in my ~4 years of playing switch online games with my friends I've never met any of them.
STUN seems like an important technique to get right for their core business, and should boil down to sending a few UDP packets back and forth with a server. As long as they have a dozen engineers that have a clue, it seems reasonable to expect NAT traversal to just work on a switch in most setups.
I have an AVM FritzBox router with UPnP enabled, easily Germany's most-used and most-loved router model. Everything that uses UPnP works out of the box, but I've never seen the Switch create UPnP rules on its own.
I wonder what the fuck keeps Nintendo from operating their own STUN/TURN servers, at least for their own fucking games where I pay 35€ a year for their online service.
Agreed. I played TF2 for a while, found the No Heroes servers, liked the community, paid the $4/month for an account. You got guaranteed slots and they had over a dozen servers for different maps. They used their own sound effects so if someone was stacking kills or whatever it would play announcer or musical clips. It was fun and added a bit of excitement. Of course you get to know the regulars, say hello and even make friends and chat on Steam. I've lost contact with all of them but its okay, what we had during the time it existed was nice.
After a while, like everything else I moved on and didn't play for years. One day I decided to install TF2 for kicks and in its place was a different game. I played for maybe 15 minutes, lost interest and uninstalled the game. I wanted to see what happened to No Heroes and found that they had closed up shop a year prior. I was saddened and honestly very turned off to the game which is why it was uninstalled.
Its because of this loss of community that I have ZERO interest in modern multiplayer gaming. Now its all about ranking so its just an Ego/dopamine boosting machine. I just wanna play a game and have fun. I could care less about rankings, they mean nothing.
> They used their own sound effects so if someone was stacking kills or whatever it would play announcer or musical clips.
Whew, to me this was a strike against community servers. There was a period there where I couldn't join a single CS:Source game without a boatload of Simpsons sounds downloading preventing me from playing. I remember replacing the downloaded sounds with 0 byte files so I wouldn't need to hear them, but servers kept changing the paths so I'd have a bunch of redundant ones to clean up.
Thankfully in true Valve fashion they gave me an out, well after things had gone completely off the rails, with a command line (and later UI) option to block only sound downloads.
Also you would have some shared values about how you enjoy playing the game from hardcore competitive to just goofing around, instead of throwing everyone into one or two queues and letting them rage at each other for ruining each other's fun.
You also wouldn't be forced into near guaranteed loss games to keep your W/L near 50/50. When one team was clearly overmatched compared to the other, the mods (you know, that other great reason to private servers) would turn on autobalance.
A lot of private servers are actually reverse engineered from game binaries. It takes a lot of dedication and a lot of time in IDA/Ghidra to accomplish. You basically run your own copy of the backend and a patched client that connects to your backend.
When I was a teenager I remember playing on MapleStory private servers, and the backend was reverse engineered from the client. GTA private servers are also popular nowadays.
I don't really know where I'm going with this comment but you can always develop your own private server for a game if you have a team that's dedicated enough.
sure, but almost any game built on the Steam engine or an id engine came with the server code, which was nearly any game that mattered for a decade. That was a huge library of games you could self host a server with.
In the case of MapleStory, in the past much of the game logic used to happen in the client side, that's why it was easier to reverse it (And create cheats for it).
In many other games that have private servers: If there was no codebase leak, basically guessing what you can't know. That's why many private servers doesn't work 1:1 when compared to the official servers, people just tried to make the calculations as close as possible after reversing it.
GTA 5 has private servers as well, and it has a similar fat client architecture. It also uses P2P for a lot of things which was probably helpful for the FiveM developers.
MapleStory was also kind of an interesting case because the developers were careless enough to include debug symbols with their binaries on multiple occasions.
These sorts of games are usually not implementing sophisticated algorithms on the server side.
The client is typically just sending simple events (e.g., player moved left) to the server. The server collects events from all the connected clients to build a shared state, and pushes state updates to clients.
Edit: jpcrs makes a good point about this and their comment is worth reading.
It is because doing the calculations on the server does not scale well, so no one wants to do it, usually what happens is that all the clients have to run the simulation anyway so the devs make sure it is the same simulation and all the server does is ship what are effectively the keypresses around. this is why desyncs are such a problem.
Note that having the server do the calculation can solve some of the cheating problem, I remember a modified quake server that would not send location information if you could not see the player, which made wallhacks not work. I just got totally nerd sniped by the memory and while I can't find the demonstration video that impressed me so much at the time. I did find that it was darkplaces quake that added the option "sv_cullentities_trace" which prevents wallhacks.
Team Fortress matchmaking will match you to their official servers, and sometimes even on third party servers. TF also has a server browser where you can select which third or first party servers to join. You can also join directly via IP, if the matchmaking service ever goes offline.
TF2 hasn't matched to 3rd party servers or allowed directly connecting to Valve servers in 6 years, since the introduction of a matchmaking service. They did, however, let a bot flood on official servers get so bad for so a few years that community servers took off and became popular again. It's only been this year that they finally started to effectively fight back against the bots, making casual usable again.
I have recently joined a modded server using matchmaking in the MvM mode, so either Valve allows that, or they run modded servers.
As far as botting goes, it's still not fixed. There was an obvious aimbotter named 'Vinesauce' that went about for 2 weeks getting kicked out of every match (and sometimes rejoining). I can't fathom having this little moderation/development on a game that still must be making millions per year.
Ah, fair enough, I generally don't play the MvM mode. Strange that they allow community servers for the matchmaking service on that after pulling it from the standard mode.
In my experience with Valve's servers in the eastern north american region, while the bots aren't completely gone, there are far fewer of them. Online discussion has indicated this isn't necessarily the case for non-NA regions.
I saw the vinesauce bots. It's my understanding that Valve bans any account kicked from an official server from rejoining that server for half an hour or so. Game harassers run small fleets of their bots. It's likely just another same-named bot joining rather than the same one rejoining, no?
As already mentioned, the matchmaking will not put you on community servers, and its existence has pretty much killed the majority of the community server scene. The game has more players than ever but less community servers than ever and most server mods that used to be very popular have been abandoned as a result.
I mean isnt that an indictment against the system by the community at large? People favor quick, normalized matchmaking. Having the option is amazing, but I dont think the general population really wants that, even if they would say they want the choice. Hard to justify the effort for the company then IMO.
Yes, most people are lazy and will always pick the most obvious and convenient option. No, that doesn't mean that the most obvious and convenient option is better.
The general population doesn't really "want" anything, they're satisfied with whatever they're fed and rarely think about it at all. Back in the server browser days you didn't hear constant complaints from people who wanted matchmaking instead, the switch to matchmaking happened because developers wanted to optimize engagement and increase their control over the game experience so they could monetize it more effectively, that's it.
Valve has always done it right IMO. CSGO is the same, you can start a server yourself or you can play on official servers.
Valve has always been community centered and it really shows in how all their development tools are pretty much available such as mapping tools, server tools etc.
With CSGO most of the matchmaking isn't even done in official servers, but with third party organizations like Faceit. If you want to be a professional CSGO player then you can't even rely on official servers. Nobody can go pro by playing official only when it comes to CSGO, you literally have to use third party services and their community servers.
I always said Starcraft Broodwar Got big in spite of Blizzard. The way they locked Starcraft 2 made it clear it'll die sooner than later, now the moment they decide to plug the plug on the SC2 servers it's gone.
And none of that was a problem because you could just leave and join another server. Meanwhile in modern games, if the admins (aka devs) don't like you, you get punished across the entire game.
Private/Community servers don't require self-hosting. E.g. in the Battlefield franchise the community for BF3 and BF4 is still going quite strong despite there being 3 successors since. And the reason is that people can play with the same people every night. The successors (BFI, BFV, BF20something) are completely uninteresting to me since there is simply no sense of community. I don't get the point in "matchmaking" even for casual gaming.
It doesn't get much easier to get quickly into a game with people ready to play than matchmaking usually.
However, consistently playing with and against the same people is not as much a thing of course.
The upside of matchmaking hence is no scheduling and waiting, the downside is playing with whoever is online anywhere instead of a familiar group.
When WoW added cross realms to PvP battlegrounds it was an eye opener as to how good our realm's community was. Queue times got better, but the enjoyment dropped through the floor.
Cross Server dungeons/raids had the exact same consequence. In the early expansions you would play with people and get to know them. Sometimes you'd be levelling at a similar pace and cross paths on a few of the instances/quests. Maybe you'd get to chatting?
I know we recruited several people into a casual guild based on doing a few dungeons and getting on well with them. This was, ofc, before guild perks etc gamified that aspect in a shitty fashion.
Ofc you also got to learn people you never wanted to instance with again. Reputation mattered! As the Parent said, may as well be playing with NPCs.
Everybody talks about this part with rose colored glasses and nostalgia, conveniently forgetting trying to put a group together for a dungeon and spending upwards of an hour before you even start, not even knowing if your team members are good enough.
I certainly don't have the time to spend on that sort of thing, so if it weren't for things like dungeon finder I wouldn't even play the game anymore. Same with other games, if there wasn't any matchmaking I probably just wouldn't play.
I remember, but I also remember the downside - that as the game got older joining a server became a shit-show.
By the end there was literally one CS server I trusted to be friendly and busy and not running "rpg-mod" or "zombie-mod" or a thousand other adjustments I didn't like, such as "no-awp", "price adjusted" etc.
Just finding a vanilla experience became difficult, doubly so if you wanted more than "dust/dust2 only".
Add in the fact that these servers could send your computer files (in theory just maps, sounds and decals, but difficult to secure of course), and you can see why companies shy away, not just to have greater control of the experience.
We had "local build servers" at one of my previous jobs. Those servers - normal towers, not racks - would communicate they are working on some job by opening CD Drives.
> Add in the fact that these servers could send your computer files (in theory just maps, sounds and decals, but difficult to secure of course), and you can see why companies shy away, not just to have greater control of the experience.
Oh please. That's corporate apologia.
I mean, yeah, those concerns are real but 99.9% of the reasons they aren't doing it anymore is that having a monopoly over servers give them better control over monetization.
Back when you could mod counter strike locally, skin packs etc.. (I'm sure that even before that when you could mod how others saw you.., but that may be rose tinted glasses).. so much fun.
It's obvious why they stopped it eventually (pldecal.wad pretty much became obligatory porn sprays everywhere), but those were the days.
Well indeed, you could even alter your skins so all players would appear bright pink too. This was before resource checking so such cheating was impossible to detect.
In retrospect it's hard to see how the game wasn't more plagued by cheats than it already was, but again it comes back to learning which servers were good servers and had active moderators who could ban people who were obviously cheating, and the less obvious probably just got away with it but were by definition less disruptive.
Of course, that also led to third party tools like PunkBuster in the end whose function then was later centralised with VAC.
GoldSrc games/mods were the golden age, and I will die on this hill. I preferred Natural Selection over CS, and it was just as moddable. It was the best. I was suited up in Mjolnir armor, wielding the pulse rifle from Aliens, blasting the soldier bugs from Starship Troopers.
I think they should be legally required to provide it honestly. The support period for games is getting shorter every year. I mean Unreal Tournament is from 1999, so 23 years old, hats off they were still running servers for it, that's honestly very good. But take Overwatch for example instead, people paid what, $50 for it? That's a game that's online only and is no longer possible to play since Overwatch 2 was released. It was only 6 years old and I'm sure many people prefer it over Overwatch 2, but they can't play it even though they paid for it.
I honestly think it's kinda fucked up that this is legal. It shouldn't be.
The release of Overwatch 2 wasn't the end of the original Overwatch. The Overwatch game that came out in 2016 hasn't existed in a long time. That game had 12 playable characters. The game was changed and that 12 character version stopped existing less than a year after the game came out. Now there's 32 characters with vastly different skills and play styles, really changing the game. The maps are different. Even the original 12 characters have had some changes.
Should it have been illegal for them to add characters to the game? It's not what I originally paid for. They took away the original Overwatch the second they rebalanced or added characters.
> Should it have been illegal for them to add characters to the game?
Sure, why not? Or at least illegal to forcefully change my game without giving me an option of not updating (at the cost of maybe not having anyone to play with). One could argue that I as the customer should be allowed to decide when to patch my game client and server.
There obviously needs to be consensus between players so some version is going to be more popular than others, probably the latest version, and the developer has an interest in keeping the game fresh so as to sell more copies (or lately, skins), so as a customer I'm driven towards the latest version, but I don't see why I should be forced to it.
It would be such a terrible outcome, having the player base fractured over tons of different versions. It would be a far worse experience than them adding some new characters and game modes and renaming the game Overwatch 2.
Yeah but that's not something you actually expect would happen do you? Like 99% of players won't bother and will just go with what the developer provides until the developer decides to kill the game, at that point you have the self-hosted servers available.
Yeah, but one could argue by making updates to the game they're destroying the experience of the old game, taking it away from me. I see little difference in the argument about the "original" Overwatch servers getting migrated to Overwatch 2 and them releasing updates which would ultimately make older versions effectively unplayable (no players).
Like cool, you've now put the force of law into making them continue to manage old versions, versions that practically nobody plays on. By adding a single new character they've now changed the game, and if you didn't like that addition, it's an unplayable game even if you had the option to not update. This is fundamentally the same as Overwatch getting shut down (the old version becomes effectively unplayable).
If anything, they shouldn't be legally allowed to modify the game at all, because making a modification to it makes the original effectively unplayable because there'd be effectively no player base. Or maybe they should be allowed to make updates to their game platform...
If the release of Overwatch 2 was effectively taking Overwatch away from the people who paid for it, every update to the game was effectively taking away that edition of Overwatch from people. But people didn't care until the launcher got updated to say "Overwatch 2", suddenly now that's a travesty and Blizzard is somehow taking it away.
I got Overwatch on release day. I still can play Overwatch today. I don't get why one would say they took it away from people unless you agree every update to the game is taking the old game away from people.
I've never played Overwatch, it was just an example, but my point stands regardless of whether players want changes or not; I simply want there to be some accountability for mega corps so they can't just abandon games, release the new iteration for $60, and then kill the old version off.
Or rather, so that when they eventually do, a potentially still popular game isn't rendered unplayable since there are no official servers and no software for me to use to host my own.
It's more aptly fit to use CoD as an example to be honest, I just used Overwatch because I'd read some were unhappy how they just killed it and replaced it with "sort of but not really the same game".
Since I'm not in the Overwatch scene, can you answer something I'd been wondering? Did they migrate cosmetics from 1 to 2? Cosmetics seems to be the big cash cow these days so if the new one has similar characters, but they kill the old one off and don't let me bring my hard earned or bought cosmetics then I'd be pretty pissed personally.
> I simply want there to be some accountability for mega corps so they can't just abandon games, release the new iteration for $60, and then kill the old version off.
Well then definitely don't point to Overwatch for that, because they released the new version for $0 and migrated everyone's equipment.
> It's more aptly fit to use CoD as an example to be honest
You mean the game where I can play multiplayer for games released well over a decade ago? I haven't heard of an instance where they shut down the old servers for that series yet at all. Other than that they'll be doing that for their free to play platform, but that's practically the same argument as Overwatch to Overwatch 2. You should be able to import accounts, it's no cost for the new version, etc.
EDIT: I guess some CoD versions ran on GameSpy which shut down a while ago. That was a third party system not made by the publisher though, dunno if you can really hold the publisher responsible for that third party service going offline.
This wouldn't work with games nowadays. Or let's rephrase is: it would discourage game developers to develop these type of games. If Blizzard would make private servers for Overwatch available, that would mean people wouldn't care about buying cosmetics from Blizzard. Same goes for games like League of Legends, Fortnite and even Call of Duty nowadays. If you can have your own private servers, you just unlock everything. I see that as a consumer you would want that to be a thing, but from a developers point of view other ventures get more attractive and we wouldn't have those games anymore.
Maybe the big developers wouldn't have incentive to develop billion-dollar cosmetic-powered games anymore, but someone would make it work financially.
You'd still have hugely popular multiplayer games, and maybe they would be somewhat less ambitious in scope and features (i.e. dev cost), but they would still be fun, and have strong communities built around them.
Maybe they sell DLC map packs (which would not have the "community fragmentation" problem from today's centralized matchmaking if private servers exist), or figure out other ways to generate incremental revenue.
Or maybe they don't, and just sell the base game, and are still successful because it's not a 5,000 person team and a nine-figure budget.
Today's games don't exist because of the business model, it's the other way around.
Why is that a bad thing though? Multiplayer shooters existed before the modern rent seeking paradigm. And they can exist afterwards too. The only thing we would lose is that particular parasitic business model. Not everything should be legal.
If this parasitic business model is legally crushed, companies will just move on to the next one, and likely eliminate an entire class of games that a lot of people enjoy because they cant make as much money off of it.
I think there's an answer to this, which is to separate the inventory service from the game servers. Keep the same inventory service online, reuse it for all of your games. Any official servers and any vanilla servers will validate that you own the cosmetics you use, modded servers can override this but you can't use your cosmetics everywhere unless they're actually registered to you. (Or possibly the clients validate it too in which case even a modded server couldn't override it for every player.)
Curious if there is an open source generic "game server backend" that indie devs can code to that would allow smaller devs to host online games?
I suppose not — to the degree that the backend doesn't just act as message/traffic coordinator but also has game logic. (Although I can imagine an architecture where the back end indeed just manages message sending ... and one of those recipients is the host app that handles the game logic.)
There's a few things out there, several game focused backend as a service. Most of them are focused on mobile games because that's where the easy money is.
Funny enough, there's a Google for Games github org that has some good open source projects for things like matchmaking, cloud saves, etc https://github.com/googleforgames
It’s interesting to me that entire genres of games were created because private dedicated servers were available and bored teenagers could create a TC and play with their friends. Also the technology was such that assets and game scripting were accessible Team fortress, counter strike, Dota, plenty of examples. You bought half-life so you could download and play the mods. I guess that niche is filled by Roblox now? Or maybe Minecraft?
One recent genre is auto-battlers from Dota 2 custom game tools. To my eyes that’s been the only large genre grown from in game tools in a decade which has life beyond original game itself.
Tower defenses and AoS/Dota/ARPG/Mobas as examples of the above from 90s and early 2000s. Maybe “gliding” is a genre too from counterstrike now seen outside in games like trackmania, and probably Gary’s mod is it’s own genre too. Then only genres and modes which live within the original games since (though amazing and well done).
I really think Blizzard had an opportunity with StarCraft 2 to rewrite gaming history if it’s modding tools were up to par. Instead we got custom games less sophisticated than ones 20 years younger from it. I don’t think the modding community ever really recovered being left empty handed in that era. Maybe it’s recovered, modders were left without adequate tools for a while. Modders really did produce hundred million to billion dollar genres in the past, I’m not sure if that is still happening.
Why would that be a problem once they decide to no longer support overwatch? When you turn off your servers, release one last patch that adds running your own server to the game as part of your game shutdown.
No skin off your back other than "cutting into sales of thatsamegame, butnextversion", which people are going to buy anyway.
you can just disable cosmetic drops/leveling/whatever else on private servers since it's sadly such a massive part of multiplayer games nowadays, problem solved.
It’s honestly difficult to imagine a bigger waste of governmental resources and time than legislating that computer game developers must legally provide server software for their multi-player games.
They still are sometimes - I was fiddling around with Steam and in my "Library" I accidentally clicked a dropdown which displayed "GAMES" and "TOOLS" as options - clicking "TOOLS" filtered on a bunch of interesting SDKs and Dedicated Servers (DayZ, Arma 3, Half-Life, Just Cause 2, and such - loads of which I don't even own or play). It's not perfect and it's far from comprehensive, but there are some games which offer this still
If it were only games. I remember an assistive technology product, roughly 6 years ago, which was a barcode reader plus online DB. Until the company went bust, and the device magically transformed into a brick.
Didnt know that one. However, looking at Wikipedia tells me :CueCat was given away for free. The story I was remembering above is about an assistive technology, read, EXPENSIVE and OVERPRICED technology for the disabled. It hurt quite a few people when they figured out their investment is now a door stopper.
A lot of the lightbulbs in my house have a similar model: they are basically controlled by a remote server somewhere, not owned by me. I ask the server to please turn my lights on.
That being said, I do have some 'cloud' IoT devices too, most of which were purchased because they were:
A) Cheap
B) Made by large companies
C) that weren't Google
This makes me _reasonably_ comfortable that the device and service will likely run for a while. I have some WeMo plugs that work great, and I also bought some second-hand Amazon plugs for $5/pp at a thrift store.
I want to get some z-wave light switches and scene controllers and make the actual light outlets smart, rather than putting the intelligence into the bulbs themselves. Unless you're going to be using the RGB abilities, putting the intelligence into the disposable part doesn't make a bunch of sense to me.
To arrange it all, I use Home Assistant, which I don't love, but it's just the best of the open source solutions available.
The lightbulbs probably don't directly have Wi-Fi and communicate with the remote server, therefore probably support local protocols such as BLE, Z-Wave, Zigbee, therefore it's probably possible someone has reverse engineered them already (even if they don't have a local-only mode).
Take a look at projects such as Home Assistant, they enable a fully local experience.
Most smart lights these days are either wireless based on Zigbee (e.g. Philips Hue, IKEA's Tradfri) and standard profiles or, for expensive smart homes and offices, wired on KNX/EIB. With either of these, if the vendor goes bust, the only paperweight will be the gateway, but you can continue to use the appliances.
This may be the one of the few true benefits of Web3/decentralization. As long as people see value in the network, it will stay online. Even if it's just a few people.
With blockchains, everything is open and accessible. Nothing is hidden, nothing will disappear against the will of others. At least that seems to be the dream some people in that space are trying to achieve, as I understand it.
On the more practicable side, I guess more automation for preserving stuff is also used. Making it a bit more comfortable to achieve those goals.
I find it interesting that, for some reason, mentioning Web3 very quickly ended up at libertarianism. My point was that storing essential data on a blockchain means it can be distributed and there's no single point of failure. For some reason people think Blockchain == crypto, however, but Blockchain can be done without crypto.
Something like this can be compared to torrents, where the data is distributed, so as long as someone hosts the data it will be available.
Web3 is crypto in everything that I have seen, admittedly I don't pay it too close attention so I may be missing some nuance but from my understanding to write something to a Blockchain I'm going to need to pay a fee to do so.
I've not seen any web3 projects tout themselves as free data storage, perhaps you could point me to some so I can be better informed?
> to write something to a Blockchain I'm going to need to pay a fee to do so
>I've not seen any web3 projects tout themselves as free data storage
Well, of course, because the main reason for building blockchains is currently to make big bucks by selling the attached cryptocurrency. Also, storage isn't free, so fee data storage can't exist. That also isn't what I was describing.
There's no need for there to be payments involved in a blockchain, however. What blockchain does is provide a medium to store data that is signed by someone and can be read by others. It also allows this data to be stored in a distributed fashion on the devices of anyone who wants to store it, without there being a possibility that someone changes the data without anyone knowing.
The commenter I responded to wrote:
> which was a barcode reader plus online DB. Until the company went bust, and the device magically transformed into a brick.
Hypothetically, if you were to use a blockchain to store the data, in stead of a centralized DB, anyone could run a copy of that blockchain and become a peer in the network. Users who still want to use the product after the company disappears can become a peers in the network to keep it running and prevent the device from becoming obsolete.
There have already been large organizations that experimented with blockchain in somewhat similar scenarios. They all run an instance of the blockchain and any data that has to be tracked between them is written to that blockchain. It's completely private to those companies, but nobody directly owns the data and there are no currency transactions involved in these blockchains.
I understand that there's confusion about this, because blockchain in the public eye means cryptocurrency. But cryptocurrency is just an implementation of the blockchain technology. And that technology works really well without any form of micro transaction involved.
You have to wonder just how little hosting a lobby server must cost a company the size of epic. Collating a list of server IPs and names seems fairly trivial.
These days aren't gone for good though. Look on Steam how many games offer LAN support or dedicated servers for instance (server browsers are a different topic unfortunately)
It's just that gamers in the past have voted too weakly against the managed MP infrastructure in some subgenres and triple A moats... Don't know whether anyone is still protesting this or whether newer generations don't even know what's happened here.
I don't really buy that "vote with your wallet" argument. It's not like you really have a choice. People can't decide to buy their favorite game with our without an open infrastructure. For example of you want to play StarCraft 2 on LAN with your friends or even only a similar game you just can't. It does not exist. If there is only one candidate then it's not really a vote, is it?
Well, more generally you want to hold the (usually big) devs/publishers accountable to the shit they pull to select against bad stewards of the art form. One way is withholding purchases.
Unfortunately a big chunk of unopinionated consumers will eat what they're served (FIFA, BF lol) and this encourages publishers to push P2W, gambling or fast iteration, which splits communities. And long-lived community-owned MP infrastructure is not particularly profitable either...
That said, a more major driver of not offering dedicated servers may simply be the lack of necessity because using cloud infrastructure is pretty sophisticated nowadays and controlling it yourself simplifies development and deployment.
Luckily the market is diverse, so overall I'm not too worried. I trust that organic discovery and good stewards keep MP gaming (and modded gaming) as I have known it alive.
I think battlefield 4 (pc) has the best of both worlds: official servers and community hosted ones. It had its drawbacks, however: community servers often spoofed player count and you would end up joining almost empty lobbies when you thought it was a full server.
Also, when the playerbase was declining, it felt harder to find servers that you enjoyed to play on.
Overall I felt it was a great experience. I hope more games take this approach in the future.
> Remember the days when the server component was included with the base game? Anyone could launch a server and play with friends and strangers online. I miss those days.
I hear you, but several of the games in this particular announcement seem like they're from that era:
* Unreal Gold
* Unreal II: The Awakening
* Unreal Tournament 2003
* Unreal Tournament 2004
* Unreal Tournament 3
* Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition
IIRC, back then the games usually shipped with the server component and all servers were run by players, and the publisher only ran a simple directory server.
Since those directory servers were so simple, I think I seen cases where someone cloned them, then batched the binary to just to go a different address for the directory.
Honestly the saddest part is how you could have both the private servers and matchmaking almost seamlessly, have official servers flagged for matchmaking and allow for a server browser like csgo, team fortress 2, etc, and yet so many act as if it was exclusively one or the other. As a big titanfall2 fan this is just infuriating since the game has been unplayable pretty much due to years long dos attacks on the servers that the company doesn't give a shit to fix, nor releases some form of dedicated servers for players to host themselves. The game is even in a modified source engine iirc.
> Honestly the saddest part is how you could have both the private servers and matchmaking almost seamlessly
Not true, having to pick a server to join by yourself out of a list was an essential part of the classic online experience and the existence of any kind of matchmaking system harms it.
Team Fortress 2 is a prime example of this, originally it only had a server browser and the community felt most "alive" during this time. Then they added a basic matchmaking system that could place you on community servers, but only if they ran stock maps and settings, which heavily discouraged running any kind of modded or customized server, and significantly harmed any servers with a strong sense of community since you had random players, often fresh F2P installs that were barely distinguishable from bots, joining servers with no intention of ever playing on them more than once. Then they replaced that with the full official-only matchmaking we have today, which killed most of the remaining servers and associated communities.
I don't disagree that dedicated servers only would be better, much to the contrary, but sadly matchmaking is here to stay and there's nothing we can do about it. You can have parallel dedicated servers that have no impact at all on the matchmaking experience, that's my point, not that matchmaking would put you into community servers, seamlessly was probably the wrong word for it. I wouldn't dislike official dedicated servers being accessible by both the browser and matchmaking however.
> You can have parallel dedicated servers that have no impact at all on the matchmaking experience
No, you can't, because in any multiplayer game with microtransactions (which almost all multiplayer games released in recent years have), any servers controlled by the community would be in direct competition with the developers, which is why the option is rarely provided in the first place. If matchmaking exists, developers have an inherent motivation to lead players to it and away from any experience they don't fully control. So why would they even allow it?
I miss days where gaming magazines had CDs filled with demos which you could test before the purchase - tho it was more possible that friend of friend had pirated full version you could borrow.
Worser still, some actively patch_destroy their own older games that have a more active community (due to superior game balance, less monetization etc.) to drive growth towards the new game.
I still (mostly) limit my multiplayer gaming to games with that available via Steam.
ARK, Valheim, etc. If games come out and I have to rely on their server or rent one, it's a pass for me, especially if I can't play privately with my group of friends.
I've been using Battle.net though... for about 15 years, I'd only do LAN, or LAN over VPN (Hamachi), but the ease of use was, of course, much better on Battle.net.
yeah, lazy devs or they're just herding everyone to their own servers where they can mine data for more profits? Either way, looks like a prime business opportunity to test out a recent addition to DMCA exemptions to allow supporting "abandoned" servers. If the users are there and willing to pay.
Yeah, I made multiplayer games in those days. Very few people played relative today and you had so much lag. You really had to build your game to accept 0.5 sec lag. There is a lot to be said for today.
Now we get a company deciding it is not worth maintaining the infrastructure and an entire part of a game is gone forever.