Ah yes, twitter screenshots. This is the original post from where I got this, which was over week ago, but who cares. Instead of writing a reply that no one will read I’ll just write a stupid blog post that no one will read.
Matchmaking
The first part of the tweet is something I’ve thought about a couple of times. I remember when I used to play Team Fortress 2 regularly that is exactly what I did. I opened the server browser and joined a random server. I’d say that is how most people played Counter Strike and most other multiplayer FPS. Sure I had some favorite servers that I’d usually go to, but ultimately it just came down to what map and gamemode I wanted to play and which servers had enough players and an acceptable ping. TF2 already had a simplified option for finding a game, which as far as I remember nobody used, but it gave an indication where things were going.
Picking a server from a server browser is apparently asking too much from the player so now we let matchmaking take care of it and introduce a whole slew of new problems. At least CS:GO and all other source games still have a server browser, but how many actually still use it? Just clicking a button to find a game is way more convenient, even if it comes with its own downsides. From what I can tell matchmaking really only has a few upsides:
- Ease of use (grug wanna play, grug click “find game”)
- (potentially) fair games with skill levels
- Harder to grief specific people (this really only affects streamers)
The downsides are
- absolutely no control over what game you’ll get (some games might let you narrow down the game mode or map, but that’s basically it)
- if there’s a cheater in your match you’re stuck with him (at least if it’s a competitive match where leaving results in a penalty)
- no community servers
- no dedicated server that you can just host yourself
- no mods, plugins, custom maps and game modes
- usually region locked, i.e. you can’t join an American game if you’re logged into the EU region
- no favorites (aka. no way to go to a server that you frequent)
A server browser and community servers fix all of those downsides, but what about the positive aspects of matchmaking? Ease of use depends on who you ask. Not having to worry about finding the right server is certainly easier, but if a task like that is too much then why are you even playing? Having favorite servers that you frequently come back to is probably the closest you can get to the easiness of just queuing for a game with automatic matchmaking.
Skill based matchmaking and e-sports
The second tweet claims that e-sports and competitive ranking ruined multiplayer, which I think is not totally correct. Obviously turning it into the big commercialised market that it is now did play a role. It became more and more mainstream which always ends up changing and often ruining something that one used to enjoy when it was still a niche. I personally don’t care too much about that part, but I can see how some people blame it for the negative developments in fps and games in general.
More importantly now, though, is the question of whether a simple server browser can give you games that are comparable to skill based matchmaking. The answer is probably not, but then again most automatic matchmaking can’t do it either. I recently played a bunch of matches and fair games were the exception. The rule was either utter domination of the enemy team or complete defeat. The game in question was Overwatch 2. You’d think that after five years of working on the first game they’d get the matchmaking semi working, but here we are.
When I think back to TF2 I never thought much about whether a game was fair or not. That is probably because I just joined pub servers and screwed around. You won some games and lost others. Some maps even had objectives turned off so it was just endless carnage. So from the perspective of a player that doesn’t look for a super competitive experience matchmaking is actually kind of useless.
But what if you are looking for those kind of matches? I’d wager that the best way to achieve that is going back forming clans and playing against each other that way. This way you can play serious matches against others who want the same. This way you also have a rough idea of who you’re playing against which makes cheating a bit harder. Simultaneously people who just play for fun in public servers don’t care that much about cheaters. If you then frequent certain servers the chance is also high that they’ll be run by people who moderate them and keep them free of cheaters.
So with that you’d not only have a good alternative of playing serious games, but you’d also have a way of dealing with cheaters without having to rely on invasive and mostly useless anti cheat software. This would also address the last part of the second tweet, which talks about how players are now kept from interacting with each other. Public servers always have the chance of building a small community around themselves and playing seriously (or also not so seriously) in clans is also miles better than just waiting in an automated queue forever just so you can play a match with and against people you don’t know.
Bloat and Games as a service
At the end of the first tweet the average multiplayer experience in public servers is described. Obviously exaggerated, but these things definitely did happen. Modern games and the maps you play on have become a lot more demanding both in disk size and other hardware requirements, which is definitely annoying since it increases download times, but that’s the price of better visuals. I don’t care too much about that since I’m still content with how TF2 or Half-Life 2 looks, but I’m also not the target audience I guess.
What I do care more about is the fact that with the introduction of matchmaking we also at some point got always online games. The original Overwatch which was released in 2016 is now effectively dead. I think the game had physical copies that you could buy, but I’m not sure if the discs actually contained the game or not. Even if they did they’d now be useless and upon launch it will probably just update to Overwatch 2. So all you could do is data mine assets from the launch version, which would lack all updates that came after release. There’s a whole lot more you could go on about, but the topic of games as a service is still best covered in the video “Games as a service” is fraud." from Ross. For me it ultimately boils down to the issue of DRM and whether I can play a game at any point in the future without having to connect to some third party service that may or may not still be available.
tl;dr
I think that skill based matchmaking isn’t bad, but the fact that it completely replaced the server browser and community servers is bad. Ideally we’d get both but I’d be okay with just a server browser. I also think that every game should run without having to connect to a thirdpary service so I can either play it offline, with others over a local network or on community servers. That also means that I think that one of the best decisions that game developers can make is to hand the tools they used to the community including the server software. Valve has done this for years and it has led to so many cool things being made, while I also can’t think of a single downside. I also don’t feel like you can solely blame negative developments of online fps on something like esports, however I do think that going back to community run servers and clans could improve both the experience of playing as well as issues with cheaters. Finally I also feel like the original tweet as well as the responses to the post are a bit over dramatic. Nostalgia is a hell of a thing and while some things certainly were better back then, not everything in newer fps games is bad. CS:GO is still pretty decent in my opinion (but some might also count it as an older game, considering that it came out in 2012) and you can still play TF2 if you prefer that. So FPS as a genre aren’t dead in my opinion, but there definitely have been some undesirable developments and the truth is that the average player doesn’t care about whether a game requires invasive anti cheat or doesn’t have community run servers. And ultimately that’s who the developers will cater to.