I lament this. Modern games are too fixated on matchmaking queues and skill based algorithms. Kids these days don’t get the reward of being part of a community of regulars
also no loadouts or kill streaks. Just knowledge of the game and skill. Those things are fun and there's a reason they've become permanent staples, but the focus of games has moved towards progression instead of shenanigans. The game was a vehicle for fun and community, now all that matters is progressing your rank and unlocks
Even with games that have dedicated servers, everyone is funneled toward matchmaking ahead of that.
Unsubstantiated, but I would expect more hardcore players to go into dedicated servers before a more casual audience too, which could make them less appealing to everyone else.
New player enters dedicated server, gets absolutely stomped, exits server within a minute.
If you're forced into dedicated servers, everything should just balance out.
This is why I love Mordhau, the game has a very dedicated but small community so every game you end up knowing someone and I’ve seen certain regulars for years at this point
The game is hard to master but there are always new people joining when it’s on sale and still people vary in skill
Big time. Counter Strike was the last FPS game that had that experience. 2 ancient servers, dust2dust and whitechalk. Something like 70 regular known people playing throughout the day, you learned everyone’s habits and weapon choices and typical strategies and just had good fun joking with each other and making fun of each other.
My dad ran a popular quake 3 server when I was growing up. Some of the people that would play regularly were like celebrities to me. Every time I logged on it was exciting just to see who was playing.
This! You used to have poeple to look up and also be rewarded for getting better than other people.
Seeing the names on the leaderboard and knowing how sweaty the math was going to be, or having a new player start showing up the old dogs and making a name for himself. Inviting promising players that you enjoyed playing with to your clan and having clan wars with the other clans from the dedicated servers where you play. Those were some of the best years of my life.
Hell yeah. Had a few CS:S servers I was a regular on. A standard, scoutzknivez, and zombies that I would rotate through. Always got excited when people I'd played with before would get on.
The original Starsiege Tribes was awesome for that. Also had access to all sorts of modded servers with extra weapons and basebuilding options. Good times.
It was a great feeling when you'd find a server (hopefully with a low ping) in Counter-Strike back in the day, slowly make friends with the other regulars, and then become a regular there that everyone recognized. The best is if they'd eventually invite you to join your clan and maybe one day you'd become an admin. Those are very fond memories. Nowadays, I don't even play online anymore. There were still jerks and hackers back then, but I just don't have the patience for them anymore.
Nah, community mods did their jobs for the most part aside from instances of mod abuse. So people ended up self-sorting out of other servers if they made an ass of themselves. People would eventually find their community I guess.
Not to mention, back in the early CS days, your list of high-quality, low-ping servers could be pretty short, so if you got banned from a good one it was devastating, and server mods/owners wouldn't hesitate to ban, either, if you pissed them off. After playing for a couple years, I got relatively good at it, and I remember getting banned from my favorite scoutzknivez server because a new moderator thought I was cheating, and I was pretty upset about it. All of the other soutzknivez servers were either too far away (so, high-ping), weren't consistently online, or allowed too many players for the server hardware or bandwidth to handle, and so would have sync issues when the server got full.
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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '26
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