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.

[–] chryan 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (9 children)

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.

[–] crestwave 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] chryan 0 points 2 weeks ago

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.

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