In general I see this as an issue of gaming becoming more professionally run and maturing over time.
Server Browsers make sense in a world in which members of the community are self-hosting their own infrastructure for others to play on. While a great way to build community, it can be a problem when it comes to player retention and competitive mechanics.
Player retention can often suffer over the long-term as such communities establish boundaries and rules, eventually orienting around a small clique of individuals, increasing the friction for integrating new members into the community.
Additionally, the competitive mechanics, which often draw a large amount of players, can suffer as player-run infrastructure can vary wildly in its connection, uptime, speed, etc. and bring a risk of unsanctioned modifications, cheats, and hacks, all negatively affecting the player experience.
Overall, its a tradeoff, the community building aspects of player run servers can truly build colorful and vibrant communities, but this can be at the expense of overall player retention, trading a large and accessible playerbase for a small dedicated community.
Most game companies choose the route of building and running dedicated server infrastructure.
Which of course, internally run servers tend to be built with a set image that gets cloned each time more are needed, making each one indistinguishable and fungible. The only problem becomes assigning the players accross servers depending on which ones have available capacity, which is where matchmaking comes in.
> In general I see this as an issue of gaming becoming more professionally run and maturing over time.
I don't think anyone is confused about why this happened. It's obvious why a game company which is trying to make money in an extremely competitive field would prefer it. Having a good reason doesn't mean that there isn't reason to mourn the loss of what came before. Some things have improved! We should celebrate that gaming is more accessible now. It's been a long time since I've been kicked from a competitive shooter mid-match because a server crashed.
> Overall, its a tradeoff, the community building aspects of player run servers can truly build colorful and vibrant communities, but this can be at the expense of overall player retention, trading a large and accessible playerbase for a small dedicated community.
I don't run a business. I'd rather have a game with small communities of players which peters out over a few years than a game with millions of players for a decade+. Toward the end of a game's life player run servers allow the game to last potentially forever. The problem of games alienating newcomers is still a problem with matchmaking systems. Your community's average skill goes up over time once the rate of new players joining slows down.
> Additionally, the competitive mechanics, which often draw a large amount of players, can suffer as player-run infrastructure can vary wildly in its connection, uptime, speed, etc. and bring a risk of unsanctioned modifications, cheats, and hacks, all negatively affecting the player experience.
Games have handled this before with "official" servers or ones run by tournament hosts. I actually had fewer trouble with hacks on heavily moderated small servers because so many people knew each other and would catch onto cheaters quickly. Services like VAC help block repeat cheaters from joining in the future. I like having access to mods and to sometimes join a server and find something completely unexpected. I don't care much about competitive play, though I do like a fair number of e-sports-y games. I never had trouble finding vanilla CS servers back in the day.
>"Server Browsers make sense in a world in which members of the community are self-hosting their own infrastructure for others to play on. While a great way to build community, it can be a problem when it comes to player retention and competitive mechanics."
This just isn't true. The average TF2 player had 3K hours long before any official matchmaking was introduced, and UGC (TF2) and FACEIT (CSGO) were their own renditions of community-hosted competitive servers - and were done with great success.
I don't really buy it. First of all you can easily have both. Second, even if you think community servers are an issue, the concepts of server rooms with the server being on the standard company platform is totally feasible.
As for server uptime, if anything I think communities manage to provide excellent service and servers. Because the people running the infrastructure actually play with that infrastructure and know if something is wrong pretty quickly.
As for player retention, I played Dota in the Warcraft 3 days and it was the most played game on the planet while having horrible matchmaking on a terrible server system. And players continue playing.
And communities and particular matchup and games increase retention. I used to always play particular types of matches and rule-sets on servers I knew had a configuration and mod-set that I liked. One of the reason this doesn't exist anymore is part of the reason playing is less fun.
And again, you can have ranked match making primary servers as well if you feel like it.
> Most game companies choose the route of building and running dedicated server infrastructure.
You can still have hosted rooms on dedicated infrastructure, or have both.
> Player retention can often suffer over the long-term as such communities establish boundaries and rules, eventually orienting around a small clique of individuals, increasing the friction for integrating new members into the community.
This sentence applied to community moderated servers and server browsers in general is just FUD. These communites are often the exact opposite and take on the roll of getting new players up to speed and properly integrated into the existing community, they absolutely increase player retention.
Also, I find it really ironic that you can come to this conclusion and then talk about pandering to the "competitive" crowd in the same response. Pandering to the try hards has done more damage to the fun/community aspects of gaming than hackers ever could.
I remember people being GLUED to their favorite servers due to community reasons. In Italy we used to have hundreds, of which at least few dozen popular open community-driven servers.
Actually, server hosting CS instances was a thing, so each provider had their own to show they had the most performing, so you played for free, and to get the best thing people in the same country gathered around the same set of servers.
I to this day remember countless of player nicknames from these times, oddly, I don't remember some of my school teammates from the time.
SBMM on official servers for those who want to just jump into a game and are there for the game loop, alongside whatever other features the official servers might have enabled, like progression or item drops.
Alongside those, the ability to self-host servers for those who crave more of a community aspect and even things like custom modes or mods.
Since my hand eye coordination sucks, I’d hate playing without SBMM and being in games where I get stomped every time, especially when it comes to competitive shooters - playing CS or Valorant without ranks would be suffering.
On the other hand, discovering that even games like Enlisted have community servers running a zombie mod, or the endless modes of the Arma series is immensely cool. Or just the ability to have a more chill custom server if the main game’s population is toxic.
Sometimes you get wildcards like SPT-AKI where the modders give you more control over the game than the devs ever would. Either way, having any sort of control is better than giving it all up to a company that sees you as a bag of money to be squeezed.
Server Browsers make sense in a world in which members of the community are self-hosting their own infrastructure for others to play on. While a great way to build community, it can be a problem when it comes to player retention and competitive mechanics.
Player retention can often suffer over the long-term as such communities establish boundaries and rules, eventually orienting around a small clique of individuals, increasing the friction for integrating new members into the community.
Additionally, the competitive mechanics, which often draw a large amount of players, can suffer as player-run infrastructure can vary wildly in its connection, uptime, speed, etc. and bring a risk of unsanctioned modifications, cheats, and hacks, all negatively affecting the player experience.
Overall, its a tradeoff, the community building aspects of player run servers can truly build colorful and vibrant communities, but this can be at the expense of overall player retention, trading a large and accessible playerbase for a small dedicated community.
Most game companies choose the route of building and running dedicated server infrastructure. Which of course, internally run servers tend to be built with a set image that gets cloned each time more are needed, making each one indistinguishable and fungible. The only problem becomes assigning the players accross servers depending on which ones have available capacity, which is where matchmaking comes in.