Comment by AlexandrB
11 days ago
> Multiplayer games were self-hosted without a central corpo authority.
Losing "dedicated servers" was a huge loss in my opinion. It was fun to play on the same handful of servers and get to know the same group of people. Dedicated servers were also free from profit-driven "matchmaking" schemes since you ended up playing with whoever was on at the time.
I also miss the chaotic multiplayer of the era, where the priority was having fun and not improving your rank on the leaderboard.
Edit: Dedicated servers also each had their own moderation. So if you wanted to play on a server that banned anyone nasty you could. But you could play with a bunch of folks dropping "gamer words" as well.
Then there were custom sprays - something no company would allow in their game today. It's sad how constrained and censored online gaming experiences are today. In many games even dropping the "f-bomb" can get you banned and typing assassin in the chat window yields "***in".
It's crazy to me that custom sprays existed at all in any capacity for so long. They were novel and sometimes funny but man, I really don't miss the days at all of playing a game and having your roommate/family ask why your computer screen is plastered with goatse or meatspin or the like. I remember more than a handful of awkward conversations trying to explain WHY that wasn't actually part of the game itself.