LexiMax

I actually called your take trash under the original circumstances you outline here, just so we're on the same page. To be clear, I have also had to work 7 days a week 9-10 hours a day before. Sometimes, shit has to be done. But I can put up with it for weeks, not months on end. And it's a lot easier to go along with it when I'm not being chronically mismanaged, asked to buy into a toxic work culture, or sexually harassed by some asshole named McCree.

If it's something I've learned about dealing with internet trolls, is that they love it when people who go high when they go low. He's spent his last replies claiming nobody knows how to read and trying to draw distinctions without differences, and he'll probably reply to your post playing a victim card about how people were so mean to him. (And as I was writing this post my assumption turned out to be correct.) Honestly, you can't even take for granted that he's worked those 60 hour work weeks he's claimed to. Don't waste your empathy on someone who is clearly lacking it.

This is a trash-ass take, and you're not some sort of exemplary human being because you were willing to work 60 hour weeks for peanuts.

I don't mind him. His responses are kind of funny in a way. 🙂

There's nothing wrong someone holding both opinions simultaneously. The nuance is in the details. I agree with you insofar that you are technically correct that the two opinions are inconsistent, but if there's a negative connotation attached to the label I don't follow.

It's possible to be a fan of one game while also worrying about another game having a cult-like following that is super-sensitive to any and all criticism. If you were trying to point out some sort of hypocrisy, I think you're off the mark.

The fact that WoW is an MMO limits the ways a story can be constructed. In particular, it necessitated that the major playable races had to be shoehorned into two big factions, and those two factions might have some form of conflict, but at the end of they day they unite to the common cause to kill the raid boss of the week because you can't have half your subscriber base not be able to play the endgame content. If there had been a hypothetical Warcraft 4, they could actually tell a story where alliances significantly shift without an obligation to return to some status quo.

If I'm being honest, the interesting story that Warcraft 3 had actually loses some luster in hindsight knowing that they were setting hallf of the major cast to be raid boss fodder. And they only got about two expansions worth of serviceable story out of it before cataclysm ruined everything.

A Realm Reborn can be kind of a slog to get through, and most of the complaints seem to be centered around that. Apparently, the expansions are way better - I can't say yay or nay, because I haven't gotten that far yet, but people really like it. That said, all other things being equal, I'd much rather a community oversell a game than complain about every little thing. For how crabby WoW players are, Blizzard doesn't seem to actually listen to them any better. And being angry at the game often spills over into being angry at other players - after all, if you feel like the developers won't listen to you, chasing other players away from the game by being toxic is the best revenge you can hope for.

Most of my friends who play MMO's have said that FF14 is far and away the least toxic MMO they've played, especially compared to WoW. I played the game for a bit and have to agree. In fact, doing a bit of googling, it seems like the surest way to tick off the average FF14 player is to either say something less than flattering about the game or to complain about how bad your teammates are.

Just an aside, but it pleases me that so many gamers these days either like Halo, or don't care for it without getting defensive or invaliding other people's opinions - a marked from discourse from even a decade ago. There's always a few exceptions, as this thread has shown, but by and large Doom and Halo peacefully coexisting in the pantheon of great FPS franchises is great to see.

Don't forget that the Marathon trilogy has one of the best stories and best writing of 90's gaming, period. Marathon provides the most engaging backstory of the three, Durandal gives you a more straightforward and fun romp with the best and most interesting character of the first game, and Infinity is so nuts and out there that people are still debating the finer points of the story to this damn day. Even if someone bounces off the gameplay, they owe it to themselves to at the very least spoil themselves on the terminals. EDIT: Story musings.

That's probably your best bet, so long as it's a recreation based on testing and observation and not a copy-paste job from the original codebase.

Having played all of them when they were contemporary, I feel like Sonic 2 and 3K have aged much better than Mario 3 or World. Mario of course has superior control, and the games' were amazing puzzle boxes, with loads of secret content to discover. However, I felt like once you got "good" at those games, the shine of them wore off quite quickly, and I found the subsequent returns to 2D Mario through the NSMB series and Mario Maker quite dull. Sonic, on the other hand, was the complete package. Not so many hidden things to discover, but if you just wanted to breeze through a game and have a good time on a lark, Sonic's graphics were much more varied, the music was top shelf, and the games just had an "energy" to them that made them fun to play for their own sake, instead of mastering them and tossing them aside. And then Sonic Mania came out and proved that those old games' weren't flukes, the formula still works. Oh, and if you liked Sonic, go play Freedom Planet 1 and 2. The two games play distinctly from Sonic, but they definitely channel the look and feel of those old games to a T.

I remember playing Rainbow Six: Siege a while back and getting matched in with a bunch of toxic throwing assholes...in casual queue no less. Very next game, I got matched with them again...but as opponents, and my teammates were all incredibly chill and communicative and helped me get revenge, with me ending up as the top fragger for that next game.

Yes I have. I've met assholes, I've met silence, but I've also met chill and friendly motherfuckers who in a previous life I would've sent friend requests to.

The in-server gaming communities of your earlier years didn't die because of the switchover to matchmaking, it was attrition and people moving on with their lives. New games come out and new communities spring up to socialize in them, they just aren't centered around game servers anymore. Nothing is being erased here, the kids are allright.

There's nothing wrong with people meeting elsewhere. I've noticed that in smaller games, the focal point of the community isn't generally on the server, but on the shared chat platform, which is usually a forum, built-in chat box, or Discord server. Some even-smaller games don't even have a constant set of players willing to populate a server - certain niche fighting games come to mind - so often those chat platforms are the way those games survive. But the same holds true for bigger games - people meet outside of the game, and then queue as a group for matchmaking so they can play with their friends. I've lost track of the number of times I've joined a gaming Discord only to find a stack in a public voice channel queueing for Fortnite, Dead by Daylight or what have you*. Those folks are certainly being social. So what about the solo queuing experience? Frankly, I don't find queuing for matchmaking any more toxic than joining a random server from an old server browser game at their peak - you were just as likely to run into assholes then as you are now, and half the time the server admins were either not paying attention or complicit in what was happening on their server. It's just that the assholes have moved on to matchmade games because most games have matchmaking these days, so it's easy to get rose-tinted glasses about the good old days. * EDIT: Heck, it doesn't even need to be a gaming Discord - I was thumbing through my servers just now and found a stack on a non-gaming Discord playing Apex Legends together.

Yep, and that game was called Halo:CE. Halo is an arena shooter, but without most of the BS that makes gamers hate arena shooters. And people play it to this day, with populated matchmaking, thanks to MCC. And it also has successful contemporaries.

Yeah, and none of them are playing Quake-style arena shooters. 🙂 I think @CFWMagic put it better and more authoritatively than I ever could.

I think the comparative staying power of Halo and CS is that they are just fundamentally more accessible games to play than Quake. I don't think it's any one thing about Quake, as most games have things like movement tech and less intuitive mechanics that are integral to playing well, but if you go back in time it's a pretty clear pattern. Developers have been trying to repackage Quake-style arena shooters for the better part of two decades and it has never found a wide audience like it did in the late 90's, when Q3A and UT99 were two name brands up against very weak competition. Since then, we've had one more hit - UT2004 - and many more misses that failed to attract a wider audience. From the free and open source shooters like Warsow, old Nexuiz, Open Arena, to the retail games Quake 4 and UT3, the abandoned UT4, Quake Live, Quake Champions, and then of course paid indie games like the new Nexuiz, Reflex Arena and Toxikk, and probably more I'm forgetting. Meanwhile, Halo-style arena shooters are still trucking ahead with MCC and Halo: Infinite being successful, alongside the indie effort Splitgate attracting a decent audience. And it turns out there is room in the market for TWO Counter-Strike games with CS:GO and Valorant. There's just something about Quake-style arena shooters that makes most gamers bounce off them and not want to continue playing them.

Correct, matchmaking plain doesn't work with low playercounts, so server lists are pretty much necessary at that point. I couldn't imagine matchmaking working with any online doom ports, for example. I am willing to put up with playing overplayed maps and game modes as long as I eventually get some variety, but the 24/7 mentality literally kills games for me and prevents me from even getting past the server list - the game might as well not exist for me at this point. That's more because the Quake 3 model of arena shooters were inaccessible and lacked staying power, so all you have left are grognards trying to squeeze blood from a stone. CS 1.0 came out a year after Q3A and Halo:CE came out a year after that, and I can quite easily get matchmade games out of both CS:GO and MCC, which are largely the same game with a modern coat of paint. That said, once the playerbase dwindles, server browsers are indeed all you have. We have to deal with someone trying to self-host a server on Odamex on a weekly basis and it's soul-rending, because it's so much worse of an experience than it needs to be. Players are now conditioned to be able to effortlessly play with just their friends whenever they want. The TSPG model sort of works as a workaround, but it requires a ton of development work by a third party and a benevolant server host to keep it running, when it should just be built into the game.

I think it's easy to point out the flaws of matchmaking today, but server browsers had tons of problems of their own. Servers are a really bad fit for game modes with low playercounts or where joining a game mid-match might be disruptive. Server owners gravitate towards running single gamemode servers with large playercounts and a single map or heavily truncated map pool, because that draws the highest playercounts due to name recognition. MM allows me to play the entire game that I paid for, not just dust2 or facing worlds. If the game is old enough, occupied servers likely aren't even running the vanilla game anymore. Hope you like a class system and experience points giving you ingame stat advantages and a grapple hook, plus random UT99 announcer quips played globally when someone gets a headshot. It's too hard to play with friends unless you know how to run a private server or you are okay with being on separate teams. Server browsers also had toxic or even exploitative communities. For every 2F2F there were a dozen "Pay $10 a month for admin rights" servers. I could list more, but I'll end with an anecdote. I stopped playing TF2 for years after my favorite server cluster got banished to "24/7 Mario Kart" hell. Valve Matchmaking is why I came back and put a fair number of additional hours into it. That said, matchmaking also has issues, and I think games should ideally have both - matchmaking for standard play, private lobbies for fooling around with friends, and a server browser for public lobbies and mods. SBMM is good for competitive modes. I agree that it's silly in the context of casual play though.

https://nitter.net/business/status/1595204862878547969

This thread reminds me that I was fascinated by maze generation as a kid. And my memory led me back to a program called Daedalus, a maze generation program for Windows. Amazingly (pun halfway intended), it's still being updated. And it has looooooads of options, including the ability to walk through the maze in 3D. So if you're looking for a way to create mazes for Doom, take a look at this program.