'Live-service is a red flag for us': Why one publisher is embracing an older kind of multiplayer hit: peer-to-peer, server browsers, and organic community

Tbh that's why community servers+p2p are the best options to have for a game - people are more than happy to host their own servers for friends and the public, and the dev doesn't have to worry about perpetual infrastructure upkeep. Win-win.

Warframe's multiplayer sessions are hosted by the players, and you can feel when the game is hosted on a Switch. The ping is consistent around 300 ms (which is not good, but about average for the EU region), but every action will have a second of latency and the enemies will constantly rubber-band around.

It isn't laggier though... I mean anything has the potential to be laggy, sure. But if you're in Europe, play on EU servers, if you're on the US East Coast, play on East Coast servers. This isn't rocket science.

It isn't inherently less secure either, any server is someone else's. In fact, I trust other players far more than I trust the publisher or whoever they're contracting with for game servers. The players aren't looking for additional revenue streams.

For most games, the performance hit for running the server is not significant. I think the majority of this post is pretty misguided.

Yep, that's right. Thanks. :)

There was supposed to be a native version. There evidently not trustworthy to follow through

If you only wanna play by default rules, then matchmaking is probably great for you.

Otherwise, hard disagree with that. I always like playing with community rules. Like, for instance, back on the first CoDs (1, UO, and 2) my favorite way was to play with only bolt action guns (got those not in the know, they mostly had small clips (5 shots (10 in 2 loaded clips on the British gun)), and each shot was fired singularly, and had to be manually rechambered, meaning there was a delay between shots as well. So it wasn't just run in and hold down the trigger and hope everyone was dead before you gun stopped shooting kinda game (felt super lame), but actually required aim and accuracy.

That was never a default rule, and while I could still pick that gun on almost any server, the bullet spam (especially against players on the Russian team, og CoD players know exactly what I'm talking about) made it a voluntary nerf unless they were really bad.

So everyone playing with those guns was highly preferable IMO, and that couldn't happen with matchmaking.

Or for a different example, while "gun game" is a fairly popular mod now (the one where everyone starts with the same gun, and when you get a kill you move on to a new gun, and have to complete a set list of kills first, and usually the last few weapons are harder to get a kill with, and getting a melee kill would set the victim back a weapon), but back during Counter Strike: Source's era, it was fairly new (not sure where it actually started, but that was the first game I experienced it) and was only available on community servers.

Maybe you're fine with the "default" experience, but even with a browser list, most servers run default (or very close to), but I like seeing what mods get traction and seeing if any of them are something I like.

But everything has a battle pass now, and lots of battle pass progress is tied to it.

I wanna go back to a world with zero overall progression and battle pass stuff. Hell, I don't even want achievements. They can release skins, but should probably be just all free, it maaaaybe tied to playing and doing a version number of things that you would commonly do, maybe with a time window. But really, all DLC should be free extra content. Absolute zero cost to all DLC.

Games should not be put out with intent to continue profiting from MTX. There shouldn't be any MTX.

I can rant all day, but zoomers will never know the peak of online gaming. It's already history.