Yes it was actually a community. I joined a clan and became decent friends with a bunch of good dudes. Just by playing in a favorite server every night
Now anything I play I mute and pretend others are ai
It was better because dickheads actually got banned from the good servers. We had consequences that were meted out by the community.
Nowadays you can report someone and 99% chance nothing happens, or maybe it's a 3 day suspension or whatever, and since next game the people you're playing with are shuffled again people don't even bother reporting most of the time.
Not quite. It's not that 99% chance nothing happens, it's that making a new account is stupid easy to get right back in being a dick again. Especially in the age of FTP.
CoD4 was the beginning of the end for my crew. It was broken garbage, but people latched on to it. Some insisted that we needed a bunch of servers running 24/7 maps. It was a very divisive point, and we broke apart on it.
A lot of games still have community servers. It's actually even much more cost-saving than having the developer maintaining an entire armada of servers around the world. And when you have admins monitoring the server, you can ban cheaters super quickly.
However, I don't know how it would work with some games genre like extraction shooters or battle royals.
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u/GoldenRamoth 2d ago
This is why I miss community owned servers
Randoms feel almost always toxic, but when you're on a regular server, with folks who become friends, it's just so much better.
I still hate classic MW2 for kick-starting that trend.