Stop Killing Games

> Lots of bad takes in this thread.

Seriously.

It's like people forgot what multiplayer gaming was like pre-2005. Everyone ran their own servers. You could run your own Half-Life game server and other users merely pointed their game client to your IP address.

The only exceptions back then were the MMORPGs.

There's no reason we can't go back to the way it used to be. I used to run multiplayer Starcraft on a LAN without an Internet connection. Why can't I do that with Starcraft II? We used to play Quake on custom servers. Some servers had fun communities. All that is gone in favor of live services that can be shut down on a whim.

I don't even think requiring server source code to be disclosed should be necessary. Merely the binaries with some basic instructions on setting it up (which could easily be based on internal documents for setting up test servers) would be sufficient.

StarCraft was amazing, you could have a link local network, just launch the game, hit multiplayer and the instances would find eachother.

Yeah, pre-console-ization of PC releases, devs would produce server binaries that would allow you to host your own servers. You could tweak rules, give preferential slots, etc. It allowed you to create a real community around your self-hosted server.

It's really difficult to create a cohesive gaming organization without controlling your own multiplayer servers. It's a sad state of gaming that every game has centralized servers. If anything, I'd love to see requirements that decentralize multiplayer hosting. The devs can release their own servers, but they'd be alongside the community ones, as well.

World of Warcraft actually made it very easy to use a custom server, since you'd just need to change a hostname in a single text file and the client would connect to it instead. Not that it was allowed but from a technical perspective it was quite supportive. I think it's no longer as simple but there's still private server projects around.

As a broke college student, I had a great time playing on third-party servers. The experience was janky, of course, but it was hilarious. I made some good friends there.

Then I had to stop playing because it was eating into my study time too much.

I've tried going back to MMOs a couple of times since then, but nothing seems to have the charm of a smaller community like that.

> Why can't I do that with Starcraft II?

Because Blizzard wanted to skin the golden goose by controling SC2 pro-scene. It went about as well as any modern Acti-Blizz idea. Poorly.