I just played Tribes 2 for 5 minutes and it just has me Thinking about how different everything was prior to multiplayer matchmaking
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You couldn't play directly against another person or group of people unless you were in the same house, or one of you knew how to run your own server, and that usually wasn't the point; pubbing was the point.
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Almost immediately after the era began - like, when Quake came out - businesses started hosting servers. Some of them are totally gone now, others have metamorphosized into other things. Think gamespy used to run a bunch.
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The servers run by businesses were relatively vanilla, usually, and you'd see them in the server browser with very orthodox names - Gamespy Counter-Strike #13 (8/16 players)
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But the servers run by individuals were, largely, batshit. You never knew what you were walking into.
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All the games in the Quake lineage (Q1/Q2/Q3/HL1/HL2 to name a few, and all the mods like Counterstrike, Team Fortress Classic, etc.) were tremendously, colossally moddable and had infrastructure in place to support modding.
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When you connected to a server in, say, Half-Life Deathmatch, by 2000 it was a near-certainty that you would not get into the game before downloading some files from the server. No, I'm not making that up. The game would transfer models, textures, maps, sounds - I think even DLLs
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No, I think that latter part is false because you couldn't load a DLL mod without restarting. But everything else. You could be forced to download 300MB of files before joining. Rate-limited.
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Once you were in there was absolutely no telling what you'd see. None. You could materialize in the castle from Mario 64 or the lobby from The Matrix. Maybe everyone has gigantic heads. Maybe the guns all kill in one shot.
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Maybe all the players are using furry models. This was huge in a couple games I played. You'd load in and there's just like 6 foxes running around with Desert Eagles.
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Some absolute bastard produced a thing for Half-Life called adminmod that allowed the server admin to touch basically all the functions in the game, live. Chat, world state, server and client variables, everything was fungible.
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Because the server could now create objects in the game world and perturb their state, mods were developed that did everything under the sun without needing to push any actual code changes to the client
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One adminmod extension for TFC I believe periodically spawned gift boxes, accompanied by sound effects and applause. I don't remember exactly what they did. You could do stuff like randomly assign godmode to people, or bury players in the ground for misbehavior
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Did I mention that these games inherited forum culture instantly? Because there was global chat that basically couldn't be shut off, and everyone playing was a dick, ingame chat was a huge social element. Servers had mods. You could mod without actually being in the game.
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You'd see arguments between mods and players. When you joined servers, the MOTD - a fullscreen text field that could *scroll* - would invariably have a code of conduct and terms of suspension that actually got enforced more often than not.
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Some servers ran a mod that let the server *vote to kick someone* to allow self-moderation. This was largely before brigading had been invented, and it's not like it is now, where if you cuss enough or cheat you get banned from an *entire game,* everywhere
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The whole thing was like some kind of fucked up local bar scene, where you might join a server with friends and go "oh shit it's FuckHenry, I'm pretty sure this guy cheats, that's why I usually just play on the furry server" and then all three of you get snapshotted by FuckHenry
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it was bizarre as hell, having servers that you'd retreat to because they'd banned the guy that was terrorizing the only other active server at midnight:40 Pacific
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This is all gone, and probably good riddance to it - I hardly ever had fun, as a kid, because these servers were just absolute carnival ride fuckfests where you couldn't make sense of anything.
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why are there presents? do i try to hit Use or- oh I got headshot and it played the headshot clip from Unreal Tournament even though this isn't that game. there's a vote going on for a gameplay feature I don't recognize. there's like 4 different colored text popups on my screen
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I'm being told by huge purple text at the top of my screen not to "corner-sit" or I'll be autobanned for half an hour. I don't know what that is, but I also just died 3 times in one minute. I think I'm gonna go play Doom 2
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All this had to go away. Playing those games wasn't fun for most people, I s2g. It was hardly fun for me, but what else could I do with my time? There was nothing to do in 2003.
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At this point you can play a game that maybe just doesn't even *have* public chat, so maybe you never hear a slur. That was unthinkable in 2003. Playing a game online meant hearing at least one slur, probably a lot of them.
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When it came out, PUBG was the first game I'd played in a very very long time where there was public chat on at the beginning of a round, and the first thing I heard was people chanting slurs in the plane. So. it's not fixed.
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But what sucked in 2002 was getting banned from the one server that was mostly well-moderated and not overloaded with admin mods because the admin called you a f***ot for using a particular gun and you told him to fuck off and now you can *never* play on the Good Server again
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What sucked in 2002 was getting online at 8 PM and there's like 6 servers with 3 people on them and one server with 30 people and it's been modded to fuck and it's on a map you hate
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i think a lot of people probably do not know what it means to be Sniped Instantly. it means that you spawn, and you step out past the protective barrier in the teamgame, and you are instantly dead because a guy is running an aimbot and there's nobody around to get rid of him
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not like "the snipers play too much and are too good" but like "every single server has a cheater on it because it's past 10PM and, literally, the mods are asleep"
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cheating was *impossibly* common. almost universal in everything quake-derived.
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honestly it was egalitarian and lib ertarian and like most such systems it mostly didn't work and was hell on earth on anyone who wasn't made out of incredibly tough stuff
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