Greentext

Huh, weird. The menfolk have had kind of a loneliness problem for about 15 years...

This was dota in 2008 basically.

Now I'm sad.

Runescape is a game I have nostalgic memories of meeting people on, nowadays it feels like a single player game that I'm paying monthly for...

This makes me think of the song "Wave" by the midnight.

"We are hooking up with strangers we will never see again We are not a sentimental age"

I started playing a game called Beyond all Reason and its got Lobbies. I forgot how much I hated matchmaking. Sitting in lobbies talking and deciding what to play is so much better. You get to know the types of lobbies and what to expect. If I want to get fucked up I join the Op lobby if I wanna chill I join the noob lobby. People recognize you after awhile and you make friends.

dude, I miss lineage 2

Game companies have definitely done their best to try and make multiplayer gaming more and more lonely. I settled in quick to single player cause at least I could have fun and not simultaneously be lonely and dominated by some hyper competitive toxic game matched tryharding BS.

Pretty solid. Explains why i stopped liking online-games which i was so damn passionate about 20yrs ago.

Beside being unable to compete with the youngsters 😁

This basically describes my experience with counter strike pre-1.6.... like 1.3 thru 1.5, circa 2002-2005. Lost thousands of hours of my youth negotiating knives-only rounds and doing stupid totem pole camping on de_dust while 1 guy on the other team tried to AWP everybody. Am I old?

Great, the loss of community now extends to video games as well

we have successfully urbanized online games. the days of a small town feeling in new online games are over

One of the last good public multiplayer experiences I had was DiRT 3. Simple lobbies, small player count, people randomly joining and leaving and everyone was chill. You'd occasionally get that guy who was stupidly good, perfect lines through every corner, and the entire lobby would try so hard to keep up. Loved it.

One time I stumbled into a lobby where the host was "hacking" but instead of cheating for an advantage, he was selecting weird car class and track combinations for the entire lobby. Stuff that the game wouldn't normally allow. Shit like trailblazer cars on rallycross circuits. So much fucking fun, one of my favorite memories from that game.

That must've been what, 4, 5 years ago? DiRT 3 released in 2011, so...oh my god DiRT 3 came out 13 years ago...

nice observation by anon.

i miss making friends in games and couldnt quite put my finger on why matchmaking was much worse and unfun than old multiplayer and this is it.

That first bit is a pretty accurate description of a lot of early online gaming.

Nostalgia might be pushing a bit hard here. Even playing obsessively on relatively small games on a limited number of servers for hours every day, I never got to recognize people just by being there. Occasionally someone would friend you, but otherwise, you knew people for 4-5 rounds at a time, and then never saw them again. Internet, even back then, was a big place.

"but my community used to be made out of 12 people!"

Well too bad. That's why you're here on Lemmy now. You dislike strangers and love familiarity. I on the other hand love strangers and chaos. That's why I was on Reddit.