Submitted 10 months ago by ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net to games@lemmy.world
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV2bCfm3zVM
An MMO i played from 1999-2007 shut down in I think 2017. I still remember the landscapes and landmarks and it is really strange knowing the shared experiences in those places are just flat gone. Inscribed items with messages to other players: deleted.
I have emulated the game world but only fragments were saved by collective efforts in the community before shutdown. Regardless there’s simply no people or things to interact with so it feels even more soullessly dead and empty.
I still love Lord of the Rings Online. It still has enough people to feel alive, to the point where they even upgraded their servers recently, and still keeps that old school feel. You can even earn LOTRO points through hunting monsters and quests, so if you put the work in you don’t even need to buy anything.
Do I miss the days before MTX? Yeah, but I feel like they are fairly less greedy about it than other games. Fairly. There’s still the VIP subscription while double-dipping into MTX that rubs me the wrong way a bit, but they still actively try to listen to the players. I’ll be sad when its gone…
Its mostly much older generations that play, though, but that really cuts down on a lot of the toxicity. I’ve had so many polite conversations in world chat with programmers and sysadmins offering advice. One of the most helpful players I met was a 72 year old vietnam veteran. He helped me get started and gave me a ton of gear just for having a nice talk with him.
I love lotro. I played it for 10 years. From release, until mordor.
I was madly inlove with lotro. It was a beautiful game. the only MMO where you actually read lore and quest text and anything else, because of how immersive it was all… and the game was perfect (before mordor). Casual, relaxing, but challenging in all the right places.
and the community was just absolutely amazing. Kind, considerate, helpful, generous. Like you said, i think the average age of lotro players was over 40… Until there was there was some issue with WoW that caused a lot of WoW players to immigrate to lotro… Then chat got less friendly, and more obnoxious, and the community got less kind, and less helpful… cause all the kind helpful people got burned by the jackholes being jackholes… Still a pleasant community, but no where near what it was before that WoWpocalypse.
My love and faith in the game changed with Mordor, though… Mordor broke me, It was just so pointlessly difficulty spiked on even the landscape mobs were slaughtering raid-ready players, that most of my kin, myself included, ended up just quitting the game. A few people eventually got the gang back together again for southern mirkwood, but that mordor level of difficulty was still there. No one in the kin, except for the hunters and the champions, seemed able to even 1v1 the landscape mobs. that also reflected group content… no one wanted anything but healers and hunters. was the same with mordor, but even worse with southern mirkwood. Mobs were so dumbly overpowered that only the lotro character equivalent of tactical nukes were wanted in groups… I, sadly, was not a tactical nuke class.
It really breaks my heart. I loved that game. I made great real life friends in that game… I met my Ex in that game (though in retrospect that probably shouldnt be viewed as part of the happy memories lol), Spent so many evenings bullshitting in voice chat while we did instances and group content, or just ground out old content for deeds. Was such a magical fucking experience, that I’ll probably never experience again for the rest of my life. The pre-mordor game was absolute perfection. Especially with the revamps to some less ideal/polished game areas like Moria.
And killed, to me, because devs listened to a vocal minority that wanted moar harderer.
I’m sad now.
Its a depressing perspective sure, but it mirrors real life pretty closely. Nothing lasts forever, buildings change, towns die out. Still a good idea to take some pictures or videos in either case.
Technically 100% do, games that require the Internet require the Internet, which means by design you’re relying on someone else hosting servers which means it may not be available, 50, 100, or even more years into the future. That’s not the case with single-player/offline-available games.
As the graph breaks down, some games are patches by companies to allow them to function offline or to enable self-hosted servers. Mostly its fan efforts to reverse engineer the server code, though.
The point of the stop killing games campaign is to legislate by law that going forward, developers/publishers would have to account for a way to allow the player to host a server or patch the game to run offline when they become unprofitable and are shut down.
My point was more that games that require the Internet itself, and not just LAN-capable servers, are games that are inevitably going to disappear.
It may seem like I’m splitting hairs but what I said is technically true.
I still miss GhostX.
There ought to be a law…
That’s why the first thing I do when I buy a new game is to turn off the internet and boot the game. If it doesn’t boot or work offline, I refund it. And I just don’t buy games that have Denuvo.
We looked at over 700 games that have or used to have some sort of online requirement…
… First up are dead games, which means no one on Earth can currently play the game. It’s not possible…
…Next, we have at-risk games, which means these games are currently working, but they’re designed in such a way that the second the publisher ends support, they will become dead games without some sort of intervention…
… Next, we have dev preserved, which means the game would have died, but the publisher or developer implemented some sort of endof life plan, so now the game is safe…
… And finally, we have Fan Preserved, where the publisher did nothing or practically nothing to save the game, but fans managed to either hack it to remove dependencies or reverse engineer a server emulator so that the game was saved in spite of the publisher actions. It’s worth stating that almost every time this happens, it’s an incredible amount of work and it’s a small miracle it happens at all. So, here are the stats on all the games that we researched.
Why doesn’t that graph show at risk games?
Out of curiosity what are the 16 dev preserved ones?
If your game requires a server for single player content, I ain’t buying it.
I’m not paying full price and getting a rental.
It shouldn’t require a server that I can’t control for multiplayer either.
V rising kind of does this but a single player game is just called a server it’s on your local machine though.
And I kind of hate that
Only exception to this is if I can run the server myself.
Me building mega castles on my one man modded Rust server.
This is why it is so important to find exploits for current gen consoles. It is not about piracy, it is about preservation. You don’t own a game that requires the internet, or a fucking download code Nintendo.
A PS3 with Evilnat custom firmware is truly a thing of beauty. A great era for videogame creativity and experimentation, when F2P was just a twinkle in Tim Sweeney’s eye.
I’m still upset about Atelier Resleriana: Forgotten Alchemy & The Polar Night Liberator
This is true. I’ve been grieving the loss of Isekai Demon Waifu, which shut down only a few days ago on the 19th of this month. I had been playing it over 3 years, and had unlocked most of the girls, become the #1 on my server, and had grown attached to seeing my harem girls every night when I play the game before bed. I missed the server shutdown notification and I was messed up the next day. It hit me hard.
I hope there is another harem game with succubi and monster girls. IDW had a lot of charm. The music, art style, aesthetic. Amazing monster girls. I’m going to miss seeing Ephinas, Fiadum, Hastia, Scardia, Palotti, Ymir, and all the others.
It doesn’t seem fair that we can spend years of our life, hundreds or even thousands of dollars, make a game experience part of our lives, and then one day it just goes poof and it’s all gone. Part of you vanishes in that moment. It’s like a bandaid being ripped off a wound, or a light in your life going out. Because someone else decided it cost too much to keep a server running?
They should be required to transition the game into an offline mode!
Can’t you use that money to see a therapist now?
I can’t tell if this is satire or not.
Depends on whether they have heard of Josh Strife Hayes.
Given the username I’d guess not. Good username btw
They should be required to transition the game into an offline mode!
Seems to me like this would be good business sense too. Wouldn’t people be more likely to buy their next online game if you felt there was a good chance you could keep playing it after a few years? Instead they’re going to get a reputation for making products with a short shelf life.
You paid this money knowing you do not have the ability to run the game. Why does the developer have the obligation to change the user agreement you signed off on when you created your account? You chose to play a game that you cannot run yourself.
That’s weasel speak. Hiding behind a user agreement is a pathetic excuse for bad behavior on the part of the developer. The developer decides what is in that agreement. It can be changed at any time, and 'but you agreed to this" is a poor excuse for laziness and disrespect for the community that supported them for so many years.
Transitioning the game into an offline mode could be done with some development time spent on a final update. Take out the multiplayer stuff, let the game run offline, and put the game up for sale as an idler for like $5 or $10. It might not make much money but it lets players continue to play a game that they love. It shows that you as a developer care about your product and the customers who have supported you for so long.
Good.
It’s astonishing to me how even right here on Lemmy so many people still misunderstand what this is about with comments saying that piracy fixes it or that downloading the game installer solves the issue. The games where those things are options aren’t what this effort is about, this is about games like Darkspore, Defiance, Tabula Rasa, and our prototypical example The Crew, where there is no one who can play them no matter where, how, or when, they acquired the game, it is impossible to play for anyone, the whole piece of art has been destroyed.
Honestly if we can’t even communicate what the movement is about to those who aught to be our base it really does not bode well for gaining any kind of wider traction.
In a way, piracy can fix that problem too, since pirate servers existing for ongoing games means they’ll never actually die, unless the server source code gets taken down and nobody archives a copy. I mean, WoW Classic only happened because a private server running vanilla got too big, despite Blizzard bullshit of “You think you want it, but you don’t” and “We don’t have the code to roll back”.
Star Wars Galaxies, Phantasy Star Online, City of Heroes, Warhammer Age of Reckoning all still exist and can be played, despite being “dead”, thanks to private/pirate servers.
In a way, piracy can fix that problem too, since pirate servers existing for ongoing games means they’ll never actually die
That happened to Ragnarok Online. Iirc the early server code got leaked by hackers (it seems it’s still being developed on GitHub lol), so all throughout the game’s 20+ years lifetime it has had a flourishing private server scene with hundreds of servers still online, so I don’t think it will die in our lifetimes.
That only works if the server code gets leaked or someone reverse engineers it. Both of those options shouldn’t be relied on, especially for more complex or less popular games.
Marvel Heroes Omega is one I recently discovered has private servers now. I really miss that one. The whole campaign is playable, but the server will be wiped once 1.0 of the emu comes out, possibly early next year.
The thing is when you created your account you agreed to the fact that it isn’t your game. What you agreed to was a game that they own and control and you can participate in. You might not like the results when they close the game but you chose to start playing that game to begin with.
Yeah, but a contract that you cannot negotiate before signing isn’t really a contract is it? It is a gate keeper. A gun to the head. An “agree to this or else”. In the modern world, one can do essentially nothing without signing a EULA. Want to get a job without signing one? Good luck. Want to play a game? Not many of them. Want to shop online, look at art, communicate with friends and family. Many of the most integral parts of maintaining our mental health are being put behind abusive “contracts” that strip us of any rights we think we have. Community, leisure, socialization, entertainment, all of the primary avenues in the modern world have predominantly become privatized and every one of those comes at a pretty steep nonmonetary cost.
You’re damn right I don’t like it, I especially don’t like how it destroys art history, which is why I’m part of this campaign to make that practice illegal.
People aren’t used to this as a concept, especially when there are so many terms and conditions screens (that have been shown in multiple jurisdictions courts to not be legally binding) they click through on a daily basis as well as many other “as a service” models that are reliable enough that people don’t realise what the pitfalls are (people playing for Netflix are fairly certain it won’t close next week, for instance), even the more technically minded expect sunset clauses - which would be a pretty good legal baseline to improve the situation.
I think the issue is that, as with reddit, a lot of people are only reading the headline and commenting.
Sure, but when the a link is to a video, I don’t blame them.
Also many young people are so used to games requiring online connection and being shut down, that they can’t imagine a better way.
I boycott single player games that require online login/validation. Rockstar and Ubisoft are on my blacklist
I returned Red Dead Redemption 2 on steam after seeing I needed an entire Shitstar account.
5 years ago I would have just forgotten about it and moved on but in today’s climate, fuck em. They don’t even deserve my $1.40.
Gotta save up for some hard drives to download and keep my GOG games, plus some pirated totally legally acquired titles
I call em full version demos. Specifically because I buy when it’s good. The 2 hour steam thing sometimes, just isn’t enough to really know. It usually is tho.
Out of the games I’ve been fortunate to work on, 1/7 require internet, and the 1 was my first industry job as QA. Everything else has been mobile, online required. 5/7 are no longer playable / removed from the internet.
It makes me sad because my kids will never play a bunch of things I made. I can’t revisit them nostalgically. If I had made something in the 90s, it would be preserved still.
I played the cards dealt to me to follow a dream and make a living, but I wish the industry wasn’t like this. The money has always been a role, but nowadays, it’s distorted so badly.
That’s the difference shareholders make.
Piracy is essentially a form of archivism. The digital age literally ended scarcity in digital media and these people were like “well that won’t do”.
You know you bring up a really great point. We’ve finally hit post-scarcity in an industry (information) and look at what it has done to us. Are we really ready for this in other areas yet. Should we use this as a chance to figure out how to integrate such a creation into society such that the next time this happens it doesn’t kill us all.
For sone of these games piracy would solve nothing. How wouldI run an 8vs8 PvP mission in DCUO that players are required to do if there aren’t 16 players on the server? If Im hosting it offline that content is still dead.
Private WoW servers thrived. Much of the endgame content required 40 players to collaborate for hours at a time, and they have kept their own dream running for well over a decade.
You should have the option to find and play with others long after corporate servers are abandoned. Whether or not there are other players immediately available is irrelevant to the issue at hand.
that’s why i dont buy digital games on nintendo. one day the service ends and it’s gone forever.
That’s why I only buy games on GOG. After purchase I archive the installer, and it’s mine forever. On console you are really fucked.
I’m not buying Nintendo at all, so many shitty policies from that camp
i buy physical because i genuinely think nintendo is one of the last good game devs remaining. but switch 2 is just download cards. i will not be purchasing it.
Im honestly so sick of online games that should be offline. I just got a few switch games to pass time on my breaks, and half of them require internet access. One of them is literally a bubble shooter.
Yeah, trusting that anything Internet connected keeps working is a pipedream these days unfortunately.
Hardware and software.
I don’t even trust non-unlockable bootloaders. There’s so much planned obsolescence everywhere
Link to the games list: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1at1k7qIo5dgPp6K1aCrYIyAgNOjY-IhF
Link to the European Citizens’ Initiative: eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home stopkillinggames.com
Two more months to go and more than 50% left to reach 1 million signatures. It’s sad to see that with how many people game, this petition has so little reach. I guess we’ll have to wait till Fortnite is shut down, then suddenly many more will care that their childhood game is gone forever.
I don’t know if I fully agree with the petition, but I do think that there are some real problems with the status quo.
I also think that either a legislature or courts need to provide legal criteria for the good or service division with games. I think that there probably need to be “good” games, "serviceʾ games, and possibly even games that have a component of both.
But I’m not in the EU or UK.
I also am kind of puzzled by this:
Isn’t the law on this already settled?
A: It mostly is within the United States, but not in many other countries.
It doesn’t sound like it was as of 2020 in the US, at least on the good/service distinction:
carltonfields.com/…/youve-been-served-legal-effec…
Of course, case law has never really been settled on whether games are goods or services. Right, Steve?
Steve Blickensderfer: No. No, I haven’t been able to figure this out one way or the other looking at the cases.
Unfortunately, I think it was just a lack of awareness that the petition in existed in certain countries where Ross just didn’t have enough reach, possibly due to language barriers. A big push from native speakers of those countries with large audiences, like streamers, could’ve pushed it over the edge.
mtchristo@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Are people still playing MS-DOS games or listening to the 50s music. I bet there are a numbered few. But everything will die eventually
Ksin@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Being for the destruction of all art history is certainly the wildest take I’ve ever seen on this issue.
ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
MS-DOS games are pretty much what GOG built their business on, they still sell quite well. 50’s music is still listened by many, and often used in movies, though that’s a bit of an odd comparison, almost as if old things aren’t worth keeping around. I mean, people still listen to classical music that’s hundreds of years old at this point, read ancient stories, and look at art from artists long dead. I consider games to be an art form like any other, and worth preserving.