Control for Convenience

How was your Thursday?

For those who don't know, I'm part of a weekly livestreamed series called "The Shambles Championship" where, to be fair, these types of crashes are expected and part of the entertainment. However, this wasn't caused by reckless opponents or driver error, but netcode.

Recently, Codemasters released a patch for F1 2021 that, according to swaths of forum posts and cancelled league events, has completely destroyed connectivity, resulting in several drivers being able to technically compete, but not in the same realm.

Desyncing leads to several players being unable to see others, yet never the less, drive into them as an immovable object, as I was unlucky enough to be the victim of it five times in one race.

This was the most broken multiplayer experience I've ever had, and I played Spec Ops The Line!

Devastating online bugs are hardly anything new though…

Back in yee olden days, the original Counter Strike mod had a bug that resulted in players being able to plant bombs which floated in mid-air, requiring Counter Terrorists to at least have two players left alive, one to crouch on the ground floor, and a teammate standing on top of him to disarm the bomb.

However, because Counter Strike was a free mod for Half Life back then, builds would be posted publically and do the rounds on websites and magazine cover discs. In short, players had access to whichever build they wanted.

So, if the latest turns out to be opposite of the greatest, drag and dropping an update they already had is all that's needed to be done to have a fun experience, and several players did this.

Server Lists used to detail not just the number of players, ping, map, and mode, but also builds. It was very helpful for dumb ten year olds like me playing Battlefield 2, not understanding how patches worked, but still finding one or two vanilla severs that were always populated.

The component of all of this is that which direction a game goes in wasn't 100% controlled by the developers. Yes, it was 90%, which doesn't seem like much less, but I personally find it hard to imagine so many modern games having the routinely accepted embarrassment of an objectively awful update in this past world.

Imagine if Rainbow Six Siege had its builds publicly available like Counter Strike when Lion first dropped?

Do you really think everyone would just sit there and accept the situation, or would multiple of the most notable players and events revert back to previous builds for the sake of stability, competition, and most importantly, enjoyment.

Do I miss having to manually install PC updates?

Hell no!

However, I do miss the influence that communities had. Ultimately, multiplayer games are a collaboration between developers and players. At the very least, and singleplayer game can be enjoyed by one person, even if they're the only person to play it. Multiplayer games require people, so it's always been quite silly to me that a team of a couple hundred can tell thousands, sometimes millions of people, how the game should be played, even if it's for the worse, and/or has nothing to do with improving said game. This modern convenience did come with some cost.

I mean seriously, this F1 update's primarily about DJMariio and a couple Youtubers…

I'm reminded of a quote from my friend Hadyn on a podcast we did 10+ years ago.

Infinity Ward seriously be like "we got all this wallhack, aimbot, one-man-army danger close… that rock glitch!"

"Don't like it!"