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by ThatPlayer
648 days ago
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> The game developers don't have the money to develop exhaustive anti-abuse mechanisms, or to pay a large support staff to sift through reports, so lots of times the best you get is a simple heuristic. And neither do open-source projects. The majority of people looking to play video games do not want to be the ones moderating. They'll take the path of least resistance and let companies do it for them. > If I play on a local soccer team and they're all racist or homophobic, I'll find a new team or a new league. But at present there's no "find a new Rocket League". You don't need to find a new game though, you can find a new league. Except for maybe battle royale games, most games still allow private matches. Make a private match and invite the people you want to play with. Organize a league yourself. It'll be easier than building your own game, and you'll run into the same problems with an open-source game: how do you convince people to play your league rather than the official easy matchmaking? Rather than the official huge playerbase game? |
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Mastodon is I think a good example of this in social media.
A game example is Team Fortress 2, where community-run servers coexist with matchmaking servers. Some of these are buy-in communities, some of them are freemium ad-ridden servers, some are just small friend groups. And they can pose an alternative to official matchmaking on merit and exist just fine. Oh, and they can remove cheaters and bots themselves.
This is a good example to your last point: when the de-facto league has cheaters, bots, or lack of moderation, people will flock to alternatives en masse, but the alternative has to exist for it to work. This isn't a "problem" with the open-source game, it's the main feature. It's the bridged gap between "building your own game" and "the official huge playerbase game" -- they're almost the same out-of-the-box, so neither the building nor convincing is insurmountable, they're surface-level.