Just play Mordhau. Playerbase is small enough that you'll see the same people over and over again.

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

Shout out to my TF2 clan. You were the best friends I ever had. 🫡

I remember all the hilarious impersonations I would do in Black Ops 2 on PSN. Everyone would be cutting up.

good times

....now everyone is in private parties

I definitely feel this way about gaming online. I miss Microsoft Ants.

I've been playing Lord of the Rings, Battle for Middle Earth lately (I believe the game came out in 2004?). Anyways, the small pool of players isn't as fun as you remember. The greentext notes giving up based on team matchup, and oh boi is that a big problem.

Had the same experience with AssaultCube last year.

CS2 still has server browser. Even I have my own dedicated server.

I can't say I share exactly this experience, but I did have some experiences of old that I miss.

The only non-MMO I ever played multiplayer prior to ~2013 was Age of Mythology. I never played ranked or competitive, but I did play a shit tonne of fun custom scenarios. Escape maps. Arenas. One really fun Helm's Deep map that would always slow to a crawl once a larger number of units hit the field. I'd browse through the open lobbies and find something that struck my fancy, or create my own lobby and wait for people to join. Hours spent browsing the Age of Mythology Heaven forums for scenarios and reading people talk about them.

I do mind miss those custom scenarios. The new Age of Mythology: Retold feels much more focused on the ranked mode. Which I do also really enjoy. But there doesn't seem the same culture of custom scenarios that there was back in the day.

This was dota in 2008 basically.

Now I'm sad.

This is happening to me now in squad.

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"

You can still play old games! TF2 still exists (istg if I die to that one soldier nolife in the 2fort sewers 1 more time)
Also SCP:SL is gonna get a big update soon and it only has servers

Well, atleast for the very top it's still the same. The best 100 players of nearly every game do still know each other.

However fuck what they've done to PUBG, fuck bots give map bans.

MechAssault, all the way back on the OG Xbox. I wish I could remember all the names. So many fun times had trying the stupidest things and somehow winning, like two of us in Raptors going on Ýmir and Loki hunting missions.

This still sort of exists in matchmaking if you play enough.

When you're like top 1% of players you tend to see the same players a lot.

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...