Analysis
What region locking did to community hosting
The map of where servers are is not a map of where players live. It is a map of where publishers decided people live, and the two diverged.
SweetMask · · 4 min
Numbers, patches and patterns, read closely.
The map of where servers are is not a map of where players live. It is a map of where publishers decided people live, and the two diverged.
SweetMask · · 4 min
Usually described as politics. It is more interesting: a ruleset is a claim about what the game is, and two leagues with different ones disagree about the sport.
SweetMask · · 3 min
No studio announces it. The transition happens administratively, in the same sequence nearly every time, and by the time anybody says it out loud it finished a year ago.
SweetMask · · 4 min
Most mod communities run on permission that was never granted. Tolerance is revocable, and it does not expire just because eight years passed.
SweetMask · · 4 min
The room emptied of sound before it emptied of people. What in-game voice provided was not communication — it was ambient presence.
SweetMask · · 4 min
A recorded match is the only evidence structure community moderation has ever had. Everything else is testimony, and testimony does not survive disagreement.
SweetMask · · 5 min
What survives is not decided by the code. It is decided by the licence and by the assets, and both are settled before anybody writes a line.
SweetMask · · 4 min
One person carries a recurring obligation everyone else experiences as free. The money is rarely what ends it.
SweetMask · · 4 min
Ranks and unlocks are a retention mechanism built for a game that sells things. A server selling nothing gets the costs without the benefit.
SweetMask · · 3 min
They look like a service and are accounted for as a cost. That one fact explains why they are conservative, and why they are cut first.
SweetMask · · 3 min
A new base version arrives, the mod ecosystem splits, and the community splits with it. Not by choice — a player on one version cannot join a server on the other.
SweetMask · · 4 min
It looks like a list in a config file. It is the clearest statement a server makes about who it is for, and it is usually assembled by accident.
SweetMask · · 4 min