Features
The person who maintains the modpack
A modded server's stability is mostly one person's judgement about versions and timing, and when that person stops, the pack does not break so much as freeze.
SweetMask · · 4 min
Longer pieces on the games, the people making them and the scenes around them.
A modded server's stability is mostly one person's judgement about versions and timing, and when that person stops, the pack does not break so much as freeze.
SweetMask · · 4 min
Publishers kept the server software, licensed the renting, took the renting in-house and finally folded hosting into the game, and each step left communities less of the machine.
SweetMask · · 5 min
The fork looked like a rename in 2023. By Minecraft 1.21.1 it decided which mods and hybrid servers a modded server could run, while installation and Forge itself carried on.
SweetMask · · 4 min
Server-side stats gave each Counter-Strike server a ladder of its own and its regulars a reason to stay, and matchmaking took that pull away when rank became portable.
SweetMask · · 5 min
The habits of the LAN floor went online with broadband, but the room that kept people civil stayed behind, and moderation has been trying to rebuild it ever since.
SweetMask · · 4 min
Rebuilt MMO servers survive on the publisher's tolerance, and the rare licence goes to a game the publisher no longer sells, run by a team that never charged for it.
SweetMask · · 5 min
When GameSpy switched off in 2014, the game servers survived and the directory did not: one hostname inside every copy of a game was the part nobody could easily replace.
SweetMask · · 4 min
Staff get recruited on skill, availability and enthusiasm. None of those three is the trait the job actually needs.
SweetMask · · 4 min
Publisher gone, official infrastructure off, store page removed — and a box still answering queries for forty people every Tuesday.
SweetMask · · 4 min
They are measured the same way and behave completely differently the first time something goes wrong — which is the only occasion anybody finds out which one they had.
SweetMask · · 3 min
Succession is the hardest unsolved problem in volunteer-run gaming, and almost nobody works on it until the week it arrives.
SweetMask · · 5 min
Fifteen years removing the server browser, then rebuilding it somewhere else. The function came back; the property that made it valuable did not.
SweetMask · · 3 min