Hi all.
I spent countless hours on the 3 iterations of this beautiful game.
Multiplayer was never its strongest suit - but playing it with my friends was anyway the most immersive experience I’ve ever had.
Now here we are, ~20 years after we started playing it, and we all bought into this pipe dream Microsoft sold us.
We thought we were going to be able to play again one of our teenage staple games, but now with a multiplayer infrastructure up to standards - which a game like this cannot live without.
Needlessly to say we were wrong. It still sucks.
But NOW we don’t even have local multiplayer option: we could at least try to self-host our games, forget about ranked ones, and play over some vpn like we were playing in our basement, some 20 years younger.
But no, we have to go through the official servers which apparently cannot even hold 25k concurrent users.
25k concurrent users.
There are plenty of multiplayer games which are able to support effortlessly a playerbase 3 orders of magnitude higher than this.
I’m not saying we need that kind of availability, but a company like Microsoft sure can spare a couple VMs in their clusters to make our experience less miserable.
Or maybe they can’t, but until someone COMES HERE AND TALKS TO US about what are the plans for the future of this game, we cannot really know and we are left to speculate.
Server maintenance shouldn’t be reactive, if you are serious about your product: it should be proactive.
Nothing kills a product like being unavailable when it is wanted the most.
Alas, the impression is this game isn’t loved by Microsoft the same way we love it - as many others have already put this, it looks like it was just a quick cash grab move.
The first sign of a dead product is the lack of dev-user interaction. Look at a game like LoL: for all its flaws, userbase - devs interaction isn’t one.
If HC3 has shown something these days is that there was an opportunity for a competitive scene - and that this opportunity has been wasted.