So, this is something I've mentioned a few times here and there, but I'm curious about peoples thoughts on this. Do people ever think there'll come a time where petty platform sniping can be put aside, to achieve what's probably better for the whole of gaming? It's all well and good to be jabbing each other back and forth over who's winning, who's doing poorly etc... but when it comes to the broader issues that could have long lasting rammifications upon the industry (in a positive or negative light), thus far, we've been unable to band together to speak as one voice. And I think it's generally important for consumers of a certain industry to remain vigilant against abuse that companies will attempt to try.
Take removal of local hosting capabilities (and thus, local admin control) of servers. This occurred pretty abruptly during last gen, and while the large, large majority of PC users (granted, they would be most affected) warned about the consequences this could have moving forward, they were largely mocked/belittled/marginalized. I'm not saying there aren't some PC gamer's who aren't outright obnoxious, I'm simply saying that the removal of that option (as opposed to instituting it on console, and then tweaking it until it worked the way the devs/pubs wanted) was overall, bad for the industry. The reason being is, policing servers really can't be up to the platform holder/publisher/dev team. We cannot expect these folks to be paying attention 24/7 (and if you do, that's silly). It's not an immediate thing for them, because, well, like WoW gold farmers...they pay for the game, so why act quickly to crush it (not to mention it's just unrealistic to expect they'd employ round the clock server admins). I don't think there's anything wrong with them offering their own servers...but, there used to be a pretty hefty industry devoted just to renting out game servers. Other than monetary gain, I see no reason why they couldn't have continued that, and allowed players to police their own experience. But, as I said, because it was the PC community, it was largely ignored while everyone retreated into their respective platform camps. For example, during that timeframe, we actually rented 2 servers here at my house, running CoD 2 and CoD 1 UO. They were policed by 3 people in the household, as was the TS (Teamspeak) server. And for the very large part it was all in real-time.
Piggy-backing on that, another one of my serious gripes is the removal of Mod/map making tools (particularly painful for me, was CoD 2 to CoDs afterwards). I will openly admit, the utter fury I felt towards the CoD franchise, the developers and the publisher, may cloud my overall judgement in this, however, for those who were able to experience the amazing variety of work put into CoD maps/mods on PC, was pretty amazing. I've previously mentioned Barbarosa (By the After-Hourz team), as an example of what can happen when you have some really invested people putting their own time into developing an entirely new map from scratch (with new vehicles, artillery etc... all authenticly recreated in 3dsMax, and other 3d modeling programs). This wasn't an over the top job, they did it very, very well. This is the kind of thing I think gamer's miss out on these days. I personally think it's unfortunate, and a sad thing, especially when we've seen how amazing user created content can be (LBP, the new Mario Maker, CoD 2, Skyrim, etc...).
Anyway, before this gets into a massive full-length novel, my point overall (and there are other examples I could put in here, it isn't just limited to the easy ones mentioned above) is, do you notice certain aspects of the industry that bother you, but the complaints seem to get ignored for whatever reason, and do you think we'll ever come to a point where regardless of what we play on, we're always looking out for each other, as a group?
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