2024-07-11
During the Spring I ran a multiplayer game of OpenTTD for a couple of hours every other Friday. The idea was to run from 1950-2050 without any specific goal or competition, for anyone who wanted to join.
A year in default game mode is about 12 minutes. Subsequently 100 years would be 1,200 minutes, i.e. around 20 hours. I scheduled 2 hours per session and planned for it to span 20 weeks.
That's a lot of numbers! We'll (mostly) leave the numbers now and see what it was like.
There were a handful of us starting out. Only two of us remained as of the last session. Not because of boredom or bankruptcies; just scheduling conflicts and busy lives. It was in no way unexpected.
What was unexpected was the number of random players hopping in to play a session or in some cases two just because the server was in the public listing. I think we had 5 concurrent players one session where only two of us were regulars. All in all over the course of the game more than 15 companies were active. I didn't count, but I had a 15 company limit and I had to remove one or two inactive companies to make room for more players at some point.
I set up a discord server in the beginning to easily allow voice chat during games, but sharing the invite link within game is difficult. The voice chat ended up just being us regulars. Sometimes a regular who wasn't playing at the moment would join the voice chat anyway because it was social.
One or two random participants never communicated. I don't consider that in any way rude; some people either don't speak English or plain don't want to chat in the game. What's important -- and made me quite happy -- is that everyone played fair and respectfully, and everyone was kind and welcoming. To me that speaks volume about the player base. There are no doubt trolls hopping into multiplayer games sometimes, but I've never encountered a mean player.
Some sessions ran on for longer than the planned two hours. A couple ran a lot longer. Because it's fun to play and hard to stop!
The one thing that sucked a bit was that those 100 in game years turned out to be closer to 25 hours of play time because the laptop I'm playing and hosting the game on is slow as molasses. When there were more than a thousand vehicles on the map the in game time moved almost half as fast as it should. Strangely we didn't really experience lag per se; it was just slower.
I announced the idea in various social channels before-hand and found willing players that way. That's how the group of regulars was formed. Sadly these were the only ones who knew about the discord server. Next time, whenever that might be, I'll set up a site with an easy-to-type URL with some info on it. Something I can share with players who find the server in the public listing.
The experience was great! Like how you find new people to talk to when you take a class or join a team of some kind I also found that the relaxed voice chat quickly went from only game related to familiar "how have you been?" and talks about life and everything. Though most of the time there was a comfortable silence in the channel as we played through the session independently together.
I love hosting games or events. Not to brag, but I'm good at it. I'm good at creating a kind and welcoming atmosphere, communicating with people, and creating opportunities to have a good time. I'm also pretty good at the game, and after the first session I already had more money than I could possibly spend. Every time someone joined I offered to give them a few million pounds to get their company rolling. Hardly anyone accepted, surprisingly. Most players like playing a startup, it turns out. It's a universally appreciated offer either way.
Another game like this will not be hosted on my faithful laptop. I'll set it up on a dedicated server for the purpose. Even a very weak server (which it'll probably be, honestly) is better because it won't have to both act as server and render graphics for a player.
Here's info on the computer I used this season.
I hope so. It was a good experience. It wasn't too hard to set up. If or when depends on other things in my life. There's always a thousand projects to do, after all. And life in general.
But it would definitely be nice to do it again.
-- CC0 Björn Wärmedal