A lot of people lament the death of community run dedicated servers, but I'm with you here. I don't miss trying to find a good deathmatch UT04 server that wasn't either super high ping, loaded to the hilt with obnoxious mods, or stuck running Rankin 24/7, only to give up after 40 minutes.
Oh wow, I had totally forgotten about server hunting.
I kept a list of "good" servers (based on ping, map rotation, who played there, mods, etc), but when they were empty finding somewhere else was a complete pain.
I miss the camaraderie on some of those dedicated servers, but I know I wouldn't be able to get into something like that these days.
I think a lot of that camaraderie and sense of community has moved to places like Discord and Reddit.
I have a group that regularly plays Overwatch together every Friday. Whenever more than 5 people show up, we play custom games. The workshop is surprisingly powerful, so it even gives us some of the experience we used to get with mods for games like Quake and Unreal.
When we have 5 or fewer people though, we really appreciate the game's matchmaking, even though it is far from perfect. It is a lot better at creating balanced matches than any server auto-balance feature ever was, while always keeping us on the same team.
Games like tf2 make parsing community servers pretty easy. You can do things like set ping cut offs, only look for nonempty and not full servers, look for certain numbers of people playing, certain maps or gametypes, and include or exclude keywords like certain modded gametypes.
At least then you could run your own server with whatever settings you wanted. Now instead you are left with unplayable games because the developer or publisher decided to shut down the servers.
