I haven't played much Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, but I've enjoyed what little of it I've experienced, and its online reputation seems to be solidly positive. One can only wonder what its makers will make of the server shown off in the video below, though, which has tweaked the game's gravity setting so that even knights in hundred-pound suits of armor are capable of flying hundreds of feet into the sky. What's more, the game's AI apparently interprets their sudden freedom from the fetters of gravity as a cause of impending death, meaning that...well, you just have to watch this.
The joys of PC gaming, huh? In the good old days, server-side modifications would lead to some crazy experiences, with servers that featured almost zero gravity, restrict you to a single weapon, make every attack an instant kill, or offer up any number of other modifications to a game's core gameplay. Heck, Unreal Tournament's mutators were basically a fancy set of server modifications along these lines. You never knew quite what you were getting into when you hopped onto a modified server, but they had the advantage of offering wacky gameplay experiences without the need to download files outside the game.
Server-side mods seem to be a fading phenomenon, though, largely because many games now are either relying on peer-to-peer multiplayer or are keeping control of dedicated servers and simply renting them out to the community. (Can't let people have too much fun if that fun happens to interfere with online leaderboards and data collection, after all.) That's a shame, but here's hoping that indie games can keep the dream alive; I know that I certainly want to track down this Chivalry server now.