the underlying assumptions behind matchmaking for everything are just dumb. it’s like a console-based infrastructure that colonised the pc platform. that and obviously games producers and their publishers wanted to stop ceding hosting rights and control to third parties (money or anticheat? i’m guessing both).
but it seems to assume that every gamer wants to be on a permanent ELO treadmill, trying to grind out skill points and always become better. or that it’s necessarily a bad thing when a game - especially one with gigantic teams like BF - has a spread of very good players/squads and not so good ones. i can see why that might matter in a 5-person game like LoL where every game involves throwing away an hour of your life and a single player can throw the whole thing. but a 64v64 capture point FPS? it’s just more fun when you have n00bs and 1337ors in the same server.
it also destroys the like ‘horizontal’ aspect of games socialisation. finding servers in your local area (lowest ping). becoming someone in your local or national scene because you frequent the most reputed servers, etc. even making new friendships and clans as a result. how the fuck do you meet other local people playing the same game as you in a matchmaking setup? again to borrow from MMOs, its like when raid finder replaced the need to actually join and maintain healthy guilds within your server community. why bother when you can just be automatically placed in a queue to instantly jump into a dungeon or raid? it’s streamlined but totally confounds all the woodworking ‘works building’.
but it seems to assume that every gamer wants to be on a permanent ELO treadmill, trying to grind out skill points and always become better. or that it’s necessarily a bad thing when a game - especially one with gigantic teams like BF - has a spread of very good players/squads and not so good ones. i can see why that might matter in a 5-person game like LoL where every game involves throwing away an hour of your life and a single player can throw the whole thing. but a 64v64 capture point FPS? it’s just more fun when you have n00bs and 1337ors in the same server.
it also destroys the like ‘horizontal’ aspect of games socialisation. finding servers in your local area (lowest ping). becoming someone in your local or national scene because you frequent the most reputed servers, etc. even making new friendships and clans as a result. how the fuck do you meet other local people playing the same game as you in a matchmaking setup? again to borrow from MMOs, its like when raid finder replaced the need to actually join and maintain healthy guilds within your server community. why bother when you can just be automatically placed in a queue to instantly jump into a dungeon or raid? it’s streamlined but totally confounds all the woodworking ‘works building’.
