[shadowmore]

Meanwhile, many multiplayer games have neither skill-based matchmaking, nor a ban on premade groups playing against solo queue players.

I just can't grasp how any developer can seriously think a game can be enjoyable when you're on a team of arbitrary players but being matched against a premade team of players all of whom have 2,000+ hours logged in that game and are coordinating flawlessly.

[magicalhippo]

In COD4, some servers ran tools which would autobalance the teams. So if you had a group of 3-5 which played together and the rest were randoms, the the other team could end up with a lot more players to compensate.

Was generally quite nice, except when you really wanted to play with your mate and the tool kept swapping you over because it didn't find any other way to balance the teams.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

Not very many, these days. There are a handful, like Escape from Tarkov, that are super hardcore and have no matchmaking. It will probably never be more than a small niche game as a result, since any new player has to contend with an extremely rigorous onboarding process in which you are unlikely to have much success for dozens of hours until you get the hang of things.

[lozaning]

I used to play Battlefield 2 competitively. After our official clan practises we'd roll into random pub servers to mess around. It usually only took ~6 of us to just dominate the server, and this is a game with (2) 64 players teams.

Rarely did we ever win though, usually we'd end up getting admin kicked for 'cheating'.