I’ll be honest: I think matchmaking is just a better experience for how I like to play FPS games. I never got a sense of “community” from sticking with a given server; I would come to find something like it via Discord years later but not just from frequenting a given game server. My server browser experience was mostly that I’d join a game in a progress, as other people come and go from a game in progress, and I wondered what the point of the match was if the teams weren’t even the same at the end of the match as when they began. Most people’s default when running a server was to turn player numbers to max and, in Battlefield’s case, “tickets” needed to win as well, but just because the numbers are bigger doesn’t mean that it’s better pacing for a match, for instance. Matchmaking sets the defaults and ensures a pretty consistent experience from start to finish of each match.
This comment from the developer is true, too.
“Matchmaking servers spin up in seconds (get filled with players), and spin down after the game is over,” Sirland wrote in a thread on X last week. "That couple of seconds when servers lose a lot of players mid-game is the only time you can join, which makes it a tricky combination (and full of queuing to join issues).
My preference for the matchmaking experience is reflected across the audience they cater to, and it contributed to an industry focus on matchmaking and the end of server browsers.
But we still need real server browsers.
If we bought a game, we should be able to do what we want with it, including running those max player/max ticket servers that run 24/7 on one map. We should be able to do it without DICE/EA’s permission, on our own if we so choose, without salaried staff running master server operations, because one day the revenue this game brings in will not justify the costs to keep it going. We should be able to deal with cheaters by vote kicking them from the server rather than installing increasingly invasive mandatory anti cheat solutions that don’t even fully solve the problem anyway, because it’s unsolvable.
The amount of time I’ve spent playing online games has fallen off a cliff after forced matchmaking, particularly SBMM. They’ve legitimately ruined my enjoyment of games.
I got into Overwatch for a bit, but the SBMM meant that at lower levels it was basically a coin flip if I would get a team that wanted to play as a team, or a bunch of kill whores who only cared about their K/D ratio. I don’t want to have to drop hundreds of hours int mastering the game just to have actual teamwork.
Oh, I love skill-based matchmaking. Without it, if you’re having a good time, it means your opponent is almost surely having a bad time, rather than keeping the matches close. At low ranks, often times a single piece of knowledge can escalate your play to a higher level, which can make those low ranks feel kind of swing-y, but I don’t know that that’s a problem that can really be solved unless you remove the asymmetry. That said, I no longer wish to substitute matchmaking for the likes of a server browser.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
Arguing against servers because you want match making is like arguing that you hate McDonalds serving Cheeseburgers because you want Chicken nuggets.
They shouldn’t be mutually exclusive, but the companies who want to monetize people perpetually see them as such.