Instead of "casual" or "ranked" they should just have "play to win" or "play for fun."
Because it doesn't seem to matter currently if you play ranked games or casual games, the general experience tends to be the same. But one has numbers and things to go with it. You still get people playing to win in casual games and you get people dicking around having fun in ranked games, and the ranks don't necessarily indicate how they play as a team and a whole bunch of other things that make it less than ideal.
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There was a brief time in the late 90s to early 2000s where you'd just hop into an open server. The lobby would keep the same players as it went round to round and people would just filter in and out as they felt like it. It didn't track scores or stats between games, and there wasn't a leveling or progression system that followed you. You just played through the round as it came. People seemed to care a whole lot less about their record or team--it just seemed like everyone was happy to be able to play online. Maybe it's just because I'm older now and I'm looking back at it with rose tinted glasses, but I wish we could go back to casual modes like that. I don't have the energy or will to deal with people the way it's set up now.
I was also there but it's not a really good system when scale up. If you are from the same era, and if you did not own a clan server, they can kick you out for whatever reason. (Like killing a mod one too many times.) And for competitive games that really doesn't work well, that's why old server has that after round auto balancing mod, it shuffles player around base on how they performed. A fake way to try balance the team. Ie. I was kinda decent capper for 3wave ctf, grenade rocket jump and all that. So if opponent doesn't have a good sniper or also decent enough capper, I can usually win the game even when our team is a bit short on players. Then when auto balancing come around to balance players, it actually make it less balance.(you also can't dial it too much that you got spawn camped and thus one side of player just quit to find another server.)
And it also not helping if you go to a clan server and the clan all want to stay on the same team. Which often leads to players go in/out frequently.(that's why later on GameSpy can even show match status so you can choose to join or not.)
A well managed server pool and MMR system helps resolve all those issues, and scale up really well.
I remember those times. They were awful. I had no fun if the people I started the match with weren't the same I ended it with. What was the point? It's not fun if I can't even tell if I'm getting better at the game. I didn't need to be the best Counter-Strike player, but I wanted to play actual Counter-Strike.
However, while this isn't necessarily mutually exclusive, those games that let you run your own servers will actually survive to be seen by future generations, unlike just about every game with matchmaking these days that won't let you run the game in LAN or on a private server. It's possible to have both, but devs don't want to.
There's a customs browser in Halo MCC that is essentially that. There are a lot of fun game modes to be found on there.
I was there. I would prefer to go back to that. At least you'd be able to find communities that have the same idea of what makes the game fun. Random matchmaking sucks donkey dick for making friends.
xonotic, sauerbraten, 0ad
The problem with non balanced lobbies is that they can be completely wrecked by someone who is more skilled.
This is especially true in games like Starcraft where even the tiniest different in skill results in a total face stomp.
This is still an issue with matchmaking systems intended to keep the game balanced in developer controlled servers though, so I don't know what the relevance is.
Its a lot less of an issue so it's obviously relevant.
If anything it happens more in the unmoderated matchmaking systems because there are no admins.
Admins do not kick people for being to good. I dont know where you get that idea.
Well I can tell you never actually played in that era, because it did happen. Just on the SLAUGHTERHOUSE TF2 servers, in which I myself was an admin, would kick players who completely dominated a game over to another server where they would fit in better. This was a pretty common practice. Not to mention the admins who power tripped and would kick anyone who killed them too often or claim everyone better than they were was cheating.
Black Ops II had this in 2012. There were still ranked modes in the game, but you could select an option in the multiplayer and it would just auto-sort you into a lobby with an open spot in it. Every time the round would end, it would reset you into a new map and there would be new people there. I always found it way more populated than the ranked modes. You could always get a full lobby at 3 am.