Well, yes. If you spend hours and hours playing the game, I can imagine that at some point you feel like you should be getting better than most people.

This was definitely true for dedicated servers anyway.

From my experience in overwatch, the system tends to favor win and loss streaks instead. You'll get 4-5 wins in a row, where the enemy team had no chance. Then 4-5 losses where your team was hopelessly outclassed. Maybe you'll get a couple of games that are close and feel fair. But not many.

The way my friend plays Rainbow Six Siege gets him killed every single time without fail. But following "the meta" is really not fun for him. Instead of being able to find a community where we can play with people who might not be as bad at the game as us but are interested in everyone having fun, he gets thrown into the same generic "Casual" pool as everyone else, including kids who play 24/7 and streamers on smurf accounts building a highlight reel. There's no room for playing around, for trying different things, for just playing unoptimally. If you do anything not in "The meta", then you lose, repeatedly, and then the system forces you against literal children to ensure you win often enough to keep that 50% winrate.

Like I said: In the past I could choose when I wanted to have fun, be lighthearted, and screw around by joining more casual servers. Then if I wanted to be competitive, I could join a more serious server, with more strict rules and systems, and play against both people much better than me, and much worse than me at the same time.

Now you have no choice, because everyone is in the same pool, so if you don't play "the meta" or do something nonstandard to have fun, you will be crushed, and then placed against terrible kids, and then placed against really good kids, over and over again. There's no room for casual gameplay because the "casual" section of matchmaking isn't casual.

The most fun we ever had playing Siege was getting a group of 8 people together to play "custom" games. The variability of skill was a huge and important part of the experience. We knew we had to carefully balance the teams for things to not be absurd, and we knew that playing "the meta" wasn't the best strategy in this case because you couldn't assume your teammates to play like perfect robots, giving you the freedom to try different strategies. This is also why people get so damn angry when you don't follow the meta and play like a perfect robot who has memorized all the strats, because if you don't, your team will most certainly lose. You could enjoy games you were bad at in 2001, because game design wasn't so aggressive about "perfect matchmaking" and "perfect competitiveness". I don't want my fun afternoon game to be a damn esport.

Winning is generally fun, but the interesting bit about using Fun as a guiding light in matchmaking design is that its a non-zero-sum game. Losing teams can also have fun. Maybe not as often, depending on the game and such, but its definitely a number larger than 50%.

I know this seems reductive and whatever, but I think its a really critical discussion that the gaming industry isn't having. Skill-based matchmaking and ELO are pretty tuned-in to, well, "skill" (whatever that means in modern gaming), such that you're pinned at that 50% rate to the best of the system's ability. Some would argue that this pinning actually results in less fun games, for two extremely valid reasons:

1) If the system is constantly adjusting to keep your win rate at 50%, you never have the opportunity to see yourself improve through the metric of your win rate. This effect is especially pronounced in games like Call of Duty, where the metric we're talking about is really something more like your KDR; if the system is engineered to constantly keep your KDR at 1.0, there's startlingly few metrics to judge your own performance by. Many games have tried to address this through the award of opaque ranks and badges; weirdly, Call of Duty doesn't, but some games do. In other words, your ability to feel like you're getting better is replaced by being told that you're getting better; many would agree that while it can feel good in the moment to get that badge, its less satisfying in the long-run.

2) A perfectly balanced skill-based match making system would reasonably want to keep every player's win-rate at 50%, over a long period of time (or, KDR at 1.0, or in Apex a win rate of 5%, or whatever is balanced for that game). But that isn't necessarily what happens over short periods of time; and players experience games in the moment, players aren't statistical databases of their entire gaming history with some title. Thus its normal to ask not just the win rate, but the standard deviation of that win rate. People play the lottery, and find it fun, for a very real psychological reason: fun can have an outsized impact relative to the odds of some game if the game has an abnormally high/unfair standard deviation of expected success. If you paid $1 for a lottery ticket, and you were guaranteed to the best of the system's ability to win $2 every 2 lottery tickets, no one would have fun playing the lottery (and the system wouldn't make any money, but that's beside the point). Yet; this is how SBMM is quite literally designed; to reduce the standard deviation of your performance as much as possible. Variety is the spice of life, as they say; but the better and more consistent SBMM systems get, the less spice the matches you play tend to have. Put another way; "popping off" for a game is supposed to be a fun, rewarding experience; but players are now universally trained to know that the system will actually punish you for being abnormally good in a match, by placing you against better players next game.

My overall point being: there's a gulf of difference between "players have to have an average aggregate win rate of 50%" and "all players should have an individual win rate of 50%", and systems which try to guarantee the latter can actually be less fun.

I also find it interesting to think about an ELO system which tries to operationalize the concept of Fun, to try and guarantee a Fun game for as many players as possible. What would that look like? Most simplistically, and probably ineffectually: ask players after the match "did you have fun?" A player's performance in the game influences their own skill rating; but a player's response to this question would instead influence every other player's "fun rating"; asserting whether or not the competitors (and teammates) were fun to play with; as well as signaling internal metrics to the development team for tuning of things like map, weapon, and game design.

Using Counter-Strike as an example: no matchmaking system - relied upon community hosted servers offering a wide range of game modes (official and community created). More competitive matches (pick-up games) were often found via IRC.

Persistent servers mean they can have distinct cultures and you get your favourite servers and start to notice the regular players. This doesn't happen with matchmaking so much.

And I think the point about the 50% win rate is important - I am a person and my mood and skill varies day by day, but ranking stats are measuring the account not the player. Some days I wanted to stomp noobs, some days I wanted a challenge, and some days I wanted to turn my brain off and run fy_iceworld. You could also change your name at will if you were worried about your reputation due to any of the above.

Even games that did have a global list of servers, one wouldn't necessarily always play on random servers, but have some favorite servers (often ping-based, which means geographically local, to some degree) and play on those.

Then game companies took total control, made you play on their servers and introduced all these problems.

Well, when you're on a 5-person team on Counterstrike and your fifth player doesn't want to buy guns and even try to complete the objective, they just want to run around and knife chickens and hide in corners the whole game, it can be a little frustrating to the other 4 players.

Like, I get its casual, and you shouldn't necessarily expect everyone to always try as hard as they possibly can to win, but when one person not even trying to do the objective of the game it sours the experience for the other four.

But this is kind of true of any team-based game. Imagine playing Spades or Rummy where your teammate is just always purposefully playing junk and never even trying to play their hand properly. Or a baseball game where whenever the second baseman gets the ball he just throws it up in the air to himself and never bothers to get the runner out. Or baseketball where one person on the team just wants to try and spin the ball on their finger instead of playing the game. If you're trying to actually play the game, its going to be frustrating having a player like that on your team.

In causal its definitely forgivable to make mistakes and try something different, but if you're just in a casual match to sniff the proverbial flowers in the game you end up ruining the experience for your teammates. Ultimately in a team based match-made game all players really should at least try and observe the objectives of the match to some level, at least in my opinion.