Not just that. People wonder why online games are so toxic, overly competitive and filled with cheaters. Matchmaking is the reason.

You don’t have to be nice because chances are you’re never going to play with those people again. All other matchmade players are just glorified bots, they’re completely dehumanized. That means shitheads can act like shitheads without any repercussions. Compare that to community servers where the admin will ban you if you’re an asshole. You even end up making friends because the same people will visit the same server.

And what’s your purpose for playing when everyone you’re playing with are glorified bots? Well your focus turns on you which in turn means your main metric of fun becomes your own skill. Since you can directly measure your own skill you look a things like wins/losses and kdr. You start to focus on things that correlate to competitive play and if the matchmaking is skill-based the game actually pushes you into sweats as the goal is to get you to a statistical 50% winrate. Now compare that to community servers where you’re not pushed into sweats, the overall skill of players stays largely the same and because you’ll be playing with people you know there no need to focus on being the best you can be, you can just mess around with others.

And of course cheating is a huge issue, but again it’s one of those things where having an admin to vet sus players make a huge difference. The admin isn’t infallible but cheating is less of an issue if you’re playing with people you know.

But people would much rather give it all up and deal with toxicity, sweats and cheating because the server admin could be a badmin. But maybe I’m just old and am remembering the good old days when you could make friends playing on the same server.

AKA dedicated servers. They exist now for games now, but are… well not rare, but very specific. Factorio has a dedicated server. Ark has a dedicated server. Valheim, Space Engineers (windows only), Satisfactory, to name a few that I’ve dealt with myself. Demand them. Punish devs who don’t accommodate them with your wallets. No user dedicated servers, no purchase. Fuck you and the distributed info-scraping service you rode in on.

I have a list of games I will never buy because they have succumbed to the lure of hosted services with no user control, no dedicated server support. Those devs want control; they want to control you, how you play and how you interact with those you play with.

Ultima Online predates those too.