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Anyone that has been playing multiplayer games for a while must have noticed the recent shift when it comes to multiplayer games matchmaking trends.
Multiplayer games were no joke, they were hardcore, with high entry barriers where the more experienced players would dominate the field, and newer players were nothing but fodder for them. If you were new to a game you could expect to lose most of your matches for a while, but if you were to put in the effort, improved, learned the game and persevered trough, then you'd be rewarded by becoming the one to dominate the field instead.
Nowadays it's different, anyone can pick up a game, no matter how experienced they are, and expect to win roughly half the games they play. From newcomers to pro players, everyone seems to be relegated to a strictly forced 50% winrate policy. But how is that possible?

The focus in game design seems to have shifted from rewarding individual oriented play, to rewarding more teamwork oriented skills instead. The focus on teamwork has been pushed so far to the point where, if your team isn't putting in the effort, no matter how good of a player you are, you won't be able to compensate for your team lack of skills and they'll be the reason why you lose the match. There wouldn't be anything inherently wrong with this, especially in a team game, if it weren't for the fact that it really feels as if the better you get at the game, the worse your teammates get.
This is how they're able to make everyone's winrates hover around 50%. Sure if you lose too much the algorithm will start giving you better teammates, but if you win too much then the quality of your matches will be abysmal, leading to a point where all the good players get effectively punished and can never fully see the fruits of the effort they put for actually learning the game.
Players have expressed for years their frustrations against this balancing method, as many felt cheated due to losing too many matches due to factors completely out of their control, but so far nothing has changed.

This sort of matchmaking algorithm can also be used to impose certain "patterns" in the wins and losses that a player experiences while playing, in order to increase their engagement. A study from 2017 published for EA , goes to show how players are more likely to quit a game if they incur in specific win/loss patterns. For example, of the entire playerbase, 5% of them will quit the game if they were to incur in three losses in a row.
Here's an excerpt from the paper's abstract
"Current matchmaking systems depend on a single core strategy: create fair games at all times. These systems pair similarly skilled players on the assumption that a fair game is best player experience. We will demonstrate, however, that this intuitive assumption sometimes fails and that matchmaking based on fairness is not optimal for engagement"

This is just a window into what goes trough the developing process of a multiplayer videogame these days. The paper is from 2017 but troughout these years this approach to multiplayer games has been adopted and developed to the point where every single multiplayer experience, from PC to mobile to consoles, feels artificially crafted and finely tuned to keep you as hooked for as much time as possible to the screen.
This doesn't stop to win/loss patterns, another example would be gears of war, where the devs have admitted to make your bullets do more damage on your first match of the day, because their studies showed that people were more likely to play troughout the day if they were to win the first match they played. These same devs would later go to make Fortnite, which would go on to generate billions in revenue for years.

What are your thoughts? Do you prefer the modern take to make multiplayer games more accessible to everyone, or would you rather go back to the days where communities would develope more organically?

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Hey all, I recently got back into gaming. Loving it so far but none of my friends play these days. I figured since Tildes has a great community it could be fun gaming with others here!

I'm thinking we could have a game as a top level comment and then sub-comments could be game IDs or people interested in connecting? I'll start off with this format but I'm open to suggestions.

(Also, this is my first post on Tildes. Hopefully it aligns with the rules/community.)

I had a vasectomy this week and needed something to do for a few days while I was down. A co-worker recommended star citizen (explaining the caveats). I love it so far, and if anyone here plays I'd love to add you to my friends list.

My username is Grendel_84

Folks, I´m going crazy over here. My social interactions are extremely limited. Online gaming has been a timesaver, but my friends are not always available (I can´t even really work because both my computers broke down).

I play on the PS4 nights and daw, on the GMT-3 time zone, but that´s flexible. Some of the online games I have / can play:

• Path of Exile
• Rocket League
• Destiny 2
• Torchlight 2
• A Way Out
• Fifa 19
• GTA V
• Overcooked
• Doom
• Borderlands 2
• Titanfall 2
• Brawlhalla

My username on PSN is goombatrooper22.

Post your platforms and available games!

As an outsider some gaming communities can appear incredibly toxic. I'm sure some of that is a deserved reputation, but I'm also aware that maybe there's a bit of generalisation going on, and that some communities are lovely but unrecognised.

So I thought I'd ask Tildes: which gaming communities do you like? And why?

(As always, feel free to interpret this question how you like. And, again, I suck at tagging so I'm grateful for any tagging edits. I do read those to try to learn.)

Since RuneScape (both RS3 and Old School) currently has a free month for those of us using Twitch Prime, is anyone here playing? I find that despite it being one of the best games I've ever played, I tend to drift away from OSRS after some time because it's so enveloped in that YouTuber meme culture that gives me a headache. So, to any players here, are you hanging out in a friendly clan chat or Discord server to escape that? Would we want to start our own?

Or, more generally, how do you deal with the toxic nature of the game's community?

Just wondering...