And leads to "toxic" behavior. If you behaved poorly in a dedicated server environment you could be banned from multiple servers in one go as each clan might host multiple servers. Eventually all that would be left for those people would be a handful of lawless servers, enough threat of punishment to deter shitty behavior, not enough of an impetus to buy a new cd key and reimpose yourself on others. In practice, most people just behaved better.

It is bizarre to see riot and blizzard run around in circles trying to combat their toxicity problem... its your meat grinder matchmaking system.

As it turns out, matching people against those who are exactly their skill level isn't what you want to do.

Going down the rabbit hole a bit further, I was always a bit pissed off with the 'match at exact skill level' method.

The best thing I ever did to progress in skill in a game was to play with/against people far better than me. I don't want to learn how to beat people who are only as good as I am; I want to learn the techniques and skills to beat the people who are at the top of the game.

And lets be honest — thinking back to how a typical game in Team Fortress 2 went — sometimes just the complete and utter satisfaction of having an awesome killing streak at the expense of a bunch of n00bs (and after such a round the server would automatically rebalance the teams, so everyone gets a chance to meet their match).

I agree with this idea. The problem, I think, is that you can't choose what kind of game you get. Lots of times I want to have a reasonable chance at winning, but now and then I want to play really good people and see how they play. You can't ever choose to do this in current matchmaking schemes, and there should be a way to do that.

I agree with you for the most part about the matchmaking stuff, but one lucky thing I've found while playing Heroes of the Storm is that if you play consistently at a certain time of day that isn't common like 7am-noon EST you can start to see a number of names over and over more frequently both on your team and opposing team. Eventually you start adding people as friends who did awesome and then they invite their friends and you add them if they were good and now I've got a slew of people who are as serious and/or as skilled about the game as I am, whereas for the longest time I played solo.

It's still not the same, but it's cool when you start to see the same names over and over, it makes you feel like the world went from an endless mass to something with size boundaries and you can tell who some of the other hardcore players are. You can hate them for always being too good or playing the same character and know what to expect, and then eventually they are a friend of a friend and then a friend.

In a similar vein, now that voice chat is there by default it can be easier to get to know people and connect or be repelled. People you respected as good players turned out to be super annoying weiners on mic, while others just regular dudes or gals talking about their life. It definitely feels like it brought a new angle to things.