Many games didn't have a global list of servers, so you just connect to a server you know.

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.

> How did the older games actually accomplish this?

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.

With the consequence that games were suffering through a much harder sink or swim in terms of popularity: the matchmaking puts the threshold for "sufficiently popular" much lower. I'm not happy about the matchmaking, but there isn't really an alternative.

Yeah I had a whole slew of servers saved that I would regularly play on. If I was in a serious try hard mood I had a selection of servers I'd check. If I was in a half as I'm drunk and want to play I had a group of servers for that. If I wanted to play the warcraft 3 mod I had servers for that too. Even had servers for off the wall stuff talked about above.

Now I dunno...

You would generally choose a server based on ping and population (many of which had custom maps or rule sets - like no sniper rifles in CS 1.6) then choose a team, but only if they had equal players otherwise you had to go to the one with fewer. In the servers I played at least, the better players were generally expected to swap teams if it got too one-sided. Otherwise people just get annoyed and go to another server. Admins would enforce rules around server culture just as readily as anything else.

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.