The problem is that every modern online game does not allow custom hosted servers. In the good old days of online multiplayer, I would load into a Halo 1 map wi

The problem is that every modern online game does not allow custom hosted servers. In the good old days of online multiplayer, I would load into a Halo 1 map with 30 other people set to capture the flag (a multiplayer mode that seems to almost not exist anymore!) where the server runs 24/7, and if either side wins, the same players get mixed into two new teams in a "balancing" way, and the game just starts back up. Most people were playing because "I just want to shoot someone" was fun on it's own. This made online games essentially a public place, where people might even get to know each other and "hang out", and you could join the same people day after day, get to know habits, make friends and rivals, etc. It was extremely low competitiveness, and nothing that happened really mattered. It didn't matter if you sucked or were amazing, because you would likely end up on the team with everyone in the server at some point, so people got wildly different gameplay experiences. This even meant that different servers could target different styles of play. You could go to the really tryhard team deathmatch servers with carefully balanced maps and active admin management for cheaters and balance purposes, or you could join the match on cramped Beaver Creek with zero shields and infinite shotguns and rockets, where average lifespan was measured in tenths of seconds, but that chaos was a great breather if you didn't feel competitive that day. No matter how shitty you were, you could find a community that felt right to you, and you were likely to even dominate occasionally when you had good days and got lucky, so that even people who suck at the game felt the high of victory. Nowadays, game devs insist not being utterly steamrolled by minute thirty is "not fun", and enforce near perfect a perfect 1:1 win/loss ratio through matchmaking systems, where you never see the same player twice, so they don't exist as fellow humans in your mind but as hostile "agents" that you must struggle against, and everyone feels average because your instantaneous success is basically driven by who got the advantage in the random matchmaking process. Everyone is forced to feel average about their performance, because everyone is forcibly given an average experience. A lot of that existed long before now, but it was always opt-in. If you wanted custom servers, you could go have that fun and chaos, but if you were feeling competitive, you could jump into matchmaking and have the enforced global balance of that system give you specific matches you were emotionally prepared for and explicitly seeking out. BUT..... companies had to get rid of custom servers, because it's way harder to sell digital items for a game if players can just go on private and custom servers that turn off or disable the checks for if you have "purchased" whatever skin you want to wear. All the bullshit A/B testing and metrics companies have made up to assure us that "people like this better" is just to defend their business strategy.