[QUOTE="lowe0"]
You're missing an important distinction... even assuming that the "join game" button is able to find me a server populated with a full game of players at exactly my skill level, what keeps it that way? When someone quits the game, what stops a player with many hours under their belt and all of the unlocks from replacing them and unbalancing the game? Without the ability to ensure a relatively even match, no, it's nowhere near the same functionality as true skill-based matchmaking.
Being able to get a good match is worth the extra wait as the server does its work. Not everyone will agree with me on that tradeoff, but not everyone has to. There are plenty of developers doing it your way as well; feel free to purchase games from them.
Ginosaji
Even the most successful matchmaking systems have decidedly failed in this endeavour. Things such as new accounts, trial accounts, shared accounts, or even a group with a wide skill gap eliminate the systems ability to find a "good" match. Even under "optimal" conditions, the competition on Halo: Reach, for example, is all over the board -- I can end any given Team SWAT match with +20 or -10. There's simply no way for a computer to reliably calculate a player's skill and dictate who s/he should be playing with based on any arbitrarily assigned value.
I'll never understand trading virtually all user freedom for an inherently flawed system like that, even in the off chance that it does what it's advertised to do. Your "good matches" always fall victim to inferior network performance and/or a complete lack of custom content/settings.
I don't remember having that problem at all back in Halo 3, nor in Bad Company 2. Yes, there are ways to game the system, but games with good matchmaking (that is, not CoD, which uses the advanced "first 17 people it can find" algorithm) have consistently given me enjoyable matches. In contrast, I usually can't find an enjoyable game on PC - I filter out all of the full, empty, unranked and hardcore servers, scroll through a few games, don't see anything that looks good, and toss the whole idea and play something single-player instead. It's just not worth it.And it's okay that you don't understand my preference. You don't have to.
At the very least: outliers in my games (players who are considerably more/less skilled than the other players) are always subject to removal at the discretion of the server's moderators, whereas in your games that problem is beyond any player's control.
Ginosaji
Except that, as a result of the above, I don't end up playing multiplayer on the PC very much, so if anyone ends up getting booted, it'll be me. Why bother?
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