Recently for my mental health I decided to stop playing competitive games. You know, your Battlefields, your Call of Duty's, your War Thunders, etc. I found myself angry more than I was having fun. For the past ten years... I don't think I ever ended a session of a player vs player match - "happy." Now I'm playing mostly singleplayer games with some MMORPGs. I am much happier. I actually look forward to gaming when I can. There is enough to get mad at in the world, I don't want my entertainment medium of choice to be anger inducing as well. I feel like the worst part about the vast majority of player vs player games is that someone basically has to not be having fun for the other person to have fun. Not universal, and probably more a matter of personal mindset but it's how I feel. I was just wondering how many if any comrades here have done the same and how it has effected you? I can confidentally say my life is better for it.
I've been playing House Flipper 2 a lot, which is a good detox from high stress games. Getting back into EU4 as well, beating up Europe at every chance I can get. Trying to learn Kremlingames games, mostly China: Mao's Legacy. Flying the MiG-19 in DCS, my favorite plane. It's been fun, and better. I do not miss War Thunder too much.
I'm not knocking people who like high action player vs player enviroments, it's just something I have grown to not enjoy anymore personally.
Not the downvoter but SBMM is a necessary evil if you have a matchmaking system instead of purely community servers.
In community servers, there's an equal emphasis in the community as well as the gameplay, so you don't mind getting dunked on as long as you have some fun with your teammates and dick around in chat.
When there's matchmaking, however, everyone aims to win the match and move on. If you don't have some type of SBMM, the new guys just get dunked on over and over with little chance to learn.
The example I have for this is TF2. In Valve servers the players with thousands of hours completely dominate everyone else, and without a sense of community this got tiring for me pretty fast, even on TF2 where there are some impromptu fun moments (conga chains etc). I tried to play circa 2015, I think they added some sort of sbmm afterwards with the competitive updtae.
Note that I say this as an argument in favor of community servers, not in favor of SBMMs, but as long as corpos make the games that's not gonna happen sadly.