I’d argue Xbox Live was better than PC online from the time it rolled out in ~2003 until PC online got better in the early 2010s. I remember StarCraft II feeling like the first time a PC game actually just had matchmaking where I could hit a button and get a match.
Xbox Live matchmaking was easy, sure, but before it became the norm on PC self-hosting servers was far more common, and there was something about the culture of a well-admined server that automatic matchmaking could never replicate – and in my opinion gaming as a whole is worse for losing that. Anonymous and unaccountable public lobbies give so much more leeway to assholes than you could get away with on a clan-hosted server.
Matchmaking was a required feature because joining a match in progress that lasted for 4 hours and had different teams at the end than it did at the start was awful.
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I’d argue Xbox Live was better than PC online from the time it rolled out in ~2003 until PC online got better in the early 2010s. I remember StarCraft II feeling like the first time a PC game actually just had matchmaking where I could hit a button and get a match.
Xbox Live matchmaking was easy, sure, but before it became the norm on PC self-hosting servers was far more common, and there was something about the culture of a well-admined server that automatic matchmaking could never replicate – and in my opinion gaming as a whole is worse for losing that. Anonymous and unaccountable public lobbies give so much more leeway to assholes than you could get away with on a clan-hosted server.
I remember good matchmaking in Warcraft 3 for srandard matches.
And I also remember having lots of fun on custom servers for CS, Half-Life, D2 etc. and not at all feeling like matchmaking was a required feature.
Matchmaking was a required feature because joining a match in progress that lasted for 4 hours and had different teams at the end than it did at the start was awful.
Yes I agree, I just wanted to point out that IMO Starcraft 2 was not the first pc game with a good matchmaking system.