Burktross, on 27 November 2020 - 06:14 PM, said:
Private lobbies of 5 get old extremely quickly compared to quick match both within and out of groups for one simple reason: 9/10 people play this game for quickmatch and the game is designed around it. If you rob people of the most basic tenants of online play-- the ability to play with friends-- you would achieve playerbase suicide on scale far greater than how OP suggests doing the reverse would. I have plenty of friends that play this game only because they are able to play with friends. Unless you implement co-op with progression, then those circumstances are non-negotiable.
Or do you mean to tell me that removing 8-man group queues did wonders for the game population?
And plenty of us quit playing because of the queue merge. In fact, after the initial spikes of people trying out merge queue, and again trying out the new PSR system, player numbers dropped substantially. They've only picked back up again since PGI announced they wanted to work to improve the game, which, of course, was a ploy to boost themselves while negotiating to sell the company.
Stomps are up since the merge as well (per PGI). And we've all seen the various screen shots and videos showing horribly mismatched teams from a mech/tonnage perspective. Skill > tonnage, but since we don't have a skill based matchmaker, that really doesn't mean much.
Mixing groups in with solo has made the game _objectively_ worse. You may subjectively like it more, but we know that the community is very split on the subjective side of it.
Guys like you refused to play the modes available to groups so much that those modes died. Yet you think it's a good thing you get to drop groups with solos now. Think about that. I mean, after all, we couldn't do solo opt ins for group queue because, in the words of PGI, "Solo players won't choose to opt-in so it would be pointless". So they had to force it on them. When is that ever good for the population? All those solo players don't want to play with groups, and you group people apparently didn't want to play with groups enough either to suffer getting stomped by 12-mans. So let's force the larger part of the population to do exactly the opposite of what they want. Totally makes sense.