> the matchmaker shuffles the queue to avoid the same players being matched together repeatedly
This is actually something I hate about multiplayer games with matchmaking nowadays. I made the majority of my childhood friends only because we stayed on the same server and played together for hours on end. I don't think it's a stretch to say that a key reason for why we play multiplayer rather than single player games is to socialize. This has become increasingly more difficult when you just get a new set of people every 10-30 minutes.
This is why smaller AA games still keep this alive - to build community. For instance: Squad, a 80-100 player multiplayer game which primarily depends upon privately hosted servers ran by communities that actually care about the community and game. You'll still run into jerks like any online game, but it's a world of difference to the one-match/single-serving strangers you usually play with in other games.
This is something I really like about Rocket League’s matchmaking. Competitive is random, but Casual play allows you to keep the same lobby. You can even vote to rematch to keep the same teams. I’ve had numerous runs of 3-4 or more matches with the same people. It’s fun to get into a back and forth, especially if you rematch and the other team wins one - then you’ve _gotta_ have a tie breaker!
Yeah, way back when I used to play Counter-Strike, I eventually landed on one server I really liked and kept going to. It would be interesting to see who was on it at different times of the day, and eventually I got to be friendly with most of the regulars that showed up, and they knew me.
Turns out several lived near the server's location, in Texas, and at one point my friends and I just happened to be going there to visit a friend who was stationed at the nearby military base, and so I ended up meeting up with them for lunch. Nice guys.
> Turns out several lived near the server's location, in Texas, and at one point my friends
Also ended up in a similar situation multiple times (bunch of randoms found some server we liked, sticked around for matches across weeks, eventually became regulars and eventually figured out we lived nearby). Sometimes we'd bump into each other on other servers too.
After a couple of times of hanging out we've found out why (probably at least) we came across each other, we all default to sorting the server list based on ping (latency), and since we were all geographically close, we tended to end up on the same servers.
Texas wasn't that close to me (I was in Illinois), but the server was hosted within a data center, and had pretty low latency for me anyway.
Also it was very consistently up and low latency compared to other servers, so that's why I kept going there at first. Later on I kept showing up because I got to know people on the server.
You can queue with people you already know, and some games do have a 'stay as a team in the next queue' option, but there's no real opportunity to actually get familiar with anyone, let alone a community, and play with them more in the same way that you get with community servers
This is actually something I hate about multiplayer games with matchmaking nowadays. I made the majority of my childhood friends only because we stayed on the same server and played together for hours on end. I don't think it's a stretch to say that a key reason for why we play multiplayer rather than single player games is to socialize. This has become increasingly more difficult when you just get a new set of people every 10-30 minutes.