A return to community-run servers, most likely, so the state of affairs before Halo 2. I remember encountering matchmaking systems on Xbox Live for the first time and being in awe of how modern and streamlined they felt. An anonymous, unseen algorithm just took you and a bunch of other randos and dumped you into a map to shoot at each other for 10 minutes, then it was over and you never had to see any of those people again.
As an anti-social person it was a vast improvement to me over trying to pick the least hostile-sounding server from a list. Then you log in and your ears are blasted with awful custom music and your eyes are assaulted by awful custom menus, or, in the case of some Day of Defeat: Source servers that I remember, lovingly hand-crafted SS skins for all the German soldiers. And then the game chat is filled with server regulars chatting with each other about their lives and it just felt really awkward
A return to community-run servers, most likely, so the state of affairs before Halo 2. I remember encountering matchmaking systems on Xbox Live for the first time and being in awe of how modern and streamlined they felt. An anonymous, unseen algorithm just took you and a bunch of other randos and dumped you into a map to shoot at each other for 10 minutes, then it was over and you never had to see any of those people again.
As an anti-social person it was a vast improvement to me over trying to pick the least hostile-sounding server from a list. Then you log in and your ears are blasted with awful custom music and your eyes are assaulted by awful custom menus, or, in the case of some Day of Defeat: Source servers that I remember, lovingly hand-crafted SS skins for all the German soldiers. And then the game chat is filled with server regulars chatting with each other about their lives and it just felt really awkward