Ever since matchmaking hit the scene it has been nigh-impossible tryng to find an actual decent game, but any actual complaint about the sever lack of quality on matchmaking is met with the same responses.

'It's casual, what do you expect?'

'Stop tryharding.'

'Go play competitive then'.*

I feel like these are fundamentally cowardly responses.

Yes casual matchmaking shouldn't be as strict as competitive. That's a given. But i do feel like at the very least it should have a consistent quality

People responding by saying 'it's casual' are missing the point. It's actually really hard to have a casual match when your team is losing faster than they can respawn. Getting curbstomped because your team is full of new players and half the team are Spy and Sniper does not but more importantly, should not mean 'casual gameplay'.

There's no fun in it, even for the people who ostensibly simply enjoying goofing around. The only ones who are capable of this are very good players who know they can survive the worst of it until the match eventually ends.

The most 'casual' matches i've had was when i knew that i could rely on my team to know the in's and out's of the game, and that the enemy would put up and organised and fair fight. I am not interested in winning (though that is undoubtedly a plus),i'm interested in having a satisfying game experience.

If i manage to play a long and decent game and end up losing, it doesn't really matter because i know me and my team gave it our all, but the enemy gave even more. That is still casual, but not nearly as incompetent.

A consistent quality in casual matchmaking could ensure a more even playing field, more equally skilled matches and not be nearly as frustrating.

Someone elses 'casual match' is someone elses Hell, and the way Matchmaking is structured doesn't give people an out.

Community servers are hit-and-miss, many have been gutted and even more are shady and rife with mod abuse, 36 player servers that are prone to spawncamping and many are modded and a really niche experience (all of the community servers i sued to frequent are dead and it's a damn shame).

I don't find it fun to not be able to get out of spawn because we have four Spies, three Snipers and the rest are Pyros and the enemy team has slightly more game sene, just enough to completely deny us any ground.

I know it's not so easy to fix any of this, the main problem being the fact that TF2 has a high skill ceiling and new players have 0 training before entering matchmaking.

More urgently the issue is that there doesn't seem to be a way to actually accomplish this.

TF2 is ten years old. Ten years of updates and ten years of weapons, all with varrying abilities, quirks and effects. Trying to hammer in this into the heads of new players before they actually start playing is daunting and probably very frustrating on a noobie who simply wants to go play Sniper for hours on end.

It's simply impossible. So the next best thing that i can think of personally, is to institute ranked matchmaking.

How does it make any sense to put new players into servers with people who are level 50, level 100, or level 130 ? What sense does it make putting players who have comp experience onto a server where half of any enemy team is made up of players who are just starting to grasp the concept?

It's not fun for the noobies who keep getting killed and as such can't really actually get better, it's not fun for the experienced players stuck carrying underpowered and inexperienced teams for no reward because they end up losing anyway and it's not even fun for veterans on the winning team, because i don't find five minute matches were we steamroll over an enemy that doesn't even know what's going on, fun.

The level up system is useles right now, it's for show. But what if it were to be useful for more than just that?

Of course the problem is that the level alone doesn't mean anything. You can be level 130 and be an absolute idiot at the game. Hackers can easily abuse this system as well, so maybe a system based on how many hours have been played?

I'm not sure, but it's the best i've got as an idea for how to make matchmaking more even and the quality of gameplay more consistent. Public matches deserve care as well, don't leave them to rot.