Give them handicaps and they'll wear them like badges of honor. They kicked so much ass, their bullets do half as much damage... and they still have even odds to win. Or make their accuracy garbage. Or slow down their movement. Or make them visible from anywhere on the map. That last one even teaches newbies about prediction.

Team-based modes are simpler: pile on more newbs. Unbalance the shit out of those teams. Give the tryhards an opportunity to say a pair of them took on ten guys, and won. Even if they roll the other team, it's hard to say the loss feels cheap, if you outnumber them so drastically.

Engineer a response that goes 'fuck, that guy is good' instead of just 'fuck that guy.'

This, I already never play anything online because it’s not fun to suck, either constantly getting killed in competitive matches or being a drag on my team in coops. And I don’t have the time or energy at the end of the day to do that, but I do like playing games with others

I do feel for the folks that are very good and have to wait long times because that ruins the game for them but is it really an enjoyable competition if you’re just annihilating everyone every match, does that not get boring? Handicapping can keep it interesting for everyone it just needs to be scaled properly

Give an option in the menu to add levels of handicap to artificially drop your skill rating an appropriate amount. Then, during the match, display what handicap that player is using with a cool badge, or a flaming skull, or something.

They already play at least 2 tournaments a year, now they want more?!

Community Dedicated Servers are always the answer. Every game I enjoyed growing up had amazing servers that were ran by fans. I was a mod on some of my favorite TFC ones. It's a great way to keep cheaters out and build a sense of comraderie amongst the regulars.

But...but...think of the profit margins when they release a ~~reskin~~ version 2 and everyone stays playing V1 on community servers.

Didn’t the Master Chief Collection add a server browser for finding wacky forge games?

That's still best achieved with SBMM (just a less strict version). With random matchmaking, you are only equally likely to see better/worse players if you are in the 50th percentile.

Also, each player is independently selected (when random). This means there will probably be a mix of high skilled and noob players in every game. You would not see a team of mostly noobs or mostly pros. For a player in the 50th percentile, with a team of 6, the chance of being better than every player on the other team team is only 1.5%. For the 25th percentile, it is 0.02%. So a very significant number of players would (almost) never experience an "insane spee on noobs". However, the chance of having at least one player in the 75th percentile on the opposing team is 82%. So they would frequently encounter situations in which they feel hopelessly outmatched.

The only way to solve this is to use matchmaking that attempts to take skill into account.

This is bever gonna work. People who hate sbmm hate it because they have to play with player of their skill level, instead of just stomping bad players

That still doesn't solve the problem of playing cannon fodder for low skill players.

Turns out only the top players get long queues with this system, so they're the only ones going into the not-skill-based queue and the wait times are still long; anyone not at the top then gets matched exclusively against top players and that's no fun for them so they keep to the skill-based queue.

I haven't been following the current state of the art in competitive multiplayer FPS land. While waiting for a match to be made, are you just staring at a progress bar, or do they let players do stuff like play warm-up play on the map?