True, tho desync is mostly caused by the mentioned things.
I saw people defending global matchmaking, with delusional claims that changing it will kill the game, as it’ll supposedly take too long to find games, while in reality that’s PRECISELY what killed the game in the very first place, people having awful experience with the game while noticing they’re being constantly thrown into 120-280ms games.
SBMM, same deal, same delusional people defending it, claiming it’ll create unbalanced teams, but that’s EXACTLY what’s going on now, just yesterday I had a game vs an Onyx player, both me and him ended the hame with 30+ kills and less than 10 deaths, the 2nd guy in my and his team were just decent, with a positive K/D, and the two bottom guys in both teams had 1, maybe two kills, and 15-18 deaths… But yeah, the match as a whole was close when you look at the end score, but in practice it was a 1vs1 game, with 4 people serving as a punching bags, how many of those kind of hames people can stand before going “you know, I think this game is nor for me”, politely speaking.
The difference between such aggressive SBMM vs ping-based matchmaking is that with SBMM there’s a CHANCE of having a balanced teams (once every 100 games or so it seems), but it’s GUARANTEED the connection is gonna suffer, because the system opts out all the people near my area with similar ping in favor of some dumb, fake, artificial, set-up match, versus, having a CHANCE of the team being unbalanced (which as mentioned already happens, purposely), but GUARANTEED great network connection between the players. Thos is also partially where desync comes from putting together players with dozens/tens ms ping difference between then in a single matxh, OF COURSE they’re going to be out of sync.
I for example am barely getting matched with people from my country, or the neighboring ones, I get guys from Netherland insted who are thousand miles away from me hence lag like a MFer… So even if the SBMM would be absolutely perfect and did put 8 players ar similar level, and eben if the net code would be the best there is, there’s no physical way to overcome such drastic ping differences.
Forced platform/input crossplay, again, same thing, someone revived today a topic from 2021 about it, because there were people with enough functional brain who could tell this will cause a ton of issues, that’s why similar topics keep spawning every single day basically, and again, there are the same delusional people defending it with the exact same claims that changing it will kill the community, while in reality many people will just go "ok fine, keep it, I’ll go play something else instead, something that doesn’t force to to play against PC/M+K players).
So all in all I firmly believe those are the core issues that at the end of the day caused 20M to run away from the game. The progression system wasn’t/isn’t the best, but all you had to do was just keep playing the game, the irony is that the people who complained the most brought XP boosts, used them on weekly challenges, maxed out battle passes within few weeks, and then complained they have nothing more to do within the game as the next season won’t arrive in half a year…
Lacking content, while the number available maps and modes also wasn’t and still isn’t the greatest, I honestly don’t think it would matter that much if AY VERY LEAST people would have FUN while playing the game, which is simply impossible due to the three factors I mentioned. I mean, there’s a dramatic difference between getting bored of the game due to lacking content but still coming back to ot every now and then, and completely abandoning the game for good due to how broken and unplayable it is.
Like I said some time ago, extending playlist to 30 different modes and adding 20 new maps won’t change anything, broken game remains broken, all those new maps, modes, armors and cosmetics fade away almost instantly once you get to the actual matches only to experience the same issues yet again and again. So those are IMO the three pillars 343 needs to sort out in the first place. Global MM has been replaced with regional already, which, surprise surprise - did absolute wonders, and as expected did brought people back insted of killing the community as some claimed (which then get flushed out in the toilet anyway with recent patch that elevated desync to unbearable levels). So now it’s time to work on SBMM and crossplay, because the game won’t move any forward and the community only continue to keep bleeding out.
EDIT:
Also - lack of proper lobby system hurs the variety of content, like you want to play objectives and it’s Attrition, Attrition, TDM, Attrition again… That’s… not an objective in my and I believe many books. Or ot is different modes but on Detachment, Detachment and again Detachment… There’s just a temporary lobby that disbands after the match ends and you have to manually enter matchmaking again and again, and the hame doesn’t remember the previous mode or map you’ve just played.
