Comment by vel0city

> For example, before matchmaking-based games became so popular a lot of our competitive games were on dedicated servers.

I still had a lot of problems with cheaters during this time. And when the admins aren't on you're still then at the whims of cheaters until you go find some other playground to play in.

And then on top of that you have the challenge of actually finding good servers to go join a game with similarly skilled players, especially when trying to play with a group of friends together. Trying to get all your friends on to the same team just for the server to auto-balance you again because the server has no concept of parties sucked. Finding a good server with the right mods or maps you're looking for, trying to join right when a round started, etc was always quite a mess.

Matchmaking services have a lot of extremely desirable features for a lot of gamers.