Before I wasn't so sure but now I'm very sympathetic to the idea of playing only co-op games and PVE stuff and I completely understand now where you guys are coming from when you've decided to take that stance. I honestly think a big part of my change in attitude are the cheat whiners who now completely infest steam.
Some of these complaints may or may not be legitimate with Chinese hackers. However we've reached a new level of retard in the games industry generally where it seems normies are being driven out of games by autists who can play well and they're genuinely too stupid to know the difference between a hacker and somebody who is actually good at the game.
Take Battlebit Remastered as an example because that's a game I played to death when it came out and I sort of hop in the servers that are still active. I don't even necessarily think it's the bullshit chat moderation that has killed off the game's playerbase I think too many people potentially got scared away from all the negative review hack accusation spam that's going about the place and it's completely ridiculous. I maybe encountered one actual hacker in the wild and he ended up getting banned to the credit of the devs and this was on an official server. Recently had a game of battlebit and sure enough there was an actual retard accusing someone of hacking but he did get completely roasted by everybody in chat.
Do you remember when hack accusations were just for the lulz? These guys clearly mean it because they're that bad at the game. It's like a bunch of polygon journalists have taken over everything and they whine constantly about how many cheaters there are and want the game balance changed so they can have an advantage. Obvious smurfing on matchmaking style games is one thing but that's something you can identify properly and when you make these guys try and justify themselves they really are complete morons.
RIP Halo and CoD style lobbies, that's a thing of the past now that the normies have found gaming unless we all get community servers and private them big time.
I've got a pretty recent example. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It came out last summer and is a PVP horror. I played it the first few weekends we got addicted for a short while. I probably built up 30 hours in the first three weeks. When it's played slower it's actually a fun cat-and-mouse game. It was ruined pretty quick by speedrunning and just general assholery among other things though.
One thing though, it was released as a full cross-play game. Consoles and PC. It's not a game that a particular input, etc. would really benefit. At one point the developers decided to disable PC from the cross-play pool because of online screaming and moaning about all the PC cheaters. I'd seen maybe one in my entire time playing, and it wasn't even that egregious. There were plenty of "that guy must be cheating" type thoughts when I was hiding and found, but most of that explained away as I got better and realized there are more tracking mechanics and that's how I was found.
That move was the first big bullet that killed the game. You could see who was partied up in the pregame lobby. Many if not the majority of parties were cross-platform with PC players too. It was the player base. Steam data showed them losing half of their Steam player base overnight. They put it back, but the game was a corpse by then.
I just played CS:2 for the first time ever because I didn't buy in the initial hype since I know how these multiplayer games always go now. I may try to do a bit of classic De_Dust 2 and see if the gameplay is any better. It's staggering though how many bad players there are there.
I think I'm being fair when I consider myself above average usually if I've got even a half-decent team on my side but we were playing Italy and as everybody knows in that game if you just sit and camp at the back as CT you're going to quickly get overwhelmed by T's and that's exactly what happened and people were being practically spawn camped. They didn't understand how to play the map at all.
I could have started being a sperg and start screeching but I know it's futile with the polygon journalist types so I simply quit. There seems to be two extremes on multiplayer gaming these days. Either you get Polygon Journalists playing who obviously don't know what they're doing at the end of the day or you get pro-gamer try hards who just seem to spend their days roflstomping these players and it's just so not fun.
I'd rather play around in my own projects these days as part of my relaxation rather than touch any recently released titles, it's that bad. I wouldn't necessarily mind giving some of these co-op games a try but I have nightmares still from GTA V though I understand that the online matchmaking in that game is particularly awful even by games industry standards. I hate co-op games that punish you for the other player's fuckups because it makes it a nightmare to try and even play the game properly and have fun.
The other games are just a vehicle for micro-transactions and can be barely called games so I'm not really interested in touching those.
I haven't played CS:2 since it was CS:GO. I think games have always been like that to a point, especially CS type games, but I really don't remember that well. I never really invested the amount of time to games in the early days of online FPS to hold my own in the "good" servers, but I used to enjoy games with server browsers that allowed different rules. There was lots of fun to be had in a night server, shotguns only, no snipers, whatever. Go in there and have fun and the people that needed to tweak everything to perfection weren't able to.
It does seem like a lot of people can't just screw around and have fun though. The height of my COD days, we would sometimes just go in with weird setups and laugh at our success or failure. I was mediocre skill at best, but one of my friends had some success at national tournaments (the in-person kind). He was good. We never cared to always be perfectly maxed out. I had a build just to shoot down helicopters fast so they couldn't get kills with them, or I'd go knife-only, or put that stupid riot shield on and just charge people. It was sometimes fun.
I actually blame the streamer culture for a lot of what I hate. That may very well be an "old man yells at clouds." Everyone that tries plays the same, it's a max build, certain strategy they saw some internet stream. As an example, I've been dragged into Fortnite by my cousin a handful of times. I'm bad at that game and I really don't do the building part at all. It's funny though, the good players all immediately start building these giant convoluted towers in every single fight. I've gotten a handful of kills just quietly going and finding good "natural" cover and angles and waiting for them to actually quit all their building shit and actually fight. You can almost see the deer in headlights look when after all that some guy pops out flanking them from behind a rock and puts them down. Why was I there? I was supposed to be sperging out building things.
Oh fortnite is such a classic example of polygon level gaming I honestly can't tell the difference between them and the bots that plague the servers who are clearly afk grinding for skins. You're absolutely right about the building aspect of the game, I preferred dicking around in the no build servers precisely for that reason.
The most hilarious side I saw to the fortnite 'gameplay' is almost everybody was using controllers and trying to exploit the fuck out of the aim assist feature. If you ever find yourself playing that game all you need to do really is learn to be a decent sniper and they can't do shit half the time and when I found this out it was incredibly boring to play. If you destroyed the buildings they would immediately flee into another building because they were hoping to camp people dumb enough to go in an duel with them and their aim assist. So if you just got your distance and sniped all of them you'd make the top 10 easy with little effort. Since they refuse to use mouse and keyboard they could easily be exploited in other ways too, for example because of the low sensitivity on controllers if you got ultra close to them their aim assist would often not work so that's another way to deal with the bastards.
The really annoying players would use the gravity hammer shotgun combo and clearly knew how to deal with that but even then some decent twitch reflexes would put you in contention with those guys fairly easily especially if you combine it with vehicles.
I'm very much done with all though precisely for the reasons you describe, arsehole normie streamers are definitely a factor. I think in general though multiplayer gaming is one of those fun things that got ruined once it got mainstreamed. Nobody will play anything genuinely good anymore because it hurts their egos so you either play mediocre shite like Fortnite and be bored as hell or stick to co-op and singleplayer.
Weird, I play other games with controller much more often than KB/mouse. Yet I can't stand Fortnite with a controller. Aim is never my issue anyway. Except maybe the snipers, something seems off about them. I've probably fired a total of 20 shots through them so it's likely a case of just haven't figured them out.