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I've met some amazing people through random matchmaking, but it tears me apart when I hear stories about how people quit games because of someone who tore them a new one or like a jerk

When we started talking about it … I have like rose-colored glasses when I think about the old server days. I don’t know how often you played games back then, but Counter-Strike was important to me in my life and Warcraft 1 and 2, 3, like hanging out on Battle.net servers and whatnot.

(Before Bungie’s Halo 2 came out in 2004, the primary way that players matched in online games was to browse a list of individual servers hosting games and manually join them, as opposed to having an algorithm pair players into games. Some games still use this method, but it generally doesn’t appear much on games that appear primarily on game consoles as opposed to those on the PC.)

I loved playing on those things, but I over time conditioned myself (as a woman) to only use text chat, never use voice. I had a very neutral gamer tag. It’s funny because people would talk about, “Oh, it wasn’t that toxic back then.” I’m like, “No, it was. It’s just there were less female gamers back then, so you probably didn’t see it as much.”

Over time, I kind of realized over time how did I get through that? A) I had the right mix of personality to be addicted to this feeling of proving people wrong. But server communities were beautiful because that was a way for people to sort of manage the kind of communities that they felt like they belonged to, and they were able to really … That was a way that I felt safe, right?

Halo 2, with matchmaking, a lot of people were so thankful for matchmaking entering and everything because it was so convenient. It got rid of the pain points of server communities: Like, you would select something, and then it’d be, “Oh, it’s full.” Or you’d go in, and it’s totally random roles. Or you’d go in, and you enter in the middle of a match. Or you go in, and someone kicks you out randomly. Those things were pulled out because of matchmaking, and you see this trend of the industry moving that direction.