Quote Originally Posted by Aidorouge View Post
Eh... I've played stuff like Smite, Paladins, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, and League of Legends and it happens quite often that a group of solo players is put up against a team and gets bodied. Maybe those games *try* to put premades against premades, but when no other premades are around... they absolutely will throw the solo queue to the wolves, or they'll sic a full stack onto a duo and such because "technically" its team vs team.

Hell, that's exactly what happens now in Frontlines, where all it takes is one 4-man/8-man stack of "friends" to shut down the whole match and reduce the other 64/68 players to NPCs who get to watch, zero guardrails there either to prevent premade abuse to the point there's entire Discords centered around "taking turns" so said premades can avoid each other because, and this part is hilarious, a lot of Frontline premades in FF14 *don't* want to fight other premades, they just want easy wins against uncoordinated fodder.

And maybe you only want duos vs duos, but we'll have someone else coming in here asking for trios, and so forth and so on until Crystaline Conflict is having to separate and main 5 different kind of queues because even just a 2-man versus a 5-man will end poorly for the duo in that equation. If you have a problem with people hating on premades though, take it up with the people who soured the whole concept for several years on Frontlines, to the extent that we just automatically assume anyone wanting it for CC is just out to abuse solo players too but in their preferred mode.

Even if you personally had no ill intentions and actually do want competition against other teams, that makes you rarer than you think.
I completely disagree with your argument because it just screams of a bunch of reason why you should just give up. And you know, maybe thats why PVP has always died in this game. Sure all the games you mention have their issues, but they are thriving or thrived because even if sometimes stuff happens they are ultimately fun to play even if not perfect.

So taking your friends away from you as a safeguard against potential multiplayer imbalances is just about the worse thing you can do. Literally any other balancing system is better than isolating you so you can't play with your friends.