>>717244267
>why do they NEED matchmaking exclusively?
More than a billion dollars has been poured into figuring out the best way to keep player retention. The result of all those studies is SBMM and similar systems. Even if the system is intentionally fucking you over, humans convince themselves that they can overcome it and that they "just need to play one more", "just need better teammates", etc. etc.
Another huge aspect of it is that if you have 100% of your playerbase in the same system, it drastically reduces queues, and the time from when you hit "play" to the time you are in a game, makes our monkey brains say "wow, this game is popular, it is so good". If we have the opposite experience where queues take too long, then we get a "wow, this game is dead, it must be bad" experience instead and developers are DEATHLY afraid of that, because that's when people start quitting the game.