Playlist-based Matchmaking is crap.

In preparation for Respawn’s highly-anticipated Titanfall 2 (dropping at the end of the month), I reinstalled its predecessor last week. The last time I had played Titanfall was November 2014, according to my Origin account. The game is highly mechanical and there are a lot of advanced tactics to brush up on. Being built on the Source engine (which itself was built from iD tech/Quake engine code), you’ve got full air control and momentum conservation in the form of bunnyhopping, on top of the already-excellent wall running and double jumping. All of this is promised to return in the sequel, so I figured why not re-master these techniques to get a bigger edge on the competition in Titanfall 2. I want to make one thing perfectly clear before I dive into the meat here: Titanfall is fun. One of the most fun FPS games I have ever played, in fact – there’s an excellent blend of tactics, movement, aim and general FPS skill that doesn’t often get to shine in such a broad spectrum in other games. With so many different ways to play, it certainly ticks the box for the competitive mantra “easy to learn, hard to master.” The gameplay is beautifully sculpted in such a way that you can only come to expect from the geniuses behind Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (the best Call of Duty title to date, I might add). It sounds cool, it looks cool, it’s fast-paced, there’s an extremely high skill ceiling However, nearly everything else about the game is crap. The netcode certainly leaves something to be desired – hit registration is lackluster, the tick rate (the rate at which the server updates the world with new information, ie: you shot the bad guy and he...