Plenty of examples in recent time with Helldivers 2 and 2042, as soon as the devs start deciding what's best for the community instead of the community, it bites back and leads to the game and community dying.
That's excessively generalizing the subject. Developers make decisions for the community all the time, often even against the wishes of the community. This is due to all sorts of different reasons, such as technical or economical limitations. If it's really a terrible decision, sure it comes back to bite them, yet there are just as many examples of situations where it doesn't and the community just accepts it and enjoys the rest of the game.
Party size isn't really an issue that's garnered the same kind of attention as things like SBMM. To think it would cause a game to die is a wild exaggeration. Battlefield 2042 never died, despite of its many issues. If anything the Road to Battlefield 6 was a major resurgence of its popularity.
Just because you faced 10 games out of a thousand to be unbalanced doesn't mean that they should work towards balancing that.
I'll fully admit that I'm just stating my own anecdotal experience, and from what I've noticed is that it wasn't just 10 out of a 1000 games, it was pretty much every single game where that happened. You're just stating some imaginary statistics though.
With your logic go ahead and limit the parties to 4 in portal and remove that limit at default so you can go and solo play on portal.
I think it comes down to catering to the largest possible audience. Who do you think is a larger audience, those that play with 4 players or less, or those that play with 5 players or more? I don't have any proof of this, but I'd estimate it's not even close.
Agree! There’s ways around what they’re trying to prevent. It’s annoying to join your friends in same game in multiple squads. But we’re all in other voice channels. So it defeats the purpose you say you’re trying to prevent. People are going to stop playing if they can’t play with their friends.
