Community servers ARE persistent. That makes a community server and a persistent server the same thing. Matchmake servers AREN'T persistent. That makes a matchmake server and a persistent server NOT the same thing. Since, a matchmake server can't easily be made persistent without completely destroying the role a matchmake server was created to solve, the only logical and constructive discussion is community servers when discussing persistent servers.
- You don't want persistent servers, you want matchmaking servers to be persistent.
- You don't want a server browser, you want a list of matchmaking servers.
Item 1: This I think is fundamentally not possible or certainly not practical. It goes against the value of matchmaking servers. Placing aside conspiracies of psychological manipulation or skilled based versus engagement based matchmaking, matchmaking fundamentally is a networking solution. The game we have is like multiple games within this one game. First of all, we have multiplayer and REDSEC. Secondly, we have crossplay on versus crossplay off. Thirdly, we have different game modes. And fourthly, we have different specific maps within those game modes. The goal of matchmaking is the find a pool of a minimum number of people who want complementary gameplay, and then find the nearest available server within that group. Matchmaking occurs after each game because: 1) They can't assume that the matchmaking which occurred was the best possible, and a new matchmaking attempt may be even better. 2) Some players join and some players quit, making that pool of the minimum number of complementary players to shift around geographically. 3) Some of the players who were in the match may have picked a specific group of maps to play which doesn't agree with the specific maps other players picked, so matchmaking needs to join them together when they complement, and split them apart when not, instead of just playing the same complementary map over and over again. 4) Some players with crossplay on may have been placed into a crossplay off lobby because the population was needed, but next match may be placed in a lobby with crossplay (as a console player, this happens a lot) and thus matchmaking was needed to move them to whatever population needed them the most at that time. 5) A server which was under-utilized for one match (having a broad playerbase over broad geography in order to fullfill minimum player requirements, causing a higher ping variation) may be better utilized after the match is over for another purpose which is seeing a rising demand (for example, multiplayer versus redsec). That all being said, you cannot have a persistent group of players without destroying the whole value of matchmaking.
Item 2: Because item one is not practical or possible (in my opinion), item 2 is not practical or possible. It would give no value to compile an ever-changing list of servers that you could attempt to join and find out that they are no longer what they said they were or no longer available to you. It would just be seen as spam. Completely worthless, in my opinion.
I think it is very odd that so much of what the playerbase wants is persistent servers and the building of a sense of community by virtue of persistent populations, but then choose to matchmake. They look back and think fondly of old games that didn't have matchmaking and instead used persistent servers in a server browser, and then for some reason choose to use matchmaking instead of using the presently available persistent servers in a server browser. Everyone says that the server browser is a waste of their time because there is no population there (or is too hard because filtering is necessary -- as if filtering was never necessary before), but if they supposedly have so much conviction of wanting a functioning community, who is more inclined to use the server browser than them? If they still choose not to form a community, who do they expect to do it for them?
Community servers choose community over network performance and convenience. They cause the player to have to choose the server they want or create a duplicate of the desired server with a lower ping (closer to them) and hope that closer players will join. They are competing strategies and have competing priorities.
