Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Back in ye olden forum days, you'd often see cozy communities with thousands of members, most of which weren't active and a lot of them came and went. You'd see like one maybe two new members every few days. Man, with me on the edge to nuking or not nuking my reddit account with a couple of smaller communities, I didn't need more nostalgia back here. I was part of the "night crew" over on the old freenode in a few…
There were definitely some TF2 servers that felt like familiar bars or chat rooms that happened to have gun mechanics on the side. That doesn't happen in modern shooters. Heck, even MMORPGs rarely have that community feel anymore.
I think the fact that server-based matchmaking is seperated in the way it is lends itself to those types of close-knit communities forming. MMOs with things like instancing implemented cause clusters like that to not form. You get that a little bit in capital cities in games like FFXIV and low-population WoW servers, but it's an unfortunate drawback for features to help with scaling.