What did we lose when we stopped talking before the game even started?
There was a time when joining a multiplayer match meant sitting in a lobby with actual people. No auto-matchmaking. No silent party queues. Just a room with a list of names, a chat window, and a countdown that didn’t start until the host said so.
It wasn’t always friendly. Sometimes it was chaos. Sometimes it was brilliant.
You had the guy copy-pasting ASCII art. The other one begging for someone to not pick the sniper again. You had the host kicking anyone with too high a ping, too low a rank, or the wrong taste in map selection. You waited. You talked. You watched alliances form before the match even started.
And it gave games a personality.
Lobbies were where you got a feel for the people you were playing with. It was matchmaking with awkward small talk. Or trash talk. Or desperate diplomacy in a 4v4 free-for-all where everyone knew the quietest player was the one to watch.
You recognised names. You remembered who rage-quit the last match. You knew who to team up with, who to avoid, who to wind up. It built continuity. And sometimes it built friendships.
Now? Now it’s all “click play and wait.” You don’t see names until the loading screen. You don’t talk unless you’re in voice chat. Most games don’t even give you the option. The moment the match ends, the group disappears. No rematch. No chat. Just a loading bar and another queue.
Part of this is convenience. People want to play, not talk. Auto-matching is faster. You don’t get stuck waiting for the host to go AFK mid-lobby. But it comes at a cost. You never meet anyone. You don’t see the same players twice. You don’t learn anything about the people you’re playing with except whether they’re better or worse than you.
And voice chat hasn’t replaced the lobby. Voice chat is optional, often toxic, and usually ignored. The old lobbies were chaotic, but they were also typed. You could mute the worst of it. You could scroll back. You could leave before the match started. Now you just load in, get wrecked, and leave.
We traded personality for efficiency. And it’s fine, mostly. But sometimes you remember how it used to feel, waiting in a lobby, watching the chat scroll, seeing that one guy with a name you hadn’t seen since last week. And you realise how sterile modern multiplayer has become.
What’s your most memorable pre-match lobby moment?
