Gone are the days where games in which you can join a regular server, where you see your friends, join a clan, etc. are the norm. Now you have to send friend requests to people and hope they accept, and even then, you can't play against your friends in casual play, only with them.
Recently I showed my little brother of an online FPS game from 2003, showing someone at a high skill level doing the map objective without help. The player killed everyone in sight with ease. My brother commented, "How the hell was that guy placed in a lobby with all these bad players?". To him, the only way that online FPS games work is that you queue in a lobby to be placed with people of a similar skill level. It didn't occur to him that you used to be able to join a server at a particular IP address and play with regulars and crack jokes with people you've known for years.