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In the 90s, almost everyone was still bad at these games (because they were relatively new as a genre), so the skill discrepancies were smaller. I was there, I remember.

When the skill gaps are smaller it's not as big of a deal to play "stronger" players. But when the skill gaps are huge, it becomes a real problem.

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Skill gaps back then were HUGE. At least in the games I used to play and compete in. Mainly Quake, CS and StarCraft. If you were an average/decent player, you'd get absolutely destroyed by a good player every single time and it was never even close.

Modern FPS games with SBMM creates this huge "blob" of low-to-average players that will rarely if ever even have the chance of playing against an actual good player and they have no clue of how huge the difference in skill gap it is.

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