Yeah, like TS and VR I had my stretch of ranked games back in the days of bungie.net and also the early days of PlayMyth. Personally I never liked it as much as unranked because so many people took it all so seriously and people would drop all the time when they were losing. There were fun games, but it was like 20-25% of the time.
I remember doing really well in a game that would have given me some serious points and the host dropped because he was losing. That kind of thing is so lame and generally sums it up for my opinion of ranked.
I have no way of knowing this but my guess is a high percentage of the true wankers are in those teenage angst years. All tied in with tribal stuff and the perception of power within a given tribe.
We (OoH) gradually learned over time that in general we had a helluva lot more fun in our private games and would invite people to join us selectively to add to the mix. That formula has worked very well for us.
I think it would be good if there were another solid server out there. I dunno if Mariusnet has improved since our experience before - we sure had a hard time with logistics and bad connections in general. That was a few years ago now though. The nice thing to me about PlayMyth is we
can look around, chat with others, play some standard stuff, and then go back to our private game whenever we like.
If I had a solid connection here I'd run our own private invitation-only server if the need ever arose. My guess is when PlayMyth finally does shut down (I don't think this will happen for a couple years yet), Mariusnet and/or something from Project Magma will fill in the gap and whoever is left who still really wants to play will have a place to play. I mean, those guys are some of the die-hard fans from the Myth TFL days and they
still play that!