Not everybody wants to play competitively, especially when it's a band of close friends who play almost exclusively with each other regularly.

> Does not ranked matchmaking make for more competitive matches, a bit like if you play ranked in lichess it matches with someone of your own level, and you have a real chance of improving your own level over a period of time.

I don't like playing a game where I need to worry about ranking systems. It adds a layer which I'm just not interested in. It's fine if I die more often than other people. Some of my fondest memories are of watching someone much more skilled than me absolutely steamroll my team. If you're playing with people you know, a vastly more skilled player becomes a fun challenge for you to try and overcome together.

Even disregarding the other comment, not necessarily.

For anything but 1-vs-1, individual skill gets smeared into the non-enemy (ally for team games, or everyone for a free-for-all) average.

Remember that cooperation isn't an individual skill (unless the meta is complete, I guess); it relies on knowing your specific partners.

And besides ... it's perfectly normal for a task-oriented group to have people at a variety of skill levels. If anything, homogeneity is what's strange. This does change what interesting interactions happen, but by no means prevents them.

>For anything but 1-vs-1, individual skill gets smeared into the non-enemy (ally for team games, or everyone for a free-for-all) average.

It's a bit more nuanced than that, CS is a 5v5 game yes, but at low rank it's a lot more depedent on individual skills. I love community game servers but a lot of time those are for fooling around and not much the competitive skills.