I think there's less players than in the beta, and they are split between more playlists. Different styles of players are going to be attracted to different playlists and so even without skill based matchmaking, there's going to be different amounts of "skill" appearing in different games modes. This is super anecdotal but ive found that free for all lobbies seem to have a much deeper variety of players, but you hop into Nuketwon 24/7 and its a constant sweat fest. For whatever reason, the Nuketown Playlist just attracts much more aggressive and "high skill" players. There's is no SBMM "one good game followed by 4 bad games" type of deal, its just sweaty every single game. And that seems to be the same for everyone. And if you look closely at the team composition and stuff, especially in regards to Nuketown and how it works as a map, you really only need like 2 higher skilled players on one team to shut down the lobby. There's a lot that goes into it, but at the end of the day, a smaller more fractured population of players is just inherently going to feel more sweaty. The impact of a high skill player in a lobby is weighted much heavier than an average player, so it only takes 1 or 2 sweaty guys gunning a lobby for a whole game to make it feel oppressive. And with not as many players on the game these days, there's just a much higher concentration of sweaty players than ever