Games

I can provide an earnest argument, if you like. I put 400+ hours into DotA in college, and enjoy games like Valheim, Lethal Company, and Monster Hunter with friends regularly, but pretty adamantly avoid competitive anonymous multiplayer these days.

1. I dislike the increased commitment of multiplayer games. When playing with a group, I have to worry about "letting down" the group, and must play fully sweaty at all times. Learning is also much more stressful and frustrating due to the social element. Even if the group isn't toxic, I'm more aware of my failures and their consequences.
2. There are engaging and difficult PvE games that challenge me, with good AI. Souls, Sekiro, DOOM Eternal, and Hollow Knight are all excellent examples with lots of unique and interesting challenges. I also enjoy stuff like speedrunning, which can take easy but fun games like Mario Odyssey and raise the skill ceiling infinitely.
3. Matchmaking eliminates the feeling of progression. I love the satisfaction of improving. I.E. Beating Sekiro and starting NG+ only to crush the opening areas that took hours because your skills have improved so much, travelling through an earlier area in Dark Souls and marvelling at how easy it feels now, or setting a huge new PB in a speedrun. Matchmaking with strangers eliminates these moments, because your MMR increases with your skill, trapping you at a 50-ish% win rate permanently, unless you smurf, which is short lived and kinda scummy. You may improve and hit a win streak, but will quickly be slapped back as your MMR increases. And I don't find seeing that number climb up to be nearly as satisfying as real moments that prove your skill.
4. I enjoy some atmosphere and narrative. It's tough to deliver a cool world via character trailers exclusively, and most multiplayer games never get an "Arcane". A single player experience will always have some of that, and it can be awesome.
5. Pacing and variety. A good game experience is paced out with moments of calm, maybe some puzzle solving or narrative, and moments of intensity and tough fights. That stuff is good when done well. Something like DOOM Eternal gets my heart pounding like nothing else in arenas on higher difficulties, but knows to let you breathe in between, so I can enjoy that heart pounding pace for more than 30m at a time. Online games will try with something like spreading players out in a Battle Royale, but it's not the same.
6. Also, I just like pausing, lol. If my wife needs something, it's nice to be able to just put the game down, I don't like being chained to my desk for 20-40 minutes depending on how the game goes because I'll lose rank and disappoint the team.

Also, I say anonymous because a lot of these problems disappear if you play exclusively with friends. I love the Smash series, for example. You have an objective skill benchmark in the friend you're playing with, as well as someone who's understanding when you have to go or do something. That's really cool, but also damn hard to schedule and not something I do often for PvP.

Competitive anonymous multiplayer is great, for those that like it. More than happy to let you enjoy that. But personally these cons outweigh the pros for me, and I'll continue to be disappointed when something I'm excited for turns out to be competitive anonymous PvP.

Well, as the others already said, it's a matter of taste and different factors play into it, but your argument with the AI is precisely why I find this decision so jarring: You don't need nor want unpredictability in a skating game.

It's not a competitive genre where the unpredictability makes it interesting. And I remember watching a video of a guy playing Skate where NPCs would constantly walk into his path and it was the most infuriating thing. If there would've been no NPCs, no unpredictability, the game would've been better.
Of course, with an MMO, other players will probably have no collision. But if you can still see them where you're skating, they'll still get in the way of you seeing what you're skating on, particularly if you run into trolls.

I'm not completely negative to the MMO concept. Maybe it is fun to see just the sheer chaos of hundreds of others skating in the same place. Maybe they have some sort of idea to actually make interaction with other players relevant in some way. Maybe it's kind of cool for folks to log into the Skate MMO and just hang out. Or maybe it's only an MMO hub-world and you don't have to see other players on the individual courses. But yeah, I'm just not holding my breath.

You can have multiplayer games that are possible to play offline. My friends and I have had a grand time playing Black Ops 2 Zombies split screen.

I mean, that game is still available online, but let's be real—BO2 Zombies will outlive every game released this year

There's too many multiplayer games.

And with them come not working anticheat, cheaters, yet another account no one asked for, and a whole other slew of BS.

Many of us find solace in single player classics.

Yes I love it when a game can arbitrarily be made unplayable when the servers are taken down, even if someone didn't want to use the multiplayer in the first place.

Some folks don't care about having the ''unpradictability of human players''. Or at the very least don't think that benefit makes up for the downsides of an always online game, such as always having to have an internet connection, server downtime, lag, the pricing models that pay for those servers, game modes that require you to interact with other players, etc.

I like multiplayer games, and I like single player games, I like couch co-op, and pvp, mmo's, and fighting games, but I think it's about having the right tool for the job.

But online multiplayer games that are spin offs or sequels to single player games have a well deserved bad reputation. Due to the numerous instances where the motivation wasn't to make the game better, but instead to force the more profitable monitary models that online multiplayer games allow for. Fallout 76 stands out as a prime example.

It's not always a bad change mind you, sometimes it really adds a lot to the game... like... uhhhh... er... Ultima Online? Im sure there are other examples too.

So maybe you can take that stick out of your ass and let folks enjoy what they like? ¯_(ツ)_/¯