Massive mistake to have a "competitive" mode in a game with this few players. It can't balance anything. If you play solo or in a duo, you'll constantly end up fighting 5-stacks that mop the floor with you. I can play 2x kill ratio vs some clan guys and lose 5-1 because the team I am with is nowhere near that level.
Fucking no one is using comms. I call my kills, I call when I die, and say if I saw someone cross; and 4 games out of 5, I am the only one doing that.
The only way to enjoy the game is to always have a five stack ready to go. But guess what - I don't have that. Yeah, sure, I guess could go to DGL discord and scream for some randos to join me, but that's not any better until you've played lots of games with them. And then when you get that sweet 5 stack rolling, what's gonna happen is that you'll play an evening and maybe lose once. Sometimes not even that. Most of your games are gonna be 5-2s, 5-1s, 5-0s. That isn't any more fun either in itself, but at least you get to talk shit with your teammates.
The cool thing about community servers in Ins2014 was that you got to know the people playing on them, you got to build your own minicommunity. You could do balancing according to either server scripts or by just manually hollering it out when you knew people's rough skill levels.
Between it taking 3 months for first update to come after launch despite some glaring issues, between there being no Pavlovian mechanics whatsoever aside of ranking up and getting your cosmetics that you run out of pretty fast, and between the competitive mode being what it is, I'm calling it quits. I got my Diamond 1 and we ended up 1st of our division in the DGL Sandstorm season 1 with the team I play in. I've seen what this game has to offer and it's pretty, but not fun. I'm gonna go back to Squad and PUBG for my FPS fixes. At least those games feel rewarding when shit goes right, instead of just being about taking turns in stomping everyone else depending on if you're stacked or not. Aside of some issues already talked about on the forums, Insurgency does its mechanics mostly right, has good enough maps, fun and tactical competitive game mode, good audio and pretty fine graphics. Shame that playing it just is a constant exercise in frustration and not nearly rewarding enough.