The party/no party playlists didn't kill TLoU MP on PS3 at all. I know this because I didn't play the MP on PS3 until January 2015 and I was always able to find matches in both playlists super quick. 1.5 years after launch is more than enough time to say whether the game has been affected or not.
There were also way more than 100k players at peak for UC4. I know this because I had people on my friends list who played for 15 minutes and accumulated a score, and they ranked in the 900k's in score per minute (disregarding that the statistic was broken until it got reset a few days ago). Longevity in any game not named COD/BF/Destiny is always going to suffer. There's a reason why those games are in a class of their own, so there's no point in comparing them because they are outliers/anomalies.
The reason why ND took out the player count is because they realized that it looked low compared to COD/BF/etc, so as a matter of pride, they took it out. If I'm not mistaken, Blops 3 doesn't have a player count on consoles, at least not on PS4. It only says something like "44% of players in this playlist." The peak time to brag about player count was in 2011 with MW3 and all that jazz.
The real metric is long-term users, and we're now at the point for UC4 where the only people who are playing are long-term users, either those who like to mess around with friends or those who are trying to get to Master Rank. Either way, they are the ones who need to be pleased from here on out, and having separate playlists would go a long way to alleviate so many headaches in one fell swoop.
Yes, Naughty Dog games have niche multiplayer compared to COD/BF, but so does every other game. If 7 million people bought TLoU, and 10% of those played MP, and 10% of THOSE stayed with MP for the long haul, that's still a 70k player pool, which is robust enough to allow for a parties/non parties playlist. Even half that number, 35k, is still enough for 3,500 matches occurring simultaneously. I'm not an expert at math but with 10 minute matches, it doesn't seem like it would be an issue to find players.
For shits and giggles I will fire up TLoU on PS3 tomorrow and see how long it takes me to find a match in both party/no party playlists, if you really want me to. But I'm confident it won't take an abnormal length of time. Even so, it's been three years since release, well after the expected support for the game has ended.
And finally, statements like "Uncharted 4 seems to be losing players faster than TLOU did" are literally speculation. I could easily say the opposite. Also, comparing to Overwatch doesn't work either because that's released on three platforms. Even if you narrow it to "Overwatch on PS4 has more players than Uncharted 4," that's still disingenuous because it's MP-only so even if they sold 100k on PS4 (no clue what actual sales are), every single copy is playing MP.
At the end of the day, parties are the biggest deterrent to having a good time in any MP game. I have never heard the phrase tickrate until this thread, and while I thank tapantaola for the explanation and appreciate the discussion over these last few pages, I can tell you that while I've certainly been affected and annoyed by it, I'm far more annoyed far more frequently when I run into a full party and get absolutely destroyed because I'm playing solo with others who don't know how to revive or flank or do anything other than run around without a clue. It's a 90/10 split on what angers me. Separate playlists would solve this problem with the flick of a switch (and some coding).
Actually you know what bothers me more than tickrate issues or parties? The god-awful get-into-cover-correctly-whoops-didn't-hit-the-right-angle-I'm-dead little mini-game that happens at least twice a match. That's infuriating and where I'm gonna end my rant.
Tickrate tweaking could fix so many things in this game...
