I never had a chance to try them out in a public match. I don't have enough PSN friends to play it in a private match. What is the purpose of taking the time and money to program features into this game, but then patch them out from being usable?

Has the development team simply moved onto another IP? If so, is there a team working on maintaining the multiplayer still?

Playlists were empty because Crytek fu*ked up communication between the devs and the gamers and people thought that they'd given up on the game. By the time Crytek got multiplayer bugs fixed, the party was over. So yeah, playlists were streamlined so more games could be found.

they removed it because no one played on those playlists. the only people who played there were boosters