activision published a 25 page study about skill based match making in call of duty multiplayer and the conclusion was that SBMM was better for everyone. turning off SBMM in A/B tests led to MORE quitting, blowouts and worse player retention
casual/non-competitive SBMM should still exist, but competitive/ranked modes specifically ruin games for me. league, dota, FPSes, it doesnt matter, once i start doing ranked matches and having to deal with a meta and best hero/weapon/whatever setup + making sure i play perfectly it becomes work and not a game anymore
The issue with sbmm and cod isn't actually sbmm at all and rather than they're forced to go against pc players with a controller. For example playing cod on ps5 with crossplay turned off is a night and day difference in enjoyment. It's still sweaty but its not ruthlessly unfair.
I imagine turning off sbmm in their study meant more console players having to go against more PC players rather than the potential to filter out pc players based on some hidden skill value.
I personally don't think PC player should be in any form of crossplay. They tend to ruin everything either by spoofing inputs and getting into controller lobbies if there's input filtering, giving themselves aim assist if there isnt, or just outright cheating and generally being the more toxic and sweaty gamers. Send the PC players to the gulag and let console players have fun.
Still community servers are still always the best but i think sbmm is unfairly blamed for issues caused by different and more annoying factors and the larger issue of company run matchmaking crap that tried to curate your entire experience poorly instead of letting you define your own enjoyment
I personally don't think PC player should be in any form of crossplay. They tend to ruin everything either by spoofing inputs and getting into controller lobbies if there's input filtering, giving themselves aim assist if there isnt, or just outright cheating and generally being the more toxic and sweaty gamers. Send the PC players to the gulag and let console players have fun.
I've mostly seen complaining about console players using 3rd party controllers that let them use mice and macros to get the double benefit of being able to actually aim reliably and the heavy autoaim that every game gives console players now. Apex Legends has been particularly notorious for having "aim assist" that just locks a console player's reticule onto someone who's close enough.
SSBM is not an oppressive corporate institution lol. It's a normal ass balancing mechanism that should be in every game. If you want an example of a SSBMless "paradise" go on to a Minecraft server with PVP. You'll die over and over again from the absurd skill gap, with next to no chance to actually improve due to the extremely limited gameplay time you get due to dying constantly.
No, literally every game including a well moderated CS or TF2 (tf2 is an exception somewhat because good players often play like shit on purpose but still) will be shit if extremely good players can curbstomp whenever. It's a case of having an actually fun game, not rank or jackoff athlete points.
I would like it if dota had a rank for each hero you play. I’m probably Archon with some but definitely Herald with others.
Role queue adjusts your rank for each role. I'm guardian I offlane but herald 4 carry.
Yeah I’m guardian 1 most everything. We should play together and then end up raging on and hating each other sometime.
Smurfing (wanting to grief new players in unmatched games) is the 420th kind of liberalism.
The funniest is that it's always people who are dogshit at the game who claim to be smurfing.
Counterpoint: What's fun about loading into a game with some Gen-Z mutant with five thumbs who can push a button with his mind and drop me before I can even take aim?
I mean, aside from capping him from halfway across the map while he's trying to dab on my friend?
Also, idk what the meme is pining for. I remember starcraft and WC3 having some sort of skill based matchmaking, for shooters they're more fun with like a skill mismatch than RTSes/MOBAs, but even then I feel like it's been the norm since at least Halo 2.
A return to community-run servers, most likely, so the state of affairs before Halo 2. I remember encountering matchmaking systems on Xbox Live for the first time and being in awe of how modern and streamlined they felt. An anonymous, unseen algorithm just took you and a bunch of other randos and dumped you into a map to shoot at each other for 10 minutes, then it was over and you never had to see any of those people again.
As an anti-social person it was a vast improvement to me over trying to pick the least hostile-sounding server from a list. Then you log in and your ears are blasted with awful custom music and your eyes are assaulted by awful custom menus, or, in the case of some Day of Defeat: Source servers that I remember, lovingly hand-crafted SS skins for all the German soldiers. And then the game chat is filled with server regulars chatting with each other about their lives and it just felt really awkward
dont get the hate for sbmm as a concept. it's more fun to have about a 50/50 chance of winning than it being totally random imo. maybe hidden MMR is better to decrease toxicity? but I think sbmm isn't the problem.
I miss that part of online games. You'd have a favorite server you'd log onto and see the same people everyday. You also got better quicker when playing in larger teams because they would get scrambled every few rounds. You could see what good players were doing without getting dumpstered.
This is half of why I still play Battlefield 1 (the other half being it's a fucking great game)
The community server I play on is great. Three of the most annoying tools have been banned (the Ilya Muromets, the SMG 08, and support mortars) with some decent moderation in place to keep those rules in line and mostly deal with toxicity. It exists but I've seen less racial slurs and ethnonationalism in it than the randomly assigned Operations servers, and gameplay wise it's fucking refreshing to not die to an untouchable heavy bomber every ten seconds
I used to play BF1942 on the Berlin and Stalingrad no vehicles or grenades servers back in the day. Then EA said "No more modded servers" and that was that 😞
Luckily the first Call of Duty Day of Defeat: Source came out soon after.
Which servers do you frequent? Also, +1 to battlefield 1 community servers being great. I service rifle servers
SaltyNoobs almost exclusively, decent vibes and no Ilya spam
Any good service rifle servers? Love that mode
I think grumpy old men runs a service rifle night every now and then. I need to find a regular service rifle server though.
They were nice but when you just wanted to play and they were full, well it isn't so nice.
ngl I can't take people who argue against SBMM seriously. 10/10 times it's some nerd who has spent 3000 hours playing Apex Legends and wants to feel powerful by stomping beginners. "I don't wanna have to tryhard all the time" is the line they always say and it's one of the most toddler-brained arguments I've ever heard.
There's a larger issue with players taking games way too seriously, even outside of ranked, but that isn't the fault of SSBM. It's the fault of a terrible gaming culture.
It's not the fault of SSBM at all. It's absurd to consider as such- merely facing opponents of the same skill level will only result in try hard bullshit if you take the game so seriously that you are willing to participate in outright antisocial behavior and to an extent psychological self-harm. You have to be primed to do that- In an entirely different setting the majority of people would instead treat such an equal match as an excuse to fuck around and not care about winning or losing, or as an opportunity to practice against reasonable odds. They have to be primed for it. And I do think RANKS do this. Putting people into outright different qualitative hierarchical categories based on how much you play a game inherently encourages them to be hierarchical.
The important words there are "qualitative and hierarchical". You can separate players into separate game categories WITHOUT applying a value judgement to it; You can have skill based match making that does not reward or intrinsically justify try hard behavior. But that requires not caring about the profit motive; it requires not wanting to force your players into a frustrating addictive cycle, it requires using SSBM properly instead of in the way companies think it is designed for.
Real SSBM has never been tried
Skill based matchmaking makes slippi viable
Some games, especially melee and starcraft, are the opposite of fun for at least one player (but usually both) if the skill difference between players is too large.
Terrible takes abound. SBMM does make people's experiences better by not having people getting steamrollered by douchebags that just want to own noobs. The reason you're having a bad time is BECAUSE THESE GAMES ARE BAD. They can never be fixed, there is no way to make them good because they have made the wrong decisions at every turn.
Matches should be short and sweet, if they last longer than 20 minutes you need to throw the entire game out and start from scratch. Teams should be scrambled regularly based on score/skill. You need to have many chances to get a kill, time to kill should be short, and respawn times should be very short. Maps should be relatively small and not too convoluted, with plenty of sight lines and hiding places. Simple controls and no abilities all upgrades should be available to everyone and per-match with no progression trees.
What I'm saying is that UT2004 is all we ever needed.
me when im matched against opponents of the same skill level instead of pubstomping new players until they quit the game
If we had SBMM for posting I wouldn't be able to see most of the replies to this thread because they'd all be bronze.
SBMM is fine as an option for 1v1 games, but it's so bad for team games. It actively foments toxicity between players, and it often doesn't even work that well. I remember playing League of Legends and only one in maybe five or ten games was actually good. The rest were ruined by leavers, smurfs, toxicity, or just bad matchups that made the games lopsided. You win as many of those games as you lose, but winning lopsided games gets old.
It doesn't help that a lot of these games aren't even that much fun to begin with. A good game should be fun whether you win or lose, but a lot of these games are only really enjoyable if you're winning. The play gets overshadowed by the competition and skinner box mechanics, leaving a hollow experience for the vast majority of players.
The rest were ruined by leavers, smurfs, toxicity, or just bad matchups that made the games lopsided
leavers
just ban them after a couple offenses
smurfs
matchmaking system should be able to detect smurfs (high KDAs, high win rates, other metrics) and boost their hidden ELO very quickly - thus making them no longer smurfs
toxicity
just ban them after a couple offenses
bad matchups
matchmaking makes this better, not worse. without skill based matchmaking you would have even more lopsided games with even more disproportionate skills
Seems like the real issue with League is Riot's unwillingness to permaban players and enforce its rules, instead trying to retain the toxic players forever and coddling their behavior with special queues. Part of this is that toxic players pay just as much (if not more) money than other players, and the other part is that it would be expensive to hire enough GMs to actually review all the cases of toxicity in chat. The problem isn't the matchmaking, it's riot being cheap
Seems like the real issue with League is Riot's unwillingness to permaban players and enforce its rules
Agreed. It's possible to solve these problems, but Riot didn't care enough to solve them, or they had an underlying motivation to keep toxic players around. It does seem like a problem that's not unique to Riot, though. I think there are some structural issues in these games that makes it easy for companies to ignore the player experience in favor of just keeping people playing. It's probably similar to all the attention economy websites where they don't care if you're getting value, they only care that you're still on the platform.
yep maybe have an improved lobby where people looking to team up as 5 could LFG, get in voice comms and play together for a while. Promote making friends and preparing your party with people you trust.
My recent experience with skill based mm in team games has been similarly bad. It feels like it uses a very bad flat score-like system that makes games quickly devolve into extremely lopsided slogs because the system thinks pairing a slightly higher ranked player with some number of slightly lower ranked ones is a good match for several average ones. Practically every game I played would have most of one team's players doing exceptionally poorly with one or two doing exceptionally well, while the other, winning team would consist of mostly everyone doing averagely well.
There is usually a very small window after updates where it feels like everything gets reset and then it's possible to get some more enjoyable matches before it returns to the norm where you can probably determine who will win within the first few minutes.
you can probably determine who will win within the first few minutes.
This is a big part of the problem with a lot of these games, imo. The matches take too long to resolve, or have too much lead time to get to the part that's actually fun and dynamic. It's easy to criticize, but it's a genuine problem if half of any given match is spent either ramping up or winding down to the natural conclusion, with the other half being the game that everyone actually wants to play.
In pickup mobas it is inevitable that ~1/3 of matches are straight up lost on the character select screen.
I was more talking about generalities like picking lategame powerspikes into a push lineup, or similarly drafting single target control exclusively against a mobile core and a save support.
I haven't played nor watched league enough to make an informed comparison.
The biggest difference design wise are
-variable turn rates making kiting harder, which opens up the design space for melee adcs without a dash -denying giving reduced xp, which makes lanes with large skill gaps absolute blowouts -most abilities are smartshot, which de-emphasizes mechanical skill in favor of macro knowledge on when to push your buttons -woods does not spawn for the first minute, meaning that dedicated jungle isn't a thing.
The entire roster is free without any grinding, which is what made me get into it over league ten years ago.
Here is a guide for making the LOL>DOTA switch written by the most popular third party stats site:
If you understand csing, and the general concepts of vision and timings, you are over the majority of the hard part, and will likely calibrate at a higher rank than me.
Love to spend 40 minutes executing a single round of very convoluted rock paper scissors.
If it's a hard counter and not just a skill issue, it'll be over in about a half hour, but that's a nitpick. Point taken.
You're blaming things on SBMM that it is designed to fix and does so pretty effectively compared to not having it
I'll just continue never playing online games.
You know how some popular games have a solo campaign mode? Yeah they really do. It's shocking I know. I'm the kind of person who plays ONLY that and skips the online part.
I remember when online games were fun... Yeah... No sbmm... No people... Just superior offline bot matches.
I don't like playing with people I want bot functionality to return. I got so much fun out of quake, unreal tournament, counter strike and battlefield without ever logging in to online play. I could mod the shit out of the games and still have bots work and even use the mods properly so people were never needed.
In this scenario i can configure the experience for maximum enjoyment ans the worst emotion I'll ever feel is slightly bored. Ooh forgotten hope 2, you were so good.
As for sbmm i don't really feel that strongly about it but what i do care about is hackers ruining everything and unpunished toxic behaviour. In the world of matchmaking you need to rely on the company to handle the problem (they dont) so the only real way to combat hackers and potentially also toxicity is the good ol tried and tested method of community run servers.
I don't like playing with people I want bot functionality to return. I got so much fun out of quake, unreal tournament, counter strike and battlefield without ever logging in to online play. I could mod the shit out of the games and still have bots work and even use the mods properly so people were never needed.
I admit I do enjoy games that had built-in bot options if I didn't want to hear a nazi manifesto from some
on lobby chat.
horrible horrible take. ranked is stupid but skill based matchmaking is how you get a chance to actually improve while still having a chance to win. Rather than just slamming your head against a brick wall until it finally clicks on your ten hundredth match.
