i like the way tf2 community servers do it: completely random teams, and with large team sizes of 12v12 (the most common team size, it can be as large as 50v50) it makes it hard for a single bad or good player to control which team wins. also, skill gap between pros and average players in tf2 are lower than other games, in tf2 the best players are around twice as powerful as an average player which is significant but not overwhelming. for example a team of 6 pro players would be an equal match for a team of 12 average players. this ensures that even the worst players won't lose all the time, and the best players won't win all the time, but still rewards people for improving so they can win slightly more often, and make a bigger contribution to their team.
this isnt how tf2 matches play out at all? what? the skill ceiling is so high and abusable with the amount of mobility that any decent demo or soldier can cremate half or more of a team on their own
A lot of it was also the fact that so many players genuinely thought they were gods at the game because they only remember the good games they had back in the day, or they beat all their friends in split screen. In their mind "If they would just turn off sbmm" because "It's not based on ping anymore" and "I"m only going up against MLG kids" and not being average or bad.
You touched upon my biggest problem with competitive games. For context, I've had a lot of bad competitive experiences, getting stomped with no recourse because my friends introduced me to a game just so they'd have someone to get easy wins against; bad matchmaking sticking me with teammates that I can't carry to victory, further bad matchmaking sticking me up against teams of incredibly sweaty high-skill players, dealing with cheaters, etc. I can't stick with competitive gaming long, because it invariably leads me to get salty and tilted when nothing I do lets me eke out a win every now and again. If I want to lose constantly, I have real life for that. The problem is that I can't enjoy the process of losing. No competitive game I've tried has felt good enough that I can honestly say I've had fun while losing. As a result, when I start losing, I start looking at why I'm losing. And if I can't find anything that I'm blatantly doing wrong, that I can do better on, then I start looking at why my opponents are winning. And that's where the problems start - usually, I find it's because they have some advantage I don't have. Such as a weapon unlock I haven't earned, or a gacha pull I can't match because my luck is crap, or maybe they're playing on a platform that allows finer control over the game than what I have. Or maybe they're even flagrantly cheating! In any case, I eventually conclude that I'm losing because my opponents have advantages that I can't match or beat. And unless I unlock the necessary counters soon, I quit. After all, why keep scraping away with loss after loss just to feed the winners wins? There's often a problem in competitive games where the rich get richer, and those who lose barely get anything at all. That makes losing sting even worse because now the gap between you and the guy who beat you has widened. It's even worse in games where your win/loss, kill/death, whatever records are publicly viewable. If you don't have a good enough record, you can't even make a salient point in public. No matter how factually correct you are, the first thing anyone's going to do is look at your record, see that it's bad (or even just 'not good enough' to make the point you want to make in their eyes) call you a scrub, and dismiss your point out of hand without even considering it. The fact that in these games, losing actively lowers your status among your peers and, if it gets bad enough, renders you into a pariah, is not something I want to deal with. Again, if I want to deal with that, I have real life. Then there's the issue of sportsmanship. Competitive games often have winners be terrible winners, leading to shit like teabagging and other insulting behavior. They use the fact that they won as an excuse to put you down. This lack of sportsmanship is something I have little tolerance for. I want to respect my peers, win or lose, but I can't respect someone who's busily shoving their character's crotch into my downed corpse's face while I'm helpless to do anything about it. Furthermore, calls to sportsmanship often get you put down by other players, since apparently nobody gives a solitary fuck about any form of sportsmanship that isn't mandated by the game rules. There's absolutely no respect for your fellow players, and that's infuriating. As a result, losing isn't fun in most games. Between the fact that losing inherently sucks, and can happen for reasons totally beyond your control, the fact that usually the rich get richer and the winners win more as their advantage over losers widens, and the utter lack of respect for other players or any form of sportsmanship in many games, losing feels utterly terrible.
great video, more really need to see it. this "sbmm is bad" echo chamber has gone on long enough. sbmm has been in games for a long time and is a necessary evil for preserving the player base. i talk to ppl irl (who are cod casuals and have no awareness of sbmm or what goes) and they have a great time playing cod. sure, having a no sbmm playlist or some modified playlist would be great to jump into but that's going off topic... having a random crazy match once in a while is fun but if you're not challenged/getting totally destroyed every match it gets boring or frustrating. some love to 2box and get those crazy kills but to me that's not fun, it's a competitive game and i wanna be challenged, learn from my mistakes and outplay better players because i was better in the situation...some matches will be more even some will be more varied.
The problem is not SBMM by itself, a bit is necessary. The problem is how tight it is. Call of Duty and Halo: Infinite, for example, have such tight parameters that if you're competent you're bound to have terrible connection quality (Halo 2's SBMM was very loose by today's standards). It's OK if, say, the bottom x% don't match the top x%, up to a degree. It's also absolutely terrible when you go play the casual gamemode with not so competitive friends, and due to your skill level you simply can't play with them because that'd make them have a terrible time. It's as simple as in casual modes connection should have a bigger weight in the equation, and vice versa for ranked ones. Playing games with friends in a casual mode should ALWAYS be a priority for a dev team, because the casual population is naturally bigger than the competitive one.
At the risk of sounding harsh a lot of the people so hard against SBMM state that they don't "want to sweat", it is extremely pathetic to enter a competitive game and expect not to have to put some effort in. They have since pivoted to saying "oh but its EOMM (Engagement Optimized Matchmaking)". While I don't necessarily think Activision wouldn't do that, the evidence presented by these COD commentators isn't very convincing and they're often flat out wrong. For example these content creators said that COD never had SBMM until recently, but a developer for Black Ops 2 who worked on its implementation confirmed it's been in since at least COD4. For context I think why you see it from Call of Duty specifically is because COD has a fairly low skill floor/cieling. A lot of early youtubers got popular by being pretty good at games like COD4-BLOPS2. Back then a lot of their opponents would have been not only new to Call of Duty but to video games in general. It's been 20 years though so the people still playing have gotten better and the new player has at least played other games, in short being good enough to be popular is now harder and these people are bitter that they have to "sweat" to get the same results they got 20 years ago when the skill curve was heaver on the lower end. Combine this with how snowbally Call of Duty can be with things like killstreaks and 2 things happen. 1) a winning player looks even better and gets to show off with their rewards that can destroy the other team. 2) The losing team now has to deal with a variety of nonsense in addition to already getting killed by opposing players. Losing in scenario 2 is so oppressive that it's not fun and the winning player once he's started winning can basically relax. Your point on liking to win but not compete is spot on. A common factor with these content creators is that they complain about not being able to play off meta. Funnily enough SBMM actually helps them here because in a random distribution they'll never lose rank and eventually be put in a tier where they can win off meta. And even without the tier fixing, can they not have fun by playing off meta even if they lose?
first off, fuck off. this exact reasoning is why people drop games. i hate this idea that video games are somehow inherently meritocratic, that there's somehow a 1:1 ratio of time/effort to results that fuel this git gud mentality
So something you said at the end is the key piece for why the CoD community hates skill based matchmaking -- Call of Duty is not fun when you are losing. This is not a mistake, it is by design. It has been this way since Call of Duty 4 and the introduction of Kill Streaks. Success at Call of Duty means getting 15 kills in a row, getting into a gunship, and getting 15 more kills for free. This is inherently extremely one sided fun. Simply playing CoD and winning and losing a TDM match 95/100 or something is not fun by Call of Duty's own standards. It's antithetical to the systems the game encourages you to use. So having a matchmaking system that aggressively pushes every player of every skill level into a 50/50 probability match, and artificially pushes everyone toward a 1KD and 1WL ratio is not fun. A lot of people try to compare skill based matchmaking in fighting games to shooters, and this is why I don't think that works. Fighting games are fun whether or not you are winning or losing, for the most part, because the game does not reward you exclusively for getting perfect victories or winning in specific conditions. If it is a close fight, you can enjoy the struggle. If you are the better player and stomping, it is a relaxing opportunity to practice. If you are the worse player and getting stomped, there is a genuine opportunity to learn and develop. Call of Duty lacks this. I can't really speak to other shooters, but as far as I am aware the CoD community is the only one where skill based matchmaking is a hotly contested topic. All of this sets aside the fact that the matchmaking is not just skill based, it's now "engagement" based which almost certainly has been formulated to encourage purchase of $20 cosmetic bundles and $30 blackcell season passes.
skill based matchmaking is great, anyone saying otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about. the problem is when they (either really or allegedly) add algorithms to artificially give one team a higher chance to win, like the "loser queue" in league, which would be terrible if it's real a good skill based matchmaking is easy to do, the difficulty comes when you don't have enough players playing at a close enough skill and there's roles involved. once again to take league as an exemple, what if you get 10 players, but 2 are slightly better (while still being in an acceptable range) ? simple anwser is : put one of the good player in each team, but if they play different roles that might still give an advantage to one team
This is a huge part of why I still play U1. You can set up and run your own personal server if you desire and even setup a password so only you and your friends can play on it. And truthfully, even without a password if you don't hand out your IP no one can find it anyhow. Not as good of graphics as modern games, but it's still every bit as fun.
If people learnt that losing is just learning, we'd have more people playing fighting games. I guess I never understood the hate toward SBMM... Oh well. good video dude.
@@NoraNoita If I talked about every specific case my comment would have been much longer. Yes I'm aware of moments like that, but with a good enough rating system that wouldn't happen as much. You just have to keep playing. Not every single match is going to be a stomp. Once you are where you need to be... if you keep getting bodied and not learn from your losses that's a skill issue.
i like the way tf2 community servers do it: completely random teams, and with large team sizes of 12v12 (the most common team size, it can be as large as 50v50) it makes it hard for a single bad or good player to control which team wins. also, skill gap between pros and average players in tf2 are lower than other games, in tf2 the best players are around twice as powerful as an average player which is significant but not overwhelming. for example a team of 6 pro players would be an equal match for a team of 12 average players.
this ensures that even the worst players won't lose all the time, and the best players won't win all the time, but still rewards people for improving so they can win slightly more often, and make a bigger contribution to their team.
this isnt how tf2 matches play out at all? what? the skill ceiling is so high and abusable with the amount of mobility that any decent demo or soldier can cremate half or more of a team on their own
A lot of it was also the fact that so many players genuinely thought they were gods at the game because they only remember the good games they had back in the day, or they beat all their friends in split screen. In their mind "If they would just turn off sbmm" because "It's not based on ping anymore" and "I"m only going up against MLG kids" and not being average or bad.
Hahaha no way, I was binging your older vids and this drops. Nice!
You touched upon my biggest problem with competitive games.
For context, I've had a lot of bad competitive experiences, getting stomped with no recourse because my friends introduced me to a game just so they'd have someone to get easy wins against; bad matchmaking sticking me with teammates that I can't carry to victory, further bad matchmaking sticking me up against teams of incredibly sweaty high-skill players, dealing with cheaters, etc. I can't stick with competitive gaming long, because it invariably leads me to get salty and tilted when nothing I do lets me eke out a win every now and again. If I want to lose constantly, I have real life for that.
The problem is that I can't enjoy the process of losing. No competitive game I've tried has felt good enough that I can honestly say I've had fun while losing. As a result, when I start losing, I start looking at why I'm losing. And if I can't find anything that I'm blatantly doing wrong, that I can do better on, then I start looking at why my opponents are winning. And that's where the problems start - usually, I find it's because they have some advantage I don't have. Such as a weapon unlock I haven't earned, or a gacha pull I can't match because my luck is crap, or maybe they're playing on a platform that allows finer control over the game than what I have. Or maybe they're even flagrantly cheating! In any case, I eventually conclude that I'm losing because my opponents have advantages that I can't match or beat. And unless I unlock the necessary counters soon, I quit. After all, why keep scraping away with loss after loss just to feed the winners wins?
There's often a problem in competitive games where the rich get richer, and those who lose barely get anything at all. That makes losing sting even worse because now the gap between you and the guy who beat you has widened. It's even worse in games where your win/loss, kill/death, whatever records are publicly viewable. If you don't have a good enough record, you can't even make a salient point in public. No matter how factually correct you are, the first thing anyone's going to do is look at your record, see that it's bad (or even just 'not good enough' to make the point you want to make in their eyes) call you a scrub, and dismiss your point out of hand without even considering it. The fact that in these games, losing actively lowers your status among your peers and, if it gets bad enough, renders you into a pariah, is not something I want to deal with. Again, if I want to deal with that, I have real life.
Then there's the issue of sportsmanship. Competitive games often have winners be terrible winners, leading to shit like teabagging and other insulting behavior. They use the fact that they won as an excuse to put you down. This lack of sportsmanship is something I have little tolerance for. I want to respect my peers, win or lose, but I can't respect someone who's busily shoving their character's crotch into my downed corpse's face while I'm helpless to do anything about it. Furthermore, calls to sportsmanship often get you put down by other players, since apparently nobody gives a solitary fuck about any form of sportsmanship that isn't mandated by the game rules. There's absolutely no respect for your fellow players, and that's infuriating.
As a result, losing isn't fun in most games. Between the fact that losing inherently sucks, and can happen for reasons totally beyond your control, the fact that usually the rich get richer and the winners win more as their advantage over losers widens, and the utter lack of respect for other players or any form of sportsmanship in many games, losing feels utterly terrible.
great video, more really need to see it. this "sbmm is bad" echo chamber has gone on long enough. sbmm has been in games for a long time and is a necessary evil for preserving the player base. i talk to ppl irl (who are cod casuals and have no awareness of sbmm or what goes) and they have a great time playing cod. sure, having a no sbmm playlist or some modified playlist would be great to jump into but that's going off topic... having a random crazy match once in a while is fun but if you're not challenged/getting totally destroyed every match it gets boring or frustrating. some love to 2box and get those crazy kills but to me that's not fun, it's a competitive game and i wanna be challenged, learn from my mistakes and outplay better players because i was better in the situation...some matches will be more even some will be more varied.
The problem is not SBMM by itself, a bit is necessary. The problem is how tight it is. Call of Duty and Halo: Infinite, for example, have such tight parameters that if you're competent you're bound to have terrible connection quality (Halo 2's SBMM was very loose by today's standards). It's OK if, say, the bottom x% don't match the top x%, up to a degree. It's also absolutely terrible when you go play the casual gamemode with not so competitive friends, and due to your skill level you simply can't play with them because that'd make them have a terrible time. It's as simple as in casual modes connection should have a bigger weight in the equation, and vice versa for ranked ones. Playing games with friends in a casual mode should ALWAYS be a priority for a dev team, because the casual population is naturally bigger than the competitive one.
At the risk of sounding harsh a lot of the people so hard against SBMM state that they don't "want to sweat", it is extremely pathetic to enter a competitive game and expect not to have to put some effort in.
They have since pivoted to saying "oh but its EOMM (Engagement Optimized Matchmaking)". While I don't necessarily think Activision wouldn't do that, the evidence presented by these COD commentators isn't very convincing and they're often flat out wrong. For example these content creators said that COD never had SBMM until recently, but a developer for Black Ops 2 who worked on its implementation confirmed it's been in since at least COD4.
For context I think why you see it from Call of Duty specifically is because COD has a fairly low skill floor/cieling. A lot of early youtubers got popular by being pretty good at games like COD4-BLOPS2. Back then a lot of their opponents would have been not only new to Call of Duty but to video games in general. It's been 20 years though so the people still playing have gotten better and the new player has at least played other games, in short being good enough to be popular is now harder and these people are bitter that they have to "sweat" to get the same results they got 20 years ago when the skill curve was heaver on the lower end.
Combine this with how snowbally Call of Duty can be with things like killstreaks and 2 things happen. 1) a winning player looks even better and gets to show off with their rewards that can destroy the other team. 2) The losing team now has to deal with a variety of nonsense in addition to already getting killed by opposing players. Losing in scenario 2 is so oppressive that it's not fun and the winning player once he's started winning can basically relax.
Your point on liking to win but not compete is spot on. A common factor with these content creators is that they complain about not being able to play off meta. Funnily enough SBMM actually helps them here because in a random distribution they'll never lose rank and eventually be put in a tier where they can win off meta. And even without the tier fixing, can they not have fun by playing off meta even if they lose?
first off, fuck off. this exact reasoning is why people drop games.
i hate this idea that video games are somehow inherently meritocratic, that there's somehow a 1:1 ratio of time/effort to results that fuel this git gud mentality
So something you said at the end is the key piece for why the CoD community hates skill based matchmaking -- Call of Duty is not fun when you are losing. This is not a mistake, it is by design. It has been this way since Call of Duty 4 and the introduction of Kill Streaks. Success at Call of Duty means getting 15 kills in a row, getting into a gunship, and getting 15 more kills for free. This is inherently extremely one sided fun. Simply playing CoD and winning and losing a TDM match 95/100 or something is not fun by Call of Duty's own standards. It's antithetical to the systems the game encourages you to use. So having a matchmaking system that aggressively pushes every player of every skill level into a 50/50 probability match, and artificially pushes everyone toward a 1KD and 1WL ratio is not fun.
A lot of people try to compare skill based matchmaking in fighting games to shooters, and this is why I don't think that works. Fighting games are fun whether or not you are winning or losing, for the most part, because the game does not reward you exclusively for getting perfect victories or winning in specific conditions. If it is a close fight, you can enjoy the struggle. If you are the better player and stomping, it is a relaxing opportunity to practice. If you are the worse player and getting stomped, there is a genuine opportunity to learn and develop.
Call of Duty lacks this. I can't really speak to other shooters, but as far as I am aware the CoD community is the only one where skill based matchmaking is a hotly contested topic.
All of this sets aside the fact that the matchmaking is not just skill based, it's now "engagement" based which almost certainly has been formulated to encourage purchase of $20 cosmetic bundles and $30 blackcell season passes.
90% of Marvel players quit right before it's their time to beat Wazzler.
I love your binge watching you old and new content! Your voice is so calming, it's nice. Keep up the great work Mild Conviction!
skill based matchmaking is great, anyone saying otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about.
the problem is when they (either really or allegedly) add algorithms to artificially give one team a higher chance to win, like the "loser queue" in league, which would be terrible if it's real
a good skill based matchmaking is easy to do, the difficulty comes when you don't have enough players playing at a close enough skill and there's roles involved.
once again to take league as an exemple, what if you get 10 players, but 2 are slightly better (while still being in an acceptable range) ?
simple anwser is : put one of the good player in each team, but if they play different roles that might still give an advantage to one team
This is a huge part of why I still play U1. You can set up and run your own personal server if you desire and even setup a password so only you and your friends can play on it. And truthfully, even without a password if you don't hand out your IP no one can find it anyhow. Not as good of graphics as modern games, but it's still every bit as fun.
As long as it's not pay-to-win stuff, I'm good.
If people learnt that losing is just learning, we'd have more people playing fighting games. I guess I never understood the hate toward SBMM... Oh well. good video dude.
well, losing by like suffering through a stomp is not learning anything of value, same is winning by stomping. It gives a false narrative.
You should always John if you play someone way better or way worse. It's a waste of time otherwise.
@@NoraNoita If I talked about every specific case my comment would have been much longer. Yes I'm aware of moments like that, but with a good enough rating system that wouldn't happen as much. You just have to keep playing. Not every single match is going to be a stomp. Once you are where you need to be... if you keep getting bodied and not learn from your losses that's a skill issue.
First
No one cares buddy.