SBMM is one thing. RBMM (Retention/Revenue based Match Making) is a whole different can of worms. Which i suspect will become a point of contention even more in the future. Where the game not only takes into account your skill to match your up "fairly" but also play and spending patterns to keep you engaged and spending more money. There are suspicions in the community that Apex uses Retention based match making. Hypothetically: It throws you an easy lobby which you win as the first match of the day to get you hooked. And then shifts the difficulty of lobbies to keep you in the sweet spot between frustrated and rewarded. Which results in longer play sessions. Than just giving you easy lobbies. And activision filed some patents for revenue based matchmaking. Where it would throw you into the lobby with players that had stronger weapon variants then you to get you to spend money on loot boxes.
i can definitely tell this is more common in warzone because ive noticed how ive gone on a week hiatus, then for my first match, im destroying little malding children left and right and then all the sudden everyone skill boosts by putting TTV in their name
I did not expect mokey here, but you make some good points. An argument to this is that, while dishonest, it does positively impact the experience quite a lot of casual players at the expense of more serious players playing to win. Where it becomes an issue is when it gets into candy crush levels of mind hacking, causing people to play even if they aren't having fun.
Highly doubt this to be true, every game i play in Apex gives me shit at the begining and makes me slowly work up to better items as the match goes. The few times i have won it have been after multiple long matches where i end up hopped up on adrenaline while sweating my ass off trying to win, the game don't give me shit ever.
One of the biggest issues with skill based matchmaking is when the game cant find a match to put you in because there arent enough players at your skill level in your region so it just puts you in high ping lobbies.
SBMM wasn’t particularly an issue with call of duty until the decision was made to break up lobbies after every match. Before that change, after match a few people would leave and people of similar skill could join to replace them. You could play for a while with the same lobby until someone had to leave. Regardless of if you had a particularly good or bad game you could choose to stick in the lobby or leave to find another. This meant that adjustment to the level of ELO players the game would put into your lobbies would slowly adjust better or worse as players shuffled in and out and would much more closely resemble a players skill as the grand majority of players would remain in the same lobby if they felt it was a close game. However if you get forced into a new lobby every match you lose that adjustment period, and if you happen to have a particularly good game, suddenly you’ll be facing off against extremely high skill players and getting absolutely swept. The other half of the problem is that the designers of that system foresaw people intentionally losing matches so to try and pub stomp and as a result they made it much harder to lose ELO and go to a lower SBMM level where you might be more comfortable. This ended up making the game feel like it was punishing you for doing well. I honestly believe that shifting back to consistent game lobbies would drastically improve CoD players reaction to SBMM
The reason why they went with the changing lobbies is to prevent “boosting” which is where a team of highly skilled friends dominate a lobby and have other friends join the lobby as the others drain from it until it’s just a group of 12 friends in a match and they just grind stuff out with each other
@@tobe.moemeka because some games definitely have done and still do this shit of "get stomped one match, next one you will be paired with fresh installs but if you stomp the next match will be a sweatfest". You can see this in action very easily with Dead By Deadlight giving you free wins after you get demolished as a Killer, although Dead By Deadlight has a very badly Implemented SBMM elo system for Killer players as its laughably easy to gain Elo but almost impossible to lose it.
One guy (who I remember being formally affiliated with Activision) once said that newer players would be placed into lobbies with players who had recently bought bundles. This way, when a newer player gets killed, they will see the killcam of the player using a specific weapon variant, convincing them that buying the weapon variant/bundle will imporve their gameplay based on their placement in these specific lobbies. After purchasing such cosmerics, the player is said to be placed into newer-player lobbies, resulting in the "bot-lobby" experience and giving them the illusion that purchasing the cosmetic drastically improved their gameplay when, in reality, it was all RBMM (don't know if this is just lingo or an actuall term, but I'll give credit to MokeySniper).
My experience with Call of Duty's SBMM in recent years has just been "oh, I'm doing really well in this match, I can probably look forward to getting absolutely destroyed in the next few games because I just went up several levels in the SBMM" and then of course the SBMM taking precedent over the quality of the connection and landing me in many 100+ ping lobbies.
It's funny because Destiny 2 uses Connection Based Matchmaking, which sounds great, until you realize you're being put up against the same 6 good players over and over again with no escape just because they have the best connection with you
@@Retro-- that must have something to do with where you live I rarely get into a match with the same people twice in destiny unless I'm playing iron banner
I only have this experience on the main sweat maps, like Shipment or Nuketown. Remember how everyone complained about Cold War being unplayable because of SBMM? I have the impression that most people who said that only ever played Nuketown, because on other maps, it wasn't nearly as bad. It's probably worse since Warzone dropped, because these kinds of maps are now the go to grinding maps for Warzone.
Yeah, pretty much, playing recent CoD games' MP has basically just been "man I've been having fun for the past few matches, so as punishment for being alright at the game I'm gonna be thrown into the fucking sweatiest lobbies ever full of tryhard FaZe wannabes for the next match or two"
yeah imo sbmm isnt bad at all in most cases and in most games they have sbmm. But casual sbmm needs to be toned down to a point where you dont really notice it. Most games succeed in that like r6 siege for example and sometimes you get a few people just straight better than you, other times you get people worse than you, but on average it feels fairly equal without you needing to sweat your balls off. Then Cod MW and CW come into the picture and they have their sbmm tuned super high (+ Retention based match making i think) so you get put against people worse than you and do alright or pop off even when playing casually. Then it bumps you up and put you against people way above your skill level rocking meta only loadouts and play styles and you get shit on until you drop back down to playing against people way worse than you. rinse and repeat. That shit is not fun and just infuriating, and if you got friends and they arent at your skill level its worse for them because they never have a good match. even when you're going against people worse than you they can just barely stay afloat for that one match. It's like playing ranked 24/7 but you flip flop between top 10% players and top 50% every handful of games and its not fun and doesnt feel good. All mp games should have a protected bracket for people that just bought the game, and people that cant maintain whatever metrics is used as the skill metric for the dev team. After that it should just be lightly tuned sbmm that tries to put you with people around your level but will maybe take some people above and/or below your skill level to fill out the match faster if it cant find enough at your level (like siege does).
I think it's nice to have both options. Not 100% sure how halo infinite works but I find in casual its a good mix of people who've had halo 3 in their hands when they were born and people who just picked it up. Where as Ranked is usually accurate to skill level and is a bit of a sweat fest.
Yeah, i really think that a game would be great if casual matches are random and ranked matches are using SBMM. Also as you said, i think that a higher nomber of players in a game needs a higher time to "creat" a lobby and random match making is a solution but in games like R6 or OW etc, we need the SBMM to have great matches
I haven't played infinite ranked yet, but good job to 343i if they've managed to keep the sweating to the competitive modes. The casual modes feel exactly like they should: casual
Yeah halo does it generally well, but on cod it’s like you’re playing ranked the whole time and they just need to release their games with a ranked / CDL mode with this SBMM System in it. Cod is no longer a casual game and has lost its way.
Actually, matchmaking shouldn't be "random" for public matches in CoD, it should be based upon connection. Then settle the lobby via team balancing. SBMM should only be used in ranked matches. Connection should be most important.
@@GuyBeyondGod I know. I used "SBMM" for familiarity for other people. It used to be SBMM, but now it's a worse system. I actually posted the following comment here at the same time as the one you replied to. "The new name of the game is player engagement and player retention. EOMM. (Engagement Optimized Matchmaking) EOMM attempts to keep players playing longer and is based on short-term performance/skill. This often can create the "roller coaster effect" on winning and losing, that is heavily noticed. EOMM is a profit driven system."
@@goon009 That's exactly what it is. People think they're playing a game, but actually, you're riding an algorithm and the game is playing you. Very manipulative.
The primary contention (for me at least) about how over tuned SBMM in current COD seems to be is not strictly getting matched against really sweaty players but in how rapidly you will ping pong between skill brackets. You start out playing much less skilled players and so dominate, rocket up whatever skill ladder exists getting some good game along the way, and then get matched against people who are going to demolish you and then send you down to the lower bracket starting the whole thing over again. It doesn't feel like you are naturally settling into a skill level but rather the game says every player gets a certain amount of guaranteed wins per hour so blowouts feel more common than in previous years as you are either being given a win or it's your turn to be someone else's.
This is do to something called EOMM. (Engagement optimized match making) it essentially puts you into 1 or 2 easy matches at first, so you start off in good mood. Then it might throw you into some relatively even games to keep you focused and competitive, as those games are the best for long term game session engagement. Then it throws you into hard games, that the system Knows your team will definitely lose. After this, to make sure you don’t rage quit, you get a few easy games and the cycle repeats. They’re not trying to make all matches even, they’re trying to make you play as long as possible. Some matches are rigged so that one team has more skill than the other.
Thats honestly what killed the game for me. If it were TRUE sbmm, like people on my skill level, no biggie. But its not. Its very obviously fixed. This just kind of creates a sense of why play this game. Am i doing really good? Its because the game wants me to. Doing bad? Its my turn to get shit on and someone elses turn to do good. What in the fuck is the point?
The thing about Call of Duty is that the cost of the SBMM in the past 3 titles (MW2019, BO:CW, Vanguard) has been persistent lobbies in multiplayer, and a large degradation in connection consistency and quality. CoD has always had very simple SBMM in the past, and it allowed you to meet people with a large diversity in skill, and to make rivalries, friendships, and funny moments, which is what made CoD a staple for me growing up. The new SBMM/EOMM (Engagement Optimized Match Making) model completely removes the "community" aspect of CoD, as another youtuber, XclusiveAce, has put it in the past, and this is without even mentioning the strength of the matchmaking creating the feeling of every match being pre-decided and predictable.
Yeah the SBMM in CoD has gotten so bad in the past 3 games that I can tell if the game wants me to win or lose the match within the first 2 minutes. That being said, the match making also seems unbalanced because when I lose, it's almost always a squashfest. Just straight up unfun
I have no issues with skill based matchmaking in games like Overwatch, CSGO, and Valorant. Those games are genuinely fun to play competitively. Call of Duty however has been completely ruined by skill based matchmaking. I used to go to all the midnight releases and now I haven't even bought the last few games due to SBMM. Call of Duty is more fun when it's ENTIRELY RANDOM. Some games are competitive, some you get stomped, some you get to own everyone. Call of Duty was designed around being able to actually get killstreaks which is completely backwards when you have SBMM trying to keep everyone at a 1KD. Call of Duty as of recent has become particularly egregious with "retention based matchmaking" where they will periodically throw you into a noob lobby so you don't stop playing the game. The whole thing just feels fake and you know you're being gamed. I just want entirely random matchmaking based off purely connection. There's zero reward in actually getting better at Call of Duty because you can't even feel it. You just get put into harder lobbies. Literal pro players are below a 2 KD a lot of the time. I feel bad for anyone who never got to feel the old school skill progression in Call of Duty. I remember being a complete noob looking at the AC-130 and thinking "there's no way I'll get that many kills without dying" then slowly progressing and getting to where I had the confidence to run it....then getting my first nuke. God that personal skill progression was fantastic. Now every match of Call of Duty FEELS THE EXACT SAME! Zero variety, zero reason to get better, no visible ranks. Everything about it is utter dogshit. It's a real shame.
@@riccardo1796 I think that it has grotten way stronger where you used to be able to use enjoyable weapons and not get stomped every time now if you are not using meta weapons you are a dead man
@@riccardo1796 That's realistically not true at all. Older CoDs had 2 matchmaking pools. A super low skill/noob protected bracket....and then EVERYONE ELSE. That's why you'd see people that had legit 3-5 KDs in the older games. That doesn't happen in the newer games.
My distaste for SBMM comes from how it changes the game for my friends. Especially on call of duty. I have always been a bit of a sweat at COD, but I have many friends who are pretty average. When we team up it's a great gaming experience for me because the games are easier than what I am used to. The opposite is true for my friends. They tend to get frustrated because they are only going up against people well above their skill level. After they realize I am the cause of the problem, they game with me less and less, and eventually not at all. And playing solo in high skill sweat fests every day when all you want to do is unlock weapon camos is the absolute worst. For me this whole dilemma ruined the experience. I don't plan to play any more CODs, or invest much time in games with high SBMM.
I am on the opposite side of things, I have the higher skilled friends and playing where I feel like Im just dragging the team down is very demoralising, just feel stressed rather then enjoying leisure time
I have had the exact same experience only that I'm the new random PuG player that gets put in your team to balance out the fact that you're there and I end up feeling absolutely useless and uninstalling. And you never even noticed that I was there.
This happens when my wife and I play Halo Infinite. She's consistently top of her team when solo queueing, but when we team up she's the bottom. Except recently when she's been getting so much better she's often second to bottom, and one glorious time she was top of our team. She gets especially frustrated because that means it's also more difficult for her to unlock the weekly challenge rewards practically at all, and since she isn't devoted to the game enough to want to buy the Battle Pass, she relies on the free content to get any cosmetics. She does plan to get the Battle Pass once she maxes out her level in it assuming she doesn't quit before then, but that possibility is becoming more and more likely as the grind continues.
Something you didn't address about team size (battlefield/apex), it isn't that the bellcurve averages out by some mystic natural occurance when the team size is large. The reason it generally works is because by having open ended map design, and lots of players, better players have a larger disadvantage (worse players are more likely to flank from behind, or catch them in an asymmetric postion via vehicles or cover/height). So for something like apex, the idea is you might not win against another team mechanically but you can wait for another team to weaken/pick them off, play defensively and bait the stronger team into a disadvantageous position, or initiate on them in a way that gives you a numbers advantage. Later in a game's life, average/good players figure out the meta which counteracts that stuff, which is when skill mm is needed. With a lack of skillbased matchmaking, it's often one team will only have bad/average players with one or two experienced outliers, while another team might have no great/awful players but a large amount of average/middle curve players. Those are the scenarios where team balance/matchmaking are most necessary, imo
(Off-topic, sorry) Man, I think of you every time my shuffle blesses me with Weezer! You didn't introduce me to 'em, but you're like the only person I've heard even acknowledge their existence outside of my immediate family :3
My Take on SBMM: In the old MW2 days I would find myself playing against people of an obviously higher skill tier and after so many games with and against them I found myself catching up to that skill by figuring out a way to counter or match their play style which would make it a highlight with these "gotcha" moments; sometimes friends were made with this rivalry. When all lobbies are randomized people who are the same then there is no special experience, there is nothing that stands out, there is no social aspect of this multiplayer game, you might as well play against similarly skilled bots. You likely wouldn't even know if they were bots unless you had an intimate knowledge of how those bots behaved and could identify them as such.
Facts. Best comment right here. I remember old cod being hard for the first few weeks, but you could actually get better and eventually you were on top if you kept it up. Not everywhere in the middle like it is now.
This is EXACTLY how I learned to play cod. I was a walking free kill but sticking with the same players allowed me to learn how they play, adapt to, and even use their tactics bit by bit. It was amazing feeding someone their own medicine.
My problem with sbmm especially in cod, is that you don't see the results for getting better at the game. This wasn't a problem with random lobbies, because you could see your stats slowly get better and better. Sbmm has eliminated that feeling, to the point where I don't even care about how well I do and just end up messing around doing random stuff
SBMM is for soft people nowadays thats all it is, its taking all the raw toughness and perseverance/pleasure away and they think its great to lose these senses
Yup, I remember in bo4 I didn't play much, then played for 2 weeks consistently, and I could see the progress, started getting more killstreaks / wins etc. Did the Same thing with mw2 after ranked came out, my kd has gone up, but I just feel like I'm running on a hamster wheel playing the game. Might get 1 game every day where I'm allowed to have a kd higher than 1.4
I feel like a good deal of the hate for it comes from people around my age that grew up with games that didn't have sbmm, and we had to go through the slog of getting our assess handed to us and get better, before finally we could be the ones consistently doing well. But now with sbmm we are always doing consistently average. Also I think part of the issue with apex, is that I'm pretty sure the game takes into account survival time and what end position your team ends up in to determine "skill" when really what this leads to is players avoiding conflict out of fear of getting stomped on until they are forced into conflict as one of the four last teams and sbmm sees that and goes "oh man they lasted a while, better bump them up a tier" while completely ignoring the fact that nobody on the team got a kill, or even broke anyone's shields
Valorant also does a real poor job at determining skill, through kills and making entry kills (first kill of the round) more valuable .. this makes no sense in a game where you REALLY need support players
Apex really isn't bad, lose a few games and it'll get easier. I feel like in COD i can get stomped ten games in a row and still get put against max rank sweats, it has honestly just killed COD for me and i have bought every single one since the PS2. Cold War was the straw the broke the camels back so to speak
I agree, when i played Cod1 UO and Cod 4 when they were new you would either do good or shit but it didnt really matter i felt. But now with people play to win like its life or death and throwing SBMM in (or making it a lot more strict?) makes it less fun for the better players. Like they added it because the majority of the player base is average and its them who will buy the most copies. Fair enough, kinda, but it makes the high skill players (who advertise the game on YT and twitch i guess) get burnt out of the game and getting put against a lot of hackers every 10th game. Kinda a double hit for us and isnt really fair in my eyes. They should make SBMM so its a LOT more forgiving on who you are put with (or random excluding those who clearly cant play like very low skilled and the disabled) and have ranked as casual matches are now 😂 Thats all it is, just doesnt show us our SBMM score/rank lol
Not sure about cod1 uo, but a developer recently during the whole SBMM discussions mentioned that cod4 had SBMM. Most multiplayer games in the xbox 360 era had SBMM with matchmaking, and was even a feature advertised with xbox live etc. That said, it doesn't change that how the SBMM is implemented can massively change the user experience especially in regards to how it functions with players queued together etc. That said I think most people imagine older games as not having SBMM when most of them did, and because of that don't know what actual random matchmaking would be like and how awfully unbalanced matchups could be. A good recent example is destiny 2, where the community often had the usual complaints about sbmm. Then they removed SBMM from a multitude of modes and complaints got far worse with people complaining that they were getting completely stomped multiple games in a row without a break, or the opposite with some people saying they got so bored of it because their team would completely dominate. I think people in general are always going to blame their frustration on matchmaking when a game doesn't go how they want it.
hunt showdown does this and its very nice; even seeing the projected ranking of a team including the MMR modifiers you get for playing solo/duos against trios
I like the idea but realistically it would have to be really really tight sbmm for players to not be the target of harassment which some games just can't achieve without long queue times. Although games should definitely let you know that the game has sbmm
I feel like it's a good concept, but is really hard to execute in practice. When I used to play Call of Duty, I would be put into a lobby with people who are very new for a few games, which would be easy for me to do good in. But then the game decides to put me into a game where people play so well I cant do anything. It put me in a cycle that took part in me quitting the game entirely.
That's because Cod doesn't just use sbmm. It uses an engagement-based matchmaking to "keep you hooked." It gives you a really easy game every once in a while to make it more fun for you, but then it goes right back to the opposite for about as long as the algorithm thinks you can take without closing the game.
@@TheBestcommentor I stopped playing early last year, but found that it's based on your winning streak instead of "player retention". It places you in an easier match right after you boot it up for the day, then a harder match if you win that one, and even harder until you lose. And if you lose, you become "the tryhard" for the lower-skilled players that got pitted against you after that, then you'll win that match & back to the SBMM cycle. It's _very different_ to a "random" matchmaking like Halo Infinite; where it hooks you up on a lobby based on the first thing the game sees, and there's no guarantee if you'll be winning/losing every match no matter how good/bad you are.
@@TheBestcommentor why would they do that though? if they want you to get hooked they should give you easy lobbies all the time, putting in hard lobbies is useless if the goal is to keep players playing
So most of my experience with sbmm is with CoD. I noticed it because there's a pretty considerable skill gap between me and my brother. Whenever we played together I would absolutely stomp on the lobby while my brother struggled against the sweats. I just think strict sbmm should be reserved for competitive ranked play where you can actually see and track your skill level. Pubs should be random matchmaking with as little sbmm as possble. Does this mean that in pubs I could get absolutely stomped on by a sweat? Yes. But it's also likely that the opposite could happen the next game and imo it feels more fair. The problem with sbmm is it feels like I'm being punished for spending tons of hours learning the mechanics and getting good at the game instead of being rewarded for my effort.
So you want to get good at the game by being fed bots? I mean I kinda get your point, except for the last sentence. What you call reward sounds like something that would ruin the game for others.
@@hovnocuc4551 What I mean is leave strict SBMM to competitive modes ONLY. I don't want to bring my A game every time I play. Sometimes I want to play for fun and do dumb stuff. Sometimes I want to sweat like crazy. Having a strict SBMM just sucks the life out of the game. So what if it's not perfectly and exactly fair. It's not the Olympics. It's not a tournament. It's a video game designed to have fun. If I end up matching against someone that's way higher skill than I am what I'll do is just leave the match. Without SBMM my chance of encountering an easier lobby for me is way better than with strict SBMM where I'm pretty much guaranteed to find a sweat of my skill level or higher.
@@yazao8282 exactly. this is what all games need to implement. and i feel you on the goofing around stuff. like if i want to run a riot shield in warzone and troll i’m gonna get stomped. sbmm has sucked all the joy from apex and warzone for me. i hate that when i have a good game it’s probably an algorithm designed to keep me glued to the game by feeding me a good lobby every once and a while. every game should have a ranked mode with sbmm and a casual mode without it. no one will care if they meet a good player every once and a while, it creates incentive to get better. plus, people who are good at things should be rewarded for it. if you develop a skill and then try to show it off to people who are better at that skill than you it’s gonna be really frustrating. especially since no matter how good you get it’ll never be good enough. point is, if your good at a game, you SHOULD be able to dominate. ranked would come in for the people who want a challenge. that’s my take on the situation.
The SBMM in Halo 2 and Halo 3 felt really damn good. I never matched into a game where I felt like I was sweating too hard. They didn't lack competition, and some matches were breakneck, but the balance lent itself to a more casual experience where both teams were playing at a similar skill level and more importantly at a similar attitude. That's something folks seem to really forget about gaming, the intention behind it. SBMM in those games worked in such a way where I felt like I could just dork around a little, take more risks in my gameplay, and experiment with the map and sandbox available. The modern implementation of SBMM in Halo Infinite and modern COD feels far more strict which limits my ability to experiment because using anything non-meta virtually guarantees a lose. The games are evenly skilled, just like before, but now the attitude of players has shifted to be more competitive and fierce, where before you might be matched with people just trying to have a good time. From all my research it appears like SBMM is good, but it become beneficial to the overall experience when it lends itself to a more social/casual experience vs a competitive one. Now, my head-canon on why this shift has occurred is because e-sports has grown quite a lot in recent years, therefore devs are designing games to be competitive to appeal to the e-sport audience in hopes of driving revenue. Now, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, at least not intrinsically, but the loss of focus on the common gamer (a demographic that every day grows, and is primarily older therefore more time restricted) has evolved gaming in a way where games don't seem to be designed for fun, rather they're designed to be competitive. That shift in philosophy has made modern shooters less fun. I think a return to the older SBMM systems would be very beneficial to the health of gaming as a whole, but that's just my view on things.
I like the way games like rocket league seems to do it. Casual is kinda close to your skill and ranked is much closer. So in casual you get to play with a wider range of skills.
I actually really like that idea. I feel like fully removing sbmm is mostly not going to happen just because devs want people hooked on their games but making it far far looser for casual players seems like a really good idea, especially since you likely could get higher kill games and improving is actually gratifying unlike regular sbmm which just makes it feel like nothing has changed
yeah, thats how its suppossed to be at least for every normal thinking human, theres a reason the modes are called casual and competetive but in other game (COD) it has no meaning.
I've been playing casual team fortress 2 for over a decade now, a game that predates sbmm, and the sense of casual camaraderie is unmatched in modern titles. In casual, you're allowed to do stupid stuff, you're allowed to go off meta or use meme loadouts because none of it matters. Being in the sane lobby as someone who just installed the game and a veteran player like me creates a sense of community, new players can learn from veterans, veterans van goof off with new players. I play video games in my spare time ro relax. If you want a challenge play competitive. It's good to play a game where you can just chill.
And this one of the reasons why tf2 was never appealing for most ppl in the last decade and it never will You can still create a sense of community even without that, thats not exclusive to tf2 And even on competitive you are also allowed to play off meta (csgo aug, csgo negev are pretty good examples) ,nobody cares about the meta,nobody stops from you to use whatever weapon you please, ppl only care if the gun its good ,thats it... And the same implies for tf2, in tf2 almost nobody uses garbage weapons (like sandman or gas passer for example) and most ppl use the meta , again nothing exclusive to tf2 And also that most of the considerably low amount of new players tf2 usually gets get bored from the game becuase of how they easily get rekt by veterans (that are pretty much most of the playerbase) Shame that most ppl did not want to play competitive, it could have made the game better and probably still give some valve employee the motivation to still work on tf2 but well, community decided to choose that path and well lets see how this ends, I highly doubt tf2 would get a bright future
Same with mw2/3 The lobbies are filled with newbies and good players. You at least get a chance to improve by killing other people that are not as good Edit: I had some "rethinking" Its definitely good to play people that are better than you for improving. However, sometimes you just want to have a casual match shooting people around without sweating
@@Ultra289 i guess you havnt played mid-tier and up csgo and dont play community servers in tf2 in csgo if you use a negev in any rank regarded as "high" you are flamed by your teammates if you dont do better with said gun, also aug isnt really "off meta" its just not considered BiS tier, only reason its not used over the m4 all the time is the price and thats it tf2 is pretty much only community servers now and the servers i play on barely have sweats, out of 100 players 10 would be considered sweats and 3-4 of them would be using meta weapons to sweat with, the rest are people either trolling, casually killing, messing with movement mechanics, or just straight up fucking around, all on the same server, and on these servers if you dont directly kill the sweats they dont kill you. also the sandman is the most common scout melee i see (even on servers that are more competitive) even the wrap assassin is up there
@@shadeshotTV Played negev on global teams against globals and supreme for years (after negev started to cost 1700) even on T rounds, even revolver and MP5 as well, and to this day no kicks and no kicks ,nobody cares what you use as long as you know how to use it and ofc you understand the economics of csgo and you coordinate with team in order to pull off the strat... Thats it Aug is not meta anymore, it wasnt meta since its last nerf, same as sg ,not even the m4a4 is meta nowadays after the m4a1 buff (I always used the silencer so no rly changes for me) As long as you prove that you do something (it doesnt need to be a carry for team) they will shut their mouths and move on, pure and simple As for tf2 community servers, yeah ,its mostly a friendlies paradise which is why most ppl dont even play there (among other reasons as well) ,nothing against it but becuase is community server, however still never saw anyone actually using a garbage weapon like the sandman, not even friendlies use the sandman ,its just not fun to use garbage weapons becuase you ll easily be defeated and losing consistently can force a a weapon switch to every individual
One of the reasons for TF2's success in this area is because the game gives the players the power to police their own lobbies through vote-kicking. Wish every game would do that.
SBMM shouldn’t be “sensitive” (one game can entirely change the players you’re against) and instead be slowly changing. (Because there is always a learning curve). or you could have different modes, one with sbmm and one without
"i won this match" "oh, you won this match against players that were all on your level?" "uh... yeah?" "so that must mean you're a master at the game!" "wait, i never said i was-" *gets thrown into a lobby with the best players in the world*
Yeah, this is probably the biggest problem with the more "modern" SBMM, it feels turned up to 11. I mostly played CoD back on MW2 and MW3 and there it felt much more casual even if there was some. Now in MW19 you could actually feel how the others you were up against were very easy, then they were MLG, then easy, then MLG. Basically that it fluctuated too much.
If I’m good at a game, I should FEEL like I’m good at the game. That’s the problem with SBMM…You never know how good you are now matter how good you actually are.
My understanding is that the SBMM in pre-MW19 CoD games was not as strict--there was usually a protected bracket of the players at the bottom that didn't get queued with the general population, and then everyone else mingled to some degree. Obviously this is not so much the case in the post-MW19 era, where the game is constantly reevaluating your skill level after each match and (seemingly) bumping you into sweatier/harder lobbies after a few wins, and rewarding you with easier ones after a few losses, perhaps in order to hook the player into chasing the next high/win. I think the reasonable, obvious solution is just to go back to the pre-MW19 compromise of having the protected bracket for some percentage of players on the lower end, and then everyone else plays in the main pool. Obviously this is preferable for the slightly above average to great CoD players, but more importantly: variety is the spice of life in casual matchmaking. It is not just that sweating in casual matchmaking is obnoxious--and it really is, don't get me wrong, casual MM in most games should have very soft, elastic skill-based MM. But also that it is horribly boring. Very high tier players and content creators do like pubstomping, but there's certainly a sizable chunk of average and above average players like myself that simply appreciate the variety that a softer SBMM brings--lower skilled players play the game differently, play maps differently, use different weapons. --if I queue into a match of Cold War w/sweaty players, I can match their meta loadouts, pull out my tec9 or something else to counter the quickscoping meta, but it's very boring and predictable. Having a larger playerbase with more variance in skill level makes the game more interesting by being less predictable i.e. more fun. I don't recall his name, but the creator of Halo 2's ELO system for its matchmaking has some great commentary/tweets on this subject. Being very boring and predictable isn't so bad in games that are more strictly tests of skill, like CSGO--though NA MM is not particularly healthy atm/filled with smurfs at most ranks, also boring. --But being boring and predictable in a fun, silly arcade shooter like CoD is a death knell for the game's health as casual, approachable fun for most people.
My issue with very strict sbmm is that you never feel like you’re improving, or at least not as much as you should considering the time. Because your win rate has to be as close to 50% as possible you never get that feeling of just destroying the enemy team. In seige for example you may be legions better than you were a year ago, but your K/D remains the same and it feels like you plateaued when in reality you’re much better
@@elu9780 my argument for games where you're getting stomped was that nothing is stopping you from leaving the game, there is no penalty, so just leave. The issue comes in when the SBMM is so strict that even if you leave, there's no guarantee the next game won't be the same. With the older games you had a higher chance of getting a better game if you just leave.
@@elu9780 a slight sbmm is important but when its too strong you just have to sweat constantly to even get a 1 kd which is just stupid in a casual playlist just make a ranked and casual playlist turn the sbmm in casual down, let the noobs get better and go in ranked for sweating, its not that complicated
2 роки тому+2
@@faninaf In every match there's one death for every kill. So a k/d rating of 1 is the average. The people willing to sweat more are likely to get it. If everyone can agree not to sweat, no one needs to sweat.
@ i hope you are aware that i meant the kd of the individual. Also the problem is that even if somehow everybody would stop sweating people would still perform differently because there's something called skill gap. If I played without sweating it would still be sweating for a noob.
I feel like SBMM brings about a huge issue that im surprised you haven't mentioned - Smurfing In random matchmaking the chances of a high skill player getting to dominate a lobby full of low skill players is...well, random, and not particularly high. In SBMM, high skill players can use the system against itself and get like a new account or purposefully derank so they can consistently terrorise new players. This is especially bad in free games like CS:GO.
My question is how does it work in games where they reset your rank after time? I went back into Modern Warfare the other day, am at level 1, and I dunno if I was being ranked with lower skill people than me or not.
@@FlamespeedyAMV OW doesn't really have SBMM, a lot of ppl just get to a rank, know that if they keep playing they will lose, and just go on smurfs to still 'have fun'
@Stardust Alien hmmm well its not a strong version of SBMM. When I play Apex, my first game of ranked is ez and I win it 8/10 times. However the next game is ALWAYS a sweat fest. Building campers, rats, hard W presses etc. On OW, I really don't encounter it that much. Might be the game that makes a difference idk
When I played MW my problem was how the game measured skill. Accuracy was a big one. So if you used low rate-of-fire weapons like Marksman rifle, it would send you straight to the top of the skill level. I wouldn't even get 2 kills in a TDM game, it was a sweatfest disaster. I would have to intentionally hipfire a lot to lower my skill rank down again. Also the final straw was the horrible 100+ ping I always had, which some people have said that when the game can't find a high enough skill game for you, it dumps you in with the highest ping game instead. I was rubber banding and getting killed 3 seconds into the future most of the time, watching the killcams and comparing what I saw with what they saw. I completely quit the game, I couldn't take it anymore.
Drew the line at 100 Ping, :-) If you can't play at 100 ping you can't play, The rubber banding is packet loss, not ping, and getting killed in situations like behind walls it not ping related but, instead lag compensation. Lag compensation is the evil here not ping.
@MelloWattz 100 ping is 1/10 of a second, no human has ever been recorded with faster reactions. I'll say it again, if you can't play at 100 ping then you can't play.
@@nobodyimportant7380 100 ping is definitely a disadvantage in a game where guns kill in 200-300ms. I've played on 100 ping and 20 ping and you can definitely see and feel the difference.
@@rileybazan9747 I have never said it wasn't disadvantage or that it can't be felt, I said, if you can't play on a 100 ping successfully, then you can't play. Blaming a loss in a single gun fight on ping is pathetic. It can be accepted when it comes to a single shot weapon that ping is king.
I wish we had the option in games like CoD where we had two gamemodes: one using SBMM and one using random. And then we can see which is better, how it feels to play this and that, and which is more popular
One of the main issues is the tolerance level for skill, they’ve been tightening restrictions on skill levels per match and thats a lot of why people find ever game to be a sweat fest. In older games with SBMM like halo 2 and 3 the SBMM had tolerance levels that would allow for some skill based matching with average players in the game as well, which made games more fun and less sweaty, games weren’t about the scoreboard and perfect balance back then, it was all about having as much fun as possible each game
Random matchmaking isn't "the other alternative". Server browsers are above all. No matchmaker needed. (I'm not saying matchmaking is useless in all cases, just that a plain old server browser is a very good [if not the best] option that has to be brought up for discussion and not simply forgotten about. It should be the 'default' in my opinion.)
@Alvi Syahri The answer is that server browsers simply don't allow balance without some form of autobalance, which can backfire and piss people off. The value of a server browser is that you can join the same server/lobby consistently over and over again, and start to learn what the regulars are like and play to their strategies. But it really only works for either casual games or for games with a small enough playerbase that matchmaking would be redundant in general. If your game is even somewhat marketed to the competitive players, then some form of skill-based matchmaking or ladder system is very important imo. Of course, that's not to say that server browsers are useless. Like I said, they're perfect for casual play. You can join the same server or lobby over and over again, learn how the regulars play, and form a small community. There's a reason they're called pubs.
It would get cluttered real fast on the big big multiplayer games with low-ish number of players per game/round (with plenty of exceptions of course). Really depends on what kind of game it is tbh on whether it should have matchmaking or lobby/server browser. Thing is player population is a hard thing to predict, so most devs just go with the safer option (which is matchmaking). Neither is the end all be all.
Server browser is also a pain. Having to manually sort through lobbies to find one that is someone decent can take time and energy. As a new player in multiplayer games, it kept me out of trying to play against players in games that didn't have a ladder system (sc1, war3, UT, CS, ...) since finding a decent lobby was a long process of trial and error and getting flamed.
@@nefas909 Yeah, not to mention all the servers that are technically open to the public but in practice quickly become insular to the point where most of the regulars will immediately grief and/or votekick anyone they don't recognize.
@@stevethepocket And admins that kick you for killing them or some other minor thing. And server rules that ban half the guns. And the good players who stack on one team and stomp everyone else.
I personally prefer being able to simply pick from a server list, especially when there are different rulesets in some of them because you can choose for yourself what kind of lobby you want to play in and find micro-communities around gametypes that you like. it's not the most convenient option, but the sense of agency is a big help in enjoying a multiplayer game for me.
Yeah but this is back in the day when you actually had to operate your own game servers. Those days are long gone sadly it means these games will not always be available to play
There was always some kind of SBMM in cod, but mw19 introduced a much different one. Previous sbmm systems appeared to be closer to ‘random’ matchmaking, while from mw19 and forward sbmm gives the impression of a much ‘stronger’ one.
To be honest, I feel like Skill-Based Matchmaking and random Matchmaking should be options for getting a quick play(I'm not saying ranked btw), and an average of the two as an option too (basically SBMM, but with a broader range of skill than the normal one). I don't know why people haven't thought of this tbh, especially when Ranked (for competitive games) is way more reliant on SBMM in a lot of games.
Personally I really like Overwatch's take on it with having somewhat stricter SBMM in competitive modes but then having it to a lesser level in casual, it keeps the competitive integrity in ranked modes but also means that people who aren't as good still don't get stomped by a random top 500 player when they just want to relax
imo, sbmm is more of a benefit to low-level players than mid-high level ones: if you have new players it's very important to make sure they aren't getting destroyed immediately regardless of their skill level to retain them bots are also very common for this and are generally used alongside sbmm I believe
This doesn't work either, as a new player can win games against fellow noobs, then be put into a game with max rank sweat squads, it's unironically more fair to just have luck of the draw.
@@wolfkermek absolutely, imo sbmm in this case should mainly about not leaving everything up to luck, with entirely random matchmaking, there's always the potential for a pro to go up against a brand new player, even if it isn't common, imo that's the main sorta thing you should be guaranteeing won't happen with sbmm, I think going too much further than that starts to be an issue
I’d say that it’s a benefit to all except the highest skill level players. It’s hard to actually get better at a game as a mid level player if you’re either going against newbies and stomping them, or getting stomped by vets. Having some SBMM, even if more broad, helps people in the mid levels have opponents they can actually improve against
At higher levels, this encourages players to maintain their skill and continue practicing, thereby naturally encouraging players to improve to keep up with their peers. This works especially well in properly balanced competitive settings and ranked modes. Players naturally become a motivator for each other, be it a positive or negative force. At mid-to-lower levels (the VAST majority of players), good SBMM only ever matches players with others who are just as ignorant as you are. People who refuse to learn, who refuse to improve, and those who spread a lot of fake nonsense amongst others who don't know any better who then take that elsewhere as "knowledge". And then when these players do well in one or a few games, they think that they've already done as well as they can and believe they deserve to keep winning. They enter the next skill bracket and start losing and think it's unfair or some kind of cheating. It is not their fault they believe this. If your skill is low enough, you'll find yourself in rooms where people will outright acknowledge a lack of interest in improving, basically making every match a tossup if a team has one of these players. SBMM is an issue in modern video games because it brings into question why skill should even matter amongst the casual audience. As we know as game designers and enthusiasts in general, the actual competitive playerbase is dwarfed by the sheer number of casual players. Those players keep games alive. It also brings into question the value of winning as opposed to improving, since the only tangible reward comes from winning your games despite your personal performance. I don't understand why everyone these days is so fixated on skill when casual players are not even part of the equation, and I do think it's the prevalence of SBMM in places it doesn't need to be. Games like TF2 and many other shooters of old didn't rely on solely matchmade games, letting players decide where they wanted to go and who they wanted to play with- whether it be with better/worse/evenly matched players. It was your choice. I do strongly believe it's one excuse (of many) for companies to avoid producing a good lobby browser and allowing players to make their own custom games that are easy to join and enjoy as well. Random matchmaking would be completely useless, I don't even know why it's a question. The issue is matchmaking in general. Basically, players should be allowed to play with whoever they want, when they want, without feeling penalized for it. Custom games in a lot of modern shooters or games in general are frowned upon with lowered rewards or no post-game rewards to speak of. Players should be allowed to jump in the deep end if they want to, and being allowed to play with players of higher skill often gives players a goal to work toward or perspective on their own skill. And sometimes you just don't want to sweat, maybe you want to help some slightly lower skilled folks out who don't mind your presence. Maybe you do want to find a game of your level, you probably can. At the end of the day, it's everyone's choice to play with the people they're with, but most games these days don't even give us this choice. On top of all this, good matchmaking is just hard to make. If your playerbase starts to dwindle, who draws the line between being able to play with similar skilled players or find a match at all?
Thats what its supposed to do, at higher levels you just get tired of seeing the same 5 things over and over again and just decide to quit at one point, before that you still have to suffer over the biggest sweatfest there is, while you're there trying to enjoy the game properly, but literally cant because of the amount of 12 year olds with meta weapons and no life. On random matchmaking this would slightly increase the sweat level on most levels of skill, but vastly decrease it on higher levels + the people who "lack knowledge" are going to be forced to learn by experience what better players do, how they do it, and why they do it. There is also a clear display of who's better by the player's kd/score compared to the rest of the lobby (this assumes they're playing legit and no scummy strategies), this whole thing should make it so that people playing longer have better tactics and strategies, new players can pick up on them as they see it ingame, raising the skill level of everybody involved, except for the people who are extremely ignorant and purposefully ignoring every strategy they find, but this makes it so that they either learn the new stuff and keep up with at least the average, or get stomped every game, the second alternative leads to more fun in SBMM, since you dont get to see the awful experience of high mmr
I've read somewhere that sbmm improves player retention by giving players just the right number of wins and losses to keep them playing for a long time. Maybe this is true, but it does feel like a lot of game companies took the idea a little too far
You have a good point but I would rather have a more fun casually with my mates, I want to play SBMM in ranked, I enjoy playing a casual game that doesn't put me in a eSports tournament with prestige masters who do nothing but play the game 24/7 while I casually play the game and try to have fun
In call of duty its simple: to encourage new players to buy skins. New player=low stats. Low stats=easy lobbies. Easy lobbies=fun. Fun=like the game and consider spending some extra money on it. SBMM used to be different in cod.
I used to play a game with no SBMM, the name was Phantom Forces (On Roblox anyways). In that game each player needed to learn to play the hard way, and because TTK is really short in that game, every gun is easy to use and provides enough to kill high rank players, so its a different case than with COD franchise but i honestly prefer a game without SBMM, because the learning curve is hard, but it provides a great advantage once you're on the average, you can dominate almost every lobby since the average ranks you'll find there are from 50-100 and only have tough fights against smurfs (people who start on new accounts) and higher ranks (100+) i managed to get to rank 164 before dropping the game because it felt too slow compared to COD and other games, but i still cheerish the memories i created in it as part of my gamer soul core.
No body likes to get continously steam rolled, and everyone wants to feel like a pro player. I know that this would be difficult to work out, but I would live to see a system that enables a player to play in easy - hard lobby and offer incentives to play in the harder lobbies. That way, you could either have a more casual experience, or gain the incentives for playing against harder players. I think k that would be ideal if set up correctly.
I think the main issue with this is that pretty much everyone will queue for the easy lobbies. You'll have newbies learning the game, casual players just trying to relax, and high tier players/content creators trying to get their next highlight reel, essentially turning the "easy" lobby into a random lobby. But if you try to limit a player's access to the easy lobby based on play time and skill, then you have sbmm. It's a tough problem
love this idea. only issue i can see is at the top and bottom of the spectrum where the highest skill players can't easily get a greater than usual challenge and the lowest can't get a lesser than usual challenge, although i can also see that at higher levels, since the level of play is so high, it's always a good challenge. lower skill would be harder to match for easier lobbies though, probably becoming increasingly difficult to find easy lobbies the lower skill a player his i also had another though on this, where there are sort of "challenge lobbies" where higher skill players play against lower skill players (pretty much the higher skilled team is just outside the maximum skill difference) but the higher skilled players have handicaps chosen both by the weaker team (say like they can choose up to 3, a number i randomly chose) in the form of weapon/operator bans (weapon bans for games more like CoD and operator bans for games more like Rainbow Six Siege), gimmicks the opposing team has to deal with (like maybe no attachments, shorter grenade fuses, smaller magazine and ammo pool sizes, etc) and if the other team is feeling more confident they have the option to enable more handicaps for themselves in exchange for an increased reward for winning. would be difficult to balance, but considering that they're meant to be challenging for the better team and easier for the weaker team it may even be best to skew the balance in favor of the weaker team slightly
@@garbaj this system is exactly what the game war thunder does and you find that you get into matches much quicker playing the harders mode than the eseyer mode
@@billcat1592 casual often is simply just tossing whatever players there are in queue into whatever lobby spaces there are, regardless of skill, meaning you don't know whether you're gonna have an easy, hard or just a standard challenge. what's proposed here is having an intentionally skewed set of matchmaking options allowing players to face either worse or better players also matchmaking using these settings. i suggested a bit to expand on this where these settings loosen the matchmaking restrictions and try to make low skill vs high skill games within reason. for example, better players looking for an easy game would go against worse players looking for a challenging game, but skill is still taken into account so newer players looking for a harder game don't get literally unwinnable games because they got matched with extremely higher ranked opponents looking for an easy game.
I played Hunt: Showdown before and after SBMM was added/improved upon. There were definitely times before, where I was put into lobbies I had a very low chance of winning. There were very commonly players that were better than me, but when I did pull off a victory, it became all the sweeter. There were also times where there were players in my lobbies that were much less skilled than me as well. It was nice to come up against these players to sometimes get an easy win but sometimes they'd win as well and that was extremely frustrating. After SBMM was tightened up in the game, the sweat levels increased massively. I felt that I had to be playing at my very best every single game to be able to win. Even worse than that, the variety of matches became completely stale. Everyone at my skill level played more or less the same way and because of this the game became much more boring. Match variety was all but gone and try-harding every single game became exhausting.
I kind of feel the same. Three and four star lobbies can be really fun, and I can play a lot of different loadouts and still get kills and extract with bounties. Once I dip into the five star lobbies it just becomes meta loadouts and camping stalemates.
I don't know how it was before cuz on PS4 at launch it was one of the worst games I've ever played in my life, completely broken from the very basic shooter mechanics like aiming (record highest input delay I've ever seen, probably ever in a game, beating red dead redemption but with a jumpy fps that went below 20 on average). So i didn't play much. I got back when they released the PS5 patch so SBMM was already there. And i gotta say SBMM is goddamn STUPID. i actively play like shit to not have 6 stars MMR. Got there and started having matches with 1 or no teams and somehow one match they were 3MMR and 4MMR players?? The 3MMR was a Smurf, a very obvious Smurf at that but still. Other matches i get a full on 6 stars MMR lobby with everyone having 2+ KD using only meta stuff and lvl 50 hunters, not a single sound the whole match and everyone camping HARD. I like to play around with guns, which is to my detriment as i never learn their timings and distances, also i push a lot. It's impossible to have fun at 6MMR. And at the same time, it's also a major pain in the ass as some people get a high MMR by playing like complete shitstains, camping the whole fuckin time in bushes, doing jackshit, literally running away at the sight of ANY trouble, not caring about teammates AT ALL. 4MMR guys that end up at 5 or 6 because they don't die, they just snipe 1 dude after camping the exit for 49 minutes and leave without the bounty. But playing as a Smurf was really fun again. Playing against 4 stars is so fun. Playing against people that don't use headphones is fun. They don't camp cuz they are losers that can only get kills from a bush, they camp cuz they are scared to death and won't even attempt to shoot you lol. Killing some of them as they stand still thinking you cant see them is so funny. One dude was literally hiding behind a lamp post as if i could see him. Another one was crouching in the middle of the open trying to headshot me with a silenced vetterli. I just turned around and headshotted him with my pistol in 2 seconds lol. But alas it was short lived as 5 matches in and I'm already MMR5 with an 8.5KD and getting matched with presigte 80 lvl 100 long ammo boys and shotgun whores while all i have is a goddamn Romero, vetterli, Winfield and scottfield, nothing to throw and not even full health syringes. At least i unlocked the spitfire in a single match.
I like this, with games like cod or overwatch I can understand having some form of skill based matchmaking as they're one one done things that don't take much time investment and can get somewhat accurate data on your skill level and matchmake appropriately. However with battle royals it feels like these things are thrown right out the window due to the time investment required to play them especially in hunt showdown's case (most games go for 20-40 minutes) alongside this it feels like something that really shouldn't be in this style of game. If someone wipes an entire lobby in hunt showdown but gets killed but a lower skilled player right before the finish line they're still punished by harder games following that, and now the lower skilled player is skyrocketed into a higher skill bracket even though they've won one engagement.
@@LanguidMint battle royale games shouldn't have SBMM. That's the point of battle royale games, everyone fights to win. Imagine if bad players got amazing weapons as random drop in battle royale games just because they suck. That's what many br games do actually. One of the reasons I left Fortnite in the first 6 months after it launched, it was random stupid bloom and random luck that wasn't all that random (my friend that was way worse than me would ALWAYS find the best shit, every single time. It was so bad that he would open every single chest i found cuz all i would get was a pignatta of common pistols and ammo for guns i don't even have while he would get a pignatta of epic shotguns, ARs and rocket launchers with the exact ammo needed for those).
The game I have experienced the most with SBMM is Dead by Daylight. SBMM was added about a year ago so the comparison between it not being implemented and it being introduced is still fresh. It has changed the game for the worst. The asymmetric style game is of course a whole different can of worms than your basic FPS but the affects are still the same. The majority of the matches you play ended up being almost identical. With over 90 survivor perks and 70 killer perks, you rarely see more than 7 or 8 different perks being played. Now to be clear, yes before SBMM was implemented, once you reached the "high ranks" of the old system the games would fall into the same pattern of only the strongest perks being used. Once SBMM was put in place, people started having harder times winning which would push people to the META perks faster just so they could have a chance at winning, no matter the skill level. This also had an aftershock affect of making the already more stressful side of "killer" being pushed to a whole new level of stress. It stopped being fun playing as a killer when a single mistake would mean the difference between a satisfactory conclusion to just being out right defeated. This has lead to more and more people abandoning the killer side of the game and making the survivor queue times far longer than they use to be. With a lower number of killers the search of a suitable opponent has become harsh.
Playing destiny 2 has given me an apreciation for sbmm. The "casual" playlists have very little room to have fun because there is always that one player with over 1000 hours ruining it. Competetive playlists are often more casual because the do have sbmm. (For those of you who play d2, I'm refering to the elemination playlist in particular as one with sbmm)
That's because SBMM is literally designed to help retain noobs and bad players like you. They literally have a kiddy pool ffs. It's like a class for disabled kids. But everyone else is fuckin annoyed and getting fucked by sbmm the whole time. You think it's goddamn fun being a rank 10 in cod and getting matched against Prestige 50 guys with all the unlocks and meta guns playing the sweatiest shit I've ever seen, while i have still the base premade classes and literally 0 knowledge of the maps that i play for the first time ever? All cuz in training i had a little bit too much fun for the game and my 20kills streaks say that I'm a bit too good for the noob lobbies, WHILE I AM A FUKN NOOB! Let's not forget that now i also have to wait 10 whole minutes to get matchmade in some random continent in europa. Yes, Europa, the jupiter moon. 120 ping after 10 mins of matchmaking after playing for 40 minutes, matchmade against players with 1200 hours. That is my sbmm average experience in a game that isn't brand fkn new with less than 1 week lifespan. Like in hunt: played a few matches and I'm MMR5 playing against Prestige 20 to 100 players while all i have is a fkn Winfield, no consumables, no full health syringes, no uncloks, no money, no must have traits like packmule and doctor. And that is a BR extraction game where weapons,traits and consumables are VERY important. So yeah, fuck SBMM. Should be called BSMM.
I used to be top 30 for d2 a longggggg time ago. Before the first raid. We’d Sherpa people for trials. I miss that game sometimes. Last time I had fond memories of video games
i have always loved the team specific skill ranges in Battlefield 3 & Battlefield 4 lobbies. Each team has its own belle curve. Maybe one or two top fraggers are top, then the good players, and then some of the bad players. So you get the best of both worlds: sweating your balls off in some firefights, owning a couple noobs in the next one. Perfect balance.
Random matchmaking would kill reverse boosting that happens with sbmm, also if there’s a ranked mode in a game why would matchmaking during casual be the same. I think there should be a mix depending on which mode you’re playing and your level of competitiveness. Missing the days of “get good”
@@gonzalodiaz9326 Its not that stupid. To me if you complain too much about SBMM its because you arent good enough to win against people of your own rank
@@zephyr6877 maybe if there are many people complaining about SKILL BASED MATCHMAKING, the SKILL BASED MATCHMAKING isn't matchmaking the players with people of their skill level? You litteraly say "its not that stupid" and then at the same time argue that the system isn't doing its job properly lmao
@@bogo_ you need to read my comment before you post. I never remotely said the system isnt doing its job properly. You were the one who said that, not me
I think this is one of the cases where asking the players for feedback can backfire very quickly. Because of the nature of the bell curve you described it's almost impossible to get even feedback from players. Even if the medium skilled players make up the biggest part of any community, the very skilled players tend to be the most vocal about the state of a game. Mostly because they spent a lot of time playing and practising the game and are therefore most likely to engage in discussion about said game. Meanwhile low skill players will rarely give feedback because they don't feel like they can or should contribute to the discussion. TLDR: Even if the perception of a game turns for the better after getting rid of sbmm that might just be because the ones suffering from the effect are those who wouldn't spread their concerns
I'm a low-skilled player that played both MW19 & Halo Infinite, and I gotta say that *I enjoy Infinite's somewhat-random matchmaking more than MW19's 100% sweatfest.* The application of modern CoD's SBMM is also based on your winning streak (some say this is RBMM/Revenue Based): Once you win a match, it puts you in another lobby with equal to higher skills than you do. And if you win that one, even higher for the next match & so on. It's designed that way to guarantee you lose a match against tryhards with dozens of cosmetics, that'll burn in your memory; which incentivize an emotional association of "more cosmetics = cooler wins". Not to mention that when you're placed lower than your skills after losing in modern CoD (even if it's just one match), _you_ become the "tryhard cosmetic guy" for someone else; probably the newbie that only bought the base game. Halo Infinite's monetization suck ass, but my time playing in Southeast Asia region has been filled with a lot more "no cosmetic" players of varying skills than a guaranteed losing chance for every victory.
for a game which is already running, as long as you can match the account of each player giving feedback, it should be easy to control for this (as well as other) possible bias
@@TheRibbonRed CoD's matchmaking is known as a bell curve match making. It takes the naturally occurring bell curve of large lobbies and tries to give people skill ratings and to engineer that bell curve, the "win streak" is part of it's mechanism where if you were at the top of the bell curve in the previous lobby, the system should want to put you in the middle or lower part of the bell curve for the next lobby. This idea for the lower end is a good idea, you were the bottom of the curve last lobby (in other words a sacrificial pawn meant to be the easy target for everybody else) then you would get promoted to somewhere in the middle next game. Not all games make this correction and people at the top 10% of players of the game would be consistently match at the top of the bell curve, and players in the bottom 10% would consistently match to be the bottom of the curve, it's arguable about which one is better... but this system does one thing really well. Since there's always a bottom of the curve, unless you're the poor fucker in that position, you will always have SOMEBODY you're better than in a lobby so you can casually still do... "ok" this is really good for player retention in the long run. A lot of players getting matched at the bottom of matches will stick with it, either out of ignorance of how bad they're doing, or out of sheer desire to get better. The reality is for ANY system, is that players that _try_ to improve will not feel rewarded, no matter what system they run across.
@@SherrifOfNottingham the only system that rewards players that try to improve, is Server Browsers. If you can find a tight-knit group that's willing to improve with you ("noobs welcome"), then they're gonna improve with you. No more unbalanced randos, no more push for MTX. Just your mates. That's how legends were made.
The real problem with sbmm specifically in the new cods, it’s more of a performance based matchmaking. If you play decently well for 2 matches, you immediately get shoved into a pro lobby with people of a kd of 4. In IW I had a kd of 1,5, and I got matched with people with a KD between 0,8-2. In mw2019 I had a kd of 0,7 and I regularly got matched with people with a KD over 4! Thats the biggest problem with new cod sbmm, getting matched with people that are just way better than you.
exactly what I was thinking. In MW 2019, BOCW, and VG if I perform well in game it will match me up with insanely good players the next, where at that point I might as well be playing ranked
I think there should be a reward for playing in higher skilled lobbies. Its very discouraging to always have the same chance of winning because of sbmm even tho I am improving. As a rewars a badge would be suitable that multiplies your xp or currency u are getting. The different badges would also be a good indicator of improvement.
I think the way it's implemented has a way bigger effect than its inherent good or badness. The only downside for me with skill-based match-making is that you almost don't feel like you are getting better even if you are because you are always going up against people who are close to or as good as you.
I agree that the implementation is incredibly important, but I disagree that you don't feel a sense of improvement when playing against similarly skilled opponents. I've recently gotten into fighting games, and I have to say you definitely notice that you have improved when you start playing against people who actually block. You get the sense that your skillset has gotten you to a point where you need to learn new things to keep progressing, which I think is an incredible feeling of getting better, at least for me.
@@bhx6252 But fighting games are a genre in which your skill (or lack therof) is constantly on display with no barriers. If you're bad, that's going to show, whereas in a shooter you can have positional, first sight, map knowlege, and game knowlege to aid you rather than being a contest of raw aim. Aside from your character, no player has an inherent advantage in a fighting game. Which means that nearly all of the advantage comes from skill. Controlling the character better is a visible improvement. If your aim gets better, but you still die 50% of the time, you can't really tell you've much improved unless you land that sick shot. Fighting games don't hide player skill, so improvement is easy to see. FPS games can hide skill, so improvment is harder to see as well.
@@davidburke4101 I disagree, I think that seeing your aim improve is a noticeable improvement event if you still die most of the time. I experience this exact thing in Hunt Showdown. I'm still ass at the game but I'm starting to get better at hitting my shots, which feels great to see. I also don't think you're looking at the bigger picture of fighting games in the comparison you're making. You can have good combos, but if you don't have good frame data knowledge, neutral control, defense, mixups, and more, you're going to struggle to succeed. This is the same scenario as having good map awareness in an FPS but having bad aim, positioning, etc. The same thing you said about your aim getting better but still dying 50% of the time can be applied to fighting games in so many ways. If your anti-airs get better but you still lose most of the time, I'd argue you will still see/feel the improvement despite the fact that your win rate hasn't increased at all. In Tekken, if you're a god at breaking throws, you can still lose very often if you don't practice your other skills. All of the things you talked about with FPS games as separate factors (positioning, map knowledge, etc.) can be factored into as a player's skill, much like how all of the individual aspects of fighting games (spacing, neutral game, anti-airs, frame data, combos etc.) can all be seen as components of that player's skill. It's the same thing in both genres.
@@bhx6252 I think you missed my point entirely. Lets take scenario A. Some player with a hypothetical skill rating of say 10 goes up against a player of 40. However, 10 guy gets the drop and/or a positional advantage over the 40 guy. 10 guy wins this engagment. Lets take scenario B. Same players different genre. Player A picks a character that B is unfamilair with. Player A still get bodied. Even with a lack of knowlege on how A's character works, it isn't enough to overcome B's greater skill. In an FPS there are many factors outside of the players skill that determines who wins an engagement. Enemy team players, position, first sight advantage etc. Map and game knowlege also play an important factor, but those just allow you to stack positional and first sight advantage more often in your favor. But no matter how good at an fps I am, I won't always get first sight or positional advantage, especially if there is an objective besides kills. The skill gap between two players can be overcome with other factors in an fps. In a fighting game you cant stack any advantage other than your character provides. The point being here is that because the only possible factor in a fg is player skill and character, its much easier to see an improvement. In a shooter, you can end up with a bunch of bad/good engagements regardless of player skill, and this can hide whether or not you've improved. This last paragraph was really the point.
thats not true, lets say i play a game mostly to relax after work, and im just naturally good at positioning and aiming. Games might start putting me in lobbies with absolute tryhards crouch spamming, prone shooting or camping... Which will then change my experience quite a bit. I like soft sbmm with good skillbased tam balancing. put sweats against me in the lobby, but id rather not have ALL the lobby be sweaty. Its not like average players cant kill me if they get the jump on me
Why would it make it sweatier for low skill players? Sweating only benefits you if the matches are close, because that extra bit of effort may be what decides the match. Which is why SBMM is so exhausting, because regardless of skill level, everyone is forced to play like they are in a MLG tournament if they want to win. And even if you don't care about winning, assuming you aren't a sociopath, it feels bad letting your team down... so everyone feels pressured to tryhard. If the other team is stomping you, there is no reason to sweat, because it isn't gonna change anything. In fact, matches where your team is getting annihilated are some of the most entertaining as people usually use it as an opportunity to relax and joke around on the mic. At least they used, back when shooters were about fun, and people played them for fun. Nowadays it seems like people only play shooters because they are wannabe MLG/streamers/youtubers or have an unhealthy addiction to unlocking skins. Also, the alternative to SBMM isn't random matchmaking, it is connection-based matchmaking. AKA not having to playing in constant lagfests. Also I think the reason SBMM doesn't work in battle royale isn't just the amount of players/teams but also the lack of data generated per match. In a match of COD, you may fight against the same player a dozen times in a match so they can get a good sense of who is better by the end of it. In a battle royale match you probably only fight that player once and it is hard to accurately extrapolate who is better than who based off a single data point.
I'd like to add that as a R6 Siege player, I'm against SBMM. Situationally. What I mean is, we have a ranked and unranked game mode for people to sweat in, and then we have casual. Why bring it to casual? My casual mmr tends to be higher than my ranked mmr, where my ranked mmr is low-mid plat, my casual lobbies tend to be filled with diamonds, champions, and the very occasional e-sports player/team. That isn't even the only problem. I've grown so used to seeing the same names in my lobbies, I've even come to know what operators they would pick, and they vice versa to me. SBMM makes casual feel like a competition, with casual games being ironically far far sweatier than ranked.
I believe that one if the old CoDs had a "training camp" for players lower than level 10 so they could get into the game without getting stomped. I think that'd be good because it would retain new players and build their confidence before it drops them into the general public where the skill level is higher on average. Then you could minimize the sbmm effects
They literally have something like that in COD mobile. Well not really a training mode. They keep you with other noobs around your skill sets until you start to get better. Then it'll be more and more randomized with people of various skill levels as you get higher. Cod mobile multiplayer is literally what the console cods should be. Clearly not a lot of people know this cuz barely anybody ever talks about that or even straight up says that. But you're literally taking care of cod mobile better than any of the console cods. Multiplayer matches tend to be balanced. That hint detection actually works. The game is basically Black ops 2 but more polished, and with other call of duty assets. I mean, it's not the most polished call of duty in the world. But compared to modern day cars and even the original Black ops 2 multiplayer, it's a little bit more polished. It's not to say you're still not going to get lagged or have other issues. But usually if it lags, it's less due to the issue of ping and more so your actual internet connection itself or the game just eats to the ram on your phone. At least with my phone, the more start to use up the ram the more it starts to lag. Sometimes it will have those moments where it takes a while to find a lobby and does put me in somewhat of a sweat fast or even just a more lag your love you with not a very good connection. But most of the time usually the connection is good. The first thing that worries about is a good connection followed by balancing out the teams. The console ds will sacrifice good ping just to have a full lobby of even players. With card mobile, it tries to give you a good pin lobby while still balancing out players on your team and the enemy team. Sometimes it'll sacrifice a full proper balance for a better connection. Sometimes it'll sacrifice a little bit of that ping to property balance the lobby. Most part it's pretty consistent and doesn't try to completely sacrifice one or the other. As for it's battle royale, I can't really say for sure. Sometimes I stomp, sometimes I get stomped. I would say most of my Battle Royale games were more of a case of circumstances rather than skill based matchmaking. If anything come I've been fucked over more by lag when game starts eating more ram. Or my internet starts to bug out. But usually it's never really a fault of the game itself. And of course compared to the ones I'm console, no cheaters whatsoever in Battle Royale. I honestly don't understand what it is about cod mobile that you're taking care of a mobile game that's free better than the ones you actually have to pray for. I almost kind of feel bad for a lot of the other cod players that wasted their money on the more recent ones. And now they're stuck with it and they don't even want to play it anymore. But at the same time, they should have learned their damn lesson by now so that's their own damn fault. And how many of them have been seen for the longest they want to go back to Black ops 2 but can't because it either can't find the lobby or it's just lobbies full of cheaters. Then refuse to outright play card mobile because either they don't like playing on phone or they like to play with controller. Which okay, then download an emulator and connect your controller. Even without an emulator this game is compatible with controllers. And for those who still want a bigger screen and not a tiny screen and again don't want to get an emulator, then they can just get a micro USB to HDMI cord. Or USB c to HDMI cord. Literally an HDMI cord you can plug into your phone and put into the tv. There you go. You're playing card mobile with the controller and you have a big screen to look at it. People can literally have the card experience they miss once again. But they're making excuses for themselves to waste the money on the versions that don't work well. I honestly don't get it. And honestly, if more of the council card players started moving more towards the mobile card, that would show them that they're doing something right on the mobile version versus the console ones. And clearly whatever you're doing better is that good if it's making people leave the AAA games. In the community can make it very clear, we're playing cod mobile because this is how we want our call of duty to be. If more of the console of cods were like this and we would play them more. But instead of doing that, they cry in bitch and moan, make their videos, and go back to playing the game again for a full year. Only to buy the next call of duty and do the cycle all over again. Cry, bitch, and make their videos. The call of duty cycle is their doom. And their Doom is eternal. And there is no Slayer coming to save them.
World at War has a "boot camp" mode where you match with players below level 8 (aka christmas n00bs), and people above level 8 found a way to get into the boot camp mode and stomp it with their dual-mag mp40
I feel like another angle that's interconnected with Skill-based matchmaking is team based matchmaking. Do you try to match groups of similar sizes against each other? How do you determine the group's position in skill-based matchmaking? At first I thought that the video had missed an important factor in SBMM, but after thinking about it this concept and how it relates to SBMM is probably worth its own short(or long) video.
It really just depends on how good the SBM is. Constantly losing a luck draw and having bad players on your team, (or being a bad player put against high level teams) is always going to feel bad. To talk about CSGO for a sec, in early CS days, there was no SBM, just random people put up against each other with the highest skill player on each team essentially 1 v 5ing the whole match. With a bad SBM, its very similar, people who are *supposed* to be the same skill level turn out to be smurfs and people literally having no hours of experience, so the same 1 v 5ing happens again. A good SBM would allow the lower level players to actually have fun, while the higher level players could continually improve (as its much more difficult to improve when you are playing against low skill opponents). Quick aside to talk about non-shooter games with SBM. Smash Bros Ultimate has a SBM and I really love it, not because its particularly good, but because of the design of the game. Outplaying your opponent isnt a mechanical skill that would need hours of out of match practice to improve, but instead, just how well you understand your opponent and how well you can counteract them, inside the match. Meaning, even when you're matched up with someone slightly better than you, you can still pull over the win if you actually put your mind to it.
Every single gamer who has played shooters before 2020 played before skill based matchmaking and got fell in love with shooters wile being the awful guy on the team. I remember slowly getting better at bo2 when I was 10 and I loved to try new things and see my improvement. It was awesome and I miss it a lot.
So I play BO2 on the Plutonium PC client where you only join games via a server browser, so there is absolutely 100% no SBMM (except for team balancing, which some servers don't even do). Here's my experience with it (it being 'no SBMM'): It's of course still pretty sweaty, since anybody of any skill level can join, and especially since only seasoned COD pros would go back and play such an old game. But since they are community-run servers, the lobbies persist and you can even rejoin the same exact server like months later and still find the exact same people playing. It gives you a chance to improve against people and become skilled like they are. With SBMM in COD, you never improve, because you just go back and forth between these super difficult lobbies and then these super easy lobbies. Another thing with non-SBMM games is the sense of community; you can play with the same people for literally hours, and with regards to Plutonium specifically, like I said before, you can often find the exact same people playing on the same servers every day, so you'll almost always run into the same people, which allows you to easily build friendships on the servers! Getting a sweaty lobby destroyer in BO2 plutonium makes me want to stay and learn from the guy; sweaty lobby destroyers in SBMM games just makes me want to leave, since I know the game is just manipulating me and is going to throw me into an easier lobby later. Overall I prefer COD without SBMM any day of the week, even if I'm getting easier lobbies from SBMM. It feels like the game is cheesing me and just trying to keep me playing.
You can have a secondary self-moderating system, by releasing server-hosting tools, and equip your game with a server browser. This allows communities to create identities for themselves, that lets players themselves chose how sweaty of an environment they want. Of course, since it takes time to find a community you like, new players should be funneled into a matchmaking system, before they decide to try to find something for themselves.
I had the opposite example of what you're asking for, I played Destiny 2 before they removed SBMM entirely and it's basically unplayable now. New and lower-medium skill players are little more than cannon fodder for the high skill players to farm and matches are now just 1-2 people on each team racing to farm piss easy kills, it's basically a first person MOBA at this point.
SBMM can sometimes be a pain for some games where you wanna play a certain gamemode, but can‘t really. NFS Hot Pursuit Remastered is one of those examples. There‘s 5 online gamemodes, each with 5 seperate car classes. You can do a quick search, which throws you into lobbies of all gamemodes and carclasses or do custom search. In the custom search you have to both select a gamemode and carclass. Meaning you have to guess for the carclass if you wanna play a specific gamemode and vice verca. Having a server browser which shows the gamemodes and carclasses would fix it. But EA isn‘t adding that
well atleast there's a quick search in the remaster, original didn't even have that i used to pretty much only play hot pursuit in supers back in the day
i've never really liked sbmm, the way i feel is that there should always be a ranked mode with sbmm and a casual mode without sbmm. adding a newcomer mode can also be useful, but then you can run into issues like smurfing.
There was a game I played on PC back in the day. I can't remember it's name but you were kept in noobie servers until a certain level, and after that level, if your kd was below one you stayed in them. If it was above 1 you had to play in the regular servers. Was a pretty good system.
For siege specifically, ranked playlist and unranked should be heavily influenced by sbmm. However casual should be less influenced by it as it makes quickplay less enjoyable when you're going again very highly skilled players and even teams when trying to play casual in quick match
the problem with that, is that you can't learn how to play with other noobs but once you get into casual with some experiences players you just get insulted the whole match and that made me stop playing
@@bapoTV I'm not saying put people in with players who are considerably worse than x player. I am saying that you should be put in with similar ranks, but less higher ranks from your rank. So for example, if you were gold 1, you would be put into games with plat 3's and other golds. So that way it's not completely unfair. I am plat 1 and get put in with champs in casual, and it's horrid because I can't enjoy the game in a casual setting.
The point is to also not scare away newer players. What is "enjoyable" for you due to beeing able to stomp the lobby is MUCH less or even not enjoyable at all for lower skilled players. I do think SBMM is a good thing. Neither stomping nor getting stomped is a good feeling in my opinion. The skill gap between people in the sub 50% of playerbase is much tighter than those from 60 up to 100. Without SBMM player of about 60% of the skill and upwards would totally dominate every lobby which consists of of a lobby more than half of people
@@mssed3031 I've been quite a lot lower in rank than Plat 1 for a long time but I also do get queued with champs/diamonds every now and again (I'm usually sitting around G1 or P3). The reason they pair you with them - I presume - is because there are so few players in those high ranks that they have to queue for a considerably longer amount of time than the average player and eventually the system gives up on trying to find a similarly skilled player and just throws them in a lobby with people of far lower skill than them. In my experience, the further you deviate from the average (which is Silver 1) the longer you have to wait to get matched but this is only really true for ranked. However, in casual the system tries its hardest to achieve a similar goal but often fails to do it within a time frame that the typical player deems reasonable. No one wants to wait 10+ minutes to play one casual game that will last about that time. I agree that it's unfair for you to play champs, but it's also unfair for champs to have to wait for eternity in the main menu...
@@mssed3031that’s still garbage, don’t be stupid. The SBMM is trying to protect the bottom 5% of players but ruin for the rest. It should be SBMM if there is one really good player he should be on the other team and make it more fair but forget ranks, this isn’t a ranked game mode no need for that. In OW im high diamond stuck there because my team sand bag me and they suck cause they cannot compete even in QP my supports and tanks get diffed constantly. No matter how many elims and DPS I do it doesn’t matter I may out perform my team consistently but I’m still in a NET L even in casual game modes it’s just as sweaty as ranked there’s no fun in that even in QP you get pocket mercy pharahs and it’s not a skill issue because I’m in top % of players 💀
Call of duty is, im pretty sure, the only fps that just doesn’t work with sbmm. In other fps games like battlefield, apex, or halo you want a fight. Because a great deal of the appeal of those games is learning to get better at them. There’s a big skill gap in those games and climbing it is one of the appeals of each match. But for cod the appeal of each match isn’t getting better at the game, it’s pub stomping. This isn’t me shitting on cod players for just being big ol babies who can’t be bothered to get good at the game. Cod as a series has massive skill gap compression, things like: insanely low ttk, massive cone fire on guns, random respawns, instant respawns, easy to memorize and simplistic maps etc. The cod games have gotten better at this since the mw reboot engine was introduced but it’s still pretty bad. These things are all by design, activision is like a crack dealer, they’re goal with every match is to give you a chance at a big blowout match. A match where you were the obvious dominant force. They achieve this by making the moment to moment gunplay essentially a coin toss of who sees who first and then allowing snowballs through kill streaks into massive kill chains. And it’s easier to provide that to the player when the moment to moment gameplay is simplistic and kills are easy to come by. You go 15/10 in a battlefield match you’re pretty satisfied. There’s a pretty wide variety of things to do in a battlefield, and each kill was something that either required effort or creativity. If you go 15/10 in cod it gets old pretty fast. It’s not just monotonous, it’s insufficiently stimulating. Cod is the only game I know of where you can be going positive in a match and still be bored out of your mind. Because each match is designed to give you a chance at the big blowout match, that’s cod’s selling point, that’s it’s big thing and if you aren’t getting that high of a big blowout match it’s just not fun. And sbmm makes it harder to achieve that. Sbmm essentially makes it harder to have a snowball match, it’s harder to get kills off of kills when the enemy team is also good at that. In effect cod sbmm invalidates the main appeal of cod, unlike any other fps game I know of. Sbmm insures that the better you get at the game the less likely you are to have fun with it because it’s less likely you will be presented with opportunities to actually engage with the main appeal. Another side note with sbmm, or just playerbase skill in general is that as a games lifespan continues it’s playerbase skill skews higher. This is because the more time a player base spends with a game the better they get at it. This also means that any new players who get into a game later in its lifespan are gonna have a harder time either finding matches or playing matches because there is a smaller percentage of similarly skilled players for them to play with
I played a VR game called Onward. It is a 5v5 and the most popular game mode is basically search and destroy but with only one objective instead of 2. When you join a lobby you are not assigned a team. There are 2 helmets on the table. You choose one and put it on your head to join a team. Between each round you have the option to leave your team and choose a helmet again. This leaves it up to the players to balance the teams if they choose. Say if everyone on one team leaves they can redistribute the players. Or if some mad lad wants to prove his skills they can do a 1v5. It's interesting seeing that some people don't care about evenly distributing the skills of each player. Sometimes you get people trying to evenly distributed the skill. Some stay loyal to a team for as long as they are in that lobby. Some will switch teams every time the map changes. Sometimes you get a lobby that feels very evenly distributed and people will say that they want to keep the same teams each time for that reason. I will say the games that feel evenly matched are super fun. Every time you kill someone or die it feels like a crucial moment in whether you teams loses or wins the round.
The new name of the game is player engagement and player retention. EOMM. (Engagement Optimized Matchmaking) EOMM attempts to keep players playing longer and is based on short-term performance/skill. This often can create the "roller coaster effect" on winning and losing, that is heavily noticed. EOMM is a profit driven system.
I can imagine a system where as well as the game estimating your skill level, you can also choose your "desired opponent skill level" at will. Then the servers could match pro players who want to take it easy with newer players that want to be challenged, as well as allowing for serious pro players to compete together in high level matches or casual low skill players to find each other.
@@pax1217 If you choose "Easy opponents" and are winning every time, you get put in servers with people who have asked for "Hard opponents" and want a challenge trying to take you down. No incentive for manipulation because you get to choose your level of opponents anyway.
@@oneocgossiptreecreek Anyone serious about getting better at the game would. And that number only has to be comparable with the number who ask for easier opponents.
I remember when I started playing COD 4. I forced myself to not punch my screen because I was obliterated almost everywhere. The ratio of good and bad players was really random and when you joined the private servers, the people there were usually playing at the server every day and the skill ceiling was over the roof. Yet, I was persistent and joined the same 3 or 4 places every day spending a fuckton of time there. I grinded, and I grinded, and I grinded... Until I was good enough to compete with the top 5 of those servers. The skills I acquired (mouse placement and movement, in-game movement, and usage of cover, etc.) translated to other fast-paced multiplayer games which I play until today. I felt real satisfaction from playing. No one (or almost no one) complained about the top guys shredding noobs like me to pieces, we just continued to play and acquire a new set of skills, often watching the most skilled ones to pick up techniques and little things that helped to upgrade your own playstyle. I do understand that nowadays when a game is being developed, the companies are aiming at accessibility and reach of those games so that they hit as many recipients as possible. I also understand that there are people that are genuinely playing for fun and they want to relax while playing. My point is, back then, in times when SBMM wasn't a thing (or it wasn't as visible as it is right now) people just tried their best to improve themselves at the game of their choice. I remember those times as the times I improved as a player the most. Maybe it isn't so good to put players into categories and gratify them or punish them for being good or bad at the game? I'm no specialist when it comes to marketing, game design or sales management, I am just a simple gamer who enjoys both the joy of winning and the lessons given by losing. I am sorry for my terrible English. Also, if you disagree with anything I've written here feel free to comment and put your perspective of how you see the issue, I didn't want to offend anyone. Have a great day.
This is a mw2019 game sequence used to go for me: -play a couple or maybe even 3 games with a week weapon or a goofy build -actually do good with said weapon and have fun -next few games have to play hard to at least saty positive -switch to a m4 or mp5 and play more relaxed -then again the following matches become an absolut swetty hell
random match making, for me, as a cod player, is the REAL experience. that curve you showed in 0:37 is why. it explains so much. you always start as a noob, someone who is not good at all. through experience, insistence and determination you achieve the impossible, you don't suck anymore. great. now you have a new goal: absolutely dominate. few people get there and that's why it's so special and rewarding when you do. this narrative -like experience, which is a long term experience, almost completely dies once skill based matchmaking is on and trying to do what it's supposed to (even if that's rare, and i'll explain why in a bit). when this moronic system was implemented, the organic random way in which people organized themselves became curated by an intrusive algorithm. it takes control out of the player. it makes the experience less rewarding and less fun. my other point is that, even when the skill based match making thing is working, the distribution of skill still follows tha same rules and proportions, but in a smaller scale. almost every match ends with two or three people out of twelve who completely destroyed everyone else. that's not just cod dude, that's life. a small amount of people dominate at sports, business, relationsihps, everything. special people are special because they push themselves through a limit most wouldn't. this always happends, and it's not "unfair". fairness has nothing to do with it, in my opinion. unfair is trying to socially engineer your players into acting in a certain matter and completely ignoring what makes playing the game in comunity (online) is all about. is about helping other people get better, showing off your cool stuff, making things that other players can't do and rising above the rest in a way or the other. i, for instance, was the editor of some sniper clans back in the day, i wan't even good at the game (not as much as my fellow sniper friends atleast), but i rose in my way, being good at what i'm good at being good (if that makes any sene) while still being part of a comunity. the randomness makes you see what can be done by people with actuall skill. if you get trickshotted at the end of a game by a much more skilled player than you, you'll most probably be embarassed, but also admired. that's what i think.
I guess SBMM comes from a desire to better control or "design" what kind of experience the players will get. With random matchmaking it's up in the air whatever or not everyone is going to have fun, because ultimately every player plays the game differently for different reasons and exert different amounts of effort. When you want your game to be about personal achievement and skill, it makes sense why you would gravitate towards implementing SBMM. In theory it makes the games more fair. Except, it's dynamic difficulty from Resident Evil 4 put into a multiplayer game and when people are aware of its existence, it opens up a lot of ways for exploitation. People already do it with things like AFKing and smurfing to get the desired rank. I wonder what would happen if we flipped SBMM on its head. What would happen if in a team game it wasn't about each team's average player skill levels, but rather about each team's individual players? Current systems have some kind of "average skill level" for every team and SBMM tries to match them as closely as possible. This means stuff like 6 people with rank 4 going against 1 player with rank 1 and 5 players with rank 5-6. Balanced game? Only by the average. What I think could be more interesting is having three average and three pro players go against another team of three average and three pro players. I don't know how many games employ this, but it's worth a shot. Of course if your game has no ambitions for competitive fairness just make it random or design the game so no matter how skilled you are there's still a chance you can win (Mario Kart FPS anyone?). Also worth noting is that SBMM makes very little sense for indie games, since they require large player numbers for it to work. If your game is 1v1 it's a bit better, but for indies it's better if they stick with random matchmaking or even community servers. Imagine if there was a game where you could combine the two and have some kind of system like TF2's Quickplay where it just picks a random community server with players on it. Oh wait.
What you described is the SBMM modern CoD uses, and it's a frustrating experience for the lower-skilled player. Every match is a sweatfest, even on "non-hardcore" matches. CoD pits you against higher skills based on every win you got, and thinks you're a "high skilled player" the moment you win your first match of the day. And if you lose? You're temporarily "lower skilled" and becomes the higher skilled player for your weak opponents. Win that match, and it's back again. *Just have a server browser for complete Casual play.* Or if you want an SBMM for Casual, you can have a more lenient range that doesn't pit you against players with +/- 5 KD from you. One lower skilled player shouldn't be used to average-out a team's or lobby's average skill; they'll be the deadweight. Less so a team, you're just guaranteeing a wipe & more disappointed players.
As with most other things, it really depends on the game. Call of Duty is a pretty casual game where you just drop in for a match or two every now and then when you want to blow some time, so it can be better to have random matchmaking, both for queue times and so you don't need to focus to either win or get demolished. Something like Counter-Strike though, has been built around making every match a sweatfest where everyone's playing to win and higher skill players will put in extra time to warm up before going into a proper match. Matches are longer, team size is smaller and map design is a lot more focused on being competitive than pretty. It's an interesting discussion though.
My biggest gripe with SBMM having such a heavy influence on matchmaking in games like Battle Royales is that its so easily exploited by simply making a new account and making it so that the system does not have enough info about that player to determine where they lie in the skill curve and will lean more towards the lower end allowing that person to stomp on the lobby making everyone elses experience worse and driving them away
The reason SBMM exsists is because in older cod games a large majority of lesser skilled players would quit within a few months of the new game because they were constantly getting destroyed. Considering lesser skilled players are a majority in any game, companies realized keeping them playing the game as long as possible will increase sales of MTX’s ..
In the CoD Community, an issue that has now been present with its matchmaking since MW2019 is that the matchmaking was changed so that it disbands player lobbies once the game ends. This is an issue, not just because it means you're going to get a new group of players, but that by doing such a thing, you're taking that choice away from players to leave the lobby. You don't get to have multiple games against anyone, its always one game and then you never see them again. It would be like if a fighting game never let you rematch people after the first match. Something like that would see major complaints with players in a fighting game. By having lobbies disband, you can never rematch a better player to learn more about how to fight against their playstyle, and you can never see that teammate that was super helpful to you again. Sure you could send a friend request and perhaps party up, but with previous SBMM, that wasn't necessary. And furthermore, its been proven that with the change to have lobbies disband, connection stability is sometimes sacrificed to get you in a more skill-matched lobby.
One thing I will say about older cods. If you felt like you were in a lobby of sweats, you could leave. There was always the option of leaving and trying to find a better match. Now, you click to enter a game mode and it takes a little bit, figures out your sbmm and places you. The fact of the matter is random matchmaking allows for both sweaty and casual play styles. That is exactly the reason they have had ranked modes in the past. It is not as if lower skill players were just stuck, they had the opportunity to leave and find an easier match. That is not really an option now unless you decide to purposely throw matches in order to lower your sbmm. Thank you for your time. Sbmm sucks
I’ve largely shifted away from games with heavily tuned SBMM (and also crossplay but that’s off topic). I would prefer completely random matchmaking because as it stands now, I feel like the outcome is decided before the match starts in games like COD and Overwatch. A few minutes into a match and 99% of the time I’ll know the outcome which just takes the fun out of it I don’t feel like I won when I win and losing feels like it’s even more out of my hands than in the old days when I’d get bad teammates because now I’m assigned bad teammates. Matches are no longer drastically different and makes games feel more repetitive To me
i have the same opinion, cod and bf42 of today are very repetitive and boaring coz there are no more fun gameplay on each match. And this force me to play another type of games, except FPS.
I think in the casual/unranked gamemodes there should be no sbmm, while in competitive games it obviously makes sense to sort people by rank or skill. But casual gamemodes should not feel like you are playing in a comp game, that just makes it a lot harder to have fun with friends for example.
It shouldn’t even exit in ranked either it should be whoever is in your rank not skill because you will be stuck playing against the best of the best in your rank and it leads to things like never progressing past a single rank unless you put in an ungodly amount of hours trying to get better, it shouldn’t be like that.
The problem that this video overlooked when it came to COD is that in the newer titles, the skill based matchmaking switches the player into a completely new lobby every game. This leads to, in a situation where a player has a very good game, the player getting switched into an extremely high skill lobby where they stand no chance. Then it takes about 5 games to get to a lower, more average lobby due to the ELO system, assuming the player gets swept in the higher skill tier lobbies. The game punishes the player for doing well and doesn’t give nearly enough padding for when they do bad. I can’t play COD for more than thirty or forty minutes anymore because if I have one good game then that’s it for the foreseeable future and everything devolves into a sweat fest
The best thing to do is get a cronus zen, and download a “reverse boosting” script. The script will make you run around and shoot so you dont get booted. Its not REALLY reverse boosting, rather letting the unplayable games play out. Come back after 4-5 games and youll be in a playable lobby again.
Every game should have a casual mode without sbmm and a competitive mode with sbmm, so players looking for a more relaxed experience and players who want to compete both get what they want
You just described pubs/casual, and arena/ranked. What most sbmm-wielding games have. Excepted now, we just have ranked. Except now you can either know your rank, or have no clue
Exactly. I suck at first person shooters, and I have no complaints about SBMM, because obviously i don’t want to be put in lobbies with pros who are gonna obliterate me
This is one of the reasons why I still play Battlefield 2042. There’s little to no SBMM, and I like leveling up everything to unlock Tier 1 skins. Now if you play with friends, it’s 10x more fun.
I think SBMM is good, but for casual matchmaking it can be a bit looser (for faster matchmaking and to help those who cry about SBMM) but ranked should have mutch tighter SBMM as getting silvershit casuals on your team can be really frustrating.
Ive been playing games before SBM was a thing, it was fine but pretty stale gameplay, but when SBM, I liked it more, and the creator(s)/company of the game can never 100% satisfy their whole community, it’s just trying to satisfy the main majority of the community, since it has the main majority of people/players. SBM was for me better, yes sometimes it can get annoying, when I feel like just playing casually and just want to relax without hurting my wrist and arm from claw grip, but I personally think that SBM is good, simply because it lets everyone be at there own pace without low skilled players matching up with lots of mid skilled players and some high skilled players.
In almost every game I have played that utilizes sbmm I have been fine with it and it usually makes the experience better, the only game that this is not the case in is call of duty. when I started playing modern warfare (2019), I had already played hundreds of hours of fps games in other titles so after a few weeks of dominating lobbies and having a ton of fun I started being placed in much harder lobbies. As you mentioned in the video, if I didn't sweat my ass off, I would be at the bottom of the leaderboard. Using any off meta gun felt like it was impossible and after about 2 months of playing the game I quit. Fast forward about 6-7 months I get bored and try playing modern warfare again. I think it reset my sbmm because all of a sudden It was just as fun as it was for those first few weeks of playing, I grinded out a bunch of the skins in the game and made quick progress. Then once again I fell into higher lobbies and quit playing. Imo for a more casual game like cod, sbmm makes it worse.
You're requesting this at the expense of worse players though. You had fun dominating, but that meant others were being crushed. Do you think your enjoyment trumps that of other players? The issue is you feel the need to play at a certain level. If you always played casually, you would end up in a situation where your "skill" matches you in a way that you're playing even games using your casual strategies. But you don't want that, you want to always be winning, so you start making use of better strategies, of using meta guns, in order to increase the win rate. But then that scales you further still into better lobbies. Your desire to win is what pushes you into feeling FORCED to use meta guns and strategies. What you are really looking for is an above average win rate, but that requires someone to have a below average win rate, and I don't really think that's fair. SBMM can have a level of randomness in it (a wide search) but it will always result in you being crushed every now and then.
That's not the problem of SBMM, that's exactly how it's supposed to work. It's just the nature of fairness. Ideally, for the game to be totally fair, everyone should win 50 % of their games. Because if one player wins more than half of their games, then all the opponents they had must have had less than 50 % win rate. So every time you were having fun, winning and gaining progress, all your opponents were not having fun, losing and slowing progress. You can't have both. If you don't want to play so hardcore, you have to start intentionally lose once in a while and give your percents to someone else.
@@plukerpluck I completely understand what you are saying. Dominating match after match for me personally isn't that fun and getting rolled every match isn't fun either. Other cods seemed to do it better in my opinion having 1 or 2 sweaty people per team, a few average, and a trash can or 2. Then maybe the next match its you getting absolutely rolled by a team of sweats then the next game its you rolling. It was just more fun not knowing the future outcome of the game. I know that right now if I hopped into MW2019 I would be thrown into a lobby of complete sweats and I would be absolutely rolled.
@@plukerpluck but it's really not fair to anyone for you to actually take turns winning it's stupid if they had a more consistent way to do sbmm then maybe that would work but at the moment after every game they think you deserve to get crushed
the biggest problem is new players all get the lowest skill ranking possible, which leads to them facing smurfs/alternate accounts, hackers, and more random shit that will eventually make them quit the game
The thing with Call of Duty is that the main talking point is putting a separate matchmaking mechanic for the bottom 20% of players and let them deal with each other, but put the rest in a general queue unless you're doing ranked. That way the worst players won't get fisted by the best, but players who have enough talent to not be in the bottom 20% have a chance to fight a variety of players at different skill levels and improve at their own pace. The current problem is that CoD is very much a sweatfest at the moment because everyone is playing at exactly their peak skill level all the time, but there's no rank or reward to show for doing so.
I have strong opinions on this one, coming from a mostly 1v1 background with Starcraft 2 and more recently 2D fighting games. The idea of not having SBMM at all from a design point of view is insane to me, practically I can understand that its hard to implement and measure SBMM, in terms of design it 100% should be in every competitive multiplayer game. I advocate for party game modes or PvE multiplayer if you're looking for something casual, and if you want a power trip then go play a single player game or vs bots. The gall to be a reasonably high level in a competitive multiplayer game and then complain that every match you have to try because your matched with other high skill players is one of the most weak sauce whinny entitled takes I've ever heard. You're playing a game where the goal is to win against other real people, the fact that some players have gotten to a point where they want to be playing casually and beating everyone else in their lobby who may actually be trying their best shows a real degree of arrogance. Again I'm all for fun casual modes, where the rules are whacky and balance is a secondary concern, in these types of games you can have fun and the best skilled player wont always be able to win simply because of other random/imbalanced elements, thats a great way to spend your time, but main ranked competitive queue can't be like that or it would kill the game. Regardless of if you're naturally talented or have put a lot of hard work in multiplayer games cannot have a majority of of games be stomping matches. Thats only going to encourage players to quit, and then guess who's left? Thats right, all the sweaty players so you end up with the same "problem" of having to try in your competitive game. One of the common problems I'm aware of in Starcraft 2, and team moba games like Dota/LoL is smurfing, where a higher skilled player has a second account thats intentionally a much lower MMR to their actual skill, I'm not sure if this is a problem in FPS games. FPS is the only genre where I hear players being actively against a SBMM system, and I assume thats because they either don't know about smurfing or its not very effective to do? (if so can someone please explain why). I've heard smurfing be used as an argument against SBMM and it is very hard to get rid of, but seeing as random match making would be unintentionally the same situation most of the time I don't think its a good argument against having SBMM. If you're a reasonably competent player, and you follow/care about/have opinions on the balance of the game then I really don't think you can also argue for the game to have random match making. To be more in depth (and perhaps a little nicer to FPS players), it comes down to why are you playing the game. Personally I enjoy difficult games that take a lot of mechanical mastery, where by playing well you get rewarded by being able to do cool powerful stuff, I also enjoy the sweating it out with another player, when your both giving it your all and are trying your hardest to win and its close is the best experience a competitive multiplayer game can give you. So I understand if you just play occasionally and don't want to learn all the indepth mechanics and stats about everything, in which case your should still want SBMM because your going to get matched with people who are taking the game about as seriously as you are. TL;DR - If it has intentional and ongoing balance adjustments, its competitive and needs SBMM. Alternative modes can be provided for a casual multiplayer experience.
@@sulfur3684 Just go and play your meme loadout and have fun then. You'll lose some games, your rating will go down and you'll be player with worse players where your meme loadout will work and give you a close fun game with it. I very much enjoy doing meme builds/playstyles in the games I play, and I know that its probably going to mean I lose a few games but if I'm playing for fun and not for rank then I don't care if my rating is going to go down. Also in Random Match Making there's no guarantee that your meme loadout would mean you get to have fun, you might get stomped just as bad.
damn you said every single thing I was thinking better than I ever could. I guess the reason those players don't simply smurf as often is that the FPS games we are talking about like CoD or BF are far from free to play and cost quite a bit of money which makes them different from many RTSs in how ez smurfing is
@@sulfur3684 if you are good, you should know how to put you're meme Loadout at work, i did it in lol with bard jg in Lol, and even if you're bot good, use it, it's a normal game, if you're really casual you shouldnt be angry for losing.
I feel like an important thing to mention about SBMM is that each game does it differently, so, one game of CS will be matched differently then say Overwatch with varying degrees of effectiveness. Another perspective is how long the game has been "alive" (or how long the game has had this style of SBMM), age determines a lot I think (unless it has seasons like Overwatch, it's less weighted). If you are playing a game that's been out for say 15 years you will probably have a much harder time getting ranked either by being matched with pro's or people who have no clue what they are doing. In SBMM there can also be greifers, who throw games on purpose, or smurfs who just want to have easier games, and of course there can be cheaters who get sick of MM. All are terrible aspects of SBMM, but I feel like you are hard pressed to not encounter one of them in any skill based game. I feel like SBMM is a good thing, but there are numerous problems with how some games handle their ranking, and/or how they queue players (and cheat detection). But, overall I think it is a good thing to have in games, it encourages people to want to get better and work towards something, and it gives players a challenge when it works well. When it works, it works really well.
In my opinion- If a game is at a stage where it has a huge influx of newer players and has a lot of hype surrounding it. Then the game can have random matchmaking as the developers can afford to turn away a few new players, it would give the dedicated high skill players some enjoyment from defeating lower skilled players while playing casually. But if it is at a stage where it cant afford loosing players it has to switch to sbmm as it would give the newer players a chance to get invested in the game.
REAL balance would be random matching, but player stats ( ACTUAL stats are "how fast do I run, how much damage do I do, how fast is the ironsights anim" NOT "total kills, win ratio" ) are adjusted to give equal chance of victory to all.
The pain when you know you’re about to lose from the outset but still play
this is usually how improvement comes about
@@batatanna that might be true but it's hard to tell since with sbmm the goal posts will move again. (E.g. more higher skilled players)
@@batatanna Not really. It would be hard to tell what worked if you always die.
overwatch in a nutshell
@@garbaj the moment when moiras play dps only and not support
SBMM is one thing. RBMM (Retention/Revenue based Match Making) is a whole different can of worms.
Which i suspect will become a point of contention even more in the future.
Where the game not only takes into account your skill to match your up "fairly" but also play and spending patterns to keep you engaged and spending more money. There are suspicions in the community that Apex uses Retention based match making. Hypothetically: It throws you an easy lobby which you win as the first match of the day to get you hooked. And then shifts the difficulty of lobbies to keep you in the sweet spot between frustrated and rewarded. Which results in longer play sessions. Than just giving you easy lobbies.
And activision filed some patents for revenue based matchmaking. Where it would throw you into the lobby with players that had stronger weapon variants then you to get you to spend money on loot boxes.
If I hot drop and die first for a few games, and then suddenly get put in a match with
i can definitely tell this is more common in warzone because ive noticed how ive gone on a week hiatus, then for my first match, im destroying little malding children left and right and then all the sudden everyone skill boosts by putting TTV in their name
@@backpain8688 it could be sbmm or rbmm, and we don't know which. Respawn denied they use rbmm but that might have been a lie
I did not expect mokey here, but you make some good points. An argument to this is that, while dishonest, it does positively impact the experience quite a lot of casual players at the expense of more serious players playing to win. Where it becomes an issue is when it gets into candy crush levels of mind hacking, causing people to play even if they aren't having fun.
Highly doubt this to be true, every game i play in Apex gives me shit at the begining and makes me slowly work up to better items as the match goes. The few times i have won it have been after multiple long matches where i end up hopped up on adrenaline while sweating my ass off trying to win, the game don't give me shit ever.
One of the biggest issues with skill based matchmaking is when the game cant find a match to put you in because there arent enough players at your skill level in your region so it just puts you in high ping lobbies.
Ikr
Or you can’t get a game
Say that to me, I usually play around 120+ ping and all my friends and other players of my region play at 60 or less
i was literally so bad in rocket league that it just said "no"
im in us west
@@obsidianflight8065 same
SBMM wasn’t particularly an issue with call of duty until the decision was made to break up lobbies after every match.
Before that change, after match a few people would leave and people of similar skill could join to replace them. You could play for a while with the same lobby until someone had to leave. Regardless of if you had a particularly good or bad game you could choose to stick in the lobby or leave to find another. This meant that adjustment to the level of ELO players the game would put into your lobbies would slowly adjust better or worse as players shuffled in and out and would much more closely resemble a players skill as the grand majority of players would remain in the same lobby if they felt it was a close game.
However if you get forced into a new lobby every match you lose that adjustment period, and if you happen to have a particularly good game, suddenly you’ll be facing off against extremely high skill players and getting absolutely swept. The other half of the problem is that the designers of that system foresaw people intentionally losing matches so to try and pub stomp and as a result they made it much harder to lose ELO and go to a lower SBMM level where you might be more comfortable. This ended up making the game feel like it was punishing you for doing well.
I honestly believe that shifting back to consistent game lobbies would drastically improve CoD players reaction to SBMM
i have realised this but never think of this before, this explain why i enjoy bo2 but not realy enjoy cold war
The reason why they went with the changing lobbies is to prevent “boosting” which is where a team of highly skilled friends dominate a lobby and have other friends join the lobby as the others drain from it until it’s just a group of 12 friends in a match and they just grind stuff out with each other
Why r u acting as if one good game will suddenly put you in crazy lobby’s?
@@tobe.moemeka because some games definitely have done and still do this shit of "get stomped one match, next one you will be paired with fresh installs but if you stomp the next match will be a sweatfest". You can see this in action very easily with Dead By Deadlight giving you free wins after you get demolished as a Killer, although Dead By Deadlight has a very badly Implemented SBMM elo system for Killer players as its laughably easy to gain Elo but almost impossible to lose it.
@@marcuso7350 just sounds like confirmation bias unless dead by daylight is different but i guarantee you most games dont work like that
One guy (who I remember being formally affiliated with Activision) once said that newer players would be placed into lobbies with players who had recently bought bundles. This way, when a newer player gets killed, they will see the killcam of the player using a specific weapon variant, convincing them that buying the weapon variant/bundle will imporve their gameplay based on their placement in these specific lobbies. After purchasing such cosmerics, the player is said to be placed into newer-player lobbies, resulting in the "bot-lobby" experience and giving them the illusion that purchasing the cosmetic drastically improved their gameplay when, in reality, it was all RBMM (don't know if this is just lingo or an actuall term, but I'll give credit to MokeySniper).
What a scummy practise
How dumb does someone have to be to think that skins = skill?
💀💀💀
brooooo
Makes sense even though you would know if it’s a bot or player
My experience with Call of Duty's SBMM in recent years has just been "oh, I'm doing really well in this match, I can probably look forward to getting absolutely destroyed in the next few games because I just went up several levels in the SBMM" and then of course the SBMM taking precedent over the quality of the connection and landing me in many 100+ ping lobbies.
It's funny because Destiny 2 uses Connection Based Matchmaking, which sounds great, until you realize you're being put up against the same 6 good players over and over again with no escape just because they have the best connection with you
@@Retro-- that must have something to do with where you live I rarely get into a match with the same people twice in destiny unless I'm playing iron banner
I only have this experience on the main sweat maps, like Shipment or Nuketown. Remember how everyone complained about Cold War being unplayable because of SBMM? I have the impression that most people who said that only ever played Nuketown, because on other maps, it wasn't nearly as bad. It's probably worse since Warzone dropped, because these kinds of maps are now the go to grinding maps for Warzone.
Yeah, pretty much, playing recent CoD games' MP has basically just been "man I've been having fun for the past few matches, so as punishment for being alright at the game I'm gonna be thrown into the fucking sweatiest lobbies ever full of tryhard FaZe wannabes for the next match or two"
yeah imo sbmm isnt bad at all in most cases and in most games they have sbmm. But casual sbmm needs to be toned down to a point where you dont really notice it. Most games succeed in that like r6 siege for example and sometimes you get a few people just straight better than you, other times you get people worse than you, but on average it feels fairly equal without you needing to sweat your balls off.
Then Cod MW and CW come into the picture and they have their sbmm tuned super high (+ Retention based match making i think) so you get put against people worse than you and do alright or pop off even when playing casually. Then it bumps you up and put you against people way above your skill level rocking meta only loadouts and play styles and you get shit on until you drop back down to playing against people way worse than you. rinse and repeat.
That shit is not fun and just infuriating, and if you got friends and they arent at your skill level its worse for them because they never have a good match. even when you're going against people worse than you they can just barely stay afloat for that one match. It's like playing ranked 24/7 but you flip flop between top 10% players and top 50% every handful of games and its not fun and doesnt feel good.
All mp games should have a protected bracket for people that just bought the game, and people that cant maintain whatever metrics is used as the skill metric for the dev team. After that it should just be lightly tuned sbmm that tries to put you with people around your level but will maybe take some people above and/or below your skill level to fill out the match faster if it cant find enough at your level (like siege does).
I think it's nice to have both options. Not 100% sure how halo infinite works but I find in casual its a good mix of people who've had halo 3 in their hands when they were born and people who just picked it up. Where as Ranked is usually accurate to skill level and is a bit of a sweat fest.
Yeah, i really think that a game would be great if casual matches are random and ranked matches are using SBMM. Also as you said, i think that a higher nomber of players in a game needs a higher time to "creat" a lobby and random match making is a solution but in games like R6 or OW etc, we need the SBMM to have great matches
That’s how it’s done right
@@Friendly_Neighborhood_Dozer for the moment yes
I haven't played infinite ranked yet, but good job to 343i if they've managed to keep the sweating to the competitive modes. The casual modes feel exactly like they should: casual
Yeah halo does it generally well, but on cod it’s like you’re playing ranked the whole time and they just need to release their games with a ranked / CDL mode with this SBMM System in it. Cod is no longer a casual game and has lost its way.
Actually, matchmaking shouldn't be "random" for public matches in CoD, it should be based upon connection. Then settle the lobby via team balancing. SBMM should only be used in ranked matches. Connection should be most important.
But then how can they use psychology to minipulate you in to giving them money.
Thats the old "sbmm" from CoD. The old matchmaking throwed players with the same ping into one lobby an then Teams were balanced
@@GuyBeyondGod I know. I used "SBMM" for familiarity for other people. It used to be SBMM, but now it's a worse system. I actually posted the following comment here at the same time as the one you replied to.
"The new name of the game is player engagement and player retention. EOMM. (Engagement Optimized Matchmaking)
EOMM attempts to keep players playing longer and is based on short-term performance/skill. This often can create the "roller coaster effect" on winning and losing, that is heavily noticed. EOMM is a profit driven system."
@@goon009 That's exactly what it is. People think they're playing a game, but actually, you're riding an algorithm and the game is playing you. Very manipulative.
@@GuyBeyondGod and more often the teams don't end up being balanced. I remember having to switch teams all the time just to balance the teams myself.
The primary contention (for me at least) about how over tuned SBMM in current COD seems to be is not strictly getting matched against really sweaty players but in how rapidly you will ping pong between skill brackets. You start out playing much less skilled players and so dominate, rocket up whatever skill ladder exists getting some good game along the way, and then get matched against people who are going to demolish you and then send you down to the lower bracket starting the whole thing over again. It doesn't feel like you are naturally settling into a skill level but rather the game says every player gets a certain amount of guaranteed wins per hour so blowouts feel more common than in previous years as you are either being given a win or it's your turn to be someone else's.
Gotta have that 50% winrate somehow...
This is do to something called EOMM. (Engagement optimized match making) it essentially puts you into 1 or 2 easy matches at first, so you start off in good mood. Then it might throw you into some relatively even games to keep you focused and competitive, as those games are the best for long term game session engagement. Then it throws you into hard games, that the system Knows your team will definitely lose. After this, to make sure you don’t rage quit, you get a few easy games and the cycle repeats. They’re not trying to make all matches even, they’re trying to make you play as long as possible. Some matches are rigged so that one team has more skill than the other.
Thats honestly what killed the game for me. If it were TRUE sbmm, like people on my skill level, no biggie.
But its not. Its very obviously fixed. This just kind of creates a sense of why play this game. Am i doing really good? Its because the game wants me to. Doing bad? Its my turn to get shit on and someone elses turn to do good.
What in the fuck is the point?
@@jakflak3767 just get better theme everyone else and the games make you it’s designated reaper
The thing about Call of Duty is that the cost of the SBMM in the past 3 titles (MW2019, BO:CW, Vanguard) has been persistent lobbies in multiplayer, and a large degradation in connection consistency and quality. CoD has always had very simple SBMM in the past, and it allowed you to meet people with a large diversity in skill, and to make rivalries, friendships, and funny moments, which is what made CoD a staple for me growing up. The new SBMM/EOMM (Engagement Optimized Match Making) model completely removes the "community" aspect of CoD, as another youtuber, XclusiveAce, has put it in the past, and this is without even mentioning the strength of the matchmaking creating the feeling of every match being pre-decided and predictable.
Yeah the SBMM in CoD has gotten so bad in the past 3 games that I can tell if the game wants me to win or lose the match within the first 2 minutes.
That being said, the match making also seems unbalanced because when I lose, it's almost always a squashfest. Just straight up unfun
Vanguard is so dead you play with the same people over and over. Unless you're in that lower bracket.
Drumple Guntr
Two minutes? Dude i can tell based on the first engagement i get in
It never had SBMM in the older COD games and it was all the better for it.
I have no issues with skill based matchmaking in games like Overwatch, CSGO, and Valorant. Those games are genuinely fun to play competitively. Call of Duty however has been completely ruined by skill based matchmaking. I used to go to all the midnight releases and now I haven't even bought the last few games due to SBMM.
Call of Duty is more fun when it's ENTIRELY RANDOM. Some games are competitive, some you get stomped, some you get to own everyone. Call of Duty was designed around being able to actually get killstreaks which is completely backwards when you have SBMM trying to keep everyone at a 1KD. Call of Duty as of recent has become particularly egregious with "retention based matchmaking" where they will periodically throw you into a noob lobby so you don't stop playing the game.
The whole thing just feels fake and you know you're being gamed. I just want entirely random matchmaking based off purely connection. There's zero reward in actually getting better at Call of Duty because you can't even feel it. You just get put into harder lobbies. Literal pro players are below a 2 KD a lot of the time.
I feel bad for anyone who never got to feel the old school skill progression in Call of Duty. I remember being a complete noob looking at the AC-130 and thinking "there's no way I'll get that many kills without dying" then slowly progressing and getting to where I had the confidence to run it....then getting my first nuke. God that personal skill progression was fantastic.
Now every match of Call of Duty FEELS THE EXACT SAME! Zero variety, zero reason to get better, no visible ranks. Everything about it is utter dogshit. It's a real shame.
SBMM has been in call of duty longer than the nuke has... You've just changed
@@riccardo1796 I think that it has grotten way stronger where you used to be able to use enjoyable weapons and not get stomped every time now if you are not using meta weapons you are a dead man
@@riccardo1796 That's realistically not true at all. Older CoDs had 2 matchmaking pools. A super low skill/noob protected bracket....and then EVERYONE ELSE.
That's why you'd see people that had legit 3-5 KDs in the older games. That doesn't happen in the newer games.
@@ZybakTV cod has had smash bros mash melee since cod4 lmao
I was following you up until you said CS:GO is fun to play competitively. 🤣
My distaste for SBMM comes from how it changes the game for my friends. Especially on call of duty. I have always been a bit of a sweat at COD, but I have many friends who are pretty average. When we team up it's a great gaming experience for me because the games are easier than what I am used to. The opposite is true for my friends. They tend to get frustrated because they are only going up against people well above their skill level. After they realize I am the cause of the problem, they game with me less and less, and eventually not at all. And playing solo in high skill sweat fests every day when all you want to do is unlock weapon camos is the absolute worst. For me this whole dilemma ruined the experience. I don't plan to play any more CODs, or invest much time in games with high SBMM.
exactly how i feel, pretty sure it was my fault my friends quit mw2019
@@JasvinPaul7😢
I am on the opposite side of things, I have the higher skilled friends and playing where I feel like Im just dragging the team down is very demoralising, just feel stressed rather then enjoying leisure time
I have had the exact same experience only that I'm the new random PuG player that gets put in your team to balance out the fact that you're there and I end up feeling absolutely useless and uninstalling. And you never even noticed that I was there.
This happens when my wife and I play Halo Infinite. She's consistently top of her team when solo queueing, but when we team up she's the bottom. Except recently when she's been getting so much better she's often second to bottom, and one glorious time she was top of our team.
She gets especially frustrated because that means it's also more difficult for her to unlock the weekly challenge rewards practically at all, and since she isn't devoted to the game enough to want to buy the Battle Pass, she relies on the free content to get any cosmetics. She does plan to get the Battle Pass once she maxes out her level in it assuming she doesn't quit before then, but that possibility is becoming more and more likely as the grind continues.
Something you didn't address about team size (battlefield/apex), it isn't that the bellcurve averages out by some mystic natural occurance when the team size is large. The reason it generally works is because by having open ended map design, and lots of players, better players have a larger disadvantage (worse players are more likely to flank from behind, or catch them in an asymmetric postion via vehicles or cover/height).
So for something like apex, the idea is you might not win against another team mechanically but you can wait for another team to weaken/pick them off, play defensively and bait the stronger team into a disadvantageous position, or initiate on them in a way that gives you a numbers advantage. Later in a game's life, average/good players figure out the meta which counteracts that stuff, which is when skill mm is needed.
With a lack of skillbased matchmaking, it's often one team will only have bad/average players with one or two experienced outliers, while another team might have no great/awful players but a large amount of average/middle curve players. Those are the scenarios where team balance/matchmaking are most necessary, imo
(Off-topic, sorry)
Man, I think of you every time my shuffle blesses me with Weezer! You didn't introduce me to 'em, but you're like the only person I've heard even acknowledge their existence outside of my immediate family :3
FUNKe -boi out here with the big think
Hi mr funke man
Well said. I don't have much of a stake in this, but this is probably where my mind would've ended up if I did.
YOOOOOO
My Take on SBMM: In the old MW2 days I would find myself playing against people of an obviously higher skill tier and after so many games with and against them I found myself catching up to that skill by figuring out a way to counter or match their play style which would make it a highlight with these "gotcha" moments; sometimes friends were made with this rivalry. When all lobbies are randomized people who are the same then there is no special experience, there is nothing that stands out, there is no social aspect of this multiplayer game, you might as well play against similarly skilled bots. You likely wouldn't even know if they were bots unless you had an intimate knowledge of how those bots behaved and could identify them as such.
Facts. Best comment right here. I remember old cod being hard for the first few weeks, but you could actually get better and eventually you were on top if you kept it up. Not everywhere in the middle like it is now.
Mw2019 is nothing like the old mw2
Facts!!!! This is so true and my issue with all the new cod
I agree 100%
This is EXACTLY how I learned to play cod. I was a walking free kill but sticking with the same players allowed me to learn how they play, adapt to, and even use their tactics bit by bit. It was amazing feeding someone their own medicine.
My problem with sbmm especially in cod, is that you don't see the results for getting better at the game. This wasn't a problem with random lobbies, because you could see your stats slowly get better and better. Sbmm has eliminated that feeling, to the point where I don't even care about how well I do and just end up messing around doing random stuff
SBMM is for soft people nowadays thats all it is, its taking all the raw toughness and perseverance/pleasure away and they think its great to lose these senses
Yup, I remember in bo4 I didn't play much, then played for 2 weeks consistently, and I could see the progress, started getting more killstreaks / wins etc. Did the Same thing with mw2 after ranked came out, my kd has gone up, but I just feel like I'm running on a hamster wheel playing the game. Might get 1 game every day where I'm allowed to have a kd higher than 1.4
I feel like a good deal of the hate for it comes from people around my age that grew up with games that didn't have sbmm, and we had to go through the slog of getting our assess handed to us and get better, before finally we could be the ones consistently doing well. But now with sbmm we are always doing consistently average. Also I think part of the issue with apex, is that I'm pretty sure the game takes into account survival time and what end position your team ends up in to determine "skill" when really what this leads to is players avoiding conflict out of fear of getting stomped on until they are forced into conflict as one of the four last teams and sbmm sees that and goes "oh man they lasted a while, better bump them up a tier" while completely ignoring the fact that nobody on the team got a kill, or even broke anyone's shields
Valorant also does a real poor job at determining skill, through kills and making entry kills (first kill of the round) more valuable .. this makes no sense in a game where you REALLY need support players
Apex really isn't bad, lose a few games and it'll get easier. I feel like in COD i can get stomped ten games in a row and still get put against max rank sweats, it has honestly just killed COD for me and i have bought every single one since the PS2. Cold War was the straw the broke the camels back so to speak
@@RubenTheCartographer entry frag is pretty important in val especially if the enemy is bad at retakes
I agree, when i played Cod1 UO and Cod 4 when they were new you would either do good or shit but it didnt really matter i felt. But now with people play to win like its life or death and throwing SBMM in (or making it a lot more strict?) makes it less fun for the better players. Like they added it because the majority of the player base is average and its them who will buy the most copies. Fair enough, kinda, but it makes the high skill players (who advertise the game on YT and twitch i guess) get burnt out of the game and getting put against a lot of hackers every 10th game. Kinda a double hit for us and isnt really fair in my eyes. They should make SBMM so its a LOT more forgiving on who you are put with (or random excluding those who clearly cant play like very low skilled and the disabled) and have ranked as casual matches are now 😂 Thats all it is, just doesnt show us our SBMM score/rank lol
Not sure about cod1 uo, but a developer recently during the whole SBMM discussions mentioned that cod4 had SBMM. Most multiplayer games in the xbox 360 era had SBMM with matchmaking, and was even a feature advertised with xbox live etc.
That said, it doesn't change that how the SBMM is implemented can massively change the user experience especially in regards to how it functions with players queued together etc. That said I think most people imagine older games as not having SBMM when most of them did, and because of that don't know what actual random matchmaking would be like and how awfully unbalanced matchups could be.
A good recent example is destiny 2, where the community often had the usual complaints about sbmm. Then they removed SBMM from a multitude of modes and complaints got far worse with people complaining that they were getting completely stomped multiple games in a row without a break, or the opposite with some people saying they got so bored of it because their team would completely dominate. I think people in general are always going to blame their frustration on matchmaking when a game doesn't go how they want it.
I think the skill based matchmaking should be transparent. You should always know your rank, your team member's rank and the rank of the enemies
This would go a long way in a lot of games.
hunt showdown does this and its very nice; even seeing the projected ranking of a team including the MMR modifiers you get for playing solo/duos against trios
The reason why they hid it is because the lower skilled player will always be the target for harassment.
Almost like, sbmm is just ranked, without telling you your rank
I like the idea but realistically it would have to be really really tight sbmm for players to not be the target of harassment which some games just can't achieve without long queue times. Although games should definitely let you know that the game has sbmm
I feel like it's a good concept, but is really hard to execute in practice. When I used to play Call of Duty, I would be put into a lobby with people who are very new for a few games, which would be easy for me to do good in. But then the game decides to put me into a game where people play so well I cant do anything. It put me in a cycle that took part in me quitting the game entirely.
That's because Cod doesn't just use sbmm. It uses an engagement-based matchmaking to "keep you hooked." It gives you a really easy game every once in a while to make it more fun for you, but then it goes right back to the opposite for about as long as the algorithm thinks you can take without closing the game.
So you got your ass handed to you soo much you straight up quit the game 😂
@@TheBestcommentor I stopped playing early last year, but found that it's based on your winning streak instead of "player retention".
It places you in an easier match right after you boot it up for the day, then a harder match if you win that one, and even harder until you lose.
And if you lose, you become "the tryhard" for the lower-skilled players that got pitted against you after that, then you'll win that match & back to the SBMM cycle.
It's _very different_ to a "random" matchmaking like Halo Infinite; where it hooks you up on a lobby based on the first thing the game sees, and there's no guarantee if you'll be winning/losing every match no matter how good/bad you are.
@@TheBestcommentor why would they do that though? if they want you to get hooked they should give you easy lobbies all the time, putting in hard lobbies is useless if the goal is to keep players playing
@@its_saval I mean, why would you keep playing if you know you always win ? Losing makes you go "I can win again ! I already did it once !"
So most of my experience with sbmm is with CoD. I noticed it because there's a pretty considerable skill gap between me and my brother. Whenever we played together I would absolutely stomp on the lobby while my brother struggled against the sweats. I just think strict sbmm should be reserved for competitive ranked play where you can actually see and track your skill level. Pubs should be random matchmaking with as little sbmm as possble. Does this mean that in pubs I could get absolutely stomped on by a sweat? Yes. But it's also likely that the opposite could happen the next game and imo it feels more fair. The problem with sbmm is it feels like I'm being punished for spending tons of hours learning the mechanics and getting good at the game instead of being rewarded for my effort.
So you want to get good at the game by being fed bots? I mean I kinda get your point, except for the last sentence. What you call reward sounds like something that would ruin the game for others.
@@hovnocuc4551 What I mean is leave strict SBMM to competitive modes ONLY. I don't want to bring my A game every time I play. Sometimes I want to play for fun and do dumb stuff. Sometimes I want to sweat like crazy. Having a strict SBMM just sucks the life out of the game. So what if it's not perfectly and exactly fair. It's not the Olympics. It's not a tournament. It's a video game designed to have fun. If I end up matching against someone that's way higher skill than I am what I'll do is just leave the match. Without SBMM my chance of encountering an easier lobby for me is way better than with strict SBMM where I'm pretty much guaranteed to find a sweat of my skill level or higher.
@@yazao8282 exactly. this is what all games need to implement. and i feel you on the goofing around stuff. like if i want to run a riot shield in warzone and troll i’m gonna get stomped. sbmm has sucked all the joy from apex and warzone for me. i hate that when i have a good game it’s probably an algorithm designed to keep me glued to the game by feeding me a good lobby every once and a while. every game should have a ranked mode with sbmm and a casual mode without it. no one will care if they meet a good player every once and a while, it creates incentive to get better. plus, people who are good at things should be rewarded for it. if you develop a skill and then try to show it off to people who are better at that skill than you it’s gonna be really frustrating. especially since no matter how good you get it’ll never be good enough. point is, if your good at a game, you SHOULD be able to dominate. ranked would come in for the people who want a challenge. that’s my take on the situation.
The SBMM in Halo 2 and Halo 3 felt really damn good. I never matched into a game where I felt like I was sweating too hard. They didn't lack competition, and some matches were breakneck, but the balance lent itself to a more casual experience where both teams were playing at a similar skill level and more importantly at a similar attitude. That's something folks seem to really forget about gaming, the intention behind it. SBMM in those games worked in such a way where I felt like I could just dork around a little, take more risks in my gameplay, and experiment with the map and sandbox available. The modern implementation of SBMM in Halo Infinite and modern COD feels far more strict which limits my ability to experiment because using anything non-meta virtually guarantees a lose. The games are evenly skilled, just like before, but now the attitude of players has shifted to be more competitive and fierce, where before you might be matched with people just trying to have a good time. From all my research it appears like SBMM is good, but it become beneficial to the overall experience when it lends itself to a more social/casual experience vs a competitive one.
Now, my head-canon on why this shift has occurred is because e-sports has grown quite a lot in recent years, therefore devs are designing games to be competitive to appeal to the e-sport audience in hopes of driving revenue. Now, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, at least not intrinsically, but the loss of focus on the common gamer (a demographic that every day grows, and is primarily older therefore more time restricted) has evolved gaming in a way where games don't seem to be designed for fun, rather they're designed to be competitive. That shift in philosophy has made modern shooters less fun. I think a return to the older SBMM systems would be very beneficial to the health of gaming as a whole, but that's just my view on things.
Why did it work there? Is it because of the lobbies?
I like the way games like rocket league seems to do it. Casual is kinda close to your skill and ranked is much closer. So in casual you get to play with a wider range of skills.
I actually really like that idea. I feel like fully removing sbmm is mostly not going to happen just because devs want people hooked on their games but making it far far looser for casual players seems like a really good idea, especially since you likely could get higher kill games and improving is actually gratifying unlike regular sbmm which just makes it feel like nothing has changed
yeah, thats how its suppossed to be at least for every normal thinking human, theres a reason the modes are called casual and competetive but in other game (COD) it has no meaning.
I've been playing casual team fortress 2 for over a decade now, a game that predates sbmm, and the sense of casual camaraderie is unmatched in modern titles. In casual, you're allowed to do stupid stuff, you're allowed to go off meta or use meme loadouts because none of it matters. Being in the sane lobby as someone who just installed the game and a veteran player like me creates a sense of community, new players can learn from veterans, veterans van goof off with new players. I play video games in my spare time ro relax. If you want a challenge play competitive. It's good to play a game where you can just chill.
And this one of the reasons why tf2 was never appealing for most ppl in the last decade and it never will
You can still create a sense of community even without that, thats not exclusive to tf2
And even on competitive you are also allowed to play off meta (csgo aug, csgo negev are pretty good examples) ,nobody cares about the meta,nobody stops from you to use whatever weapon you please, ppl only care if the gun its good ,thats it... And the same implies for tf2, in tf2 almost nobody uses garbage weapons (like sandman or gas passer for example) and most ppl use the meta , again nothing exclusive to tf2
And also that most of the considerably low amount of new players tf2 usually gets get bored from the game becuase of how they easily get rekt by veterans (that are pretty much most of the playerbase)
Shame that most ppl did not want to play competitive, it could have made the game better and probably still give some valve employee the motivation to still work on tf2 but well, community decided to choose that path and well lets see how this ends, I highly doubt tf2 would get a bright future
Same with mw2/3
The lobbies are filled with newbies and good players.
You at least get a chance to improve by killing other people that are not as good
Edit: I had some "rethinking"
Its definitely good to play people that are better than you for improving. However, sometimes you just want to have a casual match shooting people around without sweating
@@Ultra289 i guess you havnt played mid-tier and up csgo and dont play community servers in tf2
in csgo if you use a negev in any rank regarded as "high" you are flamed by your teammates if you dont do better with said gun, also aug isnt really "off meta" its just not
considered BiS tier, only reason its not used over the m4 all the time is the price and thats it
tf2 is pretty much only community servers now and the servers i play on barely have sweats, out of 100 players 10 would be considered sweats and 3-4 of them would be using meta weapons to sweat with, the rest are people either trolling, casually killing, messing with movement mechanics, or just straight up fucking around, all on the same server, and on these servers if you dont directly kill the sweats they dont kill you. also the sandman is the most common scout melee i see (even on servers that are more competitive) even the wrap assassin is up there
@@shadeshotTV
Played negev on global teams against globals and supreme for years (after negev started to cost 1700) even on T rounds, even revolver and MP5 as well, and to this day no kicks and no kicks ,nobody cares what you use as long as you know how to use it and ofc you understand the economics of csgo and you coordinate with team in order to pull off the strat... Thats it
Aug is not meta anymore, it wasnt meta since its last nerf, same as sg ,not even the m4a4 is meta nowadays after the m4a1 buff (I always used the silencer so no rly changes for me)
As long as you prove that you do something (it doesnt need to be a carry for team) they will shut their mouths and move on, pure and simple
As for tf2 community servers, yeah ,its mostly a friendlies paradise which is why most ppl dont even play there (among other reasons as well) ,nothing against it but becuase is community server, however still never saw anyone actually using a garbage weapon like the sandman, not even friendlies use the sandman ,its just not fun to use garbage weapons becuase you ll easily be defeated and losing consistently can force a a weapon switch to every individual
One of the reasons for TF2's success in this area is because the game gives the players the power to police their own lobbies through vote-kicking. Wish every game would do that.
SBMM shouldn’t be “sensitive” (one game can entirely change the players you’re against) and instead be slowly changing. (Because there is always a learning curve).
or you could have different modes, one with sbmm and one without
"i won this match"
"oh, you won this match against players that were all on your level?"
"uh... yeah?"
"so that must mean you're a master at the game!"
"wait, i never said i was-" *gets thrown into a lobby with the best players in the world*
@@jockeyfield1954 my cod cold war experience in a nutshell
I mean every other game has ranks and ELO... it works decent
@@tpeterson9140 but that tends to be in competitive game modes
Yeah, this is probably the biggest problem with the more "modern" SBMM, it feels turned up to 11. I mostly played CoD back on MW2 and MW3 and there it felt much more casual even if there was some. Now in MW19 you could actually feel how the others you were up against were very easy, then they were MLG, then easy, then MLG. Basically that it fluctuated too much.
If I’m good at a game, I should FEEL like I’m good at the game. That’s the problem with SBMM…You never know how good you are now matter how good you actually are.
My understanding is that the SBMM in pre-MW19 CoD games was not as strict--there was usually a protected bracket of the players at the bottom that didn't get queued with the general population, and then everyone else mingled to some degree. Obviously this is not so much the case in the post-MW19 era, where the game is constantly reevaluating your skill level after each match and (seemingly) bumping you into sweatier/harder lobbies after a few wins, and rewarding you with easier ones after a few losses, perhaps in order to hook the player into chasing the next high/win.
I think the reasonable, obvious solution is just to go back to the pre-MW19 compromise of having the protected bracket for some percentage of players on the lower end, and then everyone else plays in the main pool. Obviously this is preferable for the slightly above average to great CoD players, but more importantly: variety is the spice of life in casual matchmaking. It is not just that sweating in casual matchmaking is obnoxious--and it really is, don't get me wrong, casual MM in most games should have very soft, elastic skill-based MM. But also that it is horribly boring.
Very high tier players and content creators do like pubstomping, but there's certainly a sizable chunk of average and above average players like myself that simply appreciate the variety that a softer SBMM brings--lower skilled players play the game differently, play maps differently, use different weapons. --if I queue into a match of Cold War w/sweaty players, I can match their meta loadouts, pull out my tec9 or something else to counter the quickscoping meta, but it's very boring and predictable. Having a larger playerbase with more variance in skill level makes the game more interesting by being less predictable i.e. more fun. I don't recall his name, but the creator of Halo 2's ELO system for its matchmaking has some great commentary/tweets on this subject.
Being very boring and predictable isn't so bad in games that are more strictly tests of skill, like CSGO--though NA MM is not particularly healthy atm/filled with smurfs at most ranks, also boring. --But being boring and predictable in a fun, silly arcade shooter like CoD is a death knell for the game's health as casual, approachable fun for most people.
My issue with very strict sbmm is that you never feel like you’re improving, or at least not as much as you should considering the time. Because your win rate has to be as close to 50% as possible you never get that feeling of just destroying the enemy team. In seige for example you may be legions better than you were a year ago, but your K/D remains the same and it feels like you plateaued when in reality you’re much better
You may have fun destroying the enemy team, but does the enemy team have fun being destroyed by you?
@@elu9780 my argument for games where you're getting stomped was that nothing is stopping you from leaving the game, there is no penalty, so just leave. The issue comes in when the SBMM is so strict that even if you leave, there's no guarantee the next game won't be the same. With the older games you had a higher chance of getting a better game if you just leave.
@@elu9780 a slight sbmm is important but when its too strong you just have to sweat constantly to even get a 1 kd which is just stupid in a casual playlist just make a ranked and casual playlist turn the sbmm in casual down, let the noobs get better and go in ranked for sweating, its not that complicated
@@faninaf In every match there's one death for every kill. So a k/d rating of 1 is the average.
The people willing to sweat more are likely to get it.
If everyone can agree not to sweat, no one needs to sweat.
@ i hope you are aware that i meant the kd of the individual.
Also the problem is that even if somehow everybody would stop sweating people would still perform differently because there's something called skill gap. If I played without sweating it would still be sweating for a noob.
I feel like SBMM brings about a huge issue that im surprised you haven't mentioned - Smurfing
In random matchmaking the chances of a high skill player getting to dominate a lobby full of low skill players is...well, random, and not particularly high.
In SBMM, high skill players can use the system against itself and get like a new account or purposefully derank so they can consistently terrorise new players. This is especially bad in free games like CS:GO.
Most people abuse SBMM, I mean look at overwatch.
Very true. I just want to add that CS:GO is not a free game when it comes to ranked prime matchmaking (how it is supposed to be played).
My question is how does it work in games where they reset your rank after time? I went back into Modern Warfare the other day, am at level 1, and I dunno if I was being ranked with lower skill people than me or not.
@@FlamespeedyAMV OW doesn't really have SBMM, a lot of ppl just get to a rank, know that if they keep playing they will lose, and just go on smurfs to still 'have fun'
@Stardust Alien hmmm well its not a strong version of SBMM. When I play Apex, my first game of ranked is ez and I win it 8/10 times. However the next game is ALWAYS a sweat fest. Building campers, rats, hard W presses etc. On OW, I really don't encounter it that much. Might be the game that makes a difference idk
When I played MW my problem was how the game measured skill. Accuracy was a big one. So if you used low rate-of-fire weapons like Marksman rifle, it would send you straight to the top of the skill level. I wouldn't even get 2 kills in a TDM game, it was a sweatfest disaster. I would have to intentionally hipfire a lot to lower my skill rank down again. Also the final straw was the horrible 100+ ping I always had, which some people have said that when the game can't find a high enough skill game for you, it dumps you in with the highest ping game instead. I was rubber banding and getting killed 3 seconds into the future most of the time, watching the killcams and comparing what I saw with what they saw. I completely quit the game, I couldn't take it anymore.
Or when an annoying trash player camps successfully with a shotgun in a corner - all the time
SBMM will think they’re good 😂
Drew the line at 100 Ping, :-) If you can't play at 100 ping you can't play, The rubber banding is packet loss, not ping, and getting killed in situations like behind walls it not ping related but, instead lag compensation.
Lag compensation is the evil here not ping.
@MelloWattz 100 ping is 1/10 of a second, no human has ever been recorded with faster reactions.
I'll say it again, if you can't play at 100 ping then you can't play.
@@nobodyimportant7380 100 ping is definitely a disadvantage in a game where guns kill in 200-300ms. I've played on 100 ping and 20 ping and you can definitely see and feel the difference.
@@rileybazan9747 I have never said it wasn't disadvantage or that it can't be felt, I said, if you can't play on a 100 ping successfully, then you can't play.
Blaming a loss in a single gun fight on ping is pathetic.
It can be accepted when it comes to a single shot weapon that ping is king.
I wish we had the option in games like CoD where we had two gamemodes: one using SBMM and one using random.
And then we can see which is better, how it feels to play this and that, and which is more popular
One of the main issues is the tolerance level for skill, they’ve been tightening restrictions on skill levels per match and thats a lot of why people find ever game to be a sweat fest. In older games with SBMM like halo 2 and 3 the SBMM had tolerance levels that would allow for some skill based matching with average players in the game as well, which made games more fun and less sweaty, games weren’t about the scoreboard and perfect balance back then, it was all about having as much fun as possible each game
At this point in the gaming industry, we need skill-based game developers to collaborate to actually make a game worth competing in.
lmao
cs
good luck with that lmfao
xdd
@Bizarre isnt that the sick ass netcode that sounds insane, ik nothing else about it other than it sounded cool as fuck
Random matchmaking isn't "the other alternative". Server browsers are above all. No matchmaker needed.
(I'm not saying matchmaking is useless in all cases, just that a plain old server browser is a very good [if not the best] option that has to be brought up for discussion and not simply forgotten about. It should be the 'default' in my opinion.)
@Alvi Syahri The answer is that server browsers simply don't allow balance without some form of autobalance, which can backfire and piss people off. The value of a server browser is that you can join the same server/lobby consistently over and over again, and start to learn what the regulars are like and play to their strategies. But it really only works for either casual games or for games with a small enough playerbase that matchmaking would be redundant in general. If your game is even somewhat marketed to the competitive players, then some form of skill-based matchmaking or ladder system is very important imo.
Of course, that's not to say that server browsers are useless. Like I said, they're perfect for casual play. You can join the same server or lobby over and over again, learn how the regulars play, and form a small community. There's a reason they're called pubs.
It would get cluttered real fast on the big big multiplayer games with low-ish number of players per game/round (with plenty of exceptions of course).
Really depends on what kind of game it is tbh on whether it should have matchmaking or lobby/server browser. Thing is player population is a hard thing to predict, so most devs just go with the safer option (which is matchmaking). Neither is the end all be all.
Server browser is also a pain. Having to manually sort through lobbies to find one that is someone decent can take time and energy. As a new player in multiplayer games, it kept me out of trying to play against players in games that didn't have a ladder system (sc1, war3, UT, CS, ...) since finding a decent lobby was a long process of trial and error and getting flamed.
@@nefas909 Yeah, not to mention all the servers that are technically open to the public but in practice quickly become insular to the point where most of the regulars will immediately grief and/or votekick anyone they don't recognize.
@@stevethepocket And admins that kick you for killing them or some other minor thing. And server rules that ban half the guns. And the good players who stack on one team and stomp everyone else.
I personally prefer being able to simply pick from a server list, especially when there are different rulesets in some of them because you can choose for yourself what kind of lobby you want to play in and find micro-communities around gametypes that you like.
it's not the most convenient option, but the sense of agency is a big help in enjoying a multiplayer game for me.
Yeah but this is back in the day when you actually had to operate your own game servers. Those days are long gone sadly it means these games will not always be available to play
@@samholdsworth420 Community servers increase a game's lifespan don't they? Like tf2?
@@jonahharris8789 yeah, but that era is dead....
@@samholdsworth420 The era of operating your own servers? Minecraft does that today I think
@@jonahharris8789 talking shooters. And starting private lobbies isn't the same thing.
There was always some kind of SBMM in cod, but mw19 introduced a much different one. Previous sbmm systems appeared to be closer to ‘random’ matchmaking, while from mw19 and forward sbmm gives the impression of a much ‘stronger’ one.
To be honest, I feel like Skill-Based Matchmaking and random Matchmaking should be options for getting a quick play(I'm not saying ranked btw), and an average of the two as an option too (basically SBMM, but with a broader range of skill than the normal one).
I don't know why people haven't thought of this tbh, especially when Ranked (for competitive games) is way more reliant on SBMM in a lot of games.
But then the devs would have to officially admit that SBMM actually exists in the first place...
Personally I really like Overwatch's take on it with having somewhat stricter SBMM in competitive modes but then having it to a lesser level in casual, it keeps the competitive integrity in ranked modes but also means that people who aren't as good still don't get stomped by a random top 500 player when they just want to relax
imo, sbmm is more of a benefit to low-level players than mid-high level ones: if you have new players it's very important to make sure they aren't getting destroyed immediately regardless of their skill level to retain them
bots are also very common for this and are generally used alongside sbmm I believe
This doesn't work either, as a new player can win games against fellow noobs, then be put into a game with max rank sweat squads, it's unironically more fair to just have luck of the draw.
@@wolfkermek better to have a few games you can win before going against sweats, than none at all potentially I'd say
@@BobTheBob9 Keyword there is potentially. Even the games against noobs are potential wins or losses, even more so in luck of the draw.
@@wolfkermek absolutely, imo sbmm in this case should mainly about not leaving everything up to luck, with entirely random matchmaking, there's always the potential for a pro to go up against a brand new player, even if it isn't common, imo that's the main sorta thing you should be guaranteeing won't happen with sbmm, I think going too much further than that starts to be an issue
I’d say that it’s a benefit to all except the highest skill level players. It’s hard to actually get better at a game as a mid level player if you’re either going against newbies and stomping them, or getting stomped by vets.
Having some SBMM, even if more broad, helps people in the mid levels have opponents they can actually improve against
At higher levels, this encourages players to maintain their skill and continue practicing, thereby naturally encouraging players to improve to keep up with their peers. This works especially well in properly balanced competitive settings and ranked modes. Players naturally become a motivator for each other, be it a positive or negative force.
At mid-to-lower levels (the VAST majority of players), good SBMM only ever matches players with others who are just as ignorant as you are. People who refuse to learn, who refuse to improve, and those who spread a lot of fake nonsense amongst others who don't know any better who then take that elsewhere as "knowledge". And then when these players do well in one or a few games, they think that they've already done as well as they can and believe they deserve to keep winning. They enter the next skill bracket and start losing and think it's unfair or some kind of cheating. It is not their fault they believe this. If your skill is low enough, you'll find yourself in rooms where people will outright acknowledge a lack of interest in improving, basically making every match a tossup if a team has one of these players.
SBMM is an issue in modern video games because it brings into question why skill should even matter amongst the casual audience. As we know as game designers and enthusiasts in general, the actual competitive playerbase is dwarfed by the sheer number of casual players. Those players keep games alive. It also brings into question the value of winning as opposed to improving, since the only tangible reward comes from winning your games despite your personal performance. I don't understand why everyone these days is so fixated on skill when casual players are not even part of the equation, and I do think it's the prevalence of SBMM in places it doesn't need to be. Games like TF2 and many other shooters of old didn't rely on solely matchmade games, letting players decide where they wanted to go and who they wanted to play with- whether it be with better/worse/evenly matched players. It was your choice.
I do strongly believe it's one excuse (of many) for companies to avoid producing a good lobby browser and allowing players to make their own custom games that are easy to join and enjoy as well. Random matchmaking would be completely useless, I don't even know why it's a question. The issue is matchmaking in general.
Basically, players should be allowed to play with whoever they want, when they want, without feeling penalized for it. Custom games in a lot of modern shooters or games in general are frowned upon with lowered rewards or no post-game rewards to speak of. Players should be allowed to jump in the deep end if they want to, and being allowed to play with players of higher skill often gives players a goal to work toward or perspective on their own skill. And sometimes you just don't want to sweat, maybe you want to help some slightly lower skilled folks out who don't mind your presence. Maybe you do want to find a game of your level, you probably can. At the end of the day, it's everyone's choice to play with the people they're with, but most games these days don't even give us this choice.
On top of all this, good matchmaking is just hard to make. If your playerbase starts to dwindle, who draws the line between being able to play with similar skilled players or find a match at all?
You have a good point
Thats what its supposed to do, at higher levels you just get tired of seeing the same 5 things over and over again and just decide to quit at one point, before that you still have to suffer over the biggest sweatfest there is, while you're there trying to enjoy the game properly, but literally cant because of the amount of 12 year olds with meta weapons and no life.
On random matchmaking this would slightly increase the sweat level on most levels of skill, but vastly decrease it on higher levels + the people who "lack knowledge" are going to be forced to learn by experience what better players do, how they do it, and why they do it.
There is also a clear display of who's better by the player's kd/score compared to the rest of the lobby (this assumes they're playing legit and no scummy strategies), this whole thing should make it so that people playing longer have better tactics and strategies, new players can pick up on them as they see it ingame, raising the skill level of everybody involved, except for the people who are extremely ignorant and purposefully ignoring every strategy they find, but this makes it so that they either learn the new stuff and keep up with at least the average, or get stomped every game, the second alternative leads to more fun in SBMM, since you dont get to see the awful experience of high mmr
I've read somewhere that sbmm improves player retention by giving players just the right number of wins and losses to keep them playing for a long time. Maybe this is true, but it does feel like a lot of game companies took the idea a little too far
You have a good point but I would rather have a more fun casually with my mates, I want to play SBMM in ranked, I enjoy playing a casual game that doesn't put me in a eSports tournament with prestige masters who do nothing but play the game 24/7 while I casually play the game and try to have fun
@@pinkoatss Ranked should rank players by their actual skill related to other players including good and bad ones.
In call of duty its simple: to encourage new players to buy skins. New player=low stats. Low stats=easy lobbies. Easy lobbies=fun. Fun=like the game and consider spending some extra money on it. SBMM used to be different in cod.
I used to play a game with no SBMM, the name was Phantom Forces (On Roblox anyways). In that game each player needed to learn to play the hard way, and because TTK is really short in that game, every gun is easy to use and provides enough to kill high rank players, so its a different case than with COD franchise but i honestly prefer a game without SBMM, because the learning curve is hard, but it provides a great advantage once you're on the average, you can dominate almost every lobby since the average ranks you'll find there are from 50-100 and only have tough fights against smurfs (people who start on new accounts) and higher ranks (100+) i managed to get to rank 164 before dropping the game because it felt too slow compared to COD and other games, but i still cheerish the memories i created in it as part of my gamer soul core.
No body likes to get continously steam rolled, and everyone wants to feel like a pro player. I know that this would be difficult to work out, but I would live to see a system that enables a player to play in easy - hard lobby and offer incentives to play in the harder lobbies. That way, you could either have a more casual experience, or gain the incentives for playing against harder players. I think k that would be ideal if set up correctly.
I think the main issue with this is that pretty much everyone will queue for the easy lobbies. You'll have newbies learning the game, casual players just trying to relax, and high tier players/content creators trying to get their next highlight reel, essentially turning the "easy" lobby into a random lobby. But if you try to limit a player's access to the easy lobby based on play time and skill, then you have sbmm. It's a tough problem
love this idea. only issue i can see is at the top and bottom of the spectrum where the highest skill players can't easily get a greater than usual challenge and the lowest can't get a lesser than usual challenge, although i can also see that at higher levels, since the level of play is so high, it's always a good challenge. lower skill would be harder to match for easier lobbies though, probably becoming increasingly difficult to find easy lobbies the lower skill a player his
i also had another though on this, where there are sort of "challenge lobbies" where higher skill players play against lower skill players (pretty much the higher skilled team is just outside the maximum skill difference) but the higher skilled players have handicaps chosen both by the weaker team (say like they can choose up to 3, a number i randomly chose) in the form of weapon/operator bans (weapon bans for games more like CoD and operator bans for games more like Rainbow Six Siege), gimmicks the opposing team has to deal with (like maybe no attachments, shorter grenade fuses, smaller magazine and ammo pool sizes, etc) and if the other team is feeling more confident they have the option to enable more handicaps for themselves in exchange for an increased reward for winning. would be difficult to balance, but considering that they're meant to be challenging for the better team and easier for the weaker team it may even be best to skew the balance in favor of the weaker team slightly
Not to be an asshole, but isn't that just ranked and casual?
@@garbaj this system is exactly what the game war thunder does and you find that you get into matches much quicker playing the harders mode than the eseyer mode
@@billcat1592 casual often is simply just tossing whatever players there are in queue into whatever lobby spaces there are, regardless of skill, meaning you don't know whether you're gonna have an easy, hard or just a standard challenge. what's proposed here is having an intentionally skewed set of matchmaking options allowing players to face either worse or better players also matchmaking using these settings.
i suggested a bit to expand on this where these settings loosen the matchmaking restrictions and try to make low skill vs high skill games within reason. for example, better players looking for an easy game would go against worse players looking for a challenging game, but skill is still taken into account so newer players looking for a harder game don't get literally unwinnable games because they got matched with extremely higher ranked opponents looking for an easy game.
I played Hunt: Showdown before and after SBMM was added/improved upon. There were definitely times before, where I was put into lobbies I had a very low chance of winning. There were very commonly players that were better than me, but when I did pull off a victory, it became all the sweeter. There were also times where there were players in my lobbies that were much less skilled than me as well. It was nice to come up against these players to sometimes get an easy win but sometimes they'd win as well and that was extremely frustrating. After SBMM was tightened up in the game, the sweat levels increased massively. I felt that I had to be playing at my very best every single game to be able to win. Even worse than that, the variety of matches became completely stale. Everyone at my skill level played more or less the same way and because of this the game became much more boring. Match variety was all but gone and try-harding every single game became exhausting.
I kind of feel the same. Three and four star lobbies can be really fun, and I can play a lot of different loadouts and still get kills and extract with bounties. Once I dip into the five star lobbies it just becomes meta loadouts and camping stalemates.
I don't know how it was before cuz on PS4 at launch it was one of the worst games I've ever played in my life, completely broken from the very basic shooter mechanics like aiming (record highest input delay I've ever seen, probably ever in a game, beating red dead redemption but with a jumpy fps that went below 20 on average).
So i didn't play much.
I got back when they released the PS5 patch so SBMM was already there.
And i gotta say SBMM is goddamn STUPID. i actively play like shit to not have 6 stars MMR. Got there and started having matches with 1 or no teams and somehow one match they were 3MMR and 4MMR players?? The 3MMR was a Smurf, a very obvious Smurf at that but still.
Other matches i get a full on 6 stars MMR lobby with everyone having 2+ KD using only meta stuff and lvl 50 hunters, not a single sound the whole match and everyone camping HARD.
I like to play around with guns, which is to my detriment as i never learn their timings and distances, also i push a lot. It's impossible to have fun at 6MMR.
And at the same time, it's also a major pain in the ass as some people get a high MMR by playing like complete shitstains, camping the whole fuckin time in bushes, doing jackshit, literally running away at the sight of ANY trouble, not caring about teammates AT ALL. 4MMR guys that end up at 5 or 6 because they don't die, they just snipe 1 dude after camping the exit for 49 minutes and leave without the bounty.
But playing as a Smurf was really fun again. Playing against 4 stars is so fun. Playing against people that don't use headphones is fun.
They don't camp cuz they are losers that can only get kills from a bush, they camp cuz they are scared to death and won't even attempt to shoot you lol. Killing some of them as they stand still thinking you cant see them is so funny. One dude was literally hiding behind a lamp post as if i could see him. Another one was crouching in the middle of the open trying to headshot me with a silenced vetterli. I just turned around and headshotted him with my pistol in 2 seconds lol. But alas it was short lived as 5 matches in and I'm already MMR5 with an 8.5KD and getting matched with presigte 80 lvl 100 long ammo boys and shotgun whores while all i have is a goddamn Romero, vetterli, Winfield and scottfield, nothing to throw and not even full health syringes. At least i unlocked the spitfire in a single match.
I like this, with games like cod or overwatch I can understand having some form of skill based matchmaking as they're one one done things that don't take much time investment and can get somewhat accurate data on your skill level and matchmake appropriately. However with battle royals it feels like these things are thrown right out the window due to the time investment required to play them especially in hunt showdown's case (most games go for 20-40 minutes) alongside this it feels like something that really shouldn't be in this style of game. If someone wipes an entire lobby in hunt showdown but gets killed but a lower skilled player right before the finish line they're still punished by harder games following that, and now the lower skilled player is skyrocketed into a higher skill bracket even though they've won one engagement.
@@LanguidMint battle royale games shouldn't have SBMM.
That's the point of battle royale games, everyone fights to win.
Imagine if bad players got amazing weapons as random drop in battle royale games just because they suck.
That's what many br games do actually. One of the reasons I left Fortnite in the first 6 months after it launched, it was random stupid bloom and random luck that wasn't all that random (my friend that was way worse than me would ALWAYS find the best shit, every single time. It was so bad that he would open every single chest i found cuz all i would get was a pignatta of common pistols and ammo for guns i don't even have while he would get a pignatta of epic shotguns, ARs and rocket launchers with the exact ammo needed for those).
If you want to play more casually, the game will give you more casual lobbies
The game I have experienced the most with SBMM is Dead by Daylight. SBMM was added about a year ago so the comparison between it not being implemented and it being introduced is still fresh. It has changed the game for the worst. The asymmetric style game is of course a whole different can of worms than your basic FPS but the affects are still the same. The majority of the matches you play ended up being almost identical. With over 90 survivor perks and 70 killer perks, you rarely see more than 7 or 8 different perks being played. Now to be clear, yes before SBMM was implemented, once you reached the "high ranks" of the old system the games would fall into the same pattern of only the strongest perks being used. Once SBMM was put in place, people started having harder times winning which would push people to the META perks faster just so they could have a chance at winning, no matter the skill level. This also had an aftershock affect of making the already more stressful side of "killer" being pushed to a whole new level of stress. It stopped being fun playing as a killer when a single mistake would mean the difference between a satisfactory conclusion to just being out right defeated. This has lead to more and more people abandoning the killer side of the game and making the survivor queue times far longer than they use to be. With a lower number of killers the search of a suitable opponent has become harsh.
Playing destiny 2 has given me an apreciation for sbmm. The "casual" playlists have very little room to have fun because there is always that one player with over 1000 hours ruining it. Competetive playlists are often more casual because the do have sbmm. (For those of you who play d2, I'm refering to the elemination playlist in particular as one with sbmm)
That's because SBMM is literally designed to help retain noobs and bad players like you.
They literally have a kiddy pool ffs. It's like a class for disabled kids. But everyone else is fuckin annoyed and getting fucked by sbmm the whole time.
You think it's goddamn fun being a rank 10 in cod and getting matched against Prestige 50 guys with all the unlocks and meta guns playing the sweatiest shit I've ever seen, while i have still the base premade classes and literally 0 knowledge of the maps that i play for the first time ever?
All cuz in training i had a little bit too much fun for the game and my 20kills streaks say that I'm a bit too good for the noob lobbies, WHILE I AM A FUKN NOOB!
Let's not forget that now i also have to wait 10 whole minutes to get matchmade in some random continent in europa. Yes, Europa, the jupiter moon. 120 ping after 10 mins of matchmaking after playing for 40 minutes, matchmade against players with 1200 hours.
That is my sbmm average experience in a game that isn't brand fkn new with less than 1 week lifespan.
Like in hunt: played a few matches and I'm MMR5 playing against Prestige 20 to 100 players while all i have is a fkn Winfield, no consumables, no full health syringes, no uncloks, no money, no must have traits like packmule and doctor. And that is a BR extraction game where weapons,traits and consumables are VERY important.
So yeah, fuck SBMM. Should be called BSMM.
lobby balancing in D2 is worse than any other game I've ever played. And it has had sbmm and cbmm throughout the game's history.
I used to be top 30 for d2 a longggggg time ago. Before the first raid. We’d Sherpa people for trials. I miss that game sometimes. Last time I had fond memories of video games
How come SBMM worked there?
@@SpartanJoe193 I posted this comment over a year ago. My outlook has changed
The way it actually works is all game developers know of me personally and hate me, so they put me in newb groups vs pro opponents.
i have always loved the team specific skill ranges in Battlefield 3 & Battlefield 4 lobbies. Each team has its own belle curve. Maybe one or two top fraggers are top, then the good players, and then some of the bad players. So you get the best of both worlds: sweating your balls off in some firefights, owning a couple noobs in the next one. Perfect balance.
Random matchmaking would kill reverse boosting that happens with sbmm, also if there’s a ranked mode in a game why would matchmaking during casual be the same. I think there should be a mix depending on which mode you’re playing and your level of competitiveness. Missing the days of “get good”
Agree, it's stupid to give many arguments about this. Just get better at the damn game like we all did.
@@gonzalodiaz9326 Its not that stupid. To me if you complain too much about SBMM its because you arent good enough to win against people of your own rank
@@zephyr6877 maybe if there are many people complaining about SKILL BASED MATCHMAKING, the SKILL BASED MATCHMAKING isn't matchmaking the players with people of their skill level? You litteraly say "its not that stupid" and then at the same time argue that the system isn't doing its job properly lmao
@@bogo_ you need to read my comment before you post. I never remotely said the system isnt doing its job properly. You were the one who said that, not me
@@zephyr6877 "if you complain too much about SBMM its because you arent good enough to win against people of your own rank"
I think this is one of the cases where asking the players for feedback can backfire very quickly. Because of the nature of the bell curve you described it's almost impossible to get even feedback from players. Even if the medium skilled players make up the biggest part of any community, the very skilled players tend to be the most vocal about the state of a game. Mostly because they spent a lot of time playing and practising the game and are therefore most likely to engage in discussion about said game. Meanwhile low skill players will rarely give feedback because they don't feel like they can or should contribute to the discussion.
TLDR: Even if the perception of a game turns for the better after getting rid of sbmm that might just be because the ones suffering from the effect are those who wouldn't spread their concerns
I'm a low-skilled player that played both MW19 & Halo Infinite, and I gotta say that *I enjoy Infinite's somewhat-random matchmaking more than MW19's 100% sweatfest.*
The application of modern CoD's SBMM is also based on your winning streak (some say this is RBMM/Revenue Based):
Once you win a match, it puts you in another lobby with equal to higher skills than you do. And if you win that one, even higher for the next match & so on.
It's designed that way to guarantee you lose a match against tryhards with dozens of cosmetics, that'll burn in your memory; which incentivize an emotional association of "more cosmetics = cooler wins".
Not to mention that when you're placed lower than your skills after losing in modern CoD (even if it's just one match), _you_ become the "tryhard cosmetic guy" for someone else; probably the newbie that only bought the base game.
Halo Infinite's monetization suck ass, but my time playing in Southeast Asia region has been filled with a lot more "no cosmetic" players of varying skills than a guaranteed losing chance for every victory.
for a game which is already running, as long as you can match the account of each player giving feedback, it should be easy to control for this (as well as other) possible bias
@@TheRibbonRed CoD's matchmaking is known as a bell curve match making.
It takes the naturally occurring bell curve of large lobbies and tries to give people skill ratings and to engineer that bell curve, the "win streak" is part of it's mechanism where if you were at the top of the bell curve in the previous lobby, the system should want to put you in the middle or lower part of the bell curve for the next lobby. This idea for the lower end is a good idea, you were the bottom of the curve last lobby (in other words a sacrificial pawn meant to be the easy target for everybody else) then you would get promoted to somewhere in the middle next game. Not all games make this correction and people at the top 10% of players of the game would be consistently match at the top of the bell curve, and players in the bottom 10% would consistently match to be the bottom of the curve, it's arguable about which one is better... but this system does one thing really well.
Since there's always a bottom of the curve, unless you're the poor fucker in that position, you will always have SOMEBODY you're better than in a lobby so you can casually still do... "ok" this is really good for player retention in the long run. A lot of players getting matched at the bottom of matches will stick with it, either out of ignorance of how bad they're doing, or out of sheer desire to get better.
The reality is for ANY system, is that players that _try_ to improve will not feel rewarded, no matter what system they run across.
@@SherrifOfNottingham the only system that rewards players that try to improve, is Server Browsers.
If you can find a tight-knit group that's willing to improve with you ("noobs welcome"), then they're gonna improve with you. No more unbalanced randos, no more push for MTX. Just your mates. That's how legends were made.
@@SherrifOfNottingham any proof for this?
The real problem with sbmm specifically in the new cods, it’s more of a performance based matchmaking. If you play decently well for 2 matches, you immediately get shoved into a pro lobby with people of a kd of 4.
In IW I had a kd of 1,5, and I got matched with people with a KD between 0,8-2. In mw2019 I had a kd of 0,7 and I regularly got matched with people with a KD over 4!
Thats the biggest problem with new cod sbmm, getting matched with people that are just way better than you.
exactly what I was thinking. In MW 2019, BOCW, and VG if I perform well in game it will match me up with insanely good players the next, where at that point I might as well be playing ranked
I think the real issue is that SBMM ca be hard to do right. Prob should just go back to the same SBMM design the older COD games had
I think there should be a reward for playing in higher skilled lobbies. Its very discouraging to always have the same chance of winning because of sbmm even tho I am improving.
As a rewars a badge would be suitable that multiplies your xp or currency u are getting. The different badges would also be a good indicator of improvement.
That's called a ranked playlist. They already exist. strong SBMM doesn't really belong in casual lobbies
But at that point even a player that hasn't the same skill as you have the same badge while he shouldn't (or viceversa).
I think the way it's implemented has a way bigger effect than its inherent good or badness. The only downside for me with skill-based match-making is that you almost don't feel like you are getting better even if you are because you are always going up against people who are close to or as good as you.
Yeah! This is exactly my gripe with it too.
I agree that the implementation is incredibly important, but I disagree that you don't feel a sense of improvement when playing against similarly skilled opponents. I've recently gotten into fighting games, and I have to say you definitely notice that you have improved when you start playing against people who actually block. You get the sense that your skillset has gotten you to a point where you need to learn new things to keep progressing, which I think is an incredible feeling of getting better, at least for me.
@@bhx6252 But fighting games are a genre in which your skill (or lack therof) is constantly on display with no barriers. If you're bad, that's going to show, whereas in a shooter you can have positional, first sight, map knowlege, and game knowlege to aid you rather than being a contest of raw aim. Aside from your character, no player has an inherent advantage in a fighting game. Which means that nearly all of the advantage comes from skill. Controlling the character better is a visible improvement. If your aim gets better, but you still die 50% of the time, you can't really tell you've much improved unless you land that sick shot.
Fighting games don't hide player skill, so improvement is easy to see. FPS games can hide skill, so improvment is harder to see as well.
@@davidburke4101 I disagree, I think that seeing your aim improve is a noticeable improvement event if you still die most of the time. I experience this exact thing in Hunt Showdown. I'm still ass at the game but I'm starting to get better at hitting my shots, which feels great to see.
I also don't think you're looking at the bigger picture of fighting games in the comparison you're making. You can have good combos, but if you don't have good frame data knowledge, neutral control, defense, mixups, and more, you're going to struggle to succeed. This is the same scenario as having good map awareness in an FPS but having bad aim, positioning, etc. The same thing you said about your aim getting better but still dying 50% of the time can be applied to fighting games in so many ways. If your anti-airs get better but you still lose most of the time, I'd argue you will still see/feel the improvement despite the fact that your win rate hasn't increased at all. In Tekken, if you're a god at breaking throws, you can still lose very often if you don't practice your other skills. All of the things you talked about with FPS games as separate factors (positioning, map knowledge, etc.) can be factored into as a player's skill, much like how all of the individual aspects of fighting games (spacing, neutral game, anti-airs, frame data, combos etc.) can all be seen as components of that player's skill. It's the same thing in both genres.
@@bhx6252 I think you missed my point entirely.
Lets take scenario A. Some player with a hypothetical skill rating of say 10 goes up against a player of 40. However, 10 guy gets the drop and/or a positional advantage over the 40 guy. 10 guy wins this engagment.
Lets take scenario B. Same players different genre. Player A picks a character that B is unfamilair with. Player A still get bodied. Even with a lack of knowlege on how A's character works, it isn't enough to overcome B's greater skill.
In an FPS there are many factors outside of the players skill that determines who wins an engagement. Enemy team players, position, first sight advantage etc. Map and game knowlege also play an important factor, but those just allow you to stack positional and first sight advantage more often in your favor. But no matter how good at an fps I am, I won't always get first sight or positional advantage, especially if there is an objective besides kills. The skill gap between two players can be overcome with other factors in an fps. In a fighting game you cant stack any advantage other than your character provides.
The point being here is that because the only possible factor in a fg is player skill and character, its much easier to see an improvement. In a shooter, you can end up with a bunch of bad/good engagements regardless of player skill, and this can hide whether or not you've improved. This last paragraph was really the point.
the only people i saw whining about sbmm were cod youtubers that could no longer stomp 11 year olds
thats not true, lets say i play a game mostly to relax after work, and im just naturally good at positioning and aiming. Games might start putting me in lobbies with absolute tryhards crouch spamming, prone shooting or camping... Which will then change my experience quite a bit. I like soft sbmm with good skillbased tam balancing. put sweats against me in the lobby, but id rather not have ALL the lobby be sweaty. Its not like average players cant kill me if they get the jump on me
Why would it make it sweatier for low skill players? Sweating only benefits you if the matches are close, because that extra bit of effort may be what decides the match. Which is why SBMM is so exhausting, because regardless of skill level, everyone is forced to play like they are in a MLG tournament if they want to win. And even if you don't care about winning, assuming you aren't a sociopath, it feels bad letting your team down... so everyone feels pressured to tryhard. If the other team is stomping you, there is no reason to sweat, because it isn't gonna change anything. In fact, matches where your team is getting annihilated are some of the most entertaining as people usually use it as an opportunity to relax and joke around on the mic. At least they used, back when shooters were about fun, and people played them for fun. Nowadays it seems like people only play shooters because they are wannabe MLG/streamers/youtubers or have an unhealthy addiction to unlocking skins.
Also, the alternative to SBMM isn't random matchmaking, it is connection-based matchmaking. AKA not having to playing in constant lagfests. Also I think the reason SBMM doesn't work in battle royale isn't just the amount of players/teams but also the lack of data generated per match. In a match of COD, you may fight against the same player a dozen times in a match so they can get a good sense of who is better by the end of it. In a battle royale match you probably only fight that player once and it is hard to accurately extrapolate who is better than who based off a single data point.
I'd like to add that as a R6 Siege player, I'm against SBMM. Situationally. What I mean is, we have a ranked and unranked game mode for people to sweat in, and then we have casual. Why bring it to casual? My casual mmr tends to be higher than my ranked mmr, where my ranked mmr is low-mid plat, my casual lobbies tend to be filled with diamonds, champions, and the very occasional e-sports player/team. That isn't even the only problem. I've grown so used to seeing the same names in my lobbies, I've even come to know what operators they would pick, and they vice versa to me. SBMM makes casual feel like a competition, with casual games being ironically far far sweatier than ranked.
I believe that one if the old CoDs had a "training camp" for players lower than level 10 so they could get into the game without getting stomped. I think that'd be good because it would retain new players and build their confidence before it drops them into the general public where the skill level is higher on average. Then you could minimize the sbmm effects
That was cod ghost iirc
They literally have something like that in COD mobile. Well not really a training mode. They keep you with other noobs around your skill sets until you start to get better. Then it'll be more and more randomized with people of various skill levels as you get higher.
Cod mobile multiplayer is literally what the console cods should be. Clearly not a lot of people know this cuz barely anybody ever talks about that or even straight up says that. But you're literally taking care of cod mobile better than any of the console cods. Multiplayer matches tend to be balanced. That hint detection actually works. The game is basically Black ops 2 but more polished, and with other call of duty assets. I mean, it's not the most polished call of duty in the world. But compared to modern day cars and even the original Black ops 2 multiplayer, it's a little bit more polished.
It's not to say you're still not going to get lagged or have other issues. But usually if it lags, it's less due to the issue of ping and more so your actual internet connection itself or the game just eats to the ram on your phone.
At least with my phone, the more start to use up the ram the more it starts to lag. Sometimes it will have those moments where it takes a while to find a lobby and does put me in somewhat of a sweat fast or even just a more lag your love you with not a very good connection. But most of the time usually the connection is good. The first thing that worries about is a good connection followed by balancing out the teams.
The console ds will sacrifice good ping just to have a full lobby of even players. With card mobile, it tries to give you a good pin lobby while still balancing out players on your team and the enemy team.
Sometimes it'll sacrifice a full proper balance for a better connection. Sometimes it'll sacrifice a little bit of that ping to property balance the lobby. Most part it's pretty consistent and doesn't try to completely sacrifice one or the other.
As for it's battle royale, I can't really say for sure. Sometimes I stomp, sometimes I get stomped. I would say most of my Battle Royale games were more of a case of circumstances rather than skill based matchmaking. If anything come I've been fucked over more by lag when game starts eating more ram. Or my internet starts to bug out. But usually it's never really a fault of the game itself.
And of course compared to the ones I'm console, no cheaters whatsoever in Battle Royale. I honestly don't understand what it is about cod mobile that you're taking care of a mobile game that's free better than the ones you actually have to pray for. I almost kind of feel bad for a lot of the other cod players that wasted their money on the more recent ones. And now they're stuck with it and they don't even want to play it anymore. But at the same time, they should have learned their damn lesson by now so that's their own damn fault.
And how many of them have been seen for the longest they want to go back to Black ops 2 but can't because it either can't find the lobby or it's just lobbies full of cheaters.
Then refuse to outright play card mobile because either they don't like playing on phone or they like to play with controller. Which okay, then download an emulator and connect your controller. Even without an emulator this game is compatible with controllers. And for those who still want a bigger screen and not a tiny screen and again don't want to get an emulator, then they can just get a micro USB to HDMI cord. Or USB c to HDMI cord. Literally an HDMI cord you can plug into your phone and put into the tv. There you go. You're playing card mobile with the controller and you have a big screen to look at it.
People can literally have the card experience they miss once again. But they're making excuses for themselves to waste the money on the versions that don't work well. I honestly don't get it.
And honestly, if more of the council card players started moving more towards the mobile card, that would show them that they're doing something right on the mobile version versus the console ones. And clearly whatever you're doing better is that good if it's making people leave the AAA games. In the community can make it very clear, we're playing cod mobile because this is how we want our call of duty to be. If more of the console of cods were like this and we would play them more. But instead of doing that, they cry in bitch and moan, make their videos, and go back to playing the game again for a full year. Only to buy the next call of duty and do the cycle all over again. Cry, bitch, and make their videos. The call of duty cycle is their doom. And their Doom is eternal. And there is no Slayer coming to save them.
World at War has a "boot camp" mode where you match with players below level 8 (aka christmas n00bs), and people above level 8 found a way to get into the boot camp mode and stomp it with their dual-mag mp40
@@havoc3-243 oh neat. Never did play WaW. I got into cod at MW2
I feel like another angle that's interconnected with Skill-based matchmaking is team based matchmaking. Do you try to match groups of similar sizes against each other? How do you determine the group's position in skill-based matchmaking? At first I thought that the video had missed an important factor in SBMM, but after thinking about it this concept and how it relates to SBMM is probably worth its own short(or long) video.
In older cods, the sbmm was the average for the whole team. In the newer ones, its whoever has the highest skill is what it matchmakes for
In older cods it would do teams based on your score in the previous game before they started switching you after every game
It really just depends on how good the SBM is. Constantly losing a luck draw and having bad players on your team, (or being a bad player put against high level teams) is always going to feel bad. To talk about CSGO for a sec, in early CS days, there was no SBM, just random people put up against each other with the highest skill player on each team essentially 1 v 5ing the whole match. With a bad SBM, its very similar, people who are *supposed* to be the same skill level turn out to be smurfs and people literally having no hours of experience, so the same 1 v 5ing happens again. A good SBM would allow the lower level players to actually have fun, while the higher level players could continually improve (as its much more difficult to improve when you are playing against low skill opponents).
Quick aside to talk about non-shooter games with SBM. Smash Bros Ultimate has a SBM and I really love it, not because its particularly good, but because of the design of the game. Outplaying your opponent isnt a mechanical skill that would need hours of out of match practice to improve, but instead, just how well you understand your opponent and how well you can counteract them, inside the match. Meaning, even when you're matched up with someone slightly better than you, you can still pull over the win if you actually put your mind to it.
Every single gamer who has played shooters before 2020 played before skill based matchmaking and got fell in love with shooters wile being the awful guy on the team. I remember slowly getting better at bo2 when I was 10 and I loved to try new things and see my improvement. It was awesome and I miss it a lot.
So I play BO2 on the Plutonium PC client where you only join games via a server browser, so there is absolutely 100% no SBMM (except for team balancing, which some servers don't even do). Here's my experience with it (it being 'no SBMM'):
It's of course still pretty sweaty, since anybody of any skill level can join, and especially since only seasoned COD pros would go back and play such an old game. But since they are community-run servers, the lobbies persist and you can even rejoin the same exact server like months later and still find the exact same people playing. It gives you a chance to improve against people and become skilled like they are. With SBMM in COD, you never improve, because you just go back and forth between these super difficult lobbies and then these super easy lobbies.
Another thing with non-SBMM games is the sense of community; you can play with the same people for literally hours, and with regards to Plutonium specifically, like I said before, you can often find the exact same people playing on the same servers every day, so you'll almost always run into the same people, which allows you to easily build friendships on the servers! Getting a sweaty lobby destroyer in BO2 plutonium makes me want to stay and learn from the guy; sweaty lobby destroyers in SBMM games just makes me want to leave, since I know the game is just manipulating me and is going to throw me into an easier lobby later.
Overall I prefer COD without SBMM any day of the week, even if I'm getting easier lobbies from SBMM. It feels like the game is cheesing me and just trying to keep me playing.
You can have a secondary self-moderating system, by releasing server-hosting tools, and equip your game with a server browser. This allows communities to create identities for themselves, that lets players themselves chose how sweaty of an environment they want.
Of course, since it takes time to find a community you like, new players should be funneled into a matchmaking system, before they decide to try to find something for themselves.
SBMM is a gift that comes with a curse
Sbmm is a curse that comes with a curse
I had the opposite example of what you're asking for, I played Destiny 2 before they removed SBMM entirely and it's basically unplayable now. New and lower-medium skill players are little more than cannon fodder for the high skill players to farm and matches are now just 1-2 people on each team racing to farm piss easy kills, it's basically a first person MOBA at this point.
I think games should have both, like a *competetive* lobby with SBMM and a *occasional* lobby without SBMM so you can play the game just how you like
SBMM can sometimes be a pain for some games where you wanna play a certain gamemode, but can‘t really.
NFS Hot Pursuit Remastered is one of those examples.
There‘s 5 online gamemodes, each with 5 seperate car classes.
You can do a quick search, which throws you into lobbies of all gamemodes and carclasses or do custom search. In the custom search you have to both select a gamemode and carclass. Meaning you have to guess for the carclass if you wanna play a specific gamemode and vice verca.
Having a server browser which shows the gamemodes and carclasses would fix it. But EA isn‘t adding that
well atleast there's a quick search in the remaster, original didn't even have that
i used to pretty much only play hot pursuit in supers back in the day
i've never really liked sbmm, the way i feel is that there should always be a ranked mode with sbmm and a casual mode without sbmm. adding a newcomer mode can also be useful, but then you can run into issues like smurfing.
What if I wanna play casually with players at my skill level
There was a game I played on PC back in the day. I can't remember it's name but you were kept in noobie servers until a certain level, and after that level, if your kd was below one you stayed in them. If it was above 1 you had to play in the regular servers. Was a pretty good system.
For siege specifically, ranked playlist and unranked should be heavily influenced by sbmm. However casual should be less influenced by it as it makes quickplay less enjoyable when you're going again very highly skilled players and even teams when trying to play casual in quick match
the problem with that, is that you can't learn how to play with other noobs but once you get into casual with some experiences players you just get insulted the whole match and that made me stop playing
@@bapoTV I'm not saying put people in with players who are considerably worse than x player. I am saying that you should be put in with similar ranks, but less higher ranks from your rank. So for example, if you were gold 1, you would be put into games with plat 3's and other golds. So that way it's not completely unfair. I am plat 1 and get put in with champs in casual, and it's horrid because I can't enjoy the game in a casual setting.
The point is to also not scare away newer players. What is "enjoyable" for you due to beeing able to stomp the lobby is MUCH less or even not enjoyable at all for lower skilled players. I do think SBMM is a good thing. Neither stomping nor getting stomped is a good feeling in my opinion. The skill gap between people in the sub 50% of playerbase is much tighter than those from 60 up to 100. Without SBMM player of about 60% of the skill and upwards would totally dominate every lobby which consists of of a lobby more than half of people
@@mssed3031 I've been quite a lot lower in rank than Plat 1 for a long time but I also do get queued with champs/diamonds every now and again (I'm usually sitting around G1 or P3). The reason they pair you with them - I presume - is because there are so few players in those high ranks that they have to queue for a considerably longer amount of time than the average player and eventually the system gives up on trying to find a similarly skilled player and just throws them in a lobby with people of far lower skill than them. In my experience, the further you deviate from the average (which is Silver 1) the longer you have to wait to get matched but this is only really true for ranked. However, in casual the system tries its hardest to achieve a similar goal but often fails to do it within a time frame that the typical player deems reasonable. No one wants to wait 10+ minutes to play one casual game that will last about that time. I agree that it's unfair for you to play champs, but it's also unfair for champs to have to wait for eternity in the main menu...
@@mssed3031that’s still garbage, don’t be stupid. The SBMM is trying to protect the bottom 5% of players but ruin for the rest. It should be SBMM if there is one really good player he should be on the other team and make it more fair but forget ranks, this isn’t a ranked game mode no need for that. In OW im high diamond stuck there because my team sand bag me and they suck cause they cannot compete even in QP my supports and tanks get diffed constantly. No matter how many elims and DPS I do it doesn’t matter I may out perform my team consistently but I’m still in a NET L even in casual game modes it’s just as sweaty as ranked there’s no fun in that even in QP you get pocket mercy pharahs and it’s not a skill issue because I’m in top % of players 💀
Call of duty is, im pretty sure, the only fps that just doesn’t work with sbmm. In other fps games like battlefield, apex, or halo you want a fight. Because a great deal of the appeal of those games is learning to get better at them. There’s a big skill gap in those games and climbing it is one of the appeals of each match. But for cod the appeal of each match isn’t getting better at the game, it’s pub stomping. This isn’t me shitting on cod players for just being big ol babies who can’t be bothered to get good at the game. Cod as a series has massive skill gap compression, things like: insanely low ttk, massive cone fire on guns, random respawns, instant respawns, easy to memorize and simplistic maps etc. The cod games have gotten better at this since the mw reboot engine was introduced but it’s still pretty bad. These things are all by design, activision is like a crack dealer, they’re goal with every match is to give you a chance at a big blowout match. A match where you were the obvious dominant force. They achieve this by making the moment to moment gunplay essentially a coin toss of who sees who first and then allowing snowballs through kill streaks into massive kill chains. And it’s easier to provide that to the player when the moment to moment gameplay is simplistic and kills are easy to come by. You go 15/10 in a battlefield match you’re pretty satisfied. There’s a pretty wide variety of things to do in a battlefield, and each kill was something that either required effort or creativity. If you go 15/10 in cod it gets old pretty fast. It’s not just monotonous, it’s insufficiently stimulating. Cod is the only game I know of where you can be going positive in a match and still be bored out of your mind. Because each match is designed to give you a chance at the big blowout match, that’s cod’s selling point, that’s it’s big thing and if you aren’t getting that high of a big blowout match it’s just not fun. And sbmm makes it harder to achieve that. Sbmm essentially makes it harder to have a snowball match, it’s harder to get kills off of kills when the enemy team is also good at that. In effect cod sbmm invalidates the main appeal of cod, unlike any other fps game I know of. Sbmm insures that the better you get at the game the less likely you are to have fun with it because it’s less likely you will be presented with opportunities to actually engage with the main appeal.
Another side note with sbmm, or just playerbase skill in general is that as a games lifespan continues it’s playerbase skill skews higher. This is because the more time a player base spends with a game the better they get at it. This also means that any new players who get into a game later in its lifespan are gonna have a harder time either finding matches or playing matches because there is a smaller percentage of similarly skilled players for them to play with
This was very well written and explains why I don't mind losing or going negative in BF1 but can't play any COD game for longer than an hour
That is a good explanation 👏
I played a VR game called Onward. It is a 5v5 and the most popular game mode is basically search and destroy but with only one objective instead of 2.
When you join a lobby you are not assigned a team. There are 2 helmets on the table. You choose one and put it on your head to join a team. Between each round you have the option to leave your team and choose a helmet again.
This leaves it up to the players to balance the teams if they choose. Say if everyone on one team leaves they can redistribute the players. Or if some mad lad wants to prove his skills they can do a 1v5.
It's interesting seeing that some people don't care about evenly distributing the skills of each player. Sometimes you get people trying to evenly distributed the skill. Some stay loyal to a team for as long as they are in that lobby. Some will switch teams every time the map changes. Sometimes you get a lobby that feels very evenly distributed and people will say that they want to keep the same teams each time for that reason.
I will say the games that feel evenly matched are super fun. Every time you kill someone or die it feels like a crucial moment in whether you teams loses or wins the round.
Another thing is that there is a COD every year so people are used to playing now and have gotten better.
The new name of the game is player engagement and player retention. EOMM. (Engagement Optimized Matchmaking)
EOMM attempts to keep players playing longer and is based on short-term performance/skill. This often can create the "roller coaster effect" on winning and losing, that is heavily noticed. EOMM is a profit driven system.
I can imagine a system where as well as the game estimating your skill level, you can also choose your "desired opponent skill level" at will. Then the servers could match pro players who want to take it easy with newer players that want to be challenged, as well as allowing for serious pro players to compete together in high level matches or casual low skill players to find each other.
I bet you sweaty players will allways use Easy no matter what, it should be a system that is difficult to manipulate
@@pax1217 If you choose "Easy opponents" and are winning every time, you get put in servers with people who have asked for "Hard opponents" and want a challenge trying to take you down. No incentive for manipulation because you get to choose your level of opponents anyway.
@@oneocgossiptreecreek Anyone serious about getting better at the game would. And that number only has to be comparable with the number who ask for easier opponents.
I remember when I started playing COD 4.
I forced myself to not punch my screen because I was obliterated almost everywhere. The ratio of good and bad players was really random and when you joined the private servers, the people there were usually playing at the server every day and the skill ceiling was over the roof. Yet, I was persistent and joined the same 3 or 4 places every day spending a fuckton of time there. I grinded, and I grinded, and I grinded... Until I was good enough to compete with the top 5 of those servers. The skills I acquired (mouse placement and movement, in-game movement, and usage of cover, etc.) translated to other fast-paced multiplayer games which I play until today.
I felt real satisfaction from playing.
No one (or almost no one) complained about the top guys shredding noobs like me to pieces, we just continued to play and acquire a new set of skills, often watching the most skilled ones to pick up techniques and little things that helped to upgrade your own playstyle.
I do understand that nowadays when a game is being developed, the companies are aiming at accessibility and reach of those games so that they hit as many recipients as possible. I also understand that there are people that are genuinely playing for fun and they want to relax while playing.
My point is, back then, in times when SBMM wasn't a thing (or it wasn't as visible as it is right now) people just tried their best to improve themselves at the game of their choice. I remember those times as the times I improved as a player the most. Maybe it isn't so good to put players into categories and gratify them or punish them for being good or bad at the game?
I'm no specialist when it comes to marketing, game design or sales management, I am just a simple gamer who enjoys both the joy of winning and the lessons given by losing.
I am sorry for my terrible English. Also, if you disagree with anything I've written here feel free to comment and put your perspective of how you see the issue, I didn't want to offend anyone.
Have a great day.
I completely agree and your English was great
Ya great point
This is a mw2019 game sequence used to go for me:
-play a couple or maybe even 3 games with a week weapon or a goofy build
-actually do good with said weapon and have fun
-next few games have to play hard to at least saty positive
-switch to a m4 or mp5 and play more relaxed
-then again the following matches become an absolut swetty hell
random match making, for me, as a cod player, is the REAL experience. that curve you showed in 0:37 is why. it explains so much. you always start as a noob, someone who is not good at all. through experience, insistence and determination you achieve the impossible, you don't suck anymore. great. now you have a new goal: absolutely dominate. few people get there and that's why it's so special and rewarding when you do. this narrative -like experience, which is a long term experience, almost completely dies once skill based matchmaking is on and trying to do what it's supposed to (even if that's rare, and i'll explain why in a bit). when this moronic system was implemented, the organic random way in which people organized themselves became curated by an intrusive algorithm. it takes control out of the player. it makes the experience less rewarding and less fun.
my other point is that, even when the skill based match making thing is working, the distribution of skill still follows tha same rules and proportions, but in a smaller scale. almost every match ends with two or three people out of twelve who completely destroyed everyone else. that's not just cod dude, that's life. a small amount of people dominate at sports, business, relationsihps, everything. special people are special because they push themselves through a limit most wouldn't. this always happends, and it's not "unfair". fairness has nothing to do with it, in my opinion. unfair is trying to socially engineer your players into acting in a certain matter and completely ignoring what makes playing the game in comunity (online) is all about. is about helping other people get better, showing off your cool stuff, making things that other players can't do and rising above the rest in a way or the other. i, for instance, was the editor of some sniper clans back in the day, i wan't even good at the game (not as much as my fellow sniper friends atleast), but i rose in my way, being good at what i'm good at being good (if that makes any sene) while still being part of a comunity. the randomness makes you see what can be done by people with actuall skill. if you get trickshotted at the end of a game by a much more skilled player than you, you'll most probably be embarassed, but also admired. that's what i think.
I guess SBMM comes from a desire to better control or "design" what kind of experience the players will get.
With random matchmaking it's up in the air whatever or not everyone is going to have fun, because ultimately every player plays the game differently for different reasons and exert different amounts of effort. When you want your game to be about personal achievement and skill, it makes sense why you would gravitate towards implementing SBMM. In theory it makes the games more fair. Except, it's dynamic difficulty from Resident Evil 4 put into a multiplayer game and when people are aware of its existence, it opens up a lot of ways for exploitation. People already do it with things like AFKing and smurfing to get the desired rank.
I wonder what would happen if we flipped SBMM on its head. What would happen if in a team game it wasn't about each team's average player skill levels, but rather about each team's individual players? Current systems have some kind of "average skill level" for every team and SBMM tries to match them as closely as possible. This means stuff like 6 people with rank 4 going against 1 player with rank 1 and 5 players with rank 5-6. Balanced game? Only by the average.
What I think could be more interesting is having three average and three pro players go against another team of three average and three pro players. I don't know how many games employ this, but it's worth a shot. Of course if your game has no ambitions for competitive fairness just make it random or design the game so no matter how skilled you are there's still a chance you can win (Mario Kart FPS anyone?).
Also worth noting is that SBMM makes very little sense for indie games, since they require large player numbers for it to work. If your game is 1v1 it's a bit better, but for indies it's better if they stick with random matchmaking or even community servers. Imagine if there was a game where you could combine the two and have some kind of system like TF2's Quickplay where it just picks a random community server with players on it. Oh wait.
What you described is the SBMM modern CoD uses, and it's a frustrating experience for the lower-skilled player. Every match is a sweatfest, even on "non-hardcore" matches.
CoD pits you against higher skills based on every win you got, and thinks you're a "high skilled player" the moment you win your first match of the day. And if you lose? You're temporarily "lower skilled" and becomes the higher skilled player for your weak opponents. Win that match, and it's back again.
*Just have a server browser for complete Casual play.* Or if you want an SBMM for Casual, you can have a more lenient range that doesn't pit you against players with +/- 5 KD from you.
One lower skilled player shouldn't be used to average-out a team's or lobby's average skill; they'll be the deadweight. Less so a team, you're just guaranteeing a wipe & more disappointed players.
You really had to put salt on the wound with that TF2 comment huh??? I completely agree with you tho!
As with most other things, it really depends on the game. Call of Duty is a pretty casual game where you just drop in for a match or two every now and then when you want to blow some time, so it can be better to have random matchmaking, both for queue times and so you don't need to focus to either win or get demolished. Something like Counter-Strike though, has been built around making every match a sweatfest where everyone's playing to win and higher skill players will put in extra time to warm up before going into a proper match. Matches are longer, team size is smaller and map design is a lot more focused on being competitive than pretty. It's an interesting discussion though.
My biggest gripe with SBMM having such a heavy influence on matchmaking in games like Battle Royales is that its so easily exploited by simply making a new account and making it so that the system does not have enough info about that player to determine where they lie in the skill curve and will lean more towards the lower end allowing that person to stomp on the lobby making everyone elses experience worse and driving them away
Good hope the game dies because of smurfing because SBMM is literal dog shit
The reason SBMM exsists is because in older cod games a large majority of lesser skilled players would quit within a few months of the new game because they were constantly getting destroyed.
Considering lesser skilled players are a majority in any game, companies realized keeping them playing the game as long as possible will increase sales of MTX’s ..
In the CoD Community, an issue that has now been present with its matchmaking since MW2019 is that the matchmaking was changed so that it disbands player lobbies once the game ends. This is an issue, not just because it means you're going to get a new group of players, but that by doing such a thing, you're taking that choice away from players to leave the lobby. You don't get to have multiple games against anyone, its always one game and then you never see them again. It would be like if a fighting game never let you rematch people after the first match. Something like that would see major complaints with players in a fighting game.
By having lobbies disband, you can never rematch a better player to learn more about how to fight against their playstyle, and you can never see that teammate that was super helpful to you again. Sure you could send a friend request and perhaps party up, but with previous SBMM, that wasn't necessary. And furthermore, its been proven that with the change to have lobbies disband, connection stability is sometimes sacrificed to get you in a more skill-matched lobby.
Fair, sure, but casual? heck no
One thing I will say about older cods. If you felt like you were in a lobby of sweats, you could leave. There was always the option of leaving and trying to find a better match. Now, you click to enter a game mode and it takes a little bit, figures out your sbmm and places you. The fact of the matter is random matchmaking allows for both sweaty and casual play styles. That is exactly the reason they have had ranked modes in the past. It is not as if lower skill players were just stuck, they had the opportunity to leave and find an easier match. That is not really an option now unless you decide to purposely throw matches in order to lower your sbmm. Thank you for your time. Sbmm sucks
I’ve largely shifted away from games with heavily tuned SBMM (and also crossplay but that’s off topic).
I would prefer completely random matchmaking because as it stands now, I feel like the outcome is decided before the match starts in games like COD and Overwatch. A few minutes into a match and 99% of the time I’ll know the outcome which just takes the fun out of it
I don’t feel like I won when I win and losing feels like it’s even more out of my hands than in the old days when I’d get bad teammates because now I’m assigned bad teammates.
Matches are no longer drastically different and makes games feel more repetitive To me
i have the same opinion, cod and bf42 of today are very repetitive and boaring coz there are no more fun gameplay on each match. And this force me to play another type of games, except FPS.
I think in the casual/unranked gamemodes there should be no sbmm, while in competitive games it obviously makes sense to sort people by rank or skill. But casual gamemodes should not feel like you are playing in a comp game, that just makes it a lot harder to have fun with friends for example.
It shouldn’t even exit in ranked either it should be whoever is in your rank not skill because you will be stuck playing against the best of the best in your rank and it leads to things like never progressing past a single rank unless you put in an ungodly amount of hours trying to get better, it shouldn’t be like that.
The problem that this video overlooked when it came to COD is that in the newer titles, the skill based matchmaking switches the player into a completely new lobby every game. This leads to, in a situation where a player has a very good game, the player getting switched into an extremely high skill lobby where they stand no chance. Then it takes about 5 games to get to a lower, more average lobby due to the ELO system, assuming the player gets swept in the higher skill tier lobbies. The game punishes the player for doing well and doesn’t give nearly enough padding for when they do bad. I can’t play COD for more than thirty or forty minutes anymore because if I have one good game then that’s it for the foreseeable future and everything devolves into a sweat fest
The best thing to do is get a cronus zen, and download a “reverse boosting” script. The script will make you run around and shoot so you dont get booted.
Its not REALLY reverse boosting, rather letting the unplayable games play out. Come back after 4-5 games and youll be in a playable lobby again.
I think you should just have a casual mode that has almost completely random matchmaking, and a ranked that has entirely skill based.
Every game should have a casual mode without sbmm and a competitive mode with sbmm, so players looking for a more relaxed experience and players who want to compete both get what they want
You just described pubs/casual, and arena/ranked. What most sbmm-wielding games have. Excepted now, we just have ranked. Except now you can either know your rank, or have no clue
People who complain about sbmm just wanna pub stomp noobs
Exactly. I suck at first person shooters, and I have no complaints about SBMM, because obviously i don’t want to be put in lobbies with pros who are gonna obliterate me
I feel like sbmm should only be in a sperate ranked mode and not in casual
This is one of the reasons why I still play Battlefield 2042. There’s little to no SBMM, and I like leveling up everything to unlock Tier 1 skins. Now if you play with friends, it’s 10x more fun.
I think SBMM is good, but for casual matchmaking it can be a bit looser (for faster matchmaking and to help those who cry about SBMM) but ranked should have mutch tighter SBMM as getting silvershit casuals on your team can be really frustrating.
Ive been playing games before SBM was a thing, it was fine but pretty stale gameplay, but when SBM, I liked it more, and the creator(s)/company of the game can never 100% satisfy their whole community, it’s just trying to satisfy the main majority of the community, since it has the main majority of people/players.
SBM was for me better, yes sometimes it can get annoying, when I feel like just playing casually and just want to relax without hurting my wrist and arm from claw grip, but I personally think that SBM is good, simply because it lets everyone be at there own pace without low skilled players matching up with lots of mid skilled players and some high skilled players.
Among us
Among Us
In almost every game I have played that utilizes sbmm I have been fine with it and it usually makes the experience better, the only game that this is not the case in is call of duty. when I started playing modern warfare (2019), I had already played hundreds of hours of fps games in other titles so after a few weeks of dominating lobbies and having a ton of fun I started being placed in much harder lobbies. As you mentioned in the video, if I didn't sweat my ass off, I would be at the bottom of the leaderboard. Using any off meta gun felt like it was impossible and after about 2 months of playing the game I quit. Fast forward about 6-7 months I get bored and try playing modern warfare again. I think it reset my sbmm because all of a sudden It was just as fun as it was for those first few weeks of playing, I grinded out a bunch of the skins in the game and made quick progress. Then once again I fell into higher lobbies and quit playing. Imo for a more casual game like cod, sbmm makes it worse.
You're requesting this at the expense of worse players though. You had fun dominating, but that meant others were being crushed. Do you think your enjoyment trumps that of other players?
The issue is you feel the need to play at a certain level. If you always played casually, you would end up in a situation where your "skill" matches you in a way that you're playing even games using your casual strategies. But you don't want that, you want to always be winning, so you start making use of better strategies, of using meta guns, in order to increase the win rate. But then that scales you further still into better lobbies. Your desire to win is what pushes you into feeling FORCED to use meta guns and strategies.
What you are really looking for is an above average win rate, but that requires someone to have a below average win rate, and I don't really think that's fair. SBMM can have a level of randomness in it (a wide search) but it will always result in you being crushed every now and then.
That's not the problem of SBMM, that's exactly how it's supposed to work. It's just the nature of fairness. Ideally, for the game to be totally fair, everyone should win 50 % of their games. Because if one player wins more than half of their games, then all the opponents they had must have had less than 50 % win rate. So every time you were having fun, winning and gaining progress, all your opponents were not having fun, losing and slowing progress. You can't have both. If you don't want to play so hardcore, you have to start intentionally lose once in a while and give your percents to someone else.
@@plukerpluck I completely understand what you are saying. Dominating match after match for me personally isn't that fun and getting rolled every match isn't fun either. Other cods seemed to do it better in my opinion having 1 or 2 sweaty people per team, a few average, and a trash can or 2. Then maybe the next match its you getting absolutely rolled by a team of sweats then the next game its you rolling. It was just more fun not knowing the future outcome of the game. I know that right now if I hopped into MW2019 I would be thrown into a lobby of complete sweats and I would be absolutely rolled.
@@plukerpluck but it's really not fair to anyone for you to actually take turns winning it's stupid if they had a more consistent way to do sbmm then maybe that would work but at the moment after every game they think you deserve to get crushed
"i was having fun when the game was on easy mode, when the game challenged me I didnt have fun anymore"
the biggest problem is new players all get the lowest skill ranking possible, which leads to them facing smurfs/alternate accounts, hackers, and more random shit that will eventually make them quit the game
The thing with Call of Duty is that the main talking point is putting a separate matchmaking mechanic for the bottom 20% of players and let them deal with each other, but put the rest in a general queue unless you're doing ranked. That way the worst players won't get fisted by the best, but players who have enough talent to not be in the bottom 20% have a chance to fight a variety of players at different skill levels and improve at their own pace. The current problem is that CoD is very much a sweatfest at the moment because everyone is playing at exactly their peak skill level all the time, but there's no rank or reward to show for doing so.
I have strong opinions on this one, coming from a mostly 1v1 background with Starcraft 2 and more recently 2D fighting games. The idea of not having SBMM at all from a design point of view is insane to me, practically I can understand that its hard to implement and measure SBMM, in terms of design it 100% should be in every competitive multiplayer game. I advocate for party game modes or PvE multiplayer if you're looking for something casual, and if you want a power trip then go play a single player game or vs bots.
The gall to be a reasonably high level in a competitive multiplayer game and then complain that every match you have to try because your matched with other high skill players is one of the most weak sauce whinny entitled takes I've ever heard. You're playing a game where the goal is to win against other real people, the fact that some players have gotten to a point where they want to be playing casually and beating everyone else in their lobby who may actually be trying their best shows a real degree of arrogance. Again I'm all for fun casual modes, where the rules are whacky and balance is a secondary concern, in these types of games you can have fun and the best skilled player wont always be able to win simply because of other random/imbalanced elements, thats a great way to spend your time, but main ranked competitive queue can't be like that or it would kill the game. Regardless of if you're naturally talented or have put a lot of hard work in multiplayer games cannot have a majority of of games be stomping matches. Thats only going to encourage players to quit, and then guess who's left? Thats right, all the sweaty players so you end up with the same "problem" of having to try in your competitive game.
One of the common problems I'm aware of in Starcraft 2, and team moba games like Dota/LoL is smurfing, where a higher skilled player has a second account thats intentionally a much lower MMR to their actual skill, I'm not sure if this is a problem in FPS games. FPS is the only genre where I hear players being actively against a SBMM system, and I assume thats because they either don't know about smurfing or its not very effective to do? (if so can someone please explain why). I've heard smurfing be used as an argument against SBMM and it is very hard to get rid of, but seeing as random match making would be unintentionally the same situation most of the time I don't think its a good argument against having SBMM. If you're a reasonably competent player, and you follow/care about/have opinions on the balance of the game then I really don't think you can also argue for the game to have random match making.
To be more in depth (and perhaps a little nicer to FPS players), it comes down to why are you playing the game. Personally I enjoy difficult games that take a lot of mechanical mastery, where by playing well you get rewarded by being able to do cool powerful stuff, I also enjoy the sweating it out with another player, when your both giving it your all and are trying your hardest to win and its close is the best experience a competitive multiplayer game can give you. So I understand if you just play occasionally and don't want to learn all the indepth mechanics and stats about everything, in which case your should still want SBMM because your going to get matched with people who are taking the game about as seriously as you are.
TL;DR - If it has intentional and ongoing balance adjustments, its competitive and needs SBMM. Alternative modes can be provided for a casual multiplayer experience.
yeah but what if you are good, but want to use a meme loadout? Are skilled players locked out of enjoying fun?
@@sulfur3684 Just go and play your meme loadout and have fun then. You'll lose some games, your rating will go down and you'll be player with worse players where your meme loadout will work and give you a close fun game with it.
I very much enjoy doing meme builds/playstyles in the games I play, and I know that its probably going to mean I lose a few games but if I'm playing for fun and not for rank then I don't care if my rating is going to go down.
Also in Random Match Making there's no guarantee that your meme loadout would mean you get to have fun, you might get stomped just as bad.
damn you said every single thing I was thinking better than I ever could. I guess the reason those players don't simply smurf as often is that the FPS games we are talking about like CoD or BF are far from free to play and cost quite a bit of money which makes them different from many RTSs in how ez smurfing is
@@sulfur3684 if you are good, you should know how to put you're meme Loadout at work, i did it in lol with bard jg in Lol, and even if you're bot good, use it, it's a normal game, if you're really casual you shouldnt be angry for losing.
@@santiagorodriguez6686 the problem is me and my friend group are all extremely competitive by nature
I feel like an important thing to mention about SBMM is that each game does it differently, so, one game of CS will be matched differently then say Overwatch with varying degrees of effectiveness.
Another perspective is how long the game has been "alive" (or how long the game has had this style of SBMM), age determines a lot I think (unless it has seasons like Overwatch, it's less weighted).
If you are playing a game that's been out for say 15 years you will probably have a much harder time getting ranked either by being matched with pro's or people who have no clue what they are doing.
In SBMM there can also be greifers, who throw games on purpose, or smurfs who just want to have easier games, and of course there can be cheaters who get sick of MM.
All are terrible aspects of SBMM, but I feel like you are hard pressed to not encounter one of them in any skill based game.
I feel like SBMM is a good thing, but there are numerous problems with how some games handle their ranking, and/or how they queue players (and cheat detection).
But, overall I think it is a good thing to have in games, it encourages people to want to get better and work towards something, and it gives players a challenge when it works well.
When it works, it works really well.
In my opinion-
If a game is at a stage where it has a huge influx of newer players and has a lot of hype surrounding it. Then the game can have random matchmaking as the developers can afford to turn away a few new players, it would give the dedicated high skill players some enjoyment from defeating lower skilled players while playing casually.
But if it is at a stage where it cant afford loosing players it has to switch to sbmm as it would give the newer players a chance to get invested in the game.
I think the bigger problem is the implementation
REAL balance would be random matching, but player stats ( ACTUAL stats are "how fast do I run, how much damage do I do, how fast is the ironsights anim" NOT "total kills, win ratio" ) are adjusted to give equal chance of victory to all.