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@@calholli Not really. Being greedy often means making less money overall. As a retail investor I specifically look for companies that display an ability to put long term profits over short term greed.
*That's how business works. If we don't like it, we would have to make game-development not being a business as well.* I heard that such people exist. They often develop content for games and are widely referred to as modders. They always never take money for their products, except some of them who think that they are something better. Those are reserved to some communities where the game itself is not really a game, but something a bit different (referring to flight sims here). But jokes aside, there is actually one community of friends who developed a game, it's free to play, some shooter I think. Can't remember the name, but there are vids of them, they have a legal issue with some Italian dev studio, which stole their stuff into their game, which they sell on Steam.
With the amount of money these companies have invested into psychological studies to learn how to most effectively manipulate you, the only winning move here is not to play. The facade of ethical business practices and consumer rights is over. These companies will sacrifice anything and everything to increase that bottom line.
D&D and similar tabletop RPGs kick the ass of AAA gaming in geneal, with a few bros around discord and roll20 set up....well...I have pretty much ceased buying new games, even Baldurs Gate 3 left me with a "meh could have been so much more" Why buy a videogame or put time into a multiplayer focused one, if I am unironically punished for trying to be social ala the internet anno 2005, then why am I playing with other people and not just bots? In games like Hearts of Iron 4, where multiplayer is a genuine community thing where you got lots of communities constantly being created, with a small enough userbased that you can make a name for yourself, like, you can be known as "THAT GUY that is the god of navy management", or you can be famous for being useless on offense and a gigachad on defense, or be infamous for being an annoying little shit! Meanwhile "Big normie multiplayer live service" offers almost zero oppertunity to socialize. The great irony is that WoW was successful because of its social climate and its what businesses trying to convert the term "socialization" into "engagement" keep forgetting; You can do anything you want to keep me engaged, but if I feel lonely and miserable and your service keeps trying to tell me that buying a product will reward me....with what? The problem with a lot of multiplayer games forget the SOCIAL element, am there to hang with my gaming buds, the game is a secondary catalyst that can be replaced on a whim, thus a good game as a product you can sell, videogame or not, first and foremost allows for casual socialization with strangers, if this does not increase engagement, bin it, start over.
@@raphk9599 Yea, that and indie or retro. Still regularly play games such as Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and it manages to be an incredibly addictive game by simply being fun to play.
@@TWoodringFishing and the less likely it is that you will ever gain the capacity to understand real life or even care about it at all. as long as you can live in your digital fantasy land, nothing happening in the real world around you will matter at all. we see that with pretty much every mmorpg players lifestyle and politics
@@saturationstation1446 As a long time MMO player, I don't see it. You're talking about a very specific subset of shutin neets that only binge on Internet media. That's not your typical mmo player. Most of them are giga casuals.
If a game is sold to you on the idea that it is skill based, that "getting good" at it will feel rewarding, finding out that systems like these are used to interfere with you achieving something based on your own efforts is quite disheartening.
If you are talking about a game being sold to you on the idea that it's matchmaking is skill based then it won't feel rewarding at all to get better, it will feel the exact same becoming better or worst. Having random matchmaking is where you can really feel if you are getting better or not since the playerbase is constant. In skill based matchmaking you will always have people that are on your skill level thus you won't feel improvements or a degradation of skill
@@miguelnascimento2847 thats just wrong entirely. playing against people of your skill is how you get better at games because you learn to be better than them at said game. then as you get better, the people you play against get better and that cycle continues. you will always feel degradation and improvement, that is why the number goes up and down after wins and losses.
I don't know how any of these companies push this idea as good when ranked gamemodes have always had it, yet people actively chose the standard modes instead because nobody liked it.
@Brian2 we don't have to imagine it. That's exactly how Halo Infinite came out with a single gamemode with all game types merged in with SBMM. The game absolutely tanked for it.
Its terrible. On MW3 i carried the hell out of my team for the first 10 or so matches and now the algorithm thinks thats how im going to play all the time so it just matches me with teammates only capable of getting 40% the required score
There is no point. You can just intentionally play worse, and still win half of the time lololol. Once you realize that you lose all motivation to play
It was when games had a list of lobbies, and you can choose which one to join, was when it was last fun. Matchmaking always did stink right from the get-go. The same stench of knowing they can always manipulate arcade and slot machines without telling you.
Screw SBMM, it made every game into a sweatfest. TF2 or older CS games doesn't have SBMM and they are actually fun and doesn't feel like second ranked.
It's manipulative, and that is a problem. Gameplay attractiveness should not be custom tailored to the player's attention span or likelihood to quit at a loss or consecutive wins. It removes the incentive to get better, and gives a false sense of achievement or lack thereof. It is psychologically manipulative, bottom line.
Really, the mechanics used are not much different than what casinos use. Except time and personal data is the currency you and you get nothing real in return. It's manipulation using the expert class to make it as perfected as physically and psychologically possible.
my issue is that getting cubstomped when you're new is even less fun why should I put myself through that torture? how am I supposed to learn anything when I spend so much of my time in the game dead?
I'm glad I quit PvP games. I've been happier since I started to focus on PvE games, be them singleplayer or cooperative. PvP games should go back to dedicated servers/lobbies. These algorithms just play with you in order to push you to play more hours and of course, pay more.
@@Kanggaxx To play more based on obsession to end on a high note that doesn't come, or frustration, or etc. Why do you have to play more? You can play enough to feel good and LEAVE. That doesn't mean the game is bad. They are telling you just the half of the chart. I could play 5 hours and end up frustrated or play 2-3 hours leaving satisfied. According to these guys, the second outcome is bad (of course, 2 hours is difference they are not able to bombard you with opportunities to spend money, heh)
I remember some games where it tried to make the teams "balanced based on total or average player level", so if one team had 5 lvl 20 players, and the other has 1 lvl 96, it would look for 4 lvl 1 players to "even out the teams".
I had no idea what smurfing was so I looked it up, sadly years and years ago I did it on World Of Tanks. I noticed there were a lot of times as a less experienced player I lost to people that had a impossible amount of hours and awards for the level they were playing against. At the time I had a M-4 Sherman, so out of curiosity I got in my tier 1 tank and played a match. I slaughtered everyone... and it wasn't even fair, I killed every enemy player I came across, and then capped the base all by myself single handed. I never did it again because it felt wrong. But what I noticed is the farther and farther I worked up the ladder the more of this I saw, largely because at higher tiers the way they set up the game play made it impossible to make money in higher tier tanks. You will lose a match because they seem to deliberately get placed on a team where you loose the harder you try. What they are trying to get you to do is try to get you to spend money on the MTX.
And she compared it to kinder eggs. Didn't every kid out there buy more of kinder or similar stuff because they wanted a specific toy? That sucked too!
The whole trading card industry was built on the same thing tho. Baseball cards, Pokemon cards, Magic Cards, etc. Its been a part of childhood for probably 70-80 years. When were the first trading cards created?
Except your chance there of getting something desirable, generally speaking, is a bit more realistic. And it's much less manipulative inherently due to having a larger buffer between the company and people; metrics on customers were far less invasive and chance was truly random. I'm sure someone can form a better argument than me, I haven't had a lot of time to think this topic through so I'm just sharing some of my in-the-moment thoughts for now.
The most ironic thing is that they don't have to invent complex algorithms to make the game fun for everyone. Take Fifa/FC for example: I create and submit a team of 92 OVR, and during the matchmaking setup, I set that I want to play against teams between, say 90 and 93. Sometimes I want to challenge my tactics and deliberately set to match with a 94 or 95 OVR opponent. And if I want to play against 85 OVR opponent, that opponent must want to play against my 92 team as well. It's as simple as that - giving players a choice. Same goes with BF and K/D ratio. So, I guarantee you that the reason for them to implement a complex algorithm for something that could be solved by a simple player choice, is greed and increased potential for player spending money. "Having more fun" is just an excuse, a marketing term and legal defense if anyone calls them to court for implementing addictive patterns which cost people real money.
We already had a solution and we used to use it. It's just like highschool PE. Class splits into two teams. Each side takes turns picking who they want on their team. What you end up with is the most skilled people being evenly split between both teams. That's a 50% win rate and it feels fair. Yet for some reason they seem to think it's better to make it impossible to lose 50% of the time, then impossible to win 50% of the time. Which just pisses everybody off, except you're just taking turns being pissed off.
There is no such thing as an algorithm created to make something fun. Fun is not something that can ever be algorithmically fabricated. AT BEST, you can make something with 80% alogrithm (or in games, procedural generation); but it will be soulless and vapid. You still need genuine creativity for the last 20%, minimum. "Algorithms designed to make something fun" is like "Mandatory, pre-approved, chaperoned liesure time" it gives the same vibe as literally "designing by committee."
You bring up a very interesting view. Micro-transactions have turned game producers into casino's. Before, no benefit was received from rigging matchmaking. Put same level, with same level. Now, you get money from having the player "feel" more involved. If you pay more, you get matched more with weaker opponents. Another negative for micro-transactions. Never liked them, never will.
This is pretty common in most games nowadays to effectively enforce a 50-50 win loss ratio. However, once you start purposely mismatching players, it quickly falls apart because it's no longer skill based match making and it undermines the whole system. You saw this with League of Legends's Dynamic Queue system when they prioritized shorter queue times. The video of it is still up and Scarra basically blasts the system and points out a bunch of problems with it. People were quitting ranked in massive numbers at the time across the board including the lowest and highest tier players. Trust was never fully re-established after that.
yes, the league of legends video for a controversial change they made 9 years ago. which the devs said they wanted to test how short queue times with NO skillbased matchmaking would go. it was a horrendous mistake and they never made that mistake again. competitve games dont force a 50/50 win rate at all. thats just a myth that people who cant improve made up. maybe in a game like CoD it exists, the classic non competitve casual arcade shooter game but even then it didnt exist in my experience, high KDA with high win rate. never once did I say "damn, this game really making me lose on purpose to keep me playing" never once in my 900hours of overwatch competitve in masters tier have I said "damn, this game really is making me win one lose one". never in my 3k+ hours in league of legends have I said "damn, this game really forcing me to lose games to keep me stuck at my rank. that whole entire 50/50 thing is just bs that is substantiated by literally nothing at all. if you are 10mmr better than your opponents and teamates, you will climb out of the rank but it will take many hours. thats not by design of the matchmaking system, thats just how skill works.
Dota's matchmaking in ranked is quite fair imo. Thats why queue times were quite high at high end matchmaking, because it was trying to be as fair as possible. And post game you could see the ranks of the players you faced up against. It's pretty transparent. The matchmaking only falls apart in the casual game modes like unranked and turbo, where the skill gap can vary greatly.
@@mickmoon6887 I've played enough games to know this isn't true. Dota's problem is sticking all the toxic players on one team. And then the team with a higher overal communication score wins because the other team self destructs and they all report and thus get even lower communication scores. Its a very vicious cycle and there really is no way out once you get pulled down by the fucking retar
These companies should be required to transparently and publicly post how they do these things. The mechanics of how the games work are affecting children and adults and we need to know how they work to make informed decisions, like Nutrition Facts or Health warnings.
you already know they tamper with the experience, do you really need to know the minute details to determine they are doing their best to manipulate you?
Id absolutely love that! They are not all created equally. Just like used car salesmen tactics to put pressure on you, we need to read up on crooked behaviour to not fall prey to it. Our loss is their gain.
@@BraveAbandon Laws like those in California require companies to list of they contain agents that cause various diseases. Normally they also have to list chemicals and other things added. I think it is not unreasonable given what we know. The more transparency the betterm
I can't be the only one who remembers the old custom server multiplayer lobbies of games like Quake and Unreal Tournament and look on the complete lack of balance fondly right? I've had more frustrating games in SBMM systems than I remember having in completely unbalanced custom lobbies of older games.
I remember and I have an explaination. I played a number of old games wirhout any match making were you are asigned to random opponents or join a random lobby. It was fun in the old Mario Kart games and the old Yu-Gi-Oh games and many RTS and FPS. But I am convinced today, that it was fun to me bacause I was a skilled player and the same might be true for you. We played significantly better than the average player,m therefore we won well above 50% of our matches and winning is fun :) But nowadays, I prefer skill based systems to get better opponents, when I play better. My goal is to improve myself and not to have the most "fun". For this very reason I am really scared of the possibility, that the match making could be manupulated :/
@@aarionsievonah I played RTS games online as a child and got stomped over and over again. I always had fun even in defeat. Because I was a child and just enjoyed playing. The best was when someone older and actually good at the game would give me tips in game. Trying to help others out. Only problem is people who want to compete having to remove people who suck from their lobbies.
I hate how modern matchmaking scrambles the lobby after every match. Now there is almost no reason to use a mic. It used to be that you could hop in a lobby and find some cool dudes, then continue playing and chatting with them for multiple matches.
SBMM is taking some kids who like to play soccer and giving them the most competitive matches possible every time, then when they lose enough you put them against children 5 years younger than them, then when they win you make them play against adults. It's sadistic, it's manipulative, it's unfair, it's anti fun, and in the hands of greedy publishers it's potentially malicious.
i feel like that sort of experience is because algos like this aren't perfect and they never will be. there's too many factors on the expression of player skill to really quantify it into data. the reason they're here is because just randomly asigning people matches leads to random feeling outcomes which can make the game feel even more out of your hands than before. And while they can be manipulative leaving them open for people to look at is just asking for folks to game the system.
@@UpperEchelon if one cares about the money sure, people quitting is a problem. It is not a problem tho if nobody cares about that, if someone just wants to make the best game possible retention rate doesn't matter at all. If something is good then it is good despite the majority of people liking it or not. The fact that the goal for publishers has been to publish games that most people will play and for the longest time possible is the reason games are so bland and uninspired nowadays, they will become all a homogeneous mass of mediocrity. I'd rather play a good game with 10 people who love it than a meh game with millions that don't love it or hate it, they just use it to pass the time or whatever. It's insulting to any serious costumer that the quality of the product is not a priority over how many idiots they can get to play for a long time. It's not a tricky subject, at least how I see it. Keeping players playing is only objectively good for the company that profits from them, people quiting is not an indicator that the game is bad or that they didn't enjoy it so to resort to such manipulation that assumes we are all children is just unethical in most cases (and in the cases where it isn't unethical it's just an indicator of bad game design or balance as it is used as a bandaid for that).
@@UpperEchelon I don't think it's tricky at all. If your game is only fun when you award free wins then they shouldn't be playing your game, they should be playing a different game. There is no circumstance where this is better for the customer, it is only better for the company. It doesn't affect me, if the game sucks I don't stop playing games, I just stop playing your game. Besides, if it comes to team games why can't they just split the skilled players onto different teams? That should still average out to a 50% win rate, and I still get to feel the benefits of getting better, as well as getting the chance to play and learn from even better players. They used to do this I'm sure of it, you could see the even split in both the player's levels and the scores they would get. That naturally balances out to a 50% win rate more or less. Can you think back on any time in school where the PE teacher forced your side to lose because you won last time? No, what they do is each side takes turns picking who they want on their team and what you end up with is an approximately balanced team.
@@UpperEchelonAll the data presumes every quit is ‘rage based’ when it’s not. There are many reasons why games are quit and this variable wasn’t mentioned. This is a huge factor the data doesn’t consider at all - making it invalid from the start 👍🏻
One of the many reasons I never play online games... Currently playing Wartales (due to your recommendation video) - it is so addictive, I am constantly thinking about playing it again. Great find! Thank you!
Man I swear the algo is stalking me. I was watching a video on MW Remastered in 2024, and clicked the bell to see what's on offer the very minute he said "skill based match making", only for a video about it to have been posted "10sec ago"
I am curious about the Matchmaking used in Marvel Snap tbh... I recently quit that game bc the Matchmaking seems to literally adapt when you change your deck...so when you try to adapt to seeing the same deck over and over, it switches the matchmaking so you no longer face that deck...but the deck that can counter your newest deck...then when I switch back to my previous deck, suddenly i am seeing the decks that counter it again.... It honestly makes decks worthless really quickly while driving up the winning rate for the Newest Cards....
I agree with this actually. I know clash royale did that and I am pretty sure I remember devs saying it was on purpose at one point in time. but marvel snap is atrocious. I stopped playing it for a year, came back and im playing my same ramp deck and playing into the exact same decks I was a year ago. switched to an ongoing deck and all of a sudden im getting countered within 2 games of playing it. that game has a huge problem.
Skill based MM the single system that made me quit all pvp shooters, because they social engineer your matches to make you win or lose just enough to keep you playing. Did a report on R6 and Cods mm tendencies for my senior project which basically convinced me that there was no point to continue
Dark souls pvp has it's own problems but at least nobody has to deal with shit like this, they are just games made to be played and you'll be matched with whoever despite skill or any other factor other than luck
@@miguelnascimento2847gonna be honest, I’m sort of glad Fromsoft and Nintendo are sort of unchanging at multiplayer because it at least maintains the experience.
Remember custom servers for Battlefield 2 or BC2? Or let's go back to UT99? BF1942 Desert Combat? C&C RA2/Generals? It felt as you'd actually play against humans.
You know why multi-player games in the past were fun, because they were only based on your ping. That's it, no hand holding, no big brother manipulating your gameplay, and you had to get good, you would see your skill go up from getting shit on in the beginning. Sbmm shouldn't exist In the form it's in today, it takes away all feeling of accomplishment. Did you really win the match because of your skill or did big brother just decide to put in an easier lobby, are you really just bad at the game or is big brother just putting you up against pro players while giving you bots on your team. This completely ruined the fun for me, I can never play call of duty again with any sense of satisfaction
There are more noobs than there are top players. So do you cater to the minority or the majority? Or put more simply. Do you want noobs to be playing with top players? I’m sure that’s a blast for the top players, but sounds like a crappy experience for the noobs.
@@Elysiumlost It’s a tough issue. You don’t want to kick noob’s asses and ruin the fun for them, but you also don’t want to force so consistent a WLR that players who actually pay for and commit to a game don’t feel the rewards of their labor.
@@Elysiumlost noobs are already playing on the top players team ruining their games lol Halo 3 matchmaking had it balanced out and everyone had fun so it's possible. You shouldn't be punished like that for just begin better than average.
@@Legitti so let me make sure I understand this correctly. You are being “punished” by not playing with players much worse than you and feeding you easy kills. Got it.
I wonder why game studios didn't try to implement what TF2 used to do with matches (not the quickplay matchmaker, but the in-match options: playing a map for 45 minutes with team scramble coming into play if one side kept getting beat and map votes if the match became too stale). I get why SBMM exists and there are good examples of SBMM, namely multiplayer games around 2007 - 2016, but the way companies handle it these days and their morals makes me wish server browsing was more popular.
simple most multiplayer games are played by those that stack and pre party before a match starts and the other factor is lobby disband when the match is over everyone is sent back to the title screen and has to que again unless your playing in a party your likely to never see those players again and since this happens right after one match no only do games don't last 45 minuets but there is no point to mid game team scramble when the teams disband right after one match now if it was like tf2 before Meet your match happened or using the server list to join a custom game then yes team scramble really dose help those that are having a rough game but come on when was the last time a Triple A game such as overwatch , The Finals , Xdefiant acturly let you make a custom game
I think it is more fun on average BUT only with their spun up server setup. Old school static IP servers, you knew who was best and it felt good to go up against them.
SBMM should only apply to league modes. You want to be a sweaty player, play league with the rest of the sweats. Also stop scrambling the lobby after every match. It used to be that you could hop in a lobby and find some cool dudes, then continue playing and chatting with them over multiple matches. Current match making has done away with this and there is almost no reason to use a mic anymore.
@@UC3M9QmuafgJ7GCcEF2HDNQA Yeah but it usually boils down to a couple of sweats on each side, while the bulk of the lobby is made of average players and a couple scrubs.
Did you forget that the sweats mainly appear in casual mode? Well, the sweats that stomp you at least. You don't get matched with the best of the best if you're in a mid rank bro. I find ranked more fair and fun than most games if we forget about all the toxicity. Casual game modes in CoD are literally unplayable today. The first few games I played in cold war and vanguard were absolute garbage. Prestiged players with all attachments camping and mowing me down in milliseconds when had the option of 5 different predetermined classes with the worst attachments. And even though I've never been bad at FPS games I noticed how sweaty a lot of these players were. I honestly just rage quit and never played those games again and plan on never buying another CoD game unless one of my friends verify that it's actually good. Casual should have a larger skill gap allowed than ranked. Makes it less boring I think. But the best of the best should not be allowed to play with the worst of the worst. Maybe I was a part of this study?
@@nicklasveva The toxicity was part of the fun and skill base was spread across the lobby with a couple sweats, mostly average, and a handful of scrubs.
You know what's cool? Not being able to audit and/or trust. It's like a casino but it's on your phone and you're a kid and you can't smoke or drink so you are having less fun than the adults. And then you think no I'm playing games... that's different, then you visit a casino and you see how modern machines have emulated video games. Then you... hm... you play single player games and if you find yourself downloading a game on your phone again you have your friend take a hammer to your fingers.
I could go back to old Apex videos from 2 years ago and find my comments calling the EBMM "predatory". Glad to see someone that matters finally talking about it
I will probably say SBMM might not be monetized because a lot of us who live outside the US or North America, the microtransactions are super expensive. 20 U$ in my country is $140 TT, and aint nobody spending that kind of money on cosmetics!!! A 70 U$ game is already $490 TT
Just having the knowledge that these systems exist has ruined my enjoyment of competitive multiplayer games. Even without knowing if it is in the current game I'm playing the questioning of if a system like this is in place kills it. Imagine if you were a football player or any other sport really, but you were never really sure how much your practice and effort mattered because sometimes the games were just rigged to make you want to play more.
what games are you playing that are competitive? because I guarantee you that no matter what game it is, as long as it truly is an established competitive game, forces you to win and lose games. thats just not a real thing. if it was, then no player would ever be able to get out of their skill bracket. not a single player would ever get out of a bracket ever.
@@kregman6928 did you watch the video? No they don't force you to win or lose. They don't come to your house and hold a gun to your head, but they do significantly influence the odds in ways the think will make you engage with the game more. Imagine if you were a quarter back and you were on a 5 game win streak so your coach was like "hey you are doing really too good so we are gonna replace all the receivers with people that are significantly worse. That way you will have to practice more and put more hours in."
@@kregman6928 Companies spend millions on psychological studies so they know how to better manipulate players. Yes, people still play these games despite them being bad. Sunk cost fallacy is a thing. People do bad shit all the time if their pleasure centers light up enough. SBMM is basically designed to toss you a win every now and then for retention. But more importantly, make you want to spend money to get an "edge" more often. That's it.
@@kregman6928 Why would no one play them? Just curious. You know lot's of people play slot machines and everyone knows they are designed for you to loose money.
The problem with skill based matchmaking is that it's not skill based. When playing with teammates, winrate can either get dragged down or boosted. It's based just as much on luck.
This is exactly what happened to destiny. The game just got sweatier and sweatier until the only people playing are tryhard streamers. I just want to play people at my skill level and not get forced into unwinnable matches. Fair (real unmanipulated) SBMM is the best system.
I'm trying to get into Naraka Bladepoint but can't played ranked til lvl 50. "Casual" mode is anything but when almost every game has a top 500 player in it....
Destiny is probably the worst offender! When they want you to lose, not only do they stack players but your hit registration goes to shit. You can feel it in the first 3 engagements in a round.
As a d2 die hard sbmm is almost mandatory. It’s a very intricate fpsrpgmmo. New players would get absolutely destroyed game after game otherwise. As a decent player I really don’t like sbmm because I love dominating the lobby once in a while. But for the quality of life for d2 sbmm has to stay.
@@UC3M9QmuafgJ7GCcEF2HDNQA That's the least issue Cheaters and Ddosers are the biggest issue in Naraka gave up tang San event wanted to role play as him so badly but the Chinese ruined it
I've not played PVP games for awhile. Felt the inorganic outcomes from YEARS ago. They just never felt like pvp used to way back in Halo 2 days and that game had a little bit of SBMM even way back then but no where to the degree it does now. The nice thing about pvp from years ago was you could hop on and be more experienced than your buddy and could match up and have a good time together. Nowadays I can't do that. If I do it leads to an abysmal experience for one or both of us but never a positive experience for both of us. It's never even close. So then the one and only draw I ever had about playing online games was having a good time with my buddies is completely stripped away and I've just never felt the need to invest in pvp games ever since.
SBMM for Halo 2 actually was just a ranked mode. I could clearly tell what type of players I was up against when I was playing Ranked Team Slayer opposed to Team Slayer
Only if one believes the text that showed on the screen. With the video gone, something has to appear. We are all free to determine who did what and why. Considering he was pointing things out, makes you wonder if the statement on the screen was true.
Makes me _almost_ sad for those who like to play competitive multiplayer games. However, _almost_ doesn’t cover for the 0 effs I give for those money grabs disguised as games and those who play it just feed the cycle of getting exploited.
I really struggle to believe these metrics. I was never a top tier player myself but SBMM basically pushed me out of online gaming. It just feels so much less satisfying to never see actual improvement and nothing more demoralizing when after only a couple good games it decides to utterly crush you with the sweatiest nerds you'll ever see. Quite literally go from getting a decent 1.5-3KDR for 2 games then suddenly struggle to even get a single kill with people who somehow kill me before I even see them. How is this supposed to be fun? Like the game is great when it has it's ups and downs, but when it feels so artificial I just can't enjoy myself.
Matchmaking has legitimately destroyed Overwatch. The games are hardly ever even, if you’re not the one getting stomped you’re the one doing the stomping. Maybe once a day I’ll get a match that is legitimately fun and where both sides are evenly matched to an extent.
TF2 throughout its history has shown us that *Straight up random players in a server* is better than any lazily made matchmaker system. I can't play any modern "skilled based matchmaker" game with my best friend of decades because the mAtChMaKeR eventually forces us to play against better and better players when we're together. But if we queue alone it changes dramatically.
How did you not pick up the spending part in their patents? They have it written in one of them that you'll get matched and receive pre-defined losses against someone who purchased something from the ingame shop to make you buy the same thing. Once you spent the money and bought the thing, you'll get 3 - 5 pre-defined wins when using your new purchase, before being put on pre-defined losses again.. People just sucking up the "lobby" system in games since the original Modern Warfare 2 was the worst thing to happen to PvP-gaming since nothing there is decided by actual skill anymore, but by the company controlling and rigging the matches to maximize profits. Bring back actual dedicated servers where people hop in and out - teams will balance themselves, like they always did in the past.
There is this psychology book - Nudge. In the intro the authors ask a question - if (1) 'everything matters' and (2) you know how, let's say to order items in the cafeteria to nudge people into purchasing certain ones more, how should you proceed with that knowledge. Fundamentally 'the cafeteria question' and the 'matchmaking question' and a lot of questions in all aspects of life, are the same. And the answer usually depends on the values of the person/corporation.
Man I have never been happier that I completely quit playing online multiplayer games with "random" match making a decade ago. It is not that I was bad at them (my GoW group had 3 of the top 1,000 US ranked players for example) but that the match making just seemed to get worse and worse. Today the only games of that type I play are ones where me and my friends can setup teams to play against each other.
No, no, that's not it. People have a mechanism that rewards them for learning and getting better at something eventually master it and move on to do something else. This matchmaking tries to scam people into a perpetual learning curve multiplied by sunken cost fallacy.
Heroes of the storm got fked when MMR became a thing. I went from mostly winning to losing 40 games in a row because I had literal AFKers on my team because they could let the game run and still get XP.
If you don't play for a while and jump into Ranked queue, you will get matched into Bronze, maybe low silver by default. And if you're insanely unlucky, you can get literal griefers there, and then you're legit stuck with them forever.
@@GerMorden yeah just pretty much got to the point if I wasn't on a pre-made team it was just bots an griefers. And in a game like Hots missing 1 team member can end in a steam roll.
They say there’s a drop off of player retention when it’s opened. But I grew up without it and there was no issues (also was more fun) So unless the newer generation is completely different, I feel like I wanna say the devs are bs’ing
Which is why dedicated servers wont be back with AAA games. Privately hosted, they would espouse the range of skill they wanted. Beginner, good, expert, tryhard etc. You tended to play with the same people over and over, building actual rivalry and friendship. A dedicated server was like a pub or bar where everyone knew your name. But that isnt profitable to AAA corpos...
Maybe _strictly_ privately hosted servers are out of the question, but even AAA games could give players the tools to moderate their own lobbies. I'm sure the same monetization tactics could still be used, like selling skins and XP boosters, etc, while letting people to play in their own lobbies, instead of relying on generic matchmaking.
So we are just supposed to trust this "study" and pretend like we didnt already love the lack of sbmm in older cods? also plenty of games dont have strict sbmm and have better player retention than cod. They are straight up gaslighting us.
😂 MW in 2007 had sbmm,so did MW2 and MW3.😂😂 Your false sense of no SBMM in old cod's is fucking hilarious. You were fine with it then but not now😂😂 Josh Menke did a GDC talk in Nov 2021 and said "EVERY cod going back to cod 4 MW had SBMM." 😂😂
league of legends has the engagement based matchmaking where if you win too much they put you in impossible to win matches. forcing a 50/50 win loss rate regardless of rank
This plus the most predatory anti cheat in existance. I'm amazed how people tolerate this. Literally my friend and myself left with the Vaguard patch. After playing for 10+ years. The 50/50 system is just the icing on the cake🤡
the ARAM mode in League got this system, every time I got a winning streak I'll get to a losing streak where I have no idea what (at least) one teammate is doing each match and throw the game for the rest of the team.
destiny 2 put in sbmm and the quitting is so bad they started adding more and harsher penalties for leaving, and leave sbmm untouched. sbmm is awful always,.
Interesting. When did they add it? I played until 2018 and quit forever. Did they add it in recent years? I am aware that sbmm was in Iron banner but that's it.
They actually said that both tests they did resulted in high skill level players facing each other at an escalating rate, & THAT was specifically WHY they weren't gonna remove SBMM. The way they worded it everyone just completely missed it. They basically dont want high skill players facing each other bc it inhibits their partnered COD creators from making high kill game content & this will affect their sales bc children would see their favorite streamers not being great & kill the aspirations of children wanting to be great CallofDuty pro's, thereby compromising the sales of CallofDuty games or skin bundles.
I wonder how much the "retention" side of SBMM and EOMM actually works. I feel like those systems had the complete opposite effect of retaining me. SBMM actually drove me away from multiplayer games altogether. If your game has a system that has an algorithmic win/loss and K/D ratio influencer, I'm not playing it. Simple as.
Miss the old list of random servers and a filter. You would have a healthy mix of people on the servers and you could find several that would fit you perfectly 😁
"Nobody" likes SBMM because it makes every match sweaty. A few weeks after an ELO reset or whatever scoring algo they use, the better players will have been selected out from the worse players and it will be back to "fair" play. But you don't want fair, you want to win all the time. EOMM and other matchmaking algorithms face better players against worse players most of the time, so the better players feel good about themselves and keep coming back, and the publisher can manipulate the losers (say, here's a free credit booster for an hour). If you buy longer lasting boosters, you can get an edge up in the game! Of course they're using it to squeeze more money out of the whales and the inexperienced.
Know what's worse than playing casually and losing 60% of the time? Being stressed out because every game is neck-and-neck but losing exactly 50% of the time.
People don’t understand so I’ll explain It’s not about being “fair” And it never was Gaming blew up when twitch streaming became popular and it changed how majority of players acted No longer were people playing for fun and instead they played like sweats, thinking that they could make millions playing games This was not the case in 2012 But it is now Now when the companies realized this, they implemented SBMM because they saw that the Tryhard fanbase was forcing the casuals to quit Causing them to loose players and money I’m not defending SBMM but rather explaining why it’s in the game Want proof? Xdefiant is dying because the casual fans left I don’t like SBMM and I definitely think it needs a adjustment and rework but at the same time I understand why they use it
Damm that is actually pretty interesting. Never thought SBMM had that much of an impact, i always just blindly defended it because it just makes sense in terms of the average experience (particularly 1v1), you need to feel theres the chance for winning else playing against someone so abolishingly better is just not fun as it usually means that you will be playing and enjoy the game less because of it. Good stuff thanks for bringing this to light
my BIGGEST ISSUE YOU SAID IT: (paraphrased) "you are not facing opponents designated as a result of your position on an arbitrary leaderboard" THAN WHY HAVE THE BOARD YOY LYING WEASELS, IM GOOD AT THIS GAME!!!!!!!!! AGHHHHHHHHH
SBM makes gaming much less fun. One if the biggest part of game same as in life is progression. In SBM, as you get better you are matched with better players, you never feel a sense of achievement or progress. I acutally started to game the SBM, play when i am super drunk just for the LOL and lower my elo. And when i am playing with friends i play for real, and we always dominate the other team due to faulty match making. I am here to have fun. Not to prolong the longevity of game company bottom line
The skill based matchmaking isn't the problem, it's the draining and often toxic nature of competitive games that drives people away sooner or later. Being matched against equally-skilled opponents wouldn't be an issue if not for those aspects.
The single game I remember SBMM having a definite impact on my experience was Call of Duty Cold War multiplayer. I got whiplash from the constant flip flopping quite literally from match to match. The Call of Duty titles before and after had no noticeable pattern
something you missed is that the "90%" bonus is only a 1.75% at most improvement to retention. that's honestly not that massive an improvement. there's so many other issues to this study as well - like secretly changing the rules of engagement those 50% of players were used to, and MWIII being a really mixed controversial game that was explicitly designed to cater to the hardest of the hardcore Warzone 1 players that abused movement exploits and didn't like them being fixed in the previous game
I can only vouch for how it works for OW but then it's perfect given the data was made by blizzard. I can clearly remember, near autistically when OW2 came out, in it's first season, over a sample of 250 games how my Win rate, My rank, and my game experience went. I started around Plat 5, Quickly within the first 40 games i was at Diamond 5, that was about 65% win rate, the next 210 games is in like a fog of madness, because not only my Win rate didn't drop below to 62% but the furthest i went was about Diamond 4. I would go between D5 and D4 with above 60% win rate over a sample of 200 games. --My experience playing those matches were infuriatingly bad, what was happening is that my win rate was so high, so solid that it would give me consistently 45% win rate players and often throwers who would throw a fit over the smallest things and hinder our conditions. The enemy team would consist of players ranging from 50-55% WR players and that is much more stable then the team piggybacking on me, each individually played bad, but all of them were doing the minimum to get that win. --The coming seasons, S2 and S3 i would still sweat but slowly i became a thrower myself, if throwing means, not giving your all and loosing interest in this bullshit. Interestingly as soon my Win rate dropped to the same 50-55%.. I started winning, not only winning but getting pleasant team mates to win alongside with, because who would've thought, winning is only as good as the experience was getting there.. That 50% got me to Masters 3 in a week.. --Now i understand why they use systems as this, probably better then most, the game isn't about me but the larger eco system of players and most people aren't even in Diamond let alone masters. It's basically a artificial feedback loop to tell the player, you're getting good ! Look how you stomped ! You're not the old Gold 4 you were ! You're Gold 3 now ! Keep playing ! Meanwhile, you were meant to win that game 90% of the time and it was a given. Play a lot and the algorithm becomes predictable when you were meant to lose and to win and as long you ride the waves you get high even with piss poor skills and understanding of the game. So yes, you can gain the system, you can get to high ranks, this system isn't keeping you down, this system takes the fun out of trying and gives it to the casuals, wich i totally understand but still.. Why did i have to sweat so much, actually trying and giving a fuck to find out.
Players have long suspected World of Tanks to being doing this. There's a lot of evidence to support it too. It's not mere chance that every time you get on a roll of winning you suddenly get trash team after trash team after trash team. The other day, like a day or two ago, I was closing in on twenty battles with a seventy plus percent win rate. All of a sudden I got nothing but trash teams and it dropped down to forty percent. Now, as a once in a while thing that could be chalked up to just bad RNG. Sometimes it bites you in the ass. Thing is this happens all the time. Without fail. It's like they try to artificially try to force you to hover around fifty percent no matter what, or less on the days that RNG screws your ass. It's bad enough that RNG is involved with team building ( debatable in my opinion and for the stated reason ) but there's even RNG on the shell's penetration, the damage it does, and where the shell goes within the aiming bloom. They tried to get into Esports once. Between all of the RNG and premium rounds making armor irrelevant they got laughed out of the conversation. What's worse is they started building some tanks with premium rounds in mind so they're overpowered as hell. There's a lot wrong with the game but the matchmaking thing has always been squirrely. Way too much to be just mere RNG or coincidence. The same goes for the RNG on shots. There are times where you're so close to someone you could spit on them, quite literally, and your shot goes nowhere near where you aim. Why? Who the fuck knows but the running belief is that some players are actually protected. Maybe not all of the time but it's quite obvious when it happens. You'll miss shots you're fully aimed for, at a reasonable distance to guarantee penetration, yet they're on the move or not even beginning to fully aim and the shot goes exactly where they are aiming. The whole thing is just too fishy and too bullshit-y to not question.
SBMM sucks, period. It's ruined several games that I used to enjoy... It's plain *not fun* to be actively punished for getting better. I remember when I started playing MW2 on 360- I got absolutely STOMPED, and I *kept* getting stomped for like a solid week while I learned the maps and the weapons and developing game sense. I slowly started getting better... How? I learned from the people that were spanking me. I made alliances with teammates and we'd make it our mission to ambush the cracked enemy player and try to take hik outml. What was my "reward" for this? Being top frag, or chasing that awesome game-ending killcam. It was tangible- the better I got at the game, the better I did in my matches. The reward for my time investment and practice was exhibiting my skill. I *loved* competing with the other cracked guy on my team to see who could top fragged. I *LOVED* finding that guy on the other team that was just as good as me and having a little war to see who was better. What happened when I lost? NOTHING- I knew I lost because the other guy was just plain better. SBMM has completely destroyed all that. Now, the better I am at a game, the sweatier my matches get and the more I'm pigeonholed into only using meta builds and game strays. My level of skill compared to the rest of the playerbase? Doesn't matter anymore, because I'm not allowed to PLAY with the rest of the playerbase, and I'm stuck with long queue times and crap connections exclusively with other cracked players. SBMM actively punishes you for being "good", whilst simultaneously ensuring that lower skill players plateau and don't progress in skill past a certain point because they've been continuously insulated from high-level play. The reward for getting better at a game should be DOING better in the game. Period. Lower-skill players losing? That's how they learn and get better. SBMM is just robbing the most dedicated players in an attempt to pander to the most casual, by trying to convince them that they're better than they actually are.
I'm a fan of skill being measured as simple scores, with a generally wide band of allowable scores that can compete against you, especially in team games. Its still pretty random, gives you exposure to higher skill levels in general, and there are still times where you can be the best on your team, but your team barely wins When the bands get too tight, or more manipulation happens, it ruins it for everyone, where you feel like you are randomly getting slid up and down tiers constantly.
I'm reminded of that Pokémon mobile game that basically tosses you into a PVE match against bots every once in a while either because there's not enough players on at the moment for a full game or because you're on a losing streak, with microtransactions aplenty available of course... You have no idea if you're playing against actual people or bots when you start a "multiplayer" game.
SBMM/EOMM has destroyed gaming. It should only exist within ranked versions of whatever game you're playing. You are literally never playing and having an organic experience because of it. Every game you play is manipulated. That's all i need to say to prove it's trash.
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In COD, eomm = shooting spitball of a mag vs they turn an dead from 2 bullets. It's real messed up.
We should play other games then CoD OW
Like delta force and other indie
We should vote with our wallets :)
Anyone trusting them and spending money in a SBMM system is a fool. they have proven they can not be trusted to do the right thing.
4:00 No links to your sources?
New videos unavailable? Was like 2 mins into it
I trust them to be greedy. That's all they show care for.
It's their legal obligation to shareholders
@@calholli antivision is running scam & spy business.
@@calholli Not really. Being greedy often means making less money overall. As a retail investor I specifically look for companies that display an ability to put long term profits over short term greed.
@@seeibe lol.. hilarious.. Profit over greed.. You can't make this sh^t up
*That's how business works. If we don't like it, we would have to make game-development not being a business as well.*
I heard that such people exist. They often develop content for games and are widely referred to as modders. They always never take money for their products, except some of them who think that they are something better. Those are reserved to some communities where the game itself is not really a game, but something a bit different (referring to flight sims here). But jokes aside, there is actually one community of friends who developed a game, it's free to play, some shooter I think. Can't remember the name, but there are vids of them, they have a legal issue with some Italian dev studio, which stole their stuff into their game, which they sell on Steam.
With the amount of money these companies have invested into psychological studies to learn how to most effectively manipulate you, the only winning move here is not to play.
The facade of ethical business practices and consumer rights is over. These companies will sacrifice anything and everything to increase that bottom line.
Exactly! Single player or coop games only for me.
The rule of thumb is, if a game is 'free to play' but has obvious pay2win purchases, then the game is playing you. Pay2Bplayed.
D&D and similar tabletop RPGs kick the ass of AAA gaming in geneal, with a few bros around discord and roll20 set up....well...I have pretty much ceased buying new games, even Baldurs Gate 3 left me with a "meh could have been so much more"
Why buy a videogame or put time into a multiplayer focused one, if I am unironically punished for trying to be social ala the internet anno 2005, then why am I playing with other people and not just bots?
In games like Hearts of Iron 4, where multiplayer is a genuine community thing where you got lots of communities constantly being created, with a small enough userbased that you can make a name for yourself, like, you can be known as "THAT GUY that is the god of navy management", or you can be famous for being useless on offense and a gigachad on defense, or be infamous for being an annoying little shit!
Meanwhile "Big normie multiplayer live service" offers almost zero oppertunity to socialize.
The great irony is that WoW was successful because of its social climate and its what businesses trying to convert the term "socialization" into "engagement" keep forgetting;
You can do anything you want to keep me engaged, but if I feel lonely and miserable and your service keeps trying to tell me that buying a product will reward me....with what?
The problem with a lot of multiplayer games forget the SOCIAL element, am there to hang with my gaming buds, the game is a secondary catalyst that can be replaced on a whim, thus a good game as a product you can sell, videogame or not, first and foremost allows for casual socialization with strangers, if this does not increase engagement, bin it, start over.
@@Elenrai Weeeeel, from what I hear, DnD have been getting in a lot of hot water as of late due to corporate greed.
@@raphk9599 Yea, that and indie or retro.
Still regularly play games such as Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and it manages to be an incredibly addictive game by simply being fun to play.
Yeah. When I saw this, my first thought was "but they don't use sbmm, they use eomm"
Engagement doesn't mean "fun" it means "addicting"
Endorphin algorythm is the backbone of big tech fraud.
BUY THIS NEW SKIN. I KNOW IT LOOKS LIKE CRAP BUT ITS BEEN ON THE BOT IN YOUR LAST FOUR GAMES! BUY IT ALREADY!!!!!
It's 100% meant to keep you online as long as possible because the longer you're online the more micro transaction crap they can put in front of you.
@@TWoodringFishing and the less likely it is that you will ever gain the capacity to understand real life or even care about it at all. as long as you can live in your digital fantasy land, nothing happening in the real world around you will matter at all. we see that with pretty much every mmorpg players lifestyle and politics
@@saturationstation1446 As a long time MMO player, I don't see it. You're talking about a very specific subset of shutin neets that only binge on Internet media. That's not your typical mmo player. Most of them are giga casuals.
If a game is sold to you on the idea that it is skill based, that "getting good" at it will feel rewarding, finding out that systems like these are used to interfere with you achieving something based on your own efforts is quite disheartening.
If you are talking about a game being sold to you on the idea that it's matchmaking is skill based then it won't feel rewarding at all to get better, it will feel the exact same becoming better or worst. Having random matchmaking is where you can really feel if you are getting better or not since the playerbase is constant. In skill based matchmaking you will always have people that are on your skill level thus you won't feel improvements or a degradation of skill
@@miguelnascimento2847 thats just wrong entirely. playing against people of your skill is how you get better at games because you learn to be better than them at said game. then as you get better, the people you play against get better and that cycle continues. you will always feel degradation and improvement, that is why the number goes up and down after wins and losses.
I don't know how any of these companies push this idea as good when ranked gamemodes have always had it, yet people actively chose the standard modes instead because nobody liked it.
Well someone explain to me why ppl will always play ranked in games even when other modes are available
@Brian2 we don't have to imagine it. That's exactly how Halo Infinite came out with a single gamemode with all game types merged in with SBMM. The game absolutely tanked for it.
Forced 50/50 winrate engagement based matchmaking has pretty much made every competitive game unplayable.
What's the point of playing if the game wants to force you to win one and lose one?
Its terrible. On MW3 i carried the hell out of my team for the first 10 or so matches and now the algorithm thinks thats how im going to play all the time so it just matches me with teammates only capable of getting 40% the required score
SBMM should always be optional or opt out.
There is no point. You can just intentionally play worse, and still win half of the time lololol. Once you realize that you lose all motivation to play
This right here. Nearly every single fps does it now, deeming them non-competitive.
Back when games had functional skill based matchmaking, it was a lot of fun.
Modern "Engagement Based" matchmaking is just evil.
It was when games had a list of lobbies, and you can choose which one to join, was when it was last fun.
Matchmaking always did stink right from the get-go. The same stench of knowing they can always manipulate arcade and slot machines without telling you.
Cod Black Ops 2 wasn't broken. No reason to "fix" it.
@@PäiviYevheniy idk about that
Screw SBMM, it made every game into a sweatfest. TF2 or older CS games doesn't have SBMM and they are actually fun and doesn't feel like second ranked.
@Dat_Jonx let me get this straight. You DON'T want to compete against players at your skill level?
It's manipulative, and that is a problem. Gameplay attractiveness should not be custom tailored to the player's attention span or likelihood to quit at a loss or consecutive wins. It removes the incentive to get better, and gives a false sense of achievement or lack thereof. It is psychologically manipulative, bottom line.
The Games now play you!
@@Marinealver Yes, they do
Really, the mechanics used are not much different than what casinos use. Except time and personal data is the currency you and you get nothing real in return. It's manipulation using the expert class to make it as perfected as physically and psychologically possible.
Communism has unironically reached deeply into the mechanics of modern video games.
my issue is that getting cubstomped when you're new is even less fun
why should I put myself through that torture?
how am I supposed to learn anything when I spend so much of my time in the game dead?
I'm glad I quit PvP games. I've been happier since I started to focus on PvE games, be them singleplayer or cooperative.
PvP games should go back to dedicated servers/lobbies. These algorithms just play with you in order to push you to play more hours and of course, pay more.
Sadly, good single-player games, especially shooters, are getting harder and harder to find.
Same! It’s such a relief.
Those ''algorithms'' improve the game, causing people to play more.
@@m0ther_bra1ned12 are you kidding me? Indie market is thriving with boomer shooters.
@@Kanggaxx To play more based on obsession to end on a high note that doesn't come, or frustration, or etc. Why do you have to play more? You can play enough to feel good and LEAVE. That doesn't mean the game is bad.
They are telling you just the half of the chart.
I could play 5 hours and end up frustrated or play 2-3 hours leaving satisfied. According to these guys, the second outcome is bad (of course, 2 hours is difference they are not able to bombard you with opportunities to spend money, heh)
EOMM sounds predatory.
Lotteries and influencing to get people to pay money for slots should be regulated if not banned.
Especially with the whole idea of the near miss on victory.
There was a interview with guy who played and plays everything, and he said that he would blow up all the ways of gambling if he could.
I remember some games where it tried to make the teams "balanced based on total or average player level", so if one team had 5 lvl 20 players, and the other has 1 lvl 96, it would look for 4 lvl 1 players to "even out the teams".
that sounds horrible
@@stcosyem It was, you may have had a high level on your team, but you still got your a** kicked and had no real chance of winning.
@@mikkelnpetersenespecially because the games were balanced around preventing any one person from carrying the game.
Pokemon Unite in a nutshell
shit like this is why I go with a full premade
It was a good idea in theory, but in practice is rarely ever implemented in a way that doesn't enable smurfing
The theory is very dated. Gaming was far less splintered back then. The numbers don’t support it, more factors have been introduced since then.
@@bannedmann4469 Which is exactly why I said "was"
I had no idea what smurfing was so I looked it up, sadly years and years ago I did it on World Of Tanks.
I noticed there were a lot of times as a less experienced player I lost to people that had a impossible amount of hours and awards for the level they were playing against. At the time I had a M-4 Sherman, so out of curiosity I got in my tier 1 tank and played a match.
I slaughtered everyone... and it wasn't even fair, I killed every enemy player I came across, and then capped the base all by myself single handed. I never did it again because it felt wrong. But what I noticed is the farther and farther I worked up the ladder the more of this I saw, largely because at higher tiers the way they set up the game play made it impossible to make money in higher tier tanks. You will lose a match because they seem to deliberately get placed on a team where you loose the harder you try. What they are trying to get you to do is try to get you to spend money on the MTX.
@@bannedmann4469skill-based matchmaking works. It just does!
.
.
In chess, that is. Online chess. Works pretty fine.
Recent video “The Mr Beast Cover Up is GETTING WORSE” got deleted.
Went unavailable mid way through
It's still available for me ?!
Gyaaattt
Is that title exact or did it change or something? I see a decent few on his channel.
This gambling business that's crawled up into our games is very bad for everyone, especially children.
And she compared it to kinder eggs. Didn't every kid out there buy more of kinder or similar stuff because they wanted a specific toy? That sucked too!
The whole trading card industry was built on the same thing tho. Baseball cards, Pokemon cards, Magic Cards, etc. Its been a part of childhood for probably 70-80 years. When were the first trading cards created?
Except your chance there of getting something desirable, generally speaking, is a bit more realistic. And it's much less manipulative inherently due to having a larger buffer between the company and people; metrics on customers were far less invasive and chance was truly random. I'm sure someone can form a better argument than me, I haven't had a lot of time to think this topic through so I'm just sharing some of my in-the-moment thoughts for now.
@@mikeexits I don't think anyone would argue it's as bad as gambling. In my eyes it's kind of a gateway drug though.
The most ironic thing is that they don't have to invent complex algorithms to make the game fun for everyone. Take Fifa/FC for example: I create and submit a team of 92 OVR, and during the matchmaking setup, I set that I want to play against teams between, say 90 and 93. Sometimes I want to challenge my tactics and deliberately set to match with a 94 or 95 OVR opponent. And if I want to play against 85 OVR opponent, that opponent must want to play against my 92 team as well. It's as simple as that - giving players a choice. Same goes with BF and K/D ratio.
So, I guarantee you that the reason for them to implement a complex algorithm for something that could be solved by a simple player choice, is greed and increased potential for player spending money. "Having more fun" is just an excuse, a marketing term and legal defense if anyone calls them to court for implementing addictive patterns which cost people real money.
We already had a solution and we used to use it. It's just like highschool PE. Class splits into two teams. Each side takes turns picking who they want on their team. What you end up with is the most skilled people being evenly split between both teams. That's a 50% win rate and it feels fair. Yet for some reason they seem to think it's better to make it impossible to lose 50% of the time, then impossible to win 50% of the time. Which just pisses everybody off, except you're just taking turns being pissed off.
Be nice if they could just call it what it is 'whale harvesting'.
@@wobblyboost Exactly. They don't need to make everyone happy. Just the top 1%
There is no such thing as an algorithm created to make something fun. Fun is not something that can ever be algorithmically fabricated. AT BEST, you can make something with 80% alogrithm (or in games, procedural generation); but it will be soulless and vapid. You still need genuine creativity for the last 20%, minimum.
"Algorithms designed to make something fun" is like "Mandatory, pre-approved, chaperoned liesure time" it gives the same vibe as literally "designing by committee."
You bring up a very interesting view. Micro-transactions have turned game producers into casino's. Before, no benefit was received from rigging matchmaking. Put same level, with same level. Now, you get money from having the player "feel" more involved. If you pay more, you get matched more with weaker opponents. Another negative for micro-transactions. Never liked them, never will.
ummm guys, the newest video that was just posted a few minutes ago got DELETED!!!
I only got half way through. Damnit
Was deleted as I was watching it. Thought I was tripping.
did it ever come back
This is pretty common in most games nowadays to effectively enforce a 50-50 win loss ratio. However, once you start purposely mismatching players, it quickly falls apart because it's no longer skill based match making and it undermines the whole system. You saw this with League of Legends's Dynamic Queue system when they prioritized shorter queue times. The video of it is still up and Scarra basically blasts the system and points out a bunch of problems with it. People were quitting ranked in massive numbers at the time across the board including the lowest and highest tier players. Trust was never fully re-established after that.
yes, the league of legends video for a controversial change they made 9 years ago. which the devs said they wanted to test how short queue times with NO skillbased matchmaking would go. it was a horrendous mistake and they never made that mistake again. competitve games dont force a 50/50 win rate at all. thats just a myth that people who cant improve made up. maybe in a game like CoD it exists, the classic non competitve casual arcade shooter game but even then it didnt exist in my experience, high KDA with high win rate. never once did I say "damn, this game really making me lose on purpose to keep me playing" never once in my 900hours of overwatch competitve in masters tier have I said "damn, this game really is making me win one lose one". never in my 3k+ hours in league of legends have I said "damn, this game really forcing me to lose games to keep me stuck at my rank.
that whole entire 50/50 thing is just bs that is substantiated by literally nothing at all. if you are 10mmr better than your opponents and teamates, you will climb out of the rank but it will take many hours. thats not by design of the matchmaking system, thats just how skill works.
This happens to dota 2 as well but they get away with it
Dota's matchmaking in ranked is quite fair imo. Thats why queue times were quite high at high end matchmaking, because it was trying to be as fair as possible.
And post game you could see the ranks of the players you faced up against. It's pretty transparent.
The matchmaking only falls apart in the casual game modes like unranked and turbo, where the skill gap can vary greatly.
@@mickmoon6887 I've played enough games to know this isn't true. Dota's problem is sticking all the toxic players on one team. And then the team with a higher overal communication score wins because the other team self destructs and they all report and thus get even lower communication scores. Its a very vicious cycle and there really is no way out once you get pulled down by the fucking retar
@@Puppetmaster2005 Trubo is the real competitive Dota environment. perfect balance but unironically
I think we know which path they will take. And it’s not the one we would prefer.
These companies should be required to transparently and publicly post how they do these things.
The mechanics of how the games work are affecting children and adults and we need to know how they work to make informed decisions, like Nutrition Facts or Health warnings.
you already know they tamper with the experience, do you really need to know the minute details to determine they are doing their best to manipulate you?
Psychological Manipulation Mechanics listed as ingredients? Haha
Id absolutely love that! They are not all created equally. Just like used car salesmen tactics to put pressure on you, we need to read up on crooked behaviour to not fall prey to it. Our loss is their gain.
@@BraveAbandon Yes.
But imagine if cars were able to have the engine entirely uninspectable.
Much fewer people would buy used cars.
@@BraveAbandon Laws like those in California require companies to list of they contain agents that cause various diseases.
Normally they also have to list chemicals and other things added.
I think it is not unreasonable given what we know. The more transparency the betterm
"Wow, I made it to Grand Master!"
"Congrats, you must really engage with that game a lot"
Me and the boys on our way to manipulate an algorithm by quitting after every loss so now we get super easy games
I can't be the only one who remembers the old custom server multiplayer lobbies of games like Quake and Unreal Tournament and look on the complete lack of balance fondly right? I've had more frustrating games in SBMM systems than I remember having in completely unbalanced custom lobbies of older games.
I remember and I have an explaination. I played a number of old games wirhout any match making were you are asigned to random opponents or join a random lobby. It was fun in the old Mario Kart games and the old Yu-Gi-Oh games and many RTS and FPS. But I am convinced today, that it was fun to me bacause I was a skilled player and the same might be true for you.
We played significantly better than the average player,m therefore we won well above 50% of our matches and winning is fun :)
But nowadays, I prefer skill based systems to get better opponents, when I play better. My goal is to improve myself and not to have the most "fun". For this very reason I am really scared of the possibility, that the match making could be manupulated :/
@@aarionsievonah I played RTS games online as a child and got stomped over and over again. I always had fun even in defeat. Because I was a child and just enjoyed playing. The best was when someone older and actually good at the game would give me tips in game. Trying to help others out.
Only problem is people who want to compete having to remove people who suck from their lobbies.
I hate how modern matchmaking scrambles the lobby after every match. Now there is almost no reason to use a mic. It used to be that you could hop in a lobby and find some cool dudes, then continue playing and chatting with them for multiple matches.
I do play quake 3 cpma still
SBMM is taking some kids who like to play soccer and giving them the most competitive matches possible every time, then when they lose enough you put them against children 5 years younger than them, then when they win you make them play against adults.
It's sadistic, it's manipulative, it's unfair, it's anti fun, and in the hands of greedy publishers it's potentially malicious.
And yet when they take it out... people quit faster and more often... even in the middle of matches. Its a tricky subject tbh.
i feel like that sort of experience is because algos like this aren't perfect and they never will be. there's too many factors on the expression of player skill to really quantify it into data. the reason they're here is because just randomly asigning people matches leads to random feeling outcomes which can make the game feel even more out of your hands than before. And while they can be manipulative leaving them open for people to look at is just asking for folks to game the system.
@@UpperEchelon if one cares about the money sure, people quitting is a problem. It is not a problem tho if nobody cares about that, if someone just wants to make the best game possible retention rate doesn't matter at all. If something is good then it is good despite the majority of people liking it or not. The fact that the goal for publishers has been to publish games that most people will play and for the longest time possible is the reason games are so bland and uninspired nowadays, they will become all a homogeneous mass of mediocrity. I'd rather play a good game with 10 people who love it than a meh game with millions that don't love it or hate it, they just use it to pass the time or whatever. It's insulting to any serious costumer that the quality of the product is not a priority over how many idiots they can get to play for a long time.
It's not a tricky subject, at least how I see it. Keeping players playing is only objectively good for the company that profits from them, people quiting is not an indicator that the game is bad or that they didn't enjoy it so to resort to such manipulation that assumes we are all children is just unethical in most cases (and in the cases where it isn't unethical it's just an indicator of bad game design or balance as it is used as a bandaid for that).
@@UpperEchelon I don't think it's tricky at all. If your game is only fun when you award free wins then they shouldn't be playing your game, they should be playing a different game. There is no circumstance where this is better for the customer, it is only better for the company. It doesn't affect me, if the game sucks I don't stop playing games, I just stop playing your game.
Besides, if it comes to team games why can't they just split the skilled players onto different teams? That should still average out to a 50% win rate, and I still get to feel the benefits of getting better, as well as getting the chance to play and learn from even better players. They used to do this I'm sure of it, you could see the even split in both the player's levels and the scores they would get. That naturally balances out to a 50% win rate more or less.
Can you think back on any time in school where the PE teacher forced your side to lose because you won last time? No, what they do is each side takes turns picking who they want on their team and what you end up with is an approximately balanced team.
@@UpperEchelonAll the data presumes every quit is ‘rage based’ when it’s not. There are many reasons why games are quit and this variable wasn’t mentioned. This is a huge factor the data doesn’t consider at all - making it invalid from the start 👍🏻
Well that's one way to tell your costumers you're manipulating them...
One of the many reasons I never play online games... Currently playing Wartales (due to your recommendation video) - it is so addictive, I am constantly thinking about playing it again. Great find! Thank you!
Man I swear the algo is stalking me.
I was watching a video on MW Remastered in 2024, and clicked the bell to see what's on offer the very minute he said "skill based match making", only for a video about it to have been posted "10sec ago"
what channel on MW Remastered
Probably Merkmusic
Nah it just knows that statistically people with your viewing history and recent views you'd probably click that video.
I am curious about the Matchmaking used in Marvel Snap tbh...
I recently quit that game bc the Matchmaking seems to literally adapt when you change your deck...so when you try to adapt to seeing the same deck over and over, it switches the matchmaking so you no longer face that deck...but the deck that can counter your newest deck...then when I switch back to my previous deck, suddenly i am seeing the decks that counter it again....
It honestly makes decks worthless really quickly while driving up the winning rate for the Newest Cards....
I agree with this actually. I know clash royale did that and I am pretty sure I remember devs saying it was on purpose at one point in time. but marvel snap is atrocious. I stopped playing it for a year, came back and im playing my same ramp deck and playing into the exact same decks I was a year ago. switched to an ongoing deck and all of a sudden im getting countered within 2 games of playing it. that game has a huge problem.
Skill based MM the single system that made me quit all pvp shooters, because they social engineer your matches to make you win or lose just enough to keep you playing. Did a report on R6 and Cods mm tendencies for my senior project which basically convinced me that there was no point to continue
Im so glad i play mostly single player games like boomer shooters rpgs jrpgs
None of this crap
Shikanoko nokonoko koshitantan
Dark souls pvp has it's own problems but at least nobody has to deal with shit like this, they are just games made to be played and you'll be matched with whoever despite skill or any other factor other than luck
@@miguelnascimento2847gonna be honest, I’m sort of glad Fromsoft and Nintendo are sort of unchanging at multiplayer because it at least maintains the experience.
Remember custom servers for Battlefield 2 or BC2? Or let's go back to UT99? BF1942 Desert Combat? C&C RA2/Generals? It felt as you'd actually play against humans.
You know why multi-player games in the past were fun, because they were only based on your ping. That's it, no hand holding, no big brother manipulating your gameplay, and you had to get good, you would see your skill go up from getting shit on in the beginning. Sbmm shouldn't exist In the form it's in today, it takes away all feeling of accomplishment. Did you really win the match because of your skill or did big brother just decide to put in an easier lobby, are you really just bad at the game or is big brother just putting you up against pro players while giving you bots on your team. This completely ruined the fun for me, I can never play call of duty again with any sense of satisfaction
Well if you miss the cod game type and you do not want skillbased match making you can try XDefiant.
Finally someone is talking about this, SBMM is great for noobs but top players are suffering.
You're just mad you can't punch 5 year olds
There are more noobs than there are top players. So do you cater to the minority or the majority?
Or put more simply. Do you want noobs to be playing with top players? I’m sure that’s a blast for the top players, but sounds like a crappy experience for the noobs.
@@Elysiumlost
It’s a tough issue. You don’t want to kick noob’s asses and ruin the fun for them, but you also don’t want to force so consistent a WLR that players who actually pay for and commit to a game don’t feel the rewards of their labor.
@@Elysiumlost noobs are already playing on the top players team ruining their games lol Halo 3 matchmaking had it balanced out and everyone had fun so it's possible. You shouldn't be punished like that for just begin better than average.
@@Legitti so let me make sure I understand this correctly. You are being “punished” by not playing with players much worse than you and feeding you easy kills.
Got it.
I wonder why game studios didn't try to implement what TF2 used to do with matches (not the quickplay matchmaker, but the in-match options: playing a map for 45 minutes with team scramble coming into play if one side kept getting beat and map votes if the match became too stale). I get why SBMM exists and there are good examples of SBMM, namely multiplayer games around 2007 - 2016, but the way companies handle it these days and their morals makes me wish server browsing was more popular.
simple most multiplayer games are played by those that stack and pre party before a match starts and the other factor is lobby disband when the match is over everyone is sent back to the title screen and has to que again unless your playing in a party your likely to never see those players again and since this happens right after one match no only do games don't last 45 minuets but there is no point to mid game team scramble when the teams disband right after one match now if it was like tf2 before Meet your match happened or using the server list to join a custom game then yes team scramble really dose help those that are having a rough game but come on when was the last time a Triple A game such as overwatch , The Finals , Xdefiant acturly let you make a custom game
@KeiraLunar ow has custom games and all whole server browser
@@isiahmikester yes.... but it dose not give exp progression to the battle pass so im sure not many would actually play those lists
I think it is more fun on average BUT only with their spun up server setup. Old school static IP servers, you knew who was best and it felt good to go up against them.
It isn’t more fun, that’s not their concern. The concern is retention and spending.
You can only have fun if you're awarded free wins 50% of the time?
@@viktoriyaserebryakov2755 For a lot of players who would never get kills without matchmaking let alone wins, yeah it is more fun.
Yeah I don't feel bad losing against someone that I knew was going to win because they were that good. I just hate my games being a sweatfest.
SBMM should only apply to league modes. You want to be a sweaty player, play league with the rest of the sweats. Also stop scrambling the lobby after every match. It used to be that you could hop in a lobby and find some cool dudes, then continue playing and chatting with them over multiple matches. Current match making has done away with this and there is almost no reason to use a mic anymore.
Yeah but when the sweats decide to queue for "casual" they always bring the sweat with them
@@UC3M9QmuafgJ7GCcEF2HDNQA Then the casuals can go to ranked to play with people their own skill level
@@UC3M9QmuafgJ7GCcEF2HDNQA Yeah but it usually boils down to a couple of sweats on each side, while the bulk of the lobby is made of average players and a couple scrubs.
Did you forget that the sweats mainly appear in casual mode? Well, the sweats that stomp you at least. You don't get matched with the best of the best if you're in a mid rank bro. I find ranked more fair and fun than most games if we forget about all the toxicity. Casual game modes in CoD are literally unplayable today. The first few games I played in cold war and vanguard were absolute garbage. Prestiged players with all attachments camping and mowing me down in milliseconds when had the option of 5 different predetermined classes with the worst attachments. And even though I've never been bad at FPS games I noticed how sweaty a lot of these players were. I honestly just rage quit and never played those games again and plan on never buying another CoD game unless one of my friends verify that it's actually good.
Casual should have a larger skill gap allowed than ranked. Makes it less boring I think. But the best of the best should not be allowed to play with the worst of the worst.
Maybe I was a part of this study?
@@nicklasveva The toxicity was part of the fun and skill base was spread across the lobby with a couple sweats, mostly average, and a handful of scrubs.
More awareness and scrutiny of EoMM needs to happen. It's in more games than you'd think, and it's more manipulative than you'd assume.
You know what's cool? Not being able to audit and/or trust.
It's like a casino but it's on your phone and you're a kid and you can't smoke or drink so you are having less fun than the adults. And then you think no I'm playing games... that's different, then you visit a casino and you see how modern machines have emulated video games. Then you... hm... you play single player games and if you find yourself downloading a game on your phone again you have your friend take a hammer to your fingers.
I could go back to old Apex videos from 2 years ago and find my comments calling the EBMM "predatory". Glad to see someone that matters finally talking about it
I will probably say SBMM might not be monetized because a lot of us who live outside the US or North America, the microtransactions are super expensive. 20 U$ in my country is $140 TT, and aint nobody spending that kind of money on cosmetics!!! A 70 U$ game is already $490 TT
Just having the knowledge that these systems exist has ruined my enjoyment of competitive multiplayer games. Even without knowing if it is in the current game I'm playing the questioning of if a system like this is in place kills it. Imagine if you were a football player or any other sport really, but you were never really sure how much your practice and effort mattered because sometimes the games were just rigged to make you want to play more.
what games are you playing that are competitive? because I guarantee you that no matter what game it is, as long as it truly is an established competitive game, forces you to win and lose games. thats just not a real thing. if it was, then no player would ever be able to get out of their skill bracket. not a single player would ever get out of a bracket ever.
@@kregman6928 did you watch the video? No they don't force you to win or lose. They don't come to your house and hold a gun to your head, but they do significantly influence the odds in ways the think will make you engage with the game more. Imagine if you were a quarter back and you were on a 5 game win streak so your coach was like "hey you are doing really too good so we are gonna replace all the receivers with people that are significantly worse. That way you will have to practice more and put more hours in."
@@GoRamz thats a nice analogy and all but companies literally do not use these patents. noone would play competitive games if that was the case
@@kregman6928 Companies spend millions on psychological studies so they know how to better manipulate players. Yes, people still play these games despite them being bad. Sunk cost fallacy is a thing. People do bad shit all the time if their pleasure centers light up enough. SBMM is basically designed to toss you a win every now and then for retention. But more importantly, make you want to spend money to get an "edge" more often. That's it.
@@kregman6928 Why would no one play them? Just curious. You know lot's of people play slot machines and everyone knows they are designed for you to loose money.
Man I’m so happy I was born in the 90s and got to experience online gaming as it was young an new, before all this back end manipulative bullshit.
The problem with skill based matchmaking is that it's not skill based.
When playing with teammates, winrate can either get dragged down or boosted. It's based just as much on luck.
This is exactly what happened to destiny. The game just got sweatier and sweatier until the only people playing are tryhard streamers.
I just want to play people at my skill level and not get forced into unwinnable matches. Fair (real unmanipulated) SBMM is the best system.
I'm trying to get into Naraka Bladepoint but can't played ranked til lvl 50. "Casual" mode is anything but when almost every game has a top 500 player in it....
Destiny is probably the worst offender! When they want you to lose, not only do they stack players but your hit registration goes to shit. You can feel it in the first 3 engagements in a round.
As a d2 die hard sbmm is almost mandatory. It’s a very intricate fpsrpgmmo. New players would get absolutely destroyed game after game otherwise. As a decent player I really don’t like sbmm because I love dominating the lobby once in a while. But for the quality of life for d2 sbmm has to stay.
@@CollaateraL well as a long time Destiny player….none of that really matters moving forward.
@@UC3M9QmuafgJ7GCcEF2HDNQA
That's the least issue
Cheaters and Ddosers are the biggest issue in Naraka gave up tang San event wanted to role play as him so badly but the Chinese ruined it
I've not played PVP games for awhile. Felt the inorganic outcomes from YEARS ago. They just never felt like pvp used to way back in Halo 2 days and that game had a little bit of SBMM even way back then but no where to the degree it does now. The nice thing about pvp from years ago was you could hop on and be more experienced than your buddy and could match up and have a good time together. Nowadays I can't do that. If I do it leads to an abysmal experience for one or both of us but never a positive experience for both of us. It's never even close. So then the one and only draw I ever had about playing online games was having a good time with my buddies is completely stripped away and I've just never felt the need to invest in pvp games ever since.
SBMM for Halo 2 actually was just a ranked mode. I could clearly tell what type of players I was up against when I was playing Ranked Team Slayer opposed to Team Slayer
Woah. UE just deleted his new vid? Just finished the new one on MrBeast. Refreshed the page and gone
Only if one believes the text that showed on the screen. With the video gone, something has to appear. We are all free to determine who did what and why. Considering he was pointing things out, makes you wonder if the statement on the screen was true.
Wow the new video is gone, at least I was able to finish it before so
can you summarize the second half of that video?
He just reuploaded the video it seems
Makes me _almost_ sad for those who like to play competitive multiplayer games.
However, _almost_ doesn’t cover for the 0 effs I give for those money grabs disguised as games and those who play it just feed the cycle of getting exploited.
I really struggle to believe these metrics. I was never a top tier player myself but SBMM basically pushed me out of online gaming. It just feels so much less satisfying to never see actual improvement and nothing more demoralizing when after only a couple good games it decides to utterly crush you with the sweatiest nerds you'll ever see.
Quite literally go from getting a decent 1.5-3KDR for 2 games then suddenly struggle to even get a single kill with people who somehow kill me before I even see them. How is this supposed to be fun? Like the game is great when it has it's ups and downs, but when it feels so artificial I just can't enjoy myself.
''The game is fun when I win but when I lose it's so annoying, can we fix this?''
@@KanggaxxTell me you have poor reading comprehension without telling me you have poor reading comprehension. Oh wait, you already did.
Matchmaking has legitimately destroyed Overwatch. The games are hardly ever even, if you’re not the one getting stomped you’re the one doing the stomping. Maybe once a day I’ll get a match that is legitimately fun and where both sides are evenly matched to an extent.
YES! if you're put in silver they will make sure you will remain in silver forever. I also think they have some sort of regional filters also
Should've played TF2
TF2 throughout its history has shown us that *Straight up random players in a server* is better than any lazily made matchmaker system.
I can't play any modern "skilled based matchmaker" game with my best friend of decades because the mAtChMaKeR eventually forces us to play against better and better players when we're together. But if we queue alone it changes dramatically.
How did you not pick up the spending part in their patents? They have it written in one of them that you'll get matched and receive pre-defined losses against someone who purchased something from the ingame shop to make you buy the same thing. Once you spent the money and bought the thing, you'll get 3 - 5 pre-defined wins when using your new purchase, before being put on pre-defined losses again.. People just sucking up the "lobby" system in games since the original Modern Warfare 2 was the worst thing to happen to PvP-gaming since nothing there is decided by actual skill anymore, but by the company controlling and rigging the matches to maximize profits. Bring back actual dedicated servers where people hop in and out - teams will balance themselves, like they always did in the past.
You think then humans will subconsciously link their purchases to their winrate increasing?
There is this psychology book - Nudge. In the intro the authors ask a question - if (1) 'everything matters' and (2) you know how, let's say to order items in the cafeteria to nudge people into purchasing certain ones more, how should you proceed with that knowledge.
Fundamentally 'the cafeteria question' and the 'matchmaking question' and a lot of questions in all aspects of life, are the same.
And the answer usually depends on the values of the person/corporation.
Until I see the source code of these matchmaking algorithms, I ain't trusting any of them. Playing unranked forever.
What makes you think this same kind of manipulation isn't being applied to unranked matches?
normal unranked matches are manipulated too lmaooo
@@4x13x17 [Uninstalls]
[Sells computer]
[Returns to monke]
@@aquapendulum install any server based game like KF2 or singleplayer like DMC3 or NG Sigma 2. Good games exist, just less in the multiplayer format.
@@4x13x17 Thank God for single-player games 🥳
Man I have never been happier that I completely quit playing online multiplayer games with "random" match making a decade ago. It is not that I was bad at them (my GoW group had 3 of the top 1,000 US ranked players for example) but that the match making just seemed to get worse and worse. Today the only games of that type I play are ones where me and my friends can setup teams to play against each other.
No, no, that's not it. People have a mechanism that rewards them for learning and getting better at something eventually master it and move on to do something else. This matchmaking tries to scam people into a perpetual learning curve multiplied by sunken cost fallacy.
Heroes of the storm got fked when MMR became a thing. I went from mostly winning to losing 40 games in a row because I had literal AFKers on my team because they could let the game run and still get XP.
If you don't play for a while and jump into Ranked queue, you will get matched into Bronze, maybe low silver by default.
And if you're insanely unlucky, you can get literal griefers there, and then you're legit stuck with them forever.
@@GerMorden yeah just pretty much got to the point if I wasn't on a pre-made team it was just bots an griefers. And in a game like Hots missing 1 team member can end in a steam roll.
They say there’s a drop off of player retention when it’s opened. But I grew up without it and there was no issues (also was more fun)
So unless the newer generation is completely different, I feel like I wanna say the devs are bs’ing
BLACK OPS 2 BABY YEAH
@@jackbishop8610 BFBC2!
Can't have shareholders selling off their shares, now can we?
Which is why dedicated servers wont be back with AAA games. Privately hosted, they would espouse the range of skill they wanted. Beginner, good, expert, tryhard etc. You tended to play with the same people over and over, building actual rivalry and friendship. A dedicated server was like a pub or bar where everyone knew your name.
But that isnt profitable to AAA corpos...
Maybe _strictly_ privately hosted servers are out of the question, but even AAA games could give players the tools to moderate their own lobbies. I'm sure the same monetization tactics could still be used, like selling skins and XP boosters, etc, while letting people to play in their own lobbies, instead of relying on generic matchmaking.
So we are just supposed to trust this "study" and pretend like we didnt already love the lack of sbmm in older cods? also plenty of games dont have strict sbmm and have better player retention than cod. They are straight up gaslighting us.
😂 MW in 2007 had sbmm,so did MW2 and MW3.😂😂 Your false sense of no SBMM in old cod's is fucking hilarious. You were fine with it then but not now😂😂 Josh Menke did a GDC talk in Nov 2021 and said "EVERY cod going back to cod 4 MW had SBMM." 😂😂
league of legends has the engagement based matchmaking where if you win too much they put you in impossible to win matches. forcing a 50/50 win loss rate regardless of rank
This plus the most predatory anti cheat in existance. I'm amazed how people tolerate this. Literally my friend and myself left with the Vaguard patch. After playing for 10+ years.
The 50/50 system is just the icing on the cake🤡
the ARAM mode in League got this system, every time I got a winning streak I'll get to a losing streak where I have no idea what (at least) one teammate is doing each match and throw the game for the rest of the team.
destiny 2 put in sbmm and the quitting is so bad they started adding more and harsher penalties for leaving, and leave sbmm untouched. sbmm is awful always,.
Overwatch 2 is doing the same thing now for QUICK PLAY matches. I think the penalties are harsher than comp at this point.
Interesting. When did they add it? I played until 2018 and quit forever. Did they add it in recent years? I am aware that sbmm was in Iron banner but that's it.
@@VoRiiactual they added it in the last year or so. they had a twab recently discussing how common quitters were
They actually said that both tests they did resulted in high skill level players facing each other at an escalating rate, & THAT was specifically WHY they weren't gonna remove SBMM. The way they worded it everyone just completely missed it. They basically dont want high skill players facing each other bc it inhibits their partnered COD creators from making high kill game content & this will affect their sales bc children would see their favorite streamers not being great & kill the aspirations of children wanting to be great CallofDuty pro's, thereby compromising the sales of CallofDuty games or skin bundles.
As always there's only 1 thing we can do. stop giving them money
True. There are a lot of good games that respect you as a player. But kids don't understand this.
I wonder how much the "retention" side of SBMM and EOMM actually works. I feel like those systems had the complete opposite effect of retaining me. SBMM actually drove me away from multiplayer games altogether. If your game has a system that has an algorithmic win/loss and K/D ratio influencer, I'm not playing it. Simple as.
Holy fucking shit I forgot about the whole “surprise mechanics” thing
Miss the old list of random servers and a filter.
You would have a healthy mix of people on the servers and you could find several that would fit you perfectly 😁
Did your recent video get taken down?
man I still remember this "surprise mechanics" meme though....lol!!!
"Nobody" likes SBMM because it makes every match sweaty. A few weeks after an ELO reset or whatever scoring algo they use, the better players will have been selected out from the worse players and it will be back to "fair" play. But you don't want fair, you want to win all the time. EOMM and other matchmaking algorithms face better players against worse players most of the time, so the better players feel good about themselves and keep coming back, and the publisher can manipulate the losers (say, here's a free credit booster for an hour). If you buy longer lasting boosters, you can get an edge up in the game! Of course they're using it to squeeze more money out of the whales and the inexperienced.
Know what's worse than playing casually and losing 60% of the time?
Being stressed out because every game is neck-and-neck but losing exactly 50% of the time.
Earliest I've ever been, looking forward to this vid!
People don’t understand so I’ll explain
It’s not about being “fair”
And it never was
Gaming blew up when twitch streaming became popular and it changed how majority of players acted
No longer were people playing for fun and instead they played like sweats, thinking that they could make millions playing games
This was not the case in 2012
But it is now
Now when the companies realized this, they implemented SBMM because they saw that the Tryhard fanbase was forcing the casuals to quit
Causing them to loose players and money
I’m not defending SBMM but rather explaining why it’s in the game
Want proof? Xdefiant is dying because the casual fans left
I don’t like SBMM and I definitely think it needs a adjustment and rework but at the same time I understand why they use it
Anything to maximize engagement
Damm that is actually pretty interesting. Never thought SBMM had that much of an impact, i always just blindly defended it because it just makes sense in terms of the average experience (particularly 1v1), you need to feel theres the chance for winning else playing against someone so abolishingly better is just not fun as it usually means that you will be playing and enjoy the game less because of it. Good stuff thanks for bringing this to light
EOMM is the reason i stopped playing Overwatch, and any modern AAA PVP title...
"Tf2 killer" 😂
my BIGGEST ISSUE YOU SAID IT:
(paraphrased)
"you are not facing opponents designated as a result of your position on an arbitrary leaderboard"
THAN WHY HAVE THE BOARD YOY LYING WEASELS, IM GOOD AT THIS GAME!!!!!!!!! AGHHHHHHHHH
Did Mr Beast just get your latest video taken down UE?
Dedicated servers and community building is something I miss of the old days.
SBM makes gaming much less fun. One if the biggest part of game same as in life is progression. In SBM, as you get better you are matched with better players, you never feel a sense of achievement or progress.
I acutally started to game the SBM, play when i am super drunk just for the LOL and lower my elo. And when i am playing with friends i play for real, and we always dominate the other team due to faulty match making.
I am here to have fun. Not to prolong the longevity of game company bottom line
The skill based matchmaking isn't the problem, it's the draining and often toxic nature of competitive games that drives people away sooner or later. Being matched against equally-skilled opponents wouldn't be an issue if not for those aspects.
The comment bots are so quick!
I miss server browsers...
100%
My team drooling noobs who just got the game.
The other team, top-tier, sweaty, sweaty sweaty boys.
🎩
🐍 no step on snek!🇺🇸🇭🇰
almost every match for me in a nut shell
The single game I remember SBMM having a definite impact on my experience was Call of Duty Cold War multiplayer. I got whiplash from the constant flip flopping quite literally from match to match. The Call of Duty titles before and after had no noticeable pattern
something you missed is that the "90%" bonus is only a 1.75% at most improvement to retention. that's honestly not that massive an improvement. there's so many other issues to this study as well - like secretly changing the rules of engagement those 50% of players were used to, and MWIII being a really mixed controversial game that was explicitly designed to cater to the hardest of the hardcore Warzone 1 players that abused movement exploits and didn't like them being fixed in the previous game
You make videos about things I have no idea about so interesting!!
The “Git gud” crowd is in absolute shambles now
I can only vouch for how it works for OW but then it's perfect given the data was made by blizzard.
I can clearly remember, near autistically when OW2 came out, in it's first season, over a sample of 250 games how my Win rate, My rank, and my game experience went.
I started around Plat 5, Quickly within the first 40 games i was at Diamond 5, that was about 65% win rate, the next 210 games is in like a fog of madness, because not only my Win rate didn't drop below to 62% but the furthest i went was about Diamond 4. I would go between D5 and D4 with above 60% win rate over a sample of 200 games.
--My experience playing those matches were infuriatingly bad, what was happening is that my win rate was so high, so solid that it would give me consistently 45% win rate players and often throwers who would throw a fit over the smallest things and hinder our conditions. The enemy team would consist of players ranging from 50-55% WR players and that is much more stable then the team piggybacking on me, each individually played bad, but all of them were doing the minimum to get that win.
--The coming seasons, S2 and S3 i would still sweat but slowly i became a thrower myself, if throwing means, not giving your all and loosing interest in this bullshit. Interestingly as soon my Win rate dropped to the same 50-55%.. I started winning, not only winning but getting pleasant team mates to win alongside with, because who would've thought, winning is only as good as the experience was getting there.. That 50% got me to Masters 3 in a week..
--Now i understand why they use systems as this, probably better then most, the game isn't about me but the larger eco system of players and most people aren't even in Diamond let alone masters. It's basically a artificial feedback loop to tell the player, you're getting good ! Look how you stomped ! You're not the old Gold 4 you were ! You're Gold 3 now ! Keep playing ! Meanwhile, you were meant to win that game 90% of the time and it was a given. Play a lot and the algorithm becomes predictable when you were meant to lose and to win and as long you ride the waves you get high even with piss poor skills and understanding of the game. So yes, you can gain the system, you can get to high ranks, this system isn't keeping you down, this system takes the fun out of trying and gives it to the casuals, wich i totally understand but still.. Why did i have to sweat so much, actually trying and giving a fuck to find out.
Im in the 2 minutes club, but not for the first time 😢
Players have long suspected World of Tanks to being doing this. There's a lot of evidence to support it too. It's not mere chance that every time you get on a roll of winning you suddenly get trash team after trash team after trash team. The other day, like a day or two ago, I was closing in on twenty battles with a seventy plus percent win rate. All of a sudden I got nothing but trash teams and it dropped down to forty percent. Now, as a once in a while thing that could be chalked up to just bad RNG. Sometimes it bites you in the ass. Thing is this happens all the time. Without fail. It's like they try to artificially try to force you to hover around fifty percent no matter what, or less on the days that RNG screws your ass. It's bad enough that RNG is involved with team building ( debatable in my opinion and for the stated reason ) but there's even RNG on the shell's penetration, the damage it does, and where the shell goes within the aiming bloom. They tried to get into Esports once. Between all of the RNG and premium rounds making armor irrelevant they got laughed out of the conversation. What's worse is they started building some tanks with premium rounds in mind so they're overpowered as hell. There's a lot wrong with the game but the matchmaking thing has always been squirrely. Way too much to be just mere RNG or coincidence. The same goes for the RNG on shots. There are times where you're so close to someone you could spit on them, quite literally, and your shot goes nowhere near where you aim. Why? Who the fuck knows but the running belief is that some players are actually protected. Maybe not all of the time but it's quite obvious when it happens. You'll miss shots you're fully aimed for, at a reasonable distance to guarantee penetration, yet they're on the move or not even beginning to fully aim and the shot goes exactly where they are aiming. The whole thing is just too fishy and too bullshit-y to not question.
The audio is way low in this video.
You were not lying about the bot comments, jesus
SBMM sucks, period. It's ruined several games that I used to enjoy... It's plain *not fun* to be actively punished for getting better.
I remember when I started playing MW2 on 360- I got absolutely STOMPED, and I *kept* getting stomped for like a solid week while I learned the maps and the weapons and developing game sense. I slowly started getting better... How? I learned from the people that were spanking me. I made alliances with teammates and we'd make it our mission to ambush the cracked enemy player and try to take hik outml. What was my "reward" for this? Being top frag, or chasing that awesome game-ending killcam. It was tangible- the better I got at the game, the better I did in my matches. The reward for my time investment and practice was exhibiting my skill. I *loved* competing with the other cracked guy on my team to see who could top fragged. I *LOVED* finding that guy on the other team that was just as good as me and having a little war to see who was better. What happened when I lost? NOTHING- I knew I lost because the other guy was just plain better.
SBMM has completely destroyed all that. Now, the better I am at a game, the sweatier my matches get and the more I'm pigeonholed into only using meta builds and game strays. My level of skill compared to the rest of the playerbase? Doesn't matter anymore, because I'm not allowed to PLAY with the rest of the playerbase, and I'm stuck with long queue times and crap connections exclusively with other cracked players.
SBMM actively punishes you for being "good", whilst simultaneously ensuring that lower skill players plateau and don't progress in skill past a certain point because they've been continuously insulated from high-level play.
The reward for getting better at a game should be DOING better in the game. Period. Lower-skill players losing? That's how they learn and get better.
SBMM is just robbing the most dedicated players in an attempt to pander to the most casual, by trying to convince them that they're better than they actually are.
I'm a fan of skill being measured as simple scores, with a generally wide band of allowable scores that can compete against you, especially in team games.
Its still pretty random, gives you exposure to higher skill levels in general, and there are still times where you can be the best on your team, but your team barely wins
When the bands get too tight, or more manipulation happens, it ruins it for everyone, where you feel like you are randomly getting slid up and down tiers constantly.
RIP the assassins got him
It is good, trust me. I'm not a multi-million dollar company
Billion B
@@shmobbin6501 I'm not that either
I'm reminded of that Pokémon mobile game that basically tosses you into a PVE match against bots every once in a while either because there's not enough players on at the moment for a full game or because you're on a losing streak, with microtransactions aplenty available of course...
You have no idea if you're playing against actual people or bots when you start a "multiplayer" game.
SBMM/EOMM has destroyed gaming. It should only exist within ranked versions of whatever game you're playing. You are literally never playing and having an organic experience because of it. Every game you play is manipulated. That's all i need to say to prove it's trash.