What the title says.
In: 84
Skill-based matchmaking is essentially what it sounds like: it attempts to match players in competitive games against other players with a similar skill level.
The reasoning behind this is pretty simple. Nobody wants to play a game against someone who is significantly better than them to the point they just get destroyed over and over, and playing against someone who is significantly worse than you can get boring pretty quickly.
The backlash comes from primarily two places.
One is this can be difficult to implement well. What quantifiable parameters do you choose to determine skill? How wide a range do you allow for player skill in a match? Do you try to create teams that have the same skill on average but may have a variety of different skill levels among the players or have all the players on both teams at the same skill level?
The more restrictive you are in who can be matched together, the more likely the match up will be at least approximately fair, but the longer it may take to find a good match, especially if the game doesn’t have a massive playerbase that is always online trying to pick up matches.
The other, very vocal, contingent of criticism is from players, especially streamers, who want to be able to show off how good they are at the game, which is easier when you’re significantly better than your opponents. And that obviously becomes difficult when you keep getting matched against people who are as good or sometimes better than you instead of the average player that you could handily crush.
It comes down to the implementation.
For example, the long running series Counterstrike just launched the newest version, CS2.
The previous entry CS Global Offensive was out for like 10 years and had a very firmly entrenched player base with very defined ranking histories.
The gameplay from CSGO to CS2 while not quite 1:1 is very transferrable.
But then going into CS2, *everyone* had their ranking histories reset so now you’ve got a player base with fresh ranking history and anywhere from 0-10+ years of skill experience.
So right now the “skill” based matchmaking feels like shit because it doesn’t seem like what a players “rank” is has any correlation on their “skill” so it has a massive feelsbad factor.
If you play better/tend to win more than you lose, you get matched with players who are higher skilled. This means that generally, the people you play with will be harder and you won’t be able to dominate people/easily win even if you’re really good at the game. But, it also means that if you’re not as skilled or new to the game, you won’t get stomped into the ground by pros.
Generally, people want high skill = kicking people’s butts, and might find it frustrating to not be able to dominate in a game they’re good at. But, this system makes it a lot more *fair,* and prevents newbies from dropping the game because, understandably, nearly always losing isn’t fun.
Skill based matchmaking means creating matches of people who have similar levels of skill. The idea is to create games where it’s more competitive.
Unfortunately if there are a small pool of players it can take longer to find fair matches so you have to wait longer. And if players are too far apart the game can be laggy.
The alternative is connection based matchmaking where you try to match based on who is closest to you. This usually results in faster matchmaking times and lower lag in matches. The problem is it also creates very lopsided matches.
Imagine if your favorite professional sports team was matched up against your local high school team of the same sport. It wouldn’t be pretty.
So why do a lot of vocal gamers dislike skill based matchmaking? Because it’s bad for their egos.
Imagine if you had 20 players. If players in the top 5 were always matched up against players in the bottom 5, they would pretty much always win. Probably feels great for the top 5, but miserable for the bottom 5. Now, what if the top 5 had to play each other? That’s like of two pro teams compete. The chance of one winning all the time drops AND we know at least one of them will lose. Meanwhile if you match the bottom 5 against each other it’s a more even playing field.
Unfortunately outside competitive gaming where you are gaurenteed to face opponents your same skill level (more or less) because of how tournaments work, a lot of mid to high level gamers prefer being able to beat up on lower skilled opponents because it inflates their stats and lets them think they are better than they are. They would rather dominate over and over against weaker players because that’s the only way they have fun. The majority of players benefit from skill based matchmaking but the most vocal complainers are usually the ones who don’t. That’s why it SEEMS like “everyone” hates it. They don’t, just the loud ones.
The best analogy I can think of is boxing matches. Fighters are matched according to their weight so that the competition is more equal. They are also matched according to their skill, measured by how well they have done in past matches.
It’s literally exactly what it sounds like. Every player is ranked based on some sort of metric, say 0-100 based on how good you are.
If you are ranked a 65, the game will try its best to put you in matches with other people who are also rank 65, meaning everyone in the lobby is similarly skilled.
People don’t like it because (1) it eliminates the chance you get put in a lobby with a bunch of people ranked 10 and therefor can dominate them, and because being matched against people the same rank as you kinda makes the game monotonous. You get 1 kill, then you get killed once. Over and over.
It seems like everyone is giving the high level view of why SBMM is implemented, but from a player perspective, there are other considerations.
First, a lot of times what you deal with isn’t exactly skill based matchmaking, but engagement optimized matchmaking. This means that the game isn’t trying to make matches even in terms of skill, it’s trying to make you game longer like how slot machines are designed to get you addicted. In practice what this looks like is you get one match where you absolutely dominate and feel good, followed by a few or several matches where you get dominated. When you’re about ready to quit, you get a good match again to restart the cycle. Exacerbating this issue is that instead of getting a team with equally skilled players, you often get a team with 1 great player who has to try and singlehandedly carry the team to victory. If that 1 player fails, the entire team gets destroyed.
Another problem is gaming with friends. I can no longer play games like Halo with my friends due to Halo’s SBMM system. Me being in the lobby makes the game too difficult for my friends to keep up, so they don’t like to play with me anymore. Conversely, I have another friend who is significantly better than me at call of duty, and I don’t like to play with him because the matches are too difficult every single time without exception.
It’s picking opponents based on your skill level. In a race game that could result in people driving similar times, in a shooting game that would result in people getting closer to a k:d ratio of 1 because scoring well puts you in a better pool.
It’s a myth that everyone hates it. Everyone that isn’t good or below average likes it without realising. It’s the reason why you’re not 1:10 every COD game if you’re not that great.
In an ideal world, both you and your opponent have an equal chance of winning. Skill based matchmaking tries to implement this by matching people who win more often with other people who win approximately as often. When the system works properly, both you and your opponents enjoy a close match where you both have a roughly 50% chance of winning.
This is a particularly good system for new players, as anybody who lived in the age before matchmaking could tell you. The experience of hopping into a multi-player lobby for the first time only to get paired with some dude with thousands of hours in the game is a very good way to convince people not to play the game. Some higher skilled, but not particularly competitive, players miss the days where they could experience being better than the average person by stomping people less experienced than them into the dirt. While this can be fun for them, it is terrible for the long-term health of any multi-player game.
Many people also complain that the skill based matchmaking in a particular game isn’t functioning as intended. Their experience might be that they get matched into games where they alternate between stomping and getting stomped by opponents, getting them to that 50% winrate but not actually achieving the competitive games the matchmaking is intended to achieve. Others, usually incorrectly, believe that where they are placed in the ranking is incorrect and that they should be placed at a much higher skill level than the system has determined, a situation they might describe as “ELO Hell.” (ELO being the system that many skill based matchmaking systems are broadly based off of) These players are typically completely delusional but frustrated nonetheless.
I, for one, didn’t like it because I enjoy playing with friends. These friends aren’t as good as me by a long shot but most the time I just enjoy hanging out with them. The problem occurs when I am much better than them, the Skill Based Matchmaking tries to even it out and we play against people who are worse than me but better than my friends. So they end up dying all the time since they play against people who are better, and they just end up watching me most the time until I just back out and repeat. So in time my friends no longer wanted to play with me and I put the blame on skill based matchmaking.
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