What the title says.
In: 84
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.
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