What the title says.
In: 84
Good explanations of Skill based matchmaking already.
To add: I feel like only a small minority on the internet hates it. And nobody really cares about them, because they are fun vampires. They want to take the fun from others.
There is also a common system in conjunction with skill based Matchmaking: Ranks.
A higher rank shows that the game puts you against harder enemies. This still gives you progress. You can see that you get better, by climbing in rank, even though your winrate stays at ~50%. So instead of bragging that you win 90% of matches, or that you have a KDA of 20:1, you can brag that you are a “Master Tier” player, which is on of the best 0,01% of players.
It’s still not a 1to1 replacement of the joy you get from absolutely dominating your enemies, but in the long term that get’s old too.
It also depends on the game. Personally, playing a Team Deathmatch shooter without skill based matchmaking feels better than more competitive games. Because with 15 man teams, of you are a better player, the enemy team has a lot of fodder for you to kill, but also the best 2 enemies are a challenge for you. The lower skilled players can mostly play against each other, and sometimes get killed by you.
It is the same principle of taking fun from others, BUT it is spread out. The few good players take a bit of fun from the majority of average players. The average player doesn’t get all of his fun sucked. Actually in that scenario it might even be fun when you can randomly encounter a harder player. Kinda like a boss mob, that feels really good when you finally kill it.
1v1 competitive games with snowballing mechanics (RTS for example) on the other hand, I would have no fun whatsoever winning against a way worse player. I wouldn’t even really get to play the game, and I would feel bad for them.
Top voted answer is correct, but wanted to comment on people saying “b-b-b-ut I don’t want to play has good as possible just to have fun!!11! Why do I need to sweat just to tread water? SBMM is bad!!1!!”
So many streamers say this, especially in recent CoD games, saying how they cannot compete without giving 100% effort, and you can even see people in this thread saying this too.
And the answer is always the same. They are saying “I don’t want to have to sweat every single game.”
Answer: “You don’t. You don’t need to sweat. Stop sweating. Why are you trying so hard? Just relax and have fun.”
Then they clarify: No no, what I mean is that I want to relax and also mop the floor with the rest of the lobby.
Please remember this whenever a streamer or anyone says they hate SBMM. They don’t need to sweat every game. They can relax and play a game where the lose a little bit more. The only reason they bitch about it is they want to feel skilled without trying as hard.
“But if I relax, I’ll never get any kills!”
“who cares? Get no kills, who gives a shit? You’re trying to relax. If you want to relax and get lots of kills, play single player! Plenty of bots to shoot at and you can feel gud about your mad skilz.”
To me, skill based matchmaking is just a bad idea all around, especially for team based games. For one, a lot of SBMM systems will basically just give you either a really hard lobby or a really easy one depending on the performance of your last couple of matches, so if you win 2-3 games, you’re basically guaranteed to lose the next one because the system usually forces a roughly 50/50 win rate no matter how good you are, which to me creates literally 0 incentive to improve and get better at the game because you never get any benefit from it.
What’s the point of improving your skills and getting better if your performance is just going to remain the same because of an algorithm designed to make you always feel stagnant?
And speaking of stagnant, how are you supposed to improve unless you go up against people who are better than you? Personally I love fighting players that are better than me, because I get to learn how they play and use the tricks I learn from them to improve my own game play, and that’s how it’s always been, but ever since this trend of SBMM I either just get put into lobbies with literal AI bots or against a whole team of high ranked players and we get rolled.
But without SBMM you used to have a general average skill level across matches that you could actually use as a benchmark to see how you compare against the average player, and you would come across the occasional really good or really bad players and it made lobbies much more diverse and enjoyable because it let you see how much youve improved and how much more improvement there still is left to go, you would see your stats improve over time and you knew that the more you improved the more you would win, but nowadays it’s pointless, because you will always feel average, even if you aren’t and you will never feel like you’ve improved.
Skill based matched making is an attempt to use math to setup matches between players in which things are fair and the player who plays best, wins.
Its popular because its an attempt at improving matchmaking that is better than randomly throwing people together. Picture a brand new player and a veteran player forced to play together. No one is having fun, the new player is killed easily which is boring, and the veteran is frustrated that his teammate sucks, which is boring.
People online hate it for two main reasons.
1. We are humans, we don’t want fair matches, we want matches where we can win most of the time but not feel like we went against robots set to easy. We are not evolved enough to admit this to ourselves and let emotion take over.
2. Matchmaking is incredibly complex and lots of games just do a bad job of it. Beyond that it’s a balancing act between waiting time and quality of match. How many players are playing right now that are a good fit for you? How long will you wait for the perfect match? Different answer for everyone.
My 2 cents on the issue is that with AI becoming better than the best in the world at all sorts of games, we can hopefully incorporate that into bots in games. This would allow for very competent and quick matchmaking even when people aren’t available.
The matchmaking part is the more controversial since it removes choice from the player.
You cannot pick a specific map, parameters or ruleset you just get thrown into a mix where all diff types of players want different things and they end up enjoying the game less overall.
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