Edit: it's a meme y'all, chill out. The original was "stop doing math", it's not supposed to be serious.
activision published a 25 page study about skill based match making in call of duty multiplayer and the conclusion was that SBMM was better for everyone. turning off SBMM in A/B tests led to MORE quitting, blowouts and worse player retention
casual/non-competitive SBMM should still exist, but competitive/ranked modes specifically ruin games for me. league, dota, FPSes, it doesnt matter, once i start doing ranked matches and having to deal with a meta and best hero/weapon/whatever setup + making sure i play perfectly it becomes work and not a game anymore
Well yeah if you take a toxic shit show of a game built around SBMM and just turn off the part that factors skill suddenly of course it's going to be hated. I feel extra bad for the console gamers, they don't even know how nice a well-administrated CS or TF2 server used to be, all they've ever known is anonymous teenagers screaming at each other.
Counterpoint: Most player run servers were dogshit
Yes but once you found a few good ones you could keep going back.
The issue with sbmm and cod isn't actually sbmm at all and rather than they're forced to go against pc players with a controller. For example playing cod on ps5 with crossplay turned off is a night and day difference in enjoyment. It's still sweaty but its not ruthlessly unfair.
I imagine turning off sbmm in their study meant more console players having to go against more PC players rather than the potential to filter out pc players based on some hidden skill value.
I personally don't think PC player should be in any form of crossplay. They tend to ruin everything either by spoofing inputs and getting into controller lobbies if there's input filtering, giving themselves aim assist if there isnt, or just outright cheating and generally being the more toxic and sweaty gamers. Send the PC players to the gulag and let console players have fun.
Still community servers are still always the best but i think sbmm is unfairly blamed for issues caused by different and more annoying factors and the larger issue of company run matchmaking crap that tried to curate your entire experience poorly instead of letting you define your own enjoyment
I personally don't think PC player should be in any form of crossplay. They tend to ruin everything either by spoofing inputs and getting into controller lobbies if there's input filtering, giving themselves aim assist if there isnt, or just outright cheating and generally being the more toxic and sweaty gamers. Send the PC players to the gulag and let console players have fun.
I've mostly seen complaining about console players using 3rd party controllers that let them use mice and macros to get the double benefit of being able to actually aim reliably and the heavy autoaim that every game gives console players now. Apex Legends has been particularly notorious for having "aim assist" that just locks a console player's reticule onto someone who's close enough.
the larger issue of company run matchmaking crap that tried to curate your entire experience
Memes aside yeah that's the real problem. I can only assume that letting people just play the game how they want cuts into the bottom line somehow.
I would like it if dota had a rank for each hero you play. I’m probably Archon with some but definitely Herald with others.
Smurfing (wanting to grief new players in unmatched games) is the 420th kind of liberalism. 
The funniest is that it's always people who are dogshit at the game who claim to be smurfing.
Counterpoint: What's fun about loading into a game with some Gen-Z mutant with five thumbs who can push a button with his mind and drop me before I can even take aim?
I mean, aside from capping him from halfway across the map while he's trying to dab on my friend?
Also, idk what the meme is pining for. I remember starcraft and WC3 having some sort of skill based matchmaking, for shooters they're more fun with like a skill mismatch than RTSes/MOBAs, but even then I feel like it's been the norm since at least Halo 2.
A return to community-run servers, most likely, so the state of affairs before Halo 2. I remember encountering matchmaking systems on Xbox Live for the first time and being in awe of how modern and streamlined they felt. An anonymous, unseen algorithm just took you and a bunch of other randos and dumped you into a map to shoot at each other for 10 minutes, then it was over and you never had to see any of those people again.
As an anti-social person it was a vast improvement to me over trying to pick the least hostile-sounding server from a list. Then you log in and your ears are blasted with awful custom music and your eyes are assaulted by awful custom menus, or, in the case of some Day of Defeat: Source servers that I remember, lovingly hand-crafted SS skins for all the German soldiers. And then the game chat is filled with server regulars chatting with each other about their lives and it just felt really awkward
dont get the hate for sbmm as a concept. it's more fun to have about a 50/50 chance of winning than it being totally random imo. maybe hidden MMR is better to decrease toxicity? but I think sbmm isn't the problem.
I just don't like that community-run dedicated servers have been almost completely replaced now as the primary multiplayer scene by the toxic cesspool of automated matchmaking.
I miss that part of online games. You'd have a favorite server you'd log onto and see the same people everyday. You also got better quicker when playing in larger teams because they would get scrambled every few rounds. You could see what good players were doing without getting dumpstered.
yeah, I'm in agreement there
ngl I can't take people who argue against SBMM seriously. 10/10 times it's some nerd who has spent 3000 hours playing Apex Legends and wants to feel powerful by stomping beginners. "I don't wanna have to tryhard all the time" is the line they always say and it's one of the most toddler-brained arguments I've ever heard.
Skill based matchmaking makes slippi viable
Some games, especially melee and starcraft, are the opposite of fun for at least one player (but usually both) if the skill difference between players is too large.
me when im matched against opponents of the same skill level instead of pubstomping new players until they quit the game 
Terrible takes abound. SBMM does make people's experiences better by not having people getting steamrollered by douchebags that just want to own noobs. The reason you're having a bad time is BECAUSE THESE GAMES ARE BAD. They can never be fixed, there is no way to make them good because they have made the wrong decisions at every turn.
Matches should be short and sweet, if they last longer than 20 minutes you need to throw the entire game out and start from scratch. Teams should be scrambled regularly based on score/skill. You need to have many chances to get a kill, time to kill should be short, and respawn times should be very short. Maps should be relatively small and not too convoluted, with plenty of sight lines and hiding places. Simple controls and no abilities all upgrades should be available to everyone and per-match with no progression trees.
What I'm saying is that UT2004 is all we ever needed.
UT2004 was amazing while it lasted. Red Orchestra too.
What I'm saying is that UT2004 is all we ever needed.
If we had SBMM for posting I wouldn't be able to see most of the replies to this thread because they'd all be bronze.
I swear I thought I was posting a mildly funny meme that nobody would care about I wasn't trying to start matchmaking discourse. I'm just old and I like to take pot shots at anything newer than 2006.
Sounds to me like the author of this meme needs to git gud
SBMM is fine as an option for 1v1 games, but it's so bad for team games. It actively foments toxicity between players, and it often doesn't even work that well. I remember playing League of Legends and only one in maybe five or ten games was actually good. The rest were ruined by leavers, smurfs, toxicity, or just bad matchups that made the games lopsided. You win as many of those games as you lose, but winning lopsided games gets old.
It doesn't help that a lot of these games aren't even that much fun to begin with. A good game should be fun whether you win or lose, but a lot of these games are only really enjoyable if you're winning. The play gets overshadowed by the competition and skinner box mechanics, leaving a hollow experience for the vast majority of players.
The rest were ruined by leavers, smurfs, toxicity, or just bad matchups that made the games lopsided
leavers
just ban them after a couple offenses
smurfs
matchmaking system should be able to detect smurfs (high KDAs, high win rates, other metrics) and boost their hidden ELO very quickly - thus making them no longer smurfs
toxicity
just ban them after a couple offenses
bad matchups
matchmaking makes this better, not worse. without skill based matchmaking you would have even more lopsided games with even more disproportionate skills
Seems like the real issue with League is Riot's unwillingness to permaban players and enforce its rules, instead trying to retain the toxic players forever and coddling their behavior with special queues. Part of this is that toxic players pay just as much (if not more) money than other players, and the other part is that it would be expensive to hire enough GMs to actually review all the cases of toxicity in chat. The problem isn't the matchmaking, it's riot being cheap
My recent experience with skill based mm in team games has been similarly bad. It feels like it uses a very bad flat score-like system that makes games quickly devolve into extremely lopsided slogs because the system thinks pairing a slightly higher ranked player with some number of slightly lower ranked ones is a good match for several average ones. Practically every game I played would have most of one team's players doing exceptionally poorly with one or two doing exceptionally well, while the other, winning team would consist of mostly everyone doing averagely well.
There is usually a very small window after updates where it feels like everything gets reset and then it's possible to get some more enjoyable matches before it returns to the norm where you can probably determine who will win within the first few minutes.
you can probably determine who will win within the first few minutes.
This is a big part of the problem with a lot of these games, imo. The matches take too long to resolve, or have too much lead time to get to the part that's actually fun and dynamic. It's easy to criticize, but it's a genuine problem if half of any given match is spent either ramping up or winding down to the natural conclusion, with the other half being the game that everyone actually wants to play.
Yeah it makes a lot more sense for some types of games than others, RTS games are a good example. Even so, the lobby/custom game browser setup mostly worked fine for Red Alert 2 and Generals and Blizzard RTSes always had that option alongside the ranked modes.
I'll just continue never playing online games.
You know how some popular games have a solo campaign mode? Yeah they really do. It's shocking I know. I'm the kind of person who plays ONLY that and skips the online part.
Leauge of Liberalism 
I remember when online games were fun... Yeah... No sbmm... No people... Just superior offline bot matches.
I don't like playing with people I want bot functionality to return. I got so much fun out of quake, unreal tournament, counter strike and battlefield without ever logging in to online play. I could mod the shit out of the games and still have bots work and even use the mods properly so people were never needed.
In this scenario i can configure the experience for maximum enjoyment ans the worst emotion I'll ever feel is slightly bored. Ooh forgotten hope 2, you were so good.
As for sbmm i don't really feel that strongly about it but what i do care about is hackers ruining everything and unpunished toxic behaviour. In the world of matchmaking you need to rely on the company to handle the problem (they dont) so the only real way to combat hackers and potentially also toxicity is the good ol tried and tested method of community run servers.
I don't like playing with people I want bot functionality to return. I got so much fun out of quake, unreal tournament, counter strike and battlefield without ever logging in to online play. I could mod the shit out of the games and still have bots work and even use the mods properly so people were never needed.
I admit I do enjoy games that had built-in bot options if I didn't want to hear a nazi manifesto from some 
on lobby chat.
horrible horrible take. ranked is stupid but skill based matchmaking is how you get a chance to actually improve while still having a chance to win. Rather than just slamming your head against a brick wall until it finally clicks on your ten hundredth match.
l*ague on hexbear dot net
mfw the majority of hexbear dot net needs to be shoved into a gulag and reeducated through repeatedly playing kinetic novels and walking sims until they forget what l*ague is
I don't mind it because it means all the sweatlords are sorted out
Or it would mean that if it weren't for the fact that you always get a couple of guys who wanna be sweatlords, but they suck and then they blame their team and then they say something like "oh I'm actually smurfing, my main is platinum" and if that was true why DO YOU SUCK SO MUCH JUST HAVE FUN YOU'RE IN BRONZE ITS OKAY.
People like that are the reason I stopped playing league. Picking Master Yi, going Jungle and then getting mad when the rest of the team didn't want to follow their meta or whatever and if we did then their jungling would be totally viable never mind the fact I've gotten ganked 7 times up top and we can either lose the top lane, feed the other teams jungler or you could do your fucking job and when you don't then suddenly it's my fault for not being able to deal with two guys at once who can push because they know there's no counterplay- oh now is when you go for the big dragon? Be fr, yeah dude you're totally smurfing.
...
I miss LoL.
Congrats on quitting though, stay strong.
Thanks! The last bit was a joke though, I don't miss LoL. I liked the game, but online multiplayer just isn't for me due to the competetive nature and what it brings out in people.
RETVRN to community servers. It's better in TF2, battlefield 1, csgo, assetto corsa, and all other multiplayer games. The only games I don't use community servers in are Eve online and PlanetSide 2.
I thoroughly enjoy competitive CS, I just love that shit. But I played well after the community servers died off so I never got to experience a well run competitive community server
I'm critical of SBMM but not from a "I want to own noobs" point of view quite the contrary
I had a lot more fun being bad at TF2 randomly jumping in games than being bad in any SBMM games
I think skill is impossible to quantify and people will blame their mates even of their rank is ten times as high simply because when you're bad you can totally see someone doing the right thing and think it's literally griefing
Also trying to rank up pushes the global skill level of the game up, since everyone is training to get a >50% win rate in harder and harder environments
I wonder if MOBAS would be a bit less toxic if they never had any SBMM in the first place. Everyone would just be bad faith and flame just as normal except very few people would go beyond knowing what shit does in terms of game proficiency
You can have fun being bad at TF2 because pub players fucking suck at the game on average. And the good ones often dont do teamwork so they're basically bad players anyways. In other words you have fun in it because it's skill based matchmaking with only one level: bad at the game
I played original dota just within warcraft 3 TFT, so it was without skill based matchmaking. And it was mostly about the same I'd say. Sometimes you get people absurdly good, and sometimes you get people horrendously bad. I never played Dota 2 ranked matchmaking. Always just unranked, usually all random. It was intensely try hard and usually made me more upset than full of joy. So I quit when they broke all random years and years ago (2017 maybe?), also my wrists can't handle that much mouse clicking anymore so it was for the best, physically and mentally.
I think skill is impossible to quantify
objectively wrong, just because people cope about their own level of skill doesn't mean you can't easily make a system that will properly put players where they belong (also, because of needing to juice player retention due to capitalism many ranked systems have a goal of not only putting you in the right skill bracket but also making the experience addicting and frustrating, which helps cause the coping about individual skill). Now, the biggest problem with sbmm is that it struggles to properly rate your ability to be a teamplayer, because people who do best in supportive roles generally shine in an environment where you're playing with the same people every game compared to random solo queue games where the easiest thing to measure is individual skill, and also the best way to ensure the highest winrate has a solo player throughout most of the player base is to improve your own skills enough to try and drag the team on your back as many games as you can.
I stopped playing online games after a group of children in Overwatch told me and my friends to go back to work and stop playing games because we were too old
I didn't have the skill to retort and now I'm 6 years sober from competitive games
a real success story
that was skill based matchmaking and they were wildly better at insulting and demoralizing their enemy (aka me their teammate) so I reject the notion that sbmm works
I do prefer balancing to be done on a per lobby basis, but it only works out if you have good mid-match scramble autobalancing
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
3rd International Volunteer Brigade (Hexbear gaming discord)
Rules