Because the modes are casual, I should be able to have a bit of fun, some games will be easy, some games will be harder. I can experiment with different styles, loadouts whatever. SBMM in casual modes ruins this, because every game turns into a sweaty slog.
You also dont improve at games past a certain point by killing bots and players just as bad as yourself. I got better by playing against and with the better players, the lobbies were more diverse which was more fun and better for learning.
IMO people act like it’s training wheels so they can get better, but it’s more like turning the game to easy and not having to face any challenging hurdles. When people go into a game on easier difficulties and then try to play it on a higher difficulty, they actually generally have a harder time than if they just played the game on the harder difficulty to begin with (with some exceptions). Players should be getting better by experience not algorithmically making them feel better by pitting them against other poor players. It worked just fine for a long time before the invention of SBMM, and servers used to do a lot of the filtering for us before that stopped being common (for absolutely no good reasons).
Well that kind of gets to my second point of servers disappearing. Used to be you could find or create your own servers for your more casual players but most games these days have no such options.
They are low elo forever because they only play low elo games. There are way more low elo players than not, so without SBMM they wont get stomped all the time, it was never like that before so I dont get why we are pretending it will be now.
In my personal opinion people who complain about this are mid level players. Noobs like it because it means they get to win some, experience players like it because it means they get non trivial matches. But these people want to pwn noobs and are frustrated because they’re getting owned half of the time. There’s no reason to be against skill level matchmaking other than “I want to play against people who are worse than me so I can look good”.
Not true, unless you are in the absolute bottom 1%. We all enjoyed games before SBMM, it only became a real thing in like the last 6 years, don’t know why everyone is suddenly scared to have a challenge every few games.
First of all SBMM has been going in for WAY longer than that, at least going back to 2007 on CoD according to google. If it wasn’t a problem before, it shouldn’t be now, it’s just that now you’re aware so you’re salty about it. And may I ask, what’s the problem with it? You don’t like playing with people you might lose to? What’s the reasoning behind not liking it?
Also you’re assuming a uniform distribution of skill level, which doesn’t make sense, i.e. for every person who’s playing CoD for the first time there are multiple people with at least some experience, and the more experienced the more the person plays so the more likely they’ll be put in a match. This means that for people in the bottom, probably closer to bottom 10% they’re likely to be the only bottom player in the whole match, so the game for them would be spawn, die, wait over and over, which will be frustrating and so they’ll quit, and now the same will happen to the next bottom 10%, so on and so forth until no one else is left playing.
Random matchmaking is not a thing, it hasn’t been a thing for a LONG time, any match that you found online and had fun had SBMM. Small games can get away with it because the distribution is more even, but in huge titles with millions of people it’s not feasible. You know why this began to annoy you 6 years ago? Because 6 years ago you became good enough to jump from the bottom to the midrange level, and now you’re matched with people you can’t so easily beat all of the time.
I do think games should allow you to do fully random matchmaking, although I have a strong suspicion it would be lots of work to set up for a feature that almost no one will use, because you think you want that, but if you got it you will always be the worst player in the match, and if you aren’t people who’re worse than you will eventually get frustrated and quit until you’re the bottom player and get frustrated and leave.
SBMM has existed yes, but it was essentially random because the priority was always low queue times over anything else. It wasn’t until the later cods like Advanced Warfare where they started prioritising it more and then MW2019 really killed the matchmaking experience by relying on skill as a factor way too much (this by the way, is the issue we are talking about now when we refer to SBMM, not ancient systems like TrueSkill that didn’t have much sway, except for stopping the best of the best matching with the worst of the worst, which I would agree with being fine).
Call of Duty until ~2014 always prioritised queue times, same with the emergence of Battle Royales when they took over the online space for a while in 2017-2020. Fortnite had the quick queues with little SBMM, if any, because queue times were the most important thing. Now you wait a bit longer get against half players similar skill to yourself and the rest of the lobby is filled with bots to speed up matchmaking times, it’s terrible and unfun.
That’s the issue we are talking about and it’s not an unpopular opinion. It’s nothing to do with my own skill, infact I have gotten worse at shooters in the last few years if anything as I have gotten older and I still don’t want SBMM. Back when I played Cod everyday on console I was pretty average, but slowly got better until I quit consoles in 2014. On PC I mainly played CS, which I became very good at yes. I was a bit better than average on Fortnite/PUBG and would win like 1 in 10 with a decent amount of kills. Now I can win like every game because it’s all bots. It’s boring. I can beat anyone now because I’m not matched with or against people who are better than me, I don’t learn anything.
I want to jump into a game and have fun, I want to lose some, I want to win some, I want to try in some, I want to goof around in others. The strictness of SBMM today prevents that from happening. I can’t join a lobby of people, lose to them and then try to beat them in the next game, because they reset the lobby after every match. Cod is also a lot less social because of this, you can’t make friends or enemies across matches anymore. These big multiplayer games have dropped fun, instead they want people to win win win so they keep playing and buy skins. That’s why people don’t improve anymore, there’s no challenge, every game is the same thing, same strategy required.
I played some mainstream games recently and they put you against bots and stuff for like 10 of your first games, I end up quitting because I just want to play versus players, every game wants this heavily curated experience and it sucks. Let players have fun again, if people want to play against bots, give them a mode to. If they want “fair” games against players, they can play ranked. Just give us our casual lobbies back.
Before SBMM you stomped some and got stomped in some, no matter your skill level, because you sometimes had worse players and sometimes some better players. It made the big wins more exciting and forced you to try new things to win vs better players. It’s incredibly bland playing against the same skill level, every game is predictable and you will never improve as a player.
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Now remove skill-based matchmaking too.
Make only ranked skill based
Have unranked be a free for all
This would kill the fun for everyone but the best. SBMM is there to protect casuals and new players, aka 90% of players.
Well yeah, naturally, how it always was. SBMM and the addition of bots completely killed many online shooters.
What’s the reasoning for this? Why wouldn’t you want to pit players against other players of a similar level? Genuine question.
Because the modes are casual, I should be able to have a bit of fun, some games will be easy, some games will be harder. I can experiment with different styles, loadouts whatever. SBMM in casual modes ruins this, because every game turns into a sweaty slog.
You also dont improve at games past a certain point by killing bots and players just as bad as yourself. I got better by playing against and with the better players, the lobbies were more diverse which was more fun and better for learning.
IMO people act like it’s training wheels so they can get better, but it’s more like turning the game to easy and not having to face any challenging hurdles. When people go into a game on easier difficulties and then try to play it on a higher difficulty, they actually generally have a harder time than if they just played the game on the harder difficulty to begin with (with some exceptions). Players should be getting better by experience not algorithmically making them feel better by pitting them against other poor players. It worked just fine for a long time before the invention of SBMM, and servers used to do a lot of the filtering for us before that stopped being common (for absolutely no good reasons).
This is honestly why the average player is worse now than they used to be.
This misses the players who are always low elo for their whole lives - its not fun for them to get stomped every game forever…
Well that kind of gets to my second point of servers disappearing. Used to be you could find or create your own servers for your more casual players but most games these days have no such options.
They are low elo forever because they only play low elo games. There are way more low elo players than not, so without SBMM they wont get stomped all the time, it was never like that before so I dont get why we are pretending it will be now.
In my personal opinion people who complain about this are mid level players. Noobs like it because it means they get to win some, experience players like it because it means they get non trivial matches. But these people want to pwn noobs and are frustrated because they’re getting owned half of the time. There’s no reason to be against skill level matchmaking other than “I want to play against people who are worse than me so I can look good”.
Play ranked for SBMM, casual mode lobbies should be random and diverse.
Strongly disagree, I’m a weak player, this means that I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the game as I would get destroyed on all my matches.
Not true, unless you are in the absolute bottom 1%. We all enjoyed games before SBMM, it only became a real thing in like the last 6 years, don’t know why everyone is suddenly scared to have a challenge every few games.
First of all SBMM has been going in for WAY longer than that, at least going back to 2007 on CoD according to google. If it wasn’t a problem before, it shouldn’t be now, it’s just that now you’re aware so you’re salty about it. And may I ask, what’s the problem with it? You don’t like playing with people you might lose to? What’s the reasoning behind not liking it?
Also you’re assuming a uniform distribution of skill level, which doesn’t make sense, i.e. for every person who’s playing CoD for the first time there are multiple people with at least some experience, and the more experienced the more the person plays so the more likely they’ll be put in a match. This means that for people in the bottom, probably closer to bottom 10% they’re likely to be the only bottom player in the whole match, so the game for them would be spawn, die, wait over and over, which will be frustrating and so they’ll quit, and now the same will happen to the next bottom 10%, so on and so forth until no one else is left playing.
Random matchmaking is not a thing, it hasn’t been a thing for a LONG time, any match that you found online and had fun had SBMM. Small games can get away with it because the distribution is more even, but in huge titles with millions of people it’s not feasible. You know why this began to annoy you 6 years ago? Because 6 years ago you became good enough to jump from the bottom to the midrange level, and now you’re matched with people you can’t so easily beat all of the time.
I do think games should allow you to do fully random matchmaking, although I have a strong suspicion it would be lots of work to set up for a feature that almost no one will use, because you think you want that, but if you got it you will always be the worst player in the match, and if you aren’t people who’re worse than you will eventually get frustrated and quit until you’re the bottom player and get frustrated and leave.
SBMM has existed yes, but it was essentially random because the priority was always low queue times over anything else. It wasn’t until the later cods like Advanced Warfare where they started prioritising it more and then MW2019 really killed the matchmaking experience by relying on skill as a factor way too much (this by the way, is the issue we are talking about now when we refer to SBMM, not ancient systems like TrueSkill that didn’t have much sway, except for stopping the best of the best matching with the worst of the worst, which I would agree with being fine).
Call of Duty until ~2014 always prioritised queue times, same with the emergence of Battle Royales when they took over the online space for a while in 2017-2020. Fortnite had the quick queues with little SBMM, if any, because queue times were the most important thing. Now you wait a bit longer get against half players similar skill to yourself and the rest of the lobby is filled with bots to speed up matchmaking times, it’s terrible and unfun.
That’s the issue we are talking about and it’s not an unpopular opinion. It’s nothing to do with my own skill, infact I have gotten worse at shooters in the last few years if anything as I have gotten older and I still don’t want SBMM. Back when I played Cod everyday on console I was pretty average, but slowly got better until I quit consoles in 2014. On PC I mainly played CS, which I became very good at yes. I was a bit better than average on Fortnite/PUBG and would win like 1 in 10 with a decent amount of kills. Now I can win like every game because it’s all bots. It’s boring. I can beat anyone now because I’m not matched with or against people who are better than me, I don’t learn anything.
I want to jump into a game and have fun, I want to lose some, I want to win some, I want to try in some, I want to goof around in others. The strictness of SBMM today prevents that from happening. I can’t join a lobby of people, lose to them and then try to beat them in the next game, because they reset the lobby after every match. Cod is also a lot less social because of this, you can’t make friends or enemies across matches anymore. These big multiplayer games have dropped fun, instead they want people to win win win so they keep playing and buy skins. That’s why people don’t improve anymore, there’s no challenge, every game is the same thing, same strategy required.
I played some mainstream games recently and they put you against bots and stuff for like 10 of your first games, I end up quitting because I just want to play versus players, every game wants this heavily curated experience and it sucks. Let players have fun again, if people want to play against bots, give them a mode to. If they want “fair” games against players, they can play ranked. Just give us our casual lobbies back.
Honestly, games need some form of SBMM. Otherwise you just get pub-stompers every lobby that make the game unfun for everyone but the best players.
Before SBMM you stomped some and got stomped in some, no matter your skill level, because you sometimes had worse players and sometimes some better players. It made the big wins more exciting and forced you to try new things to win vs better players. It’s incredibly bland playing against the same skill level, every game is predictable and you will never improve as a player.