Do you understand why people play games though?

I understand why I do. I can’t speak to your motivations, I’m not you. I can, however, point to studies that discuss groups of people’s preferences in aggregate, as I have done. You’re an outlier, and that’s ok! Play what you want how you want!

SBMM is, unfortunately for you, the current utilitarian optimal for multiplayer PvP gaming. It maximizes both adoption and retention metrics, as well as self-reported enjoyment scores (Likert scale) for the highest number of people. Bummer that it doesn’t optimize for you, but the other good part is that there are plenty of games that still support custom lobbies. Find one you like and have fun!

If you can’t make it 10 matches in a new game, I don’t think SBMM is your problem with the game.

10 matches should be like, between 3-10 hours. Assuming an hour a night, you’ll be approximately ranked for SBMM within a week.

It’s based on overall usage metrics - number of active users, number of matches played per user, length of a session per user, etc.

It does account for people quitting.

I pulled that number out of my bootyhole because I knew it was a safe bet for a stable ELO.

US Chess Federation uses 25 games as your provisional ELO stage, many video games will use 10 matches. Assuming a large enough variety of ELO in the player base, you can be confident your ELO is mostly accurate after a shockingly small number of matches.

If you’re curious about the mechanics behind ELO and ELO confidence distributions after X matches, chess ELO is actually a well studied way to learn about the algorithm used by almost all SBMM. After a shockingly small number of matches, your ELO is going to end up being in the right neighborhood for you have +/- 50% WR.

Yes, I am.

This is just one study I could find quickly but the results are consistent.

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/activision-secretly-experimented-on-50-of-call-of-duty-players-by-decreasing-skill-based-matchmaking-and-determined-players-like-sbmm-even-if-they-don-t-know-it/

Because from what I’ve seen, when automated matchmaking is used, you NEED to play the game like a job just to reach your “correct” ranking and actually enjoy the game.

This is not accurate. Most people’s ELOs don’t shift much after settling into your “natural” rank, which should happen after about 50 matches or so. Probably what you’re referring to is the publicly available “rank” which is per “season”, wherein every few months your rank gets reset. This is FAR less opaque than SBMM but results in lower playtime and lower retention for casual players who don’t want to be grinding the 50 matches to settle at their ELO every 3 months.

Actual opaque SBMM (the algorithm you mentioned originally) that never resets creates, on average, much more fun MP experiences for most people.

As much as that may be true for you, on average people enjoy MP games with SBMM more than without by a decent margin. Studies have shown that people play more matches and play longer sessions when SBMM creates more balanced matches.

Idk… lotta people on mics in pre/post-game lobbies in Splitgate for it to be bot matches