11 ms·

Players Blame Skill-Based Matchmaking for Losing in Call of Duty

45 points by fredoralive 6y ago

andyp-kw 6y ago
Isn't this better for the lower skilled players, who no longer get dominated by professionals?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Yes. Winning in a game with two players/teams and one winner is by definition zero sum. You can't have some players win more without other players winning less. Asking for the difficulty of the game to be reduced for oneself fundamentally implies that you want the difficulty of the game to be increased for someone else. There is no other possibility. The most hilarious thing is when people ask that there be a ranked playlist with sbmm and an unranked playlist without. The one without, they assume, would be more favorable to them, since they would experience a random distribution of players (and they assume they are above average, naturally). But for players in the bottom decile of skill, unranked would have a dramatically worse experience than ranked! So they would leave for the ranked playlist. Now the new bottom decile of skill would be having a terrible experience in unranked, so they would leave, etc. By induction, unranked would quickly become depopulated. It is really tough to be a below-average player in a game without any matchmaking. You lose all the time and almost never have an impact. You can kiiinda get away with this as a developer in games that have very large teams. For example, World of Warships has no skill based matchmaking (although tier level is somewhat a proxy for skill and performs a bit of a weed-out of the lowest skill players in the higher tiers). There are people who play that game who have only a 30% winrate over a large number of games. This is in a 12v12 game where presumably things tend to average out in the mix of skills on each team, so having that negative of an impact on team performance is in some sense pretty impressive. The only thing difficult for me to understand is the resilience of the mentality involved in continuing to play that game if you are one of the way below average players. I would not have fun if I never had a positive impact on my team's performance. It's also worth noting that if WoWS had the playerbase to support it, they'd probably build SBMM too. But it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. The issue is that their monetization system requires what is effectively forty or fifty different queues (5 tier-based matching bands * 4 ship classes * 2-2.2 game modes, depending on whether ranked is active). Queue times can already be quite extended in some tiers and for some ship ship classes. Developing a system that continues with this alignment of tiers and classes and also substantially reduces skill gaps is probably unsolvable without a much large player base or a more complicated role selection system.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    I don't know about World of Warships but in Warthunder you can get a lot of kills without meaningfully contributing to your team. Kills are very enjoyable though.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > I don't know about World of Warships but in Warthunder you can get a lot of kills without meaningfully contributing to your team. Its harder in World of Warships because of the absence of respawns. Each kill has a bigger direct impact on team win/loss probability than in War Thunder.
- alistairSH 6y ago
  Yes. Also, why would a "pro" want to sandbag like this? I've been an amateur athlete most of my life and my goal was never to compete against known weaker athletes - there's no fun in that. Or, do these games lack the ability to spin up "practice" sessions fully under the control of the player? That seems like the real answer, and would mirror what athletes in meat-space do - train for weeks/months, then compete at well-timed intervals against the best (or, at least relatively equal, if you're doing age group amateur competitions).
  - LanceH 6y ago
    Imagine you're a world class striker on your soccer team. You play against world class defenders and goalkeepers. It's exhausting because you have to play your top game, every time. Now, one day you decide to try out goalkeeper. You get to face world class competition because of your status as a striker. Two possible results: 1. You get discouraged and don't play the off positions. You only maximize. Maybe you get burned out because you never relax. 2. You do switch back and forth between things you are good/not good at. Your skill averages out and you play easy matches where you carry your team, alternated with impossible matches where you drag your team down. I know a lot of pros will have secondary accounts for things like this. Sometimes it gets viewed as sandbagging (and sometimes it is).
    - alistairSH 6y ago
      This is why I asked about practice sessions. Any professional e-sport should have some means for a pro to practice without: 1- engaging in actual public game play 2- sandbagging against weaker competition In your striker-wants-to-be-goalie situation, the wanna be goalie would practice against the clubs B team. He would not step into the WC as goalie. Nor would he shit up the local junior tournament while he tries things out.
      - LanceH 6y ago
        Practice. You were talking about practice... I'm sure all the esports games have a practice. But that really only satisfies the situation where you have full teams available. Also, a lot of pros make more money from playing the game without a team and streaming it on twitch or youtube.
shadowmore 6y ago
Meanwhile, many multiplayer games have neither skill-based matchmaking, nor a ban on premade groups playing against solo queue players. I just can't grasp how any developer can seriously think a game can be enjoyable when you're on a team of arbitrary players but being matched against a premade team of players all of whom have 2,000+ hours logged in that game and are coordinating flawlessly.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  Not very many, these days. There are a handful, like Escape from Tarkov, that are super hardcore and have no matchmaking. It will probably never be more than a small niche game as a result, since any new player has to contend with an extremely rigorous onboarding process in which you are unlikely to have much success for dozens of hours until you get the hang of things.
- lozaning 6y ago
  I used to play Battlefield 2 competitively. After our official clan practises we'd roll into random pub servers to mess around. It usually only took ~6 of us to just dominate the server, and this is a game with (2) 64 players teams. Rarely did we ever win though, usually we'd end up getting admin kicked for 'cheating'.
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  In COD4, some servers ran tools which would autobalance the teams. So if you had a group of 3-5 which played together and the rest were randoms, the the other team could end up with a lot more players to compensate. Was generally quite nice, except when you really wanted to play with your mate and the tool kept swapping you over because it didn't find any other way to balance the teams.
jswny 6y ago
The implementation of SBMM in Call of Duty is particularly bad. Usually, you would expect such a system to match you with players of similar skill. But, that's NOT how it works in CoD. Instead, the SBMM in CoD matches you with a bunch of players who are far worse than you for a game or two. Then, it matches you with a bunch of players who are far better than you for a game or two, and this cycle continues over and over again. This means that you will do really well for a game or two, and then get destroyed for a game or two. Eventually, this averages out to the target of every player having around a 1.0 kill/death ratio. In theory, SBMM is supposed to help lower-skilled players, but the implementation in CoD is so bad it is more of a roller coaster than a bunch of matches against similarly-skilled players.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  I do perceive some "swinginess" in my performance in Black Ops Cold War, but I'm not positive that it's actually real. Gamblers at the roulette table also perceive trends where in fact there is only random variance. It's also worth noting that this is only half of the complaints that you see on message boards about this game. The other half, or maybe the majority, is people saying, "I just want to be able to get high and use off-meta weapons and not lose to sweats (i.e. people who are trying) all night." This type of complaint is fundamentally a request to be matched against lower skilled players, and has nothing to do with the swinginess of matchmaking.
  - strken 6y ago
    It sounds like a request to be matched appropriately to expected performance at times when they're deliberately sabotaging their ability, which is not that unreasonable except for the near-impossibility of doing so. They might even be able to achieve it by having a separate account for messing around while they're high and using dumb weapons.
    - harimau777 6y ago
      Something that could help would be to allow players to choose what server they play on. The server could then establish rules against tactics that are regarded as effective but unsportsmanlike. Casual servers could also choose to implement more aggressive rebalancing systems between rounds. Finally, players could choose to select servers that they know to have a more casual community.
svrb 6y ago
The same people will vote for politicians who will allow them to win at the expense of others, just consider that.
- LanceH 6y ago
  I cringe every time I hear the phrase, "Why would they voting that way. They're voting against their own self interest." Personally I think we need more people voting against their own self interest.
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    Voting against one's self interest doesn't mean you're voting for the good of the world. The often intended meaning of that statement is that you, as a lower class individual, are unwittingly empowering the upper class and exacerbating societal problems, and often implied that you don't realize you're doing this.
    - aidenn0 6y ago
      The words themselves imply that the only rational thing to do is to vote selfishly, which is trivial to reject.
      - klmadfejno 6y ago
        I mean, sure but that's because there's additional context. The point is implying people vote for a policy to accomplish A, but instead are voting for !A.
        aidenn0 6y ago
        If that's the implication, then I think the implication is wrong. It's not like they don't know they are voting to cut entitlements and lower taxes on the wealthy.
    - LanceH 6y ago
coding123 6y ago
The complaint is coming from one of the best players in the world, so... skill based matching is... working. I don't want to play against him.
PatentlyDC123 6y ago
I just wish the matchmaking was biased to be limited by ping/region. Too many times I finally do well in one game just to get slaughtered the next when the matchmaking moves me to another significantly slower server. Filtering team making by language would be nice too.
hbosch 6y ago
Hilarious that the bulk of complaints come from people who consider themselves "good" at the game, particularly content creators/streamers, because their entertainment product relies on them being the best in the server... The games I've played/been playing with online MM are the usual ones... CoD (Modern Warfare), Halo (Reach), CS/CS:S/CS:GO mainly, and lately Valorant. Of all the games to do it, I think Counter Strike gets it the most correct. Cheating aside, the amount of play modes and available in CS has always been perfect for dropping yourself exactly where you want to play for these reasons: 1) 2v2, 5v5, 10v10 Casual, Battle Royale, Deathmatch all available natively in the game, on Valve servers. 5v5 Competitive is CS'S only "Ranked" mode. Wingman (2v2) and Danger Zone (Battle Royale) have ranks but I find they're pretty elastic in their MM. 2) The ability to run Community Servers with custom code... e.g. Surf maps, KZ (Platforming) maps, Retakes (now native in the new Operation), Executes, regular DM, FFA DM, XvX casual games.) These servers are player-owned, player-maintained, and strictly "unranked". 3) ESEA/Faceit/et al. Pick up games for players who want to pay for better anti-cheat, tighter SBMM, and generally a lower skill floor. Also, "pug"s tend to -- more or less -- follow the rules in place for the pro circuit. The fact that CS gives players the ability to "graduate" out of their SBMM and move into a pro/am competitive environment OR join a community server and play Zombie Mode OR relax for an hour surfing OR play a baseline ranked match is something that has allowed the game to endure so well. If I could suggest one thing to CoD, Valorant, Halo, and any other "competitive" game it would be support community and 3rd-party servers! EDIT: By the way, SBMM leads to one annoying issue not touched upon in the article. Smurfing. Often, due to SBMM, a high skilled player can't play with their lower skilled friends. That sucks. Or, if I just want to ruin SBMM for 9 other people, I can simply make a new account, throw a couple games, get ranked low on purpose and then frag out. Smurfs are actually the glaring problem with SBMM, IMO.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  anecdotally, it seems like valve has mitigated the smurfing issue pretty well in recent years. I very rarely see obvious smurfs in the gold nova range these days. unfortunately, the side effect is that there are now a bunch of hoops that a fresh account needs to jump through to get into MM. I think the current state is a decent compromise. it's totally viable to make a new account whenever you have a new friend that starts playing. as long as you only play with them on the smurf account, it will stay in a close MMR range. your friend has to go through the grind anyway, so you may as well do it with them. the grinding does make it pretty annoying to make new accounts over and over again just to tear through the ranks.
okprod 6y ago
I'm fine with SBMM, and I'm top 10 TDM for one of the recent CoDs (casual/nonpro). I want to play against better people; it's really no fun to me to easily win games. The main complaint I've seen re: SBMM comes from top level players, including creators, who don't want to sweat / they want to beat players who aren't as good as them. To me this means SBMM is absolutely needed. Unranked play shouldn't mean better players can crush those who aren't as good. This isn't even considering the fact that creators rely on looking good play-wise for their income, and SBMM makes this harder.
- fatnoah 6y ago
  As a non-good player, my main complaint with SBMM is that EVERY round feels like a sweatfest. I much preferred the "sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you" experience of other games. Sometimes you want to have a good game and have that excitement of completely crushing it.
  - okprod 6y ago
    I haven't experienced much of that; I either finish at the top of the board or at the top for my team and still lose, or I win the game. If I'm really feeling like I'm getting crushed, I'll start a party with other players I know are good, but I don't do that often. I typically prefer solo in public lobbies for the challenge and the variety.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    agreed, this was the magic of #sourcescrim back in the day (if you played css). you might get five kids who just bought the game, or you might get rolled by some invite team. SBMM with first party servers is definitely more accessible though. I'll grudgingly accept it if it means a larger playerbase and more active development for my favorite games.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - cubic 6y ago
    And many people prefer to not play games where they have to suffer through however long a match takes in a hopeless effort to maybe not lose _that_ much. I would vastly prefer if every match I play makes me at least _feel_ like I have a chance to win if I try hard enough, than have a large percentage be obvious losses leading only to frustration and waste of time.
jimbob45 6y ago
SBMM is fine and has been around for more than a decade now (probably longer). The problem being discussed widely today is that developers have a dark incentive for players to lose when purchaseable lootboxes are present. SBMM is just one (and fairly benign) tool developers use to lower players winrate.
- filoleg 6y ago
  >The problem being discussed widely today is that developers have a dark incentive for players to lose when purchasable lootboxes are present. While this could've held true a few years ago for CoD franchise, I know for a fact that neither last year's CoD installment nor the most recent one discussed in this article (Black Ops: Cold War) has any sort of lootbox mechanics.
- Tinyyy 6y ago
  For every loser there’s a winner. I fail to see how developers could ‘lower’ players’ winrates without also improving others’ winrates.
ogre_codes 6y ago
> offering the freedom to decide when they want to sweat and when they want to kick back and own some noobs. This quote from the article is likely the simplest explanation for why the game companies implement skill based matchmaking. If you are the noob this article references, it means the game royally sucks. Setting up the game so experienced players get to abuse your newest customers isn't exactly a great recipe for long term success.
- mewpmewp2 6y ago
  Yeah, makes me think how narrow minded can those "good" players really be? Their statements are truly ridiculous. Of course same with the notion of "elo hell". I would be deeply ashamed of myself if I would defy all logic and sense to find excuses for my lack of skill.
  - prohobo 6y ago
    You learn from players who are better than you, not players who are as good as you (or worse). Matchmaking ruined the competitive aspects of gaming for me, since I either get dragged down by team mates or I get stuck playing the same games over and over. It's boring, and if I want to get better I have to watch an hour of pro streams before even getting into the game to remind myself of what good play looks like. People who are against matchmaking have a valid point, and it's part of why games revolving around community run servers last longer.
    - castlecrasher2 6y ago
      Seriously. I'm marginally above average and the SBMM in Destiny 2 was a nonstop rollercoaster of win, lose, repeat. Imo it made it difficult to learn, since the game alternated between giving me awful teammates and skilled opponents and giving me skilled teammates and awful opponents. Now that it's gone for most modes, it feels better. Games where I lose don't feel so simply because the game wanted me to lose.
    - bagacrap 6y ago
      with sbmm, roughly half the players you face off against are better than you (assuming you have been accurately ranked) and half worse. You have ample opportunity to learn from better players. SBMM simply limits the skill gap between you and the better player. I am never going to get better at basketball by playing Lebron in 1v1s.
jklinger410 6y ago
Matchmaking is always blamed for a basic issue with online multiplayer games: forming a team with complete strangers to complete an objective with little to no communication about strategy, or buy-in from everyone on the team. I would argue that matchmaking could be perfect, and these complaints would not stop at all. The very idea of random online matchmaking is dumb. Fun, because it fills a need, but very dumb. Ask any hardcore MMO player how they got to where they are, and if they are honest, it's because they started by teaming up with their already talented friends who actually worked as a team to grind up the ladder.
- engineer_22 6y ago
  This is correct. It's a team game [requires communication], but nobody wants to play on a team with strangers. I think it's part of the reason for the popularity of battle royale games.
- smallnamespace 6y ago
  It seems like this could be remedied by biasing matchmaking towards people you've already played (won?) with. This need not be a hard requirement, so: - Playing in the middle of the night, no previous teammates around? You get a random crew - Playing at the same time every day? The system slowly builds a team of likeminded people around you.
Waterluvian 6y ago
Balanced matchmaking is hard if not impossible. And it's why Nintendo loves to design games that make it moot (blue shell). If a small delta in skill drastically changes how it feels to be winning or Losing, the game is poorly designed for matchmaking.
xyst 6y ago
basically, washed up player is angry that she/he is getting rolled on their own live stream and ridiculed by their audience.
- dylan604 6y ago
  It's right up there with things like: This game cheats! I know I pushed the button first! My sights were right on them! STFU!!!! You get paid to play a friggin' video game. Sit down. Shut Up. Get better.
samwhiteUK 6y ago
This article is hard for me to follow. Basically, players were happy to lose when they thought it could be due to people being better than them, but aren't happy to lose when it's someone who's at their skill level playing.... better than them?
olliej 6y ago
Ignoring anything else -- bugs, bad implementation, etc -- an ideal matchmaking system should be matching people with equal skill, so you would expect to lose 50% of the time. That's what is expected in the SC community - someone, Maru or sOs?, said that if they weren't losing regularly they weren't going to be learning anything.
cletus 6y ago
The issue here varies by game. It was most apparent in Fortnite because Fortnite added a competitive ("arena") mode, which is by definition SBMM. The problem a lot of creators had was what was the point in unranked mode ALSO having SBMM? I'm sympathetic to that argument. Forcing SBMM in all cases just seems like it's meant to protect n00bs from getting crapped on but isn't this coddling players? There's something aspirational about playing better players, no? Also, "smurfing" (creating a new account to play against n00bs) largely defeats this anyway. If n00bs wanted to play against only other n00bs couldn't they play in ranked mode where that would happen? More relaxed modes tend to be better viewing. That's actually good for the game IMHO if streaming it has longevity and audience retention.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  > Forcing SBMM in all cases just seems like it's meant to protect n00bs from getting crapped on but isn't this coddling players. Asking for the converse is fundamentally a request to coddle experienced players instead.
- wmf 6y ago
  Before the introduction of ranking and bots you could spend a few minutes queuing up for a game, get killed in seconds, and repeat ad infinitum. That's not aspirational.
- cubic 6y ago
  > Forcing SBMM in all cases just seems like it's meant to protect n00bs from getting crapped on but isn't this coddling players? Most people want to have fun when they play. Players consistently getting curbstomped and having no reliable avenue for improvement is a good way to create a game with terrible player retention. People don't stay around to suffer through game after game just because they really like ninja. "Ranked" implies a competitive, high-stakes mode, which drives people who want a relaxed game (i.e. one where they _won't_ repeatedly get curbstomped) to naturally gravitate away from a game described as such. You may think that's stupid, but you can't really fight basic human psychology. Don't forget, "n00bs" are people too.
lanius 6y ago
I wonder why these complaints only seem to come from players of team-based games. I have never heard anyone call for an outright removal of skill-based matchmaking in 1v1 games like Starcraft or Super Smash Bros. Is it because the lack of teammates means you can only blame yourself for losing?
- cubic 6y ago
  Oh, absolutely. I'm actually pretty sure I can count on one hand the amount times I've seen any of my friends / clan mates who consistently play pvp modes blame themselves for a loss. They are very quick to assert that they're "carrying" when they win, though. I have seen some of their recordings, the difference in performance between them and their teammate is much lower than they think.
- saddestcatever 6y ago
  I've always wanted a metric for how well talent correlates to victory in a given game. For me, Super Smash Brothers Melee is a great example. Let's say I'm rank 1,000 in my city, and I play someone rank 250. I expect to loose 99% of those games. I can't say the same thing is true for Call of Duty. It may be perception bias, but I think there's a LOT more variance between skill and victory. What's the breakdown of expected to actual performance? Would it be a 90% win rate, etc?
laurentdc 6y ago
Me and my brother share the same gaming PC. I suck, he's pretty good at the game. So when it's my turn to play, I encounter though opponents and rank down, and when it's his turn to play, he completely obliterates the lower ranked players that I should have gotten instead. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
enjeyw 6y ago
As someone who is the particularly unskilled at FPS games, the introduction of SBMM was a game-changer for me. I went from being totally outplayed almost every game to actually having a chance of competing.

45 points by fredoralive 6y ago

andyp-kw 6y ago

Isn't this better for the lower skilled players, who no longer get dominated by professionals?

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
Yes. Winning in a game with two players/teams and one winner is by definition zero sum. You can't have some players win more without other players winning less. Asking for the difficulty of the game to be reduced for oneself fundamentally implies that you want the difficulty of the game to be increased for someone else. There is no other possibility. The most hilarious thing is when people ask that there be a ranked playlist with sbmm and an unranked playlist without. The one without, they assume, would be more favorable to them, since they would experience a random distribution of players (and they assume they are above average, naturally). But for players in the bottom decile of skill, unranked would have a dramatically worse experience than ranked! So they would leave for the ranked playlist. Now the new bottom decile of skill would be having a terrible experience in unranked, so they would leave, etc. By induction, unranked would quickly become depopulated. It is really tough to be a below-average player in a game without any matchmaking. You lose all the time and almost never have an impact. You can kiiinda get away with this as a developer in games that have very large teams. For example, World of Warships has no skill based matchmaking (although tier level is somewhat a proxy for skill and performs a bit of a weed-out of the lowest skill players in the higher tiers). There are people who play that game who have only a 30% winrate over a large number of games. This is in a 12v12 game where presumably things tend to average out in the mix of skills on each team, so having that negative of an impact on team performance is in some sense pretty impressive. The only thing difficult for me to understand is the resilience of the mentality involved in continuing to play that game if you are one of the way below average players. I would not have fun if I never had a positive impact on my team's performance. It's also worth noting that if WoWS had the playerbase to support it, they'd probably build SBMM too. But it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. The issue is that their monetization system requires what is effectively forty or fifty different queues (5 tier-based matching bands * 4 ship classes * 2-2.2 game modes, depending on whether ranked is active). Queue times can already be quite extended in some tiers and for some ship ship classes. Developing a system that continues with this alignment of tiers and classes and also substantially reduces skill gaps is probably unsolvable without a much large player base or a more complicated role selection system.
- imtringued 6y ago
  I don't know about World of Warships but in Warthunder you can get a lot of kills without meaningfully contributing to your team. Kills are very enjoyable though.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > I don't know about World of Warships but in Warthunder you can get a lot of kills without meaningfully contributing to your team. Its harder in World of Warships because of the absence of respawns. Each kill has a bigger direct impact on team win/loss probability than in War Thunder.
alistairSH 6y ago
Yes. Also, why would a "pro" want to sandbag like this? I've been an amateur athlete most of my life and my goal was never to compete against known weaker athletes - there's no fun in that. Or, do these games lack the ability to spin up "practice" sessions fully under the control of the player? That seems like the real answer, and would mirror what athletes in meat-space do - train for weeks/months, then compete at well-timed intervals against the best (or, at least relatively equal, if you're doing age group amateur competitions).
- LanceH 6y ago
  Imagine you're a world class striker on your soccer team. You play against world class defenders and goalkeepers. It's exhausting because you have to play your top game, every time. Now, one day you decide to try out goalkeeper. You get to face world class competition because of your status as a striker. Two possible results: 1. You get discouraged and don't play the off positions. You only maximize. Maybe you get burned out because you never relax. 2. You do switch back and forth between things you are good/not good at. Your skill averages out and you play easy matches where you carry your team, alternated with impossible matches where you drag your team down. I know a lot of pros will have secondary accounts for things like this. Sometimes it gets viewed as sandbagging (and sometimes it is).
  - alistairSH 6y ago
    This is why I asked about practice sessions. Any professional e-sport should have some means for a pro to practice without: 1- engaging in actual public game play 2- sandbagging against weaker competition In your striker-wants-to-be-goalie situation, the wanna be goalie would practice against the clubs B team. He would not step into the WC as goalie. Nor would he shit up the local junior tournament while he tries things out.
    - LanceH 6y ago
      Practice. You were talking about practice... I'm sure all the esports games have a practice. But that really only satisfies the situation where you have full teams available. Also, a lot of pros make more money from playing the game without a team and streaming it on twitch or youtube.

shadowmore 6y ago

Meanwhile, many multiplayer games have neither skill-based matchmaking, nor a ban on premade groups playing against solo queue players. I just can't grasp how any developer can seriously think a game can be enjoyable when you're on a team of arbitrary players but being matched against a premade team of players all of whom have 2,000+ hours logged in that game and are coordinating flawlessly.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
Not very many, these days. There are a handful, like Escape from Tarkov, that are super hardcore and have no matchmaking. It will probably never be more than a small niche game as a result, since any new player has to contend with an extremely rigorous onboarding process in which you are unlikely to have much success for dozens of hours until you get the hang of things.
lozaning 6y ago
I used to play Battlefield 2 competitively. After our official clan practises we'd roll into random pub servers to mess around. It usually only took ~6 of us to just dominate the server, and this is a game with (2) 64 players teams. Rarely did we ever win though, usually we'd end up getting admin kicked for 'cheating'.
magicalhippo 6y ago
In COD4, some servers ran tools which would autobalance the teams. So if you had a group of 3-5 which played together and the rest were randoms, the the other team could end up with a lot more players to compensate. Was generally quite nice, except when you really wanted to play with your mate and the tool kept swapping you over because it didn't find any other way to balance the teams.

jswny 6y ago

The implementation of SBMM in Call of Duty is particularly bad. Usually, you would expect such a system to match you with players of similar skill. But, that's NOT how it works in CoD. Instead, the SBMM in CoD matches you with a bunch of players who are far worse than you for a game or two. Then, it matches you with a bunch of players who are far better than you for a game or two, and this cycle continues over and over again. This means that you will do really well for a game or two, and then get destroyed for a game or two. Eventually, this averages out to the target of every player having around a 1.0 kill/death ratio. In theory, SBMM is supposed to help lower-skilled players, but the implementation in CoD is so bad it is more of a roller coaster than a bunch of matches against similarly-skilled players.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
I do perceive some "swinginess" in my performance in Black Ops Cold War, but I'm not positive that it's actually real. Gamblers at the roulette table also perceive trends where in fact there is only random variance. It's also worth noting that this is only half of the complaints that you see on message boards about this game. The other half, or maybe the majority, is people saying, "I just want to be able to get high and use off-meta weapons and not lose to sweats (i.e. people who are trying) all night." This type of complaint is fundamentally a request to be matched against lower skilled players, and has nothing to do with the swinginess of matchmaking.
- strken 6y ago
  It sounds like a request to be matched appropriately to expected performance at times when they're deliberately sabotaging their ability, which is not that unreasonable except for the near-impossibility of doing so. They might even be able to achieve it by having a separate account for messing around while they're high and using dumb weapons.
  - harimau777 6y ago
    Something that could help would be to allow players to choose what server they play on. The server could then establish rules against tactics that are regarded as effective but unsportsmanlike. Casual servers could also choose to implement more aggressive rebalancing systems between rounds. Finally, players could choose to select servers that they know to have a more casual community.

svrb 6y ago

The same people will vote for politicians who will allow them to win at the expense of others, just consider that.

LanceH 6y ago
I cringe every time I hear the phrase, "Why would they voting that way. They're voting against their own self interest." Personally I think we need more people voting against their own self interest.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  Voting against one's self interest doesn't mean you're voting for the good of the world. The often intended meaning of that statement is that you, as a lower class individual, are unwittingly empowering the upper class and exacerbating societal problems, and often implied that you don't realize you're doing this.
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    The words themselves imply that the only rational thing to do is to vote selfishly, which is trivial to reject.
    - klmadfejno 6y ago
      I mean, sure but that's because there's additional context. The point is implying people vote for a policy to accomplish A, but instead are voting for !A.
      - aidenn0 6y ago
        If that's the implication, then I think the implication is wrong. It's not like they don't know they are voting to cut entitlements and lower taxes on the wealthy.
  - LanceH 6y ago

coding123 6y ago

The complaint is coming from one of the best players in the world, so... skill based matching is... working. I don't want to play against him.

PatentlyDC123 6y ago

I just wish the matchmaking was biased to be limited by ping/region. Too many times I finally do well in one game just to get slaughtered the next when the matchmaking moves me to another significantly slower server. Filtering team making by language would be nice too.

hbosch 6y ago

Hilarious that the bulk of complaints come from people who consider themselves "good" at the game, particularly content creators/streamers, because their entertainment product relies on them being the best in the server... The games I've played/been playing with online MM are the usual ones... CoD (Modern Warfare), Halo (Reach), CS/CS:S/CS:GO mainly, and lately Valorant. Of all the games to do it, I think Counter Strike gets it the most correct. Cheating aside, the amount of play modes and available in CS has always been perfect for dropping yourself exactly where you want to play for these reasons: 1) 2v2, 5v5, 10v10 Casual, Battle Royale, Deathmatch all available natively in the game, on Valve servers. 5v5 Competitive is CS'S only "Ranked" mode. Wingman (2v2) and Danger Zone (Battle Royale) have ranks but I find they're pretty elastic in their MM. 2) The ability to run Community Servers with custom code... e.g. Surf maps, KZ (Platforming) maps, Retakes (now native in the new Operation), Executes, regular DM, FFA DM, XvX casual games.) These servers are player-owned, player-maintained, and strictly "unranked". 3) ESEA/Faceit/et al. Pick up games for players who want to pay for better anti-cheat, tighter SBMM, and generally a lower skill floor. Also, "pug"s tend to -- more or less -- follow the rules in place for the pro circuit. The fact that CS gives players the ability to "graduate" out of their SBMM and move into a pro/am competitive environment OR join a community server and play Zombie Mode OR relax for an hour surfing OR play a baseline ranked match is something that has allowed the game to endure so well. If I could suggest one thing to CoD, Valorant, Halo, and any other "competitive" game it would be support community and 3rd-party servers! EDIT: By the way, SBMM leads to one annoying issue not touched upon in the article. Smurfing. Often, due to SBMM, a high skilled player can't play with their lower skilled friends. That sucks. Or, if I just want to ruin SBMM for 9 other people, I can simply make a new account, throw a couple games, get ranked low on purpose and then frag out. Smurfs are actually the glaring problem with SBMM, IMO.

leetcrew 6y ago
anecdotally, it seems like valve has mitigated the smurfing issue pretty well in recent years. I very rarely see obvious smurfs in the gold nova range these days. unfortunately, the side effect is that there are now a bunch of hoops that a fresh account needs to jump through to get into MM. I think the current state is a decent compromise. it's totally viable to make a new account whenever you have a new friend that starts playing. as long as you only play with them on the smurf account, it will stay in a close MMR range. your friend has to go through the grind anyway, so you may as well do it with them. the grinding does make it pretty annoying to make new accounts over and over again just to tear through the ranks.

okprod 6y ago

I'm fine with SBMM, and I'm top 10 TDM for one of the recent CoDs (casual/nonpro). I want to play against better people; it's really no fun to me to easily win games. The main complaint I've seen re: SBMM comes from top level players, including creators, who don't want to sweat / they want to beat players who aren't as good as them. To me this means SBMM is absolutely needed. Unranked play shouldn't mean better players can crush those who aren't as good. This isn't even considering the fact that creators rely on looking good play-wise for their income, and SBMM makes this harder.

fatnoah 6y ago
As a non-good player, my main complaint with SBMM is that EVERY round feels like a sweatfest. I much preferred the "sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you" experience of other games. Sometimes you want to have a good game and have that excitement of completely crushing it.
- okprod 6y ago
  I haven't experienced much of that; I either finish at the top of the board or at the top for my team and still lose, or I win the game. If I'm really feeling like I'm getting crushed, I'll start a party with other players I know are good, but I don't do that often. I typically prefer solo in public lobbies for the challenge and the variety.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  agreed, this was the magic of #sourcescrim back in the day (if you played css). you might get five kids who just bought the game, or you might get rolled by some invite team. SBMM with first party servers is definitely more accessible though. I'll grudgingly accept it if it means a larger playerbase and more active development for my favorite games.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cubic 6y ago
  And many people prefer to not play games where they have to suffer through however long a match takes in a hopeless effort to maybe not lose _that_ much. I would vastly prefer if every match I play makes me at least _feel_ like I have a chance to win if I try hard enough, than have a large percentage be obvious losses leading only to frustration and waste of time.

jimbob45 6y ago

SBMM is fine and has been around for more than a decade now (probably longer). The problem being discussed widely today is that developers have a dark incentive for players to lose when purchaseable lootboxes are present. SBMM is just one (and fairly benign) tool developers use to lower players winrate.

filoleg 6y ago
>The problem being discussed widely today is that developers have a dark incentive for players to lose when purchasable lootboxes are present. While this could've held true a few years ago for CoD franchise, I know for a fact that neither last year's CoD installment nor the most recent one discussed in this article (Black Ops: Cold War) has any sort of lootbox mechanics.
Tinyyy 6y ago
For every loser there’s a winner. I fail to see how developers could ‘lower’ players’ winrates without also improving others’ winrates.

ogre_codes 6y ago

> offering the freedom to decide when they want to sweat and when they want to kick back and own some noobs. This quote from the article is likely the simplest explanation for why the game companies implement skill based matchmaking. If you are the noob this article references, it means the game royally sucks. Setting up the game so experienced players get to abuse your newest customers isn't exactly a great recipe for long term success.

mewpmewp2 6y ago
Yeah, makes me think how narrow minded can those "good" players really be? Their statements are truly ridiculous. Of course same with the notion of "elo hell". I would be deeply ashamed of myself if I would defy all logic and sense to find excuses for my lack of skill.
- prohobo 6y ago
  You learn from players who are better than you, not players who are as good as you (or worse). Matchmaking ruined the competitive aspects of gaming for me, since I either get dragged down by team mates or I get stuck playing the same games over and over. It's boring, and if I want to get better I have to watch an hour of pro streams before even getting into the game to remind myself of what good play looks like. People who are against matchmaking have a valid point, and it's part of why games revolving around community run servers last longer.
  - castlecrasher2 6y ago
    Seriously. I'm marginally above average and the SBMM in Destiny 2 was a nonstop rollercoaster of win, lose, repeat. Imo it made it difficult to learn, since the game alternated between giving me awful teammates and skilled opponents and giving me skilled teammates and awful opponents. Now that it's gone for most modes, it feels better. Games where I lose don't feel so simply because the game wanted me to lose.
  - bagacrap 6y ago
    with sbmm, roughly half the players you face off against are better than you (assuming you have been accurately ranked) and half worse. You have ample opportunity to learn from better players. SBMM simply limits the skill gap between you and the better player. I am never going to get better at basketball by playing Lebron in 1v1s.

jklinger410 6y ago

Matchmaking is always blamed for a basic issue with online multiplayer games: forming a team with complete strangers to complete an objective with little to no communication about strategy, or buy-in from everyone on the team. I would argue that matchmaking could be perfect, and these complaints would not stop at all. The very idea of random online matchmaking is dumb. Fun, because it fills a need, but very dumb. Ask any hardcore MMO player how they got to where they are, and if they are honest, it's because they started by teaming up with their already talented friends who actually worked as a team to grind up the ladder.

engineer_22 6y ago
This is correct. It's a team game [requires communication], but nobody wants to play on a team with strangers. I think it's part of the reason for the popularity of battle royale games.
smallnamespace 6y ago
It seems like this could be remedied by biasing matchmaking towards people you've already played (won?) with. This need not be a hard requirement, so: - Playing in the middle of the night, no previous teammates around? You get a random crew - Playing at the same time every day? The system slowly builds a team of likeminded people around you.

Waterluvian 6y ago

Balanced matchmaking is hard if not impossible. And it's why Nintendo loves to design games that make it moot (blue shell). If a small delta in skill drastically changes how it feels to be winning or Losing, the game is poorly designed for matchmaking.

xyst 6y ago

basically, washed up player is angry that she/he is getting rolled on their own live stream and ridiculed by their audience.

dylan604 6y ago
It's right up there with things like: This game cheats! I know I pushed the button first! My sights were right on them! STFU!!!! You get paid to play a friggin' video game. Sit down. Shut Up. Get better.

samwhiteUK 6y ago

This article is hard for me to follow. Basically, players were happy to lose when they thought it could be due to people being better than them, but aren't happy to lose when it's someone who's at their skill level playing.... better than them?

olliej 6y ago

Ignoring anything else -- bugs, bad implementation, etc -- an ideal matchmaking system should be matching people with equal skill, so you would expect to lose 50% of the time. That's what is expected in the SC community - someone, Maru or sOs?, said that if they weren't losing regularly they weren't going to be learning anything.

cletus 6y ago

The issue here varies by game. It was most apparent in Fortnite because Fortnite added a competitive ("arena") mode, which is by definition SBMM. The problem a lot of creators had was what was the point in unranked mode ALSO having SBMM? I'm sympathetic to that argument. Forcing SBMM in all cases just seems like it's meant to protect n00bs from getting crapped on but isn't this coddling players? There's something aspirational about playing better players, no? Also, "smurfing" (creating a new account to play against n00bs) largely defeats this anyway. If n00bs wanted to play against only other n00bs couldn't they play in ranked mode where that would happen? More relaxed modes tend to be better viewing. That's actually good for the game IMHO if streaming it has longevity and audience retention.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
> Forcing SBMM in all cases just seems like it's meant to protect n00bs from getting crapped on but isn't this coddling players. Asking for the converse is fundamentally a request to coddle experienced players instead.
wmf 6y ago
Before the introduction of ranking and bots you could spend a few minutes queuing up for a game, get killed in seconds, and repeat ad infinitum. That's not aspirational.
cubic 6y ago
> Forcing SBMM in all cases just seems like it's meant to protect n00bs from getting crapped on but isn't this coddling players? Most people want to have fun when they play. Players consistently getting curbstomped and having no reliable avenue for improvement is a good way to create a game with terrible player retention. People don't stay around to suffer through game after game just because they really like ninja. "Ranked" implies a competitive, high-stakes mode, which drives people who want a relaxed game (i.e. one where they _won't_ repeatedly get curbstomped) to naturally gravitate away from a game described as such. You may think that's stupid, but you can't really fight basic human psychology. Don't forget, "n00bs" are people too.

lanius 6y ago

I wonder why these complaints only seem to come from players of team-based games. I have never heard anyone call for an outright removal of skill-based matchmaking in 1v1 games like Starcraft or Super Smash Bros. Is it because the lack of teammates means you can only blame yourself for losing?

cubic 6y ago
Oh, absolutely. I'm actually pretty sure I can count on one hand the amount times I've seen any of my friends / clan mates who consistently play pvp modes blame themselves for a loss. They are very quick to assert that they're "carrying" when they win, though. I have seen some of their recordings, the difference in performance between them and their teammate is much lower than they think.
saddestcatever 6y ago
I've always wanted a metric for how well talent correlates to victory in a given game. For me, Super Smash Brothers Melee is a great example. Let's say I'm rank 1,000 in my city, and I play someone rank 250. I expect to loose 99% of those games. I can't say the same thing is true for Call of Duty. It may be perception bias, but I think there's a LOT more variance between skill and victory. What's the breakdown of expected to actual performance? Would it be a 90% win rate, etc?

laurentdc 6y ago

Me and my brother share the same gaming PC. I suck, he's pretty good at the game. So when it's my turn to play, I encounter though opponents and rank down, and when it's his turn to play, he completely obliterates the lower ranked players that I should have gotten instead. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

deleted 6y ago

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enjeyw 6y ago

As someone who is the particularly unskilled at FPS games, the introduction of SBMM was a game-changer for me. I went from being totally outplayed almost every game to actually having a chance of competing.