4 ms·
Hilarious that the bulk of complaints come from people who consider themselves "good" at the game, particularly content creators/streamers, because their entert
by 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 agoanecdotally, 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.
- hbosch 6y agoTrue, and well, I feel with the 3rd party ecosystem for matchmaking most people who would consider smurfing do it on a platform like Faceit. Nice name. :)
- stunt 6y agoThat's one of the reasons that a lot of streamers just play with other streamers in squads. Winning a shooter game as a streamer is easy specially with Battle Royale games. You have huge advantage just playing with your friends in a party because most of the other players don't even use microphone to communicate with their squad, and those that do are just random players matched together. Also popular Battle Royale games are cross platform which means you play against a lot of console players. A lot the console gamers play on high latency TV screens with WIFI connection. Not to mention that an average console player can't aim as good as an average PC player.
- cwhiz 6y agoThe auto-aim and recoil control on controllers for some of these games is insane. On warzone it’s basically auto-aim dialed down to 10%.