I remember Sledgehammer tried to deny Advanced Warfare had SBMM -- up until they banned people for "reverse boosting" (i.e. suicided themselves with grenades to lower their K:D ratio to get matchmaked with shitters). That's a tacit admission that SBMM wasn't done for the benefit of players.
I'm not really surprised. As someone who used to play CoD a lot, I used to think I wasn't a fan of SBMM. The more I thought about it though, the problems I had with the game wasn't from that. It was that both the game and the gaming community had left me in the past. It's the same thing with a game like Fortnite. Basically, it's me realizing I'm old and disinterested in learning these new tactics.
I grew up on early FPS stuff, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake. That's what I was playing at the ages you have the most time and room to learn. The thing is those are really simple games. I mean Quake had jump, wow. It was all about keeping moving and dealing damage. After the late 90s, I didn't really do much FPS until around CoD4 and Halo 3. Getting into that, you can see my old school playstyle. I move laterally, jump, and shoot. It wasn't that bad on those games and I adapted to the point I'd learn maps and essentially do what everyone else wasn't to get an advantageous position, then rush at the enemy aggressively just like I'd do with my Doom shotgun.
They are all so complicated now, and I guess that's what the youth want. Slide, dive, different types of sprint, slide cancelling, double jump, wall running, or GoW with "wall-bouncing". Trying to take my antique tactics in there now only marginally works, and it's with the same thing I learn the maps and try to be in their face before they know what happened. I added a slide move, but that's about it.
Long only mildly related story aside, I've made my peace with SBMM, and for the most part just moved on to other things.
Oh yeah, I showed my cousin once how I played Doom with only the keyboard, and that's how I played it well into the 2000s. Yeah, he had no understanding of how I ever managed to do that. I don't even remember how mouse-look worked in "base" Doom.
Trying to recall, might have been Rise of the Triad that was one of the first games with look up/down? I believe Duke3D was the first big hit that had it.
Yeah I had a similar realization in college playing Halo 1 online. As relatively simple as the mechanics were (not at the time but compared to today), I realized I didn't have the time to commit to keeping up against some Korean dude grinding the game with autismo-trainers for six hours a day. So there really wasn't a point in playing it competitively.
I don't care. Community servers, dedicated servers, stand-alone servers are the only acceptable way. Run your own server and play with anyone you want.
I don't play many games with SBMM so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I despise it. I think it has to do with the matchmaker seeing you win a game and then launching you up way too high to where you are vastly outmatched. If games simply tuned down the formula to decrease the jump after winning it would be fantastic. I understand why it's there, but seriously games shouldn't punish you for winning, even in things like 100 player Battle Royale.
SBMM is a great idea on paper. It should keep every type of player winning enough to continue to have fun playing. Except nobody seems to be able to implement it in a way that it doesn't just give you whiplash.
An illustration of the negative feedback loop of low skill players leaving the player base
The problem they have is they have a game where winning is fun and losing sucks so they need skill matchmaking so everybody wins enough games.
The games are also impossible to win with even one bad player. If this wasn't the case then with random matchmaking a bad player would get in enough games with good players to still win some. There's not enough random in who wins.
What they should do is have a game where winning is fun and playing the game is also fun.
This can be done with PvE and other ways you can help your team. For example, classic WoW battlegrounds if you were terrible at battles you could take the mines in Alterac Valley, or collect items to power up your base - and battlegrounds were never as fun again. In Team Fortress you can play as medic where you don't need cat reflexes.
The problem isn't using SBMM at all, the problem is linking it up with manufactured discontent and near-miss psychological responses right out of the gambling industry in order to milk lootboxes.
Which is always sort of how tech goes these days. Someone comes up with something cool that enhances things for everyone, then some fucking asshole perverts it into a revenue stream.
After all, the whole local / regional / state / national championship organization of sports is effectively Skill-Based Match Making, and it's been around forever.
one of the big reasons why they're pushing so hard for this always online shit is precisely because of the metrics
Go spend at least 8 hours playing one of these mainstream games, CoD, Fortnite, whatever. Look at the attire of all of the other players and the tiny percentage of it that is included in the base game. You'll see the reason for always online right there. The amount of money they have to making selling that cosmetic shit is absolutely mind blowing.
Studying this workflow tells you exactly what these retards do every day. They're low level midwit devs who have meetings and look at stats they've acquired from spying on their players and make changes based on that instead of oh I don't know checking the damn feedback and playing the game to see how everything looks and feels by comparison to what the feedback is to make sure it's legit and not just somebody bitching which does happen.
This also leads me to another point about the issue of metrics as part of your game development workflow, it's ripe for trolling. You could potentially fuck with the devs if they're spying on you and have everybody do something similar and rather than investigate what gamers are doing with a particular action they'll just blindly read it off a chart and go "Hmm that's interesting, lots of people seem to really like using this weapon, maybe we should release new skins or nerf it".
You cannot trust these companies at all, they're dead, they don't know what fun is. It looks like their spying is less about anti-cheat and more about collecting gameplay metrics because they're cunts. Fascinating if a a massive black pill because it explains why all of these companies are so bad. Activision kind of shot themselves in the foot here because now we know exactly what the logic behind the workflow of every AAA company is and the answer is they're retarded.
I play fighting games where SBMM is mandatory simply because of how fighting games work, so I'm reading this comment kind of wondering what exactly makes them 'retarded', because reading the study, I don't necessarily have an objection with how they're doing it, because feedback is weird. There's a shitload of developers in MMOs, fighting games, FPSs, whatever that have said the following in many different ways and I get it: 'Gamers are excellent at finding what's wrong with something in-game; they suck at making solutions to said problem'.
You gotta separate the trolling from the real feedback and then isolate the issue in order to actually make a good patch/nerf/buff, but I don't think this necessarily feeds back into anything involving wokeness, that's just a byproduct of these people living in echo chambers. I think the way that patches are done is fine, because playing the game doesn't change the fact that for example the pre-patch AWP in CSGO did too much for how it was priced at the time and that showed up at all levels of play. I maybe shouldn't but I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt mainly because making sure people have fun is the main objective, and at least in fighting games, it works.
The games were less about progressing some sort of perceived ladder/ranking system and were just about having fun.
Yup I played Gears of War 1 for eight years and that game had no progression system, no character or weapon skins, no updates, no new maps, no new characters, and only had very basic k/d stat.
When I hear people complain about games today with stuff like, "Where's the new battle pass? What's the point of playing if we don't have rewards to aim for?" I just shake my head.
It’s because the games aren’t as good. There’s no community. No pub server you could log on to and play with a bunch of people you’ve played with and talked to before.
Even on Xbox, the day party chat went live, halo went to shit. Everyone was in small parties, and there was no more fun, no more smack talk or random chat, just silence.
CoD is one of the most played games in the world mainly because it's the 'casual' FPS compared to something like CS2 (or CSGO when it was the main one), but something I was reading in the discussion that made a lot of sense to me is that the reason that SBMM is so controversial in CoD is because a lot of the fun in CoD is the stuff you get for killstreaks, and SBMM inherently makes it harder to accomplish killstreaks.
I primarily play fighting games as my 'competitive multiplayer game', so I don't really have an opinion because in the end, you need to go enter a tournament to truly prove how good you are if that's what you wanna do so I get my enjoyment through that, but as a whole, I think CoD specifically has gone through a lot in its lifetime that has cultivated the playerbase it does. While SBMM has supposedly been in place since MW1 back in 2007, I didn't really see it be as big of a debate until a few years ago since people wanna pubstomp as a whole. I get the whole 'centralized servers suck' thing, I just wasn't around playing shooters during that time so I'd have no idea, but back to the study overall, I don't disagree with the methodology because there's not really a way to do this other than using the game they already have and turning SBMM off/relaxing it massively.
I get the complaint of 'why didn't you tell people you were doing this as a study', but people choosing not to play because of the study would mess up the results versus not playing due to a lack of SBMM, which serves to keep someone who's skill is static at around a 50% win rate ideally, but obviously if your skill is improving your winrate is going to increase.
In a fighting game, SBMM is IMO even more mandatory just because of the fact that fighting games being one on one makes it so, let alone legacy knowledge amount other things.
Overall, I think SBMM specifically in fighting games is inherently a good thing, but for FPSs, I think making killstreaks less rewarding would help even out the dopamine effect of stomping which is a lot of why the whole 'SBMM sucks' stuff even came up, but we're stuck with centralized servers for the foreseeable future.
There's an inherent problem with turning off SBMM. The players have been trained to expect a certain gameplay experience, but turning it off changes that experience drastically. Not expecting that change could greatly exacerbate their negative feelings towards their gameplay experience. If there was a third group in the study that was informed that SBMM was turned off, that would provide a more useful group for comparison.
I remember Sledgehammer tried to deny Advanced Warfare had SBMM -- up until they banned people for "reverse boosting" (i.e. suicided themselves with grenades to lower their K:D ratio to get matchmaked with shitters). That's a tacit admission that SBMM wasn't done for the benefit of players.
They were called 'Smurf's in Overwatch where high/top ranking players would start up new accounts and just steamroll everyone in the lower ranks.
I'm not really surprised. As someone who used to play CoD a lot, I used to think I wasn't a fan of SBMM. The more I thought about it though, the problems I had with the game wasn't from that. It was that both the game and the gaming community had left me in the past. It's the same thing with a game like Fortnite. Basically, it's me realizing I'm old and disinterested in learning these new tactics.
I grew up on early FPS stuff, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake. That's what I was playing at the ages you have the most time and room to learn. The thing is those are really simple games. I mean Quake had jump, wow. It was all about keeping moving and dealing damage. After the late 90s, I didn't really do much FPS until around CoD4 and Halo 3. Getting into that, you can see my old school playstyle. I move laterally, jump, and shoot. It wasn't that bad on those games and I adapted to the point I'd learn maps and essentially do what everyone else wasn't to get an advantageous position, then rush at the enemy aggressively just like I'd do with my Doom shotgun.
They are all so complicated now, and I guess that's what the youth want. Slide, dive, different types of sprint, slide cancelling, double jump, wall running, or GoW with "wall-bouncing". Trying to take my antique tactics in there now only marginally works, and it's with the same thing I learn the maps and try to be in their face before they know what happened. I added a slide move, but that's about it.
Long only mildly related story aside, I've made my peace with SBMM, and for the most part just moved on to other things.
I still remember all the Quake machinima and the one with mouse players making fun of a "keyboard only" guy. Good times.
Oh yeah, I showed my cousin once how I played Doom with only the keyboard, and that's how I played it well into the 2000s. Yeah, he had no understanding of how I ever managed to do that. I don't even remember how mouse-look worked in "base" Doom.
It only controlled lateral looking, not vertical. It's kind of funky.
The original Doom engine couldn't pitch the camera. That's one of the reasons it was fast enough to be (barely) playable on a 386.
Trying to recall, might have been Rise of the Triad that was one of the first games with look up/down? I believe Duke3D was the first big hit that had it.
System Shock had a 3D engine with mouse look. It came out the same time as Doom. It is still a great game.
Never played SS when it came out, thanks for the reminder. 👍
Yeah I had a similar realization in college playing Halo 1 online. As relatively simple as the mechanics were (not at the time but compared to today), I realized I didn't have the time to commit to keeping up against some Korean dude grinding the game with autismo-trainers for six hours a day. So there really wasn't a point in playing it competitively.
I don't care. Community servers, dedicated servers, stand-alone servers are the only acceptable way. Run your own server and play with anyone you want.
I don't play many games with SBMM so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I despise it. I think it has to do with the matchmaker seeing you win a game and then launching you up way too high to where you are vastly outmatched. If games simply tuned down the formula to decrease the jump after winning it would be fantastic. I understand why it's there, but seriously games shouldn't punish you for winning, even in things like 100 player Battle Royale.
SBMM is a great idea on paper. It should keep every type of player winning enough to continue to have fun playing. Except nobody seems to be able to implement it in a way that it doesn't just give you whiplash.
Activision has investigated itself and found the system it developed to maximize user grind time is indeed good for the players
Also wasn't the system not only used to match players but also alter the mechanics for the better players by making their guns less accurate?
The problem they have is they have a game where winning is fun and losing sucks so they need skill matchmaking so everybody wins enough games.
The games are also impossible to win with even one bad player. If this wasn't the case then with random matchmaking a bad player would get in enough games with good players to still win some. There's not enough random in who wins.
What they should do is have a game where winning is fun and playing the game is also fun.
This can be done with PvE and other ways you can help your team. For example, classic WoW battlegrounds if you were terrible at battles you could take the mines in Alterac Valley, or collect items to power up your base - and battlegrounds were never as fun again. In Team Fortress you can play as medic where you don't need cat reflexes.
The problem isn't using SBMM at all, the problem is linking it up with manufactured discontent and near-miss psychological responses right out of the gambling industry in order to milk lootboxes.
Which is always sort of how tech goes these days. Someone comes up with something cool that enhances things for everyone, then some fucking asshole perverts it into a revenue stream.
After all, the whole local / regional / state / national championship organization of sports is effectively Skill-Based Match Making, and it's been around forever.
Go spend at least 8 hours playing one of these mainstream games, CoD, Fortnite, whatever. Look at the attire of all of the other players and the tiny percentage of it that is included in the base game. You'll see the reason for always online right there. The amount of money they have to making selling that cosmetic shit is absolutely mind blowing.
I play fighting games where SBMM is mandatory simply because of how fighting games work, so I'm reading this comment kind of wondering what exactly makes them 'retarded', because reading the study, I don't necessarily have an objection with how they're doing it, because feedback is weird. There's a shitload of developers in MMOs, fighting games, FPSs, whatever that have said the following in many different ways and I get it: 'Gamers are excellent at finding what's wrong with something in-game; they suck at making solutions to said problem'.
You gotta separate the trolling from the real feedback and then isolate the issue in order to actually make a good patch/nerf/buff, but I don't think this necessarily feeds back into anything involving wokeness, that's just a byproduct of these people living in echo chambers. I think the way that patches are done is fine, because playing the game doesn't change the fact that for example the pre-patch AWP in CSGO did too much for how it was priced at the time and that showed up at all levels of play. I maybe shouldn't but I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt mainly because making sure people have fun is the main objective, and at least in fighting games, it works.
Yup I played Gears of War 1 for eight years and that game had no progression system, no character or weapon skins, no updates, no new maps, no new characters, and only had very basic k/d stat.
When I hear people complain about games today with stuff like, "Where's the new battle pass? What's the point of playing if we don't have rewards to aim for?" I just shake my head.
It’s because the games aren’t as good. There’s no community. No pub server you could log on to and play with a bunch of people you’ve played with and talked to before.
Even on Xbox, the day party chat went live, halo went to shit. Everyone was in small parties, and there was no more fun, no more smack talk or random chat, just silence.
CoD is one of the most played games in the world mainly because it's the 'casual' FPS compared to something like CS2 (or CSGO when it was the main one), but something I was reading in the discussion that made a lot of sense to me is that the reason that SBMM is so controversial in CoD is because a lot of the fun in CoD is the stuff you get for killstreaks, and SBMM inherently makes it harder to accomplish killstreaks.
I primarily play fighting games as my 'competitive multiplayer game', so I don't really have an opinion because in the end, you need to go enter a tournament to truly prove how good you are if that's what you wanna do so I get my enjoyment through that, but as a whole, I think CoD specifically has gone through a lot in its lifetime that has cultivated the playerbase it does. While SBMM has supposedly been in place since MW1 back in 2007, I didn't really see it be as big of a debate until a few years ago since people wanna pubstomp as a whole. I get the whole 'centralized servers suck' thing, I just wasn't around playing shooters during that time so I'd have no idea, but back to the study overall, I don't disagree with the methodology because there's not really a way to do this other than using the game they already have and turning SBMM off/relaxing it massively.
I get the complaint of 'why didn't you tell people you were doing this as a study', but people choosing not to play because of the study would mess up the results versus not playing due to a lack of SBMM, which serves to keep someone who's skill is static at around a 50% win rate ideally, but obviously if your skill is improving your winrate is going to increase.
In a fighting game, SBMM is IMO even more mandatory just because of the fact that fighting games being one on one makes it so, let alone legacy knowledge amount other things.
Overall, I think SBMM specifically in fighting games is inherently a good thing, but for FPSs, I think making killstreaks less rewarding would help even out the dopamine effect of stomping which is a lot of why the whole 'SBMM sucks' stuff even came up, but we're stuck with centralized servers for the foreseeable future.
There's an inherent problem with turning off SBMM. The players have been trained to expect a certain gameplay experience, but turning it off changes that experience drastically. Not expecting that change could greatly exacerbate their negative feelings towards their gameplay experience. If there was a third group in the study that was informed that SBMM was turned off, that would provide a more useful group for comparison.