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.
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.