This I think is one of the biggest key factors. The second you introduce any kind of system that categorizes participants into "better" or "worse" groups you immediately get people trying to game it. From the Tryhards to the Hackers to the Griefers and the Smurfs and the Carried. I think the best case scenario is the one described in Futurama: "When you do things right, people won't be sure you did anything at all."
@@ThisNameIsNotTaken99 That's called being boosted and I think people do it so they can tell their friends that they have a high ranked account. Thats the only reason I can think of that makes sense.
@@CoreyTF2Its also a blaming your teammates thing, people become so convinced that their team is the issue that they legitimately believe theyll be able to compete at the highest level if they just get boosted up there
The talk of "do the people who want easy wins just not like knowing the thrill of a close match? Do they not have fun knowing they pulled through with their own skill?" comes up from Woolie a few times on the podcast, when talking of cheaters or smurfs, and the like, and the answer that comes to my mind is usually: "Maybe they would prefer it, but they'd have to actually experience it first. And that requires reaching the top of a hill they are either unable or unwilling to climb, and have no way of knowing if it'll be worth the effort beforehand."
I've had this conversation with a few ppl in Overwatch. They tell me I should only be having fun and not try as hard to be playing the game, or winning. I ask them, why can't I do both, and they never have a reply.
@@DA-zc7kr what they mean is learn to enjoy the process over the result. Its is fun to win but wins should idealy be a bonus, you should like the game first. I had to learn that the hard way, childhood shenaningans made me hate losing therefore making me hate competitions, works wonders liking the process above the result.
One part of the conversation that I'd like to hear their opinion on is the reduced prevalence of custom lobbies. Cause, yea sbmm is fantastic for ranked, but a lot of games now only offer "ranked" and "random lobby"(which is still usually using sbmm). But I remember the old CS1 days where you'd have a server list and if you wanted to goof off and not have to try there'd be severs for that, so then all the stoners would be in one sever and all the try hards in another, and the new players in another, and I feel like there was less toxicity. Maybe that was just because I was in a stoner sever.
I have little experience with shooters, but by my understanding, the biggest provider of custom lobbies right now is Halo Infinite. There's ick attached to that name, but from every person I've heard mentioning its lobbies, they are the way to maximize multiplayer fun. Lethal Company is the only other custom lobby-heavy game I know, and that's due in large part to mods applying per lobby.
servers also foster a community around them. so you can gain a familiarity with players you're fighting against. so even if you're on a 'casual but trying to win' server that has some pro players on it, you can eventually learn how to overcome them. its something that cant be done if you're going through a rotating door of people. where it's just sink or swim.
I do miss the time when onilne FPS map cycles included recreations of the Simpsons Town, rat maps, some guy's highschool and "the dopest map you've ever played, made entirely out of orange default textures."
Recently got back into WoW, friend of mine loves PvP. Brought up SBMM to him as a way to handle the PvP issue of player retention, maybe balance it around gear level with caps in place so you never fought someone vastly weaker or stronger than you and using their match making record to populate battlegrounds. His honest to god response was “But I don’t want that, I like two shotting dudes with no gear” That’s what we’re up against to make SBMM the norm, the idea of “But this is fun for ME”
Every form of wow pvp has mmr and so SBMM except for random battlegrounds which are about as casual as it gets. You can watch your number go up and down in WoW from match to match.
I know that people play games to have fun not to have a challenge, but I feel like people who do that should be immediately flagged and be put under something like being a sex criminal background check for being a sociopath
Engagement and playtime are the wrong metrics because your quality of life is not optimal when you're playing 1 game for 8 hours straight versus playing a few games with naturally occurring "alright that's enough" moments.
Sadly many man children never learn to take a loss. A loss screen is a reason to give up or throw a fit (accuse cheating, verbal abuse, ect) sorta like that irl too. People are NOT well rounded mentally generally speaking... unless you're referring to the grooves in their brain.
@@Dracobyte I very strongly enjoyed the original Conker's Bad Fur Day multiplayer for the N64. The XBox version completely changed the multiplayer, but the N64 version's multiplayer was asymmetric. I genuinely just enjoyed the shenanigans and cool moments, and didn't care much if I lost, which was nice. It nailed a very precise vibe that I've rarely seen done elsewhere.
Love the bit of statistics talk. As basic as it is, the psychological ramifications of that shit explain quite a bit about the world and the way people build their beliefs on personal experience, even against good evidence of the opposite. I remember a similar discussion around Baldur's Gate 3 and the dice roll "smoothener" algorithm a while ago. Turns out, actual randomness sometimes feels like absolute shit, and it may be what you want, but having the Karmic Dice turned on by default makes more sense for most people trying to have a good time.
@@RicochetForceX-com *is" mostly fair though, you only get benefits on streaks where you're missing, ayyyyys are hitting, or you've lost soldiers. Which is significant, of course, but for like 95% of a successful campaign it won't be super relevant. And it shows, people butch about X-Com percentages all the time.
Pretty sure the guy behind the Matchmaking of MW2 that Pats talking about is Max Hoberman, who was the matchmaking dev for Halo 2. Dude does not get enough credit for creating matchmaking as we know it today.
The games I develop are really small. One of them has a button to automatically join a match that simply connects you to whoever clicks that button immediately before or after you click it (depending on whether someone is already waiting). Since the playerbase is so tiny, nobody bothers clicking that button and they just manually connect to each other's matches through a chat room. The other game with matchmaking is slightly larger, but still not big enough for skill-based matchmaking to work (plus, it's a co-op game). So the "algorithm" we use is the exact clever algorithm you're probably subconsciously inventing right now in your head. We show the player a list of lobbies that they're allowed to join and then let the player pick one. That's it, that's the entire algorithm. We still have some knobs we can turn - the default ordering of the list, the placement of various data points about each lobby on the screen, etc. But at its heart, the algorithm is a big black box that data goes into and a decision comes out. And the algorithm is different for every player because the algorithm *is* the player. (And no, I'm not going to advertise them here, so don't ask.)
@@spideralexandre2099 in a place where it would be appropriate to talk about my own projects by name; not the comments section of someone else's content.
my only experience with sbmm is dead by daylight where one team mate will be *way* over your skill level and 2 teammates will be *way* under your skill level, and the devs consider this 'blanaced' matchmaking
Dealing with ranked gaming requires a degree of ego death, I think. If you are thinking, "I deserve to rank higher than this" you're gonna have a bad time.
Cod pretty much always had some type of sbmm but it was always fun to play. Now the game tries too hard to force a strict 50% win/loss ratio by making you get stomped 50% of the time and then trying to keep you engaged by giving you noobs to stomp the other 50% of the time. Neither of these types of games are actually fun that's the problem.
This is EXACTLY it. Sbmm has been around for a long time. It’s existence is not the problem. The problem is that it’s been tuned WAY WAY too tightly in more recent games.
This this this. The idea of matching players based on their skill level is a good idea, but the ideal outcome in my eyes is extremely balanced matches that constantly come down to the wire because they're so evenly matched, not the game intentionally placing you in situations where you either stomp or get stomped
While that is often called "Skill Based Matchmaking", it's not really true SBMM (more like "Win Based Matchmaking"). True SBMM would not even look at your winrate when matchmaking, as it would try to find players mostly based on the skill level it thinks you are. That skill level would of course change based on wins etc., but not wildly enough to completely turn a stomp into being stomped (at least after the player has played enough matches). It's one of the reasons why I usually play ranked in competitive games, as it often is closer to that than casual modes. You would still have some players that only know one thing and win/lose depending on if the opponent can handle that one strategy/cheese. Like a Ryu that always jumps in or a DI spammer in Street Fighter, as examples.
Ranked team games can be the worst, but I'll always take a kid learning how to play over someone who says 'I'll be doing this exact thing over and over, I refuse to do anything else and you guys need to do the objective'. My favourite is those times you'll play an extra hour because you don't want to lose a random team you're doing well with. It's not even that you're winning, just that it feels close.
The biggest problem is when that focus is placed squarely on a 50% winrate, so you ping-pong between stomping and getting stomped with nothing in between. And neither is really all that fun in the long run.
I think there is a small aspect about CoD that makes it different from other multiplayer games, it's the kill streak system. The game was built around the pursuit of not just winning, but winning so hard that you're rewarded with free kills. Everyone who has played CoD for a long time is just chasing those highs of those ridiculous kill streaks and I don't think that's compatible with SSBM.
There are a lot of other aspects of CoD specifically that I think muddy the water here. If you try to play a game with your friends who aren't in the same skill bracket as you, somebody is guaranteed to have a bad time because the rubberbanding algorithm will still put you into the higher "ranked" player's lobbies (even though you the game isn't polite enough to actually tell you your rank). Combine that with the game's historic focus on casual camo grinding fighting with the matchmaking system that encourages you to always play as efficiently as possible, and the whole experience becomes very frustrating very quickly. I absolutely understand the need for a matchmaking system in games like this, but CoD's handling of it repulses me.
In addition to that last part - there's also a demographic of people who KNOW where they are and are just, like, okay with that? Even in the competitive sphere, there'll be a not-insignificant group of people who'll be like "hey newbie, I just started like 2 weeks ago but i've learned some cool shit - try this out!" and that's honestly even more fun, imo, because like hell yeah, man, let's learn together!
I'm the dude who knows he's shit but I'm cool with it if I can still find my own enjoyment in a game. I see a new player and am like "Good for you man, I hope things go well and you have your fun too." The skill issue toxicity never really was an issue for me because I accepted just kinda being shit at certain things.
Recently I played some Teamfight Tactics with a friend, and I just had two just... abominable games. Didn't get any units I was looking for, my items were all wrong, just terrible. Came in last place super fast I was proud of myself for being able to laugh and be like "That might be a sign of God just telling me that tonight is not it, I think Im good for the night" because a younger me would have def spiralled
Pat talking about sports winstreaks made me remember the Florida State Seminoles getting screwed out of a national championship contention despite being totally undefeated last season because of how bullshit college football's seed system is
Undefeated Power Conference champion and they still couldn't get in! Absolute madness. I almost prefer the COD scrubs over the College Football Playoff Committee.
Not the first time either. It's like they hate money. Everyone loves an underdog story. Let the local team that could in even if they might lose in the end. If they win, though, everyone will go nuts! It's win-win for everyone involved because at least they got their shot.
Call of Duty has had SBMM since Black Ops 2 but no one ever realized. Let's be honest, SBMM isn't even the problem. It's the scapegoat to the real problem: Lobby disbanding. Ever since Modern Warfare 2019 you can no longer rematch players or stay in lobbies, as the matchmaker disbands lobbies when it detects an MMR disparity. Just keep SBMM as it is, but stop the lobby disbanding. If I had fun that game and wanna stay in the lobby, let me
That sounds good, except the issue is several players from the losing team left. So now it's either reshuffle the teams - which most people hate - or disband the lobby and go back to matching, which is effectively the same thing, annoying but fair.
In my experience, the problem with SBMM in Call of Duty was that wasn't TRUE skill based matchmaking. The game would throw you into a lobby with terrible players, you win like 5 games in a row, and then you'd get thrown into a lobby with players who pub stomp you instead for 5 games in a row, and then back to the baby table. It never feels like I'm ever really playing against people at my skill level. It's either sweats or actual children. No middle ground. I'd much rather play a game where both teams are balanced with two sweaty dudes and three morons than the former.
one of my most memorable matches in a pvp shooter was Battlefield 3, noshahr canals, Rush, attackers. defending team had prevented my team from taking a single objective and stolen all our teams helicopters. it was a 999 ticket match and by the time I joined we only had about 400 tickets left. my team had been being spawn camped for god knows how long. and then I made history. sniped a helicopter pilot, jumped off the ship and stole the helicopter before it hit the water. captured an objective before anyone noticed what had happened. attackers won the match with 3 tickets left.
I was under the impression that layoffs were happening as retaliation for forming unions, and the people who joined were always "coincidentally" always first on the chopping block compared to scabs
@@Necrikus I don't think it would prevent layoffs regardless, just pull the good old "The studio wasn't performing to expectations" excuse out, and cry to shareholders for more money
Some of them, certainly. That's why wall-to-wall unions are so important compared to ones for a specific department or location, because it's everyone. They can't lay off the entire company without destroying it.
I'm pretty sure that's a union-busting strategy. Executives bully individuals with micromanagement, third-party groups, and whatever layoffs they can afford to prevent a union from forming. The reason why layoffs are so prevalent right now is because they've become the most affordable strategy due to years of poor planning - and are part of it, because they just make the ongoing talent bleed worse. Once a union forms, it's a lot more expensive to get rid of the people part of it, which in turn gives employees leverage in changing company policy for their benefit. There are ways that unions can go bad or become self-defeating, but in an industry that is already falling apart, there's no meaningful downside to attempting one right now.
Yes, a company within our current system for profit will naturally resist something that eats into said profits. Whatever action is taken to do that is just the current flavor. Remember return to the office? IIRC from a recent study it was around a third of companies used heavy requirements returning to office as a way for people to quit, and not issue layoffs. All around pure evil
I don't know why it's so controversial to say you should be playing against people of your own skill level more often than not, I understand a lot of games have more insidious tactics than just SBMM to enforce their matchmaking but uh, here's a tough pill to swallow for everyone: If you're playing against people of your own skill level, you're going to win half your games, and lose half your games. If you want to win more of your games than not, that's going to come at the expense of someone else losing more of their games than not.
@@LieseFury thats probably not so much smurfing as it is people that are higher ranked with another character or in another game playing a new one but not enough to rank up to their skill level
@@gusbabiski true but people actively make new accounts for the sake of being able to rank up a character without being thrown in a rank they cant handle with said character. streamers have done it all the time. regardless its not really that big of an issue since the only difference between it happening in SFV vs SF6 is that SF6 doesn't make you jump through hoops to do it.
I always love it when someone calls you trash for beating them. Like okay, so what does that make you for losing? If the character, gun, whatever i'm using is bad how was it I was able to beat you? Someone who is using the meta pick. 9/10 they usually call me a slur and that's when you know you've won.
My favorite is when, in a shooter, you actually use your brain and tactics instead of the usually just sprinting around the map, causing the other team to go “man wtf how could that possibly happen?? Report this mf” As you use a sniper and spotter correctly, for instance.
@@UCannotDefeatMyShmeatNothing is funnier to me than literally standing still with something like a shotgun in a room and shooting the same two people over and over again. My guy. Pattern recognition. If you got shot from the left the last four times you went into this SPECIFIC doorway, maybe try any strategy other than sprinting full tilt into the room and looking to the right.
The problem is that after every single match you get put into a new lobby, when before it would just scramble the lobby based on the performance of everyone accordingly. And the comparison of sbmm to real life sports or even flipping a coin just doesn’t work because that’s a naturally occurring statistic. What cod has been doing is basically trying it’s absolute hardest to make the coin flip to heads whenever you get a tails and vice versa. It has almost no margin for error either maybe that 30-5 game was just a fluke, well the game doesn’t see it that way, so it “rewards” you with 15-20 match and that’ll probably be your experience for the next 5 matches. It’s like when you don’t do that well you don’t really sink or swim but on that off occasion when you preform beyond what the game expects of you it keeps you it’s like “nuh uh” and pulls you back. Not to mention there’s TONS of gaslighting in that document. And to the people defending them, have you already forgotten the tried and true “we’ve investigated ourselves and found that we did nothing wrong” and also the company that this is even about?
do you have proof of the system actually functioning this way outside of "vibes" kinda hard to take this point seriously when everything you've said has mainly only gotten to become a popular defense from the same people who said they missed stomping on kids
I agree that SBMM is good for the majority of circumstances but when I played CoD last in the most recent MW2, if my friends played with me, they’d have to be in lobbies with significantly better players where I and one other person might be the only people going positive on a team, making even the wins feel exhausting.
Elo hell isn't just about being pulled down, in League's case it's also possible for the point gain/loss to become completely fucking broken and you just stop gaining as many points per win because it recognizes your skill level is higher even though your rank is trapped by the player distribution, and now by the points themselves requiring those win streaks just to finally move.
about pick-up games. We had the opposite in football. Blowout games were too boring so I was used as the balancing rod. The team of great players with a trash goalkeeper vs the team with trash players and a great goalkeeper. The other team could easily get through the players on my team, but I could stop them from scoring again and again. But if my team ever got close to their goalkeeper? Basically a guaranteed win. It was a game of who would break first. Me, the good goalkeeper or the one dude that accidentally got past them and scored
Iirc for studies in maintaining the fun factor in play, winning 30% of the time is the minimum as going below that feels bad and one loses interest in playing anymore, be it humans or other animals. So that's another factor with the loss feeling twice as bad as a win, and not setting the sbmm parameters to shoot for a 50/50 win loss ratio as that gives you the wiggle room for win streaks here and there.
"Fair does not feel fair" reminds me of XCOM. And how everyone always makes the memes about how much the game cheats and is bullshit and the classic "that's XCOM, baby!" meme. Only for it to come out that yes, the game DOES cheat! But in the PLAYER'S favor. And that the difference in the difficulty levels is just adjusting how much the game cheats in the player's favor.
people have a seriously difficult time understanding probability and percentages. they will throw tantrums about missing a 85% chance to hit because they the 15% to to miss really isn't that unlikely at all.
There's also an important distinction between having balanced teams and having everyone at the same skill level. I think there is value in having teams that are evenly matched but have skill disparity within them. A team where Pat and Chris are on the same team vs the skins isn't fun (even oftentimes for the winners). But more balanced teams can be fun in a different way than exclusively skin vs skin and pat vs chris matches. Of course this also comes with game design where less skilled players can still contribute.
I'm convinced that mitigating loss aversion is the reason so many games will have you drop ranking/MMR (when losing a match) twice as fast as you will gain it (from winning a match). Dropping rank your rank further is more likely to put you with someone you will win against, your odds of winning will favour you.
I think the biggest problem is that SBMM is a black box to some extent. And gamers at least in the people I’ve talked to more assume it has to do with Carodon stick attention retention as opposed to actual fair matchmaking. I’ve talked to a lot of people about this and have told me they believe it works in a system that lets them win just to keep playing, but only enough, pretty much matching them against players that are better than them the majority of the time until it decides to let them go against someone of lower skill. Now it doesn’t matter if this is what’s happening and I doubt this is what’s happening, but the people I’ve talked to this certainly seems to be a widespread impression.
When it comes to statistics, one of my favorite games to look at is Blood Bowl. People assume that in a 1d6 system that you're bound to fail only 1 out of 6 rolls. However, there's a lot of dice being rolled and the odds of a game where you fail every roll will always be 100% guaranteed to happen to someone at some point.
SBMM is great when you want a game to be more centered around competition and wanting to improve. CoD players ***don't want that.*** if they did? They'd use the ranked play mode. They want to hop into a random game, on a random map, with random people of random skill levels, with the only common factor being decent ping, and the fact they're playing the same game. SBMM may indeed work for what the *company* wants, but the players, the ones that have been around for a long-ass time, have been playing since ye olden days, even the new ones, they hate it. I have no strong opinions on it. My main complaint with modern CoD games is how every gun sounds like ass, they don't keep lobbies together between matches, and how the unique co-op modes, Spec ops and Zombies, seem to be getting turned into *just* zombies.
Skill based matchmaking only works when it's not cheesed which is a problem with Higher skill levels. So many people in overwatch for example, made alt accounts to go "haha bronze to gm" mainly to just to harass players that weren't at their level. Still a thing and overlooked by the company.
I dont know how the high-level Overwatch players are " harrassing" lower-level players with their bronze to gm videos: They're barely staying in those low rank for two or three games at best. It's literaly a speedrunner. Add the fact that those kind of video are often requested by their own community. Its not like when Redshell made a bronze account just to watch bronze player being stupid in ranked. I also don't blame those guys for making alt account especially when you see their 20-30 min queue-time to find a game in their elo. At least they can play the game and keep themselves busy for a moment. In a odd way , "Bronze to gm" in OW is also due to bad (GM games with a lost diamond 1 on your team) and super slow matchmaking, bored viewers and viewers who wants that "Educational bronze to gm" so they can get some tips to be better in their own elo.
@@starcilio4962 Mostly unrelated but I finally have some niche knowledge I can share since I was an ex-pretty high elo player around season 3 of overwatch 1 and this chance will never come up again. Here's how high-level overwatch players are harrassing lower level players. There were entire discords for high elo players who would int or hard carry low elo games on alt accounts to prep for climbs with an added incentive being bounty systems for targetting specific players. Mostly streamers "Oh this player is on the enemy team, spawncamp their entire team. Then let them take the first objective to extend time, and then spawncamp them all again." Games dragged out for up to an hour of this. And you only really need 2 players on a team who are masters+ to manage it in gold/silver/bronze. Some people didn't care about this aspect, a lot of people were just throwing games to set up for a high winrate climb so they could get some ridiculous numbers like 112 wins 0 losses or 60 elims a game on tracer to show off on the stat sites that tracked that. I don't know if this or target inting low elo players is still a thing in today's overwatch. But there were absolutely coordinated groups of really good players who would go out of their way to fuck up low elo. Both ways, going down and going up and I would not be shocked if that community is still going.
As an FF14 player, playing DPS is a double-edged sword because of how long you have to wait in queue or if someone drops mid-dungeon/trial. It’s partly why I started playing tank classes. So it always sucks when expansions have both new classes be DPS; I absolutely get the frustration from some people during those times because they have finite time in a day like everyone else.
There has been one standout to SBMM that has actual ruined the game for my friends and myself and thats the Hunt Showdown star system were you have a skill rank of 1-6 stars but it fluctuates actively as you have successful games at 4 star (were my group usually sits) that feel like normal games were its challenging but not stomping, but the moment we win like 2-3 runs we move up to 5 star and get put against 5-6 star groups that rush spawns and are just WAY too sweaty. So a session of playing Hunt for my friends and myself just boils down to now is we play a few in 4 star get moved up to 5 star then get stomped on every game until we get pushed back down to 4 star.
Legitimately as a former Call of Duty player, SBMM should never be a non-variable. Having the matchmaking be THAT strict makes the game boring. Most of the mechanics that would be interesting with customization goes out the window since you're now fighting for a couple percent chance more to win gunfights watching TH-cam after every patch. No diverse builds, just what's the best 2 ARs and SMGs. Honestly pushed me back to fighting games since at least there I can see myself getting better or worse. If there was a rank or number to actually show any progression whatsoever the complaints wouldn't be as bad.
I miss the days of 1.6 private servers. One of the servers I played on had something like 4 tiers of players. I was somewhere between tier 2 and tier 3 depending on the day. But then a tier 1 player would show up and completely own me. The server had about 150 active players, which would cycle over time during the day. I was not in /top15, but I was in the group of people that could sometimes get in and then get pushed out. but if someone from the top 5 showed up everyone was getting shot down. Why say all this? Because I learned from that and that's how I was able to sometimes get into top 15. I had to go against someone better to understand that my bullshit isn't so hot and that I'm making mistakes. Kind of like fighting games. Then matchmaking came and I lost that. I don't like any kind of matchmaking because it tends to make you plateau because you don't encounter people better than you so your nonsense doesn't get called out. But if there's going to be matchmaking, at least make it skill based. It's boring to curb stomp
My main critique of the SBMM paper was that it still showed that it could give you unbalanced matches. By their matchmaking logic, a valid match would have one team with one high-skill player and a bunch of low-skill ones vs a team of all middling-skill players. Players on the higher-end of the skill bracket are far more likely to end up in matches where their teammates are far, far worse than them and likely the enemy team. Sure, it's balanced but it's in no way enjoyable for the high-skill players to always have to carry.
I just realized I'm really high and I haven't been listening to anything being said for 10 minutes and instead have been watching Woolie's beard scratch against the mic guard wondering what that sounds like.
I've got a funny story about the sf6 win streak bonus. I play modern controls Zangief (I'm bad at fighters and grabs make the dopamine go brrr) and after a while I didn't play the game so much but when I did, I would just hop on rank get some matches and hop off. problem is that I had a week of just winning match's in like 2-3 fights per day before hopping off. I am NOT good sf6, barely know how to drive cancel and combos? not happening. My rank was I think at mid/top of bronze and when I ended the streak, I was at the top of silver almost getting into gold. my streak was I believe was somewhere in the 15+ range so the scaling was crazy on the elo boosts. This is all fine and dandy, but when I finally got in the mood to just sit down and play for a while, I got utterly obliterated. I rightfully got my rank back down to a reasonable level but I'm still just stuck at the very beginning of silver because of the derank protection. I cant play Zangief anymore cuz I fucked up my elo and everyone beats my ass. straight up made me switch to Manon because I never went on some wild SPD spree to fuck up my rank XD.
12:22 I've seen the pattern like that a few times, but with scratch tickets. When I do I know it's time to cash out. I walk away making more money over all that way.
Personally, one of my biggest problems with COD's matchmaking system is that it basically invalidates anything not considered meta. Once your MMR gets high enough, you will not see anyone using anything but the like 5 best guns in the game, all customized the exact same way. Deviating from the meta basically guarantees you will lose the vast majority of gunfights you get into. It gets incredibly boring having to use the same thing game after game after game when there's like 60 other guns in the game to use.
that's not a COD problem thats a video game problem. all games always have metas the issue isn't the matchmaking its that in the vast majority of all "realistic" FPS games there is only so much you can do with a gun to actually give it values that are separate from others outside of shotgun close range, rifle medium range, sniper long range. Everything aside from that are very small changes for the most part. even games like TF2 that has alot more ability to make guns weird and different still suffers from most people using a very small selection of the weapon list. Honestly alot of this is due to the reality that real world guns 100% fall under the aspect of meta guns being the only viable ones if you dont want to die. there are thousands of guns in the world but 99% of all militaries use weapons that are almost exactly alike from eachother.
Sbmm makes sense in small scale games like 5v5 or 6v6 on maps designed to accentuate player abilities and skill expression Sbmm doesn't make sense in battle royale games which is where the vast majority of people who encounter it have problems with its implementation
I don't mind close games. It's the games where your team is bad and you are hard carrying to the point of frustration at teammates just dragging you down.
Ignoring the True Hardcore types who just want to stomp on children, the problem most normal people have with matchmaking is that more often than not, it's just really badly implemented. Halo Infinite took an entire year to start giving both teams the same player count; League of Legends used to frequently ignore its own 'Too few players' warning causing 3v5 stompings; Team Fortress 2's 12-against-4 matchmaker is objectively complete crap, and unlike in a server browser game there's no scramble button to try and sort the numbers out.
might be true enough, but i balk at anyone using terms like "self-awareness" or "media literacy" now, i only bring up the media literacy thing because i stole this opinion from someone else when that was the topic. it reeks of people trying to sound smarter than everyone else. i should know, i've played the self-awareness card many times, and look at how big of a bunghole i am!
The winstreak bonus is interesting because to people who enjoy improving and getting a challenge this is a reward but for people who just like stomping noobs it's a penalty.
ELO hell is the idea that you are more skilled than your team you are stuck in currently, but not enough so to drag them kicking and screaming to victory. I personally believe it's a myth because you aren't stuck in that same team over multiple matches (usually) and if you really truly are more skilled than your current rank then your skill should likely be the deciding factor in the match. That being said I remember back in my 2016-2018 OW days specifically hopping into group chats saying "kill that mf (insert character here)" and you can bully those better players out of being able to impact the game as significantly as they would with divided attention
If your actual skill level is higher than your ranking indicates, you should be able to flip enough games in your team's favour to move up the leaderboard over time. But it's gonna take a lot longer than in a 1v1 game, where your individual influence is higher. Especially in a game like LoL where if you have 2 hours to play, then you're *maybe* getting 3 matches in.
@@williampounds5191Elo hell is real and you're delusional if you think it isn't. There are so many people who don't deserve to be in the rank they are but they are stuck because of their team or BS like smurfs. You can be a silver player in league going against a smurf who is diamond. Are you bad because you can't beat a guy 4 divisions higher than you? Are you bad if you are playing well but bot lane is griefing/inting? Are you bad if your mid laner gets diffed mid and he decides to rage quit the game leaving you in a 4v5 unwinnable game. To sit here and say Elo hell doesn't exist is beyond stupid.
I feel a reverse problem in Fortnite where any easy fight often feels like it's probably a bot, even if it wasn't. Which can make it feel kind of empty to win.
And then you have games like Hearthstone, where your win rate and your rank directly affect your ability to play the game (since you're rewarded for winning and having a high rank, and that's how you get cards). The stress was real, the salt was high. I'm so glad I'm out of there.
Skill based matchmaking would be much easier to swallow if the game had some kind of ELO system. The game nunerically ranks all players, so games will be an unbalanced mess on day one, then everyone filters out over time until every game is a relatively even match. Using ranking systems doesn't have that level of precision, so no game is guaranteed to be truly balanced with some players getting up in ranks by fluke accidents only to get stamped back down into games they steamroll, creating a cycle of pain for everyone.
I’m a fun guy. I just like to play. For example I have like a 3% win rate on Street Fighter 6 and that’s still one of my favorite games. Meanwhile I’m more of like a 50/50 guy on Tekken 8. Same deal.
Having a perma 50/50 is garbage game design, just let some players be slightly better and slightly worse. I actually don’t find the sbmm for cod so bad, Halo Infinite had the worst IMO where if you did well one round with a team it would take your high skill and have you teamed with low skill players while the enemy team was made up of middle skill players and you’d get stomped trying to carry your team.
The loss of players was minimal lmao They also don't tell you that strict modern SBMM is hated but the looser shit the old Halo games had is what made them the hottest games on the planet for years
SBMM disincentivizes using anything but the best guns in COD. That's why it's looked down on. Every lobby is a sweat factory. Unless you're also using an STG-44 or MCW, you're gonna have a rough time.
literally all forms of competition disincentivizes using anything but the best strategy and equipment. the simple act of wining and losing inherently rewards those for using the best methods to achieve victory because victory is the intrinsic goal of all competition. People have been chasing the meta since the dawn of time. we've been throwing spears because human mains learned quickly that spear throwing is way more op for killing Gazelle then strangling them even though salty Lion mains called us tryhards for it.
the real solution to making a game be able to have the addiction of winning and also have an actually good competitive experience is to have bot matches where you can shit on some dumbass cpu enemies who fall over to make you feel better, star wars battlefront 2 the original game at least, never played the ea ones, was one of the best games ever bc of this way to make you feel really good about yourself
I think my biggest issue with this whole thing is games should stop doing Ranked and un-ranked modes have different gameplay mechanics. Overwatch 2, for example, don't play full length of the match if you play casual. In Ranked you play both Offense and Defense, but in casual you only play one or the other and game ends, so you can get 20 games on defense in a row. Dota 2 is another example. Back when i played, Ranked would have ban phase as well as pick phase and in casual whoever pick first going to play that character. I hate what Ranked matches do to people and how shitty it is to play, whether it's stomps by smurfs or just people being insufferible, but unranked game modes not fun to play, because they don't have depth of ranked games.
Tekken 8 hackers have me confused on my actual skill level, I just made it to purple and alls I do is grab and stomp feet with steve fox. Im basically never allowed to do any of my good moves. I just have to stare and watch them whiff. And it feels so funny they dont know what punishing is and just keep kinda doing moves at me.
In the weird gacha gundam extreme versus clone i've been playing, I'm in a situation where i've been using unranked to try out new characters and apply tech to my game plan, so my rank has fallen so far behind my skill level that playing ranked just results in me 3-0 a bunch of mashers and I'm more likely to get a decent match from a random dice roll than the algorithm
God reminds me of when I played Overwatch competively back in 2016 to 2019. Could call myself a mid diamond ranked player but due to either extreme sweat 6 man team or the fact my friends and I would have 1 or 2 random that would botch the game so hard I was always stuck in high Platinum.
Fighting game players are there for the thrill of battles not whatever the fucking results screen say. Mind you, I think shitty systems force people to rely on what the results say more than the journey it takes to get there and that shit sucks. FGs stay winning.
I am correct and different. I want all matchmaking (aside from 1v1 games) to be replaced with the older and better system which is dedicated servers wheer you join.
The real issue is two factors: The actual data doesn't show a meaningful depreciation, it shows a small percentage. And also it's a study done by the people promoting the model. Who have a stake in the use of a model that has the sole focus of retaining players. That doesn't make it a *good* model. It makes it an effective one. But if you conflate effectiveness with good, you might be a moron. Especially showing how this impacts people's stress.
what value would it have for them to lie on their own model when the point of the system is to be effective. stress? motherfucker its a video game if you're playing it and feeling stress then thats on you for having a shit attitude. if you are gonna be this critical of the only data we know then go make your own
If fair means 50/50 winrate then your entire playerbase will stay at roughly the same rank forever. Minor variations aside it sounds like a steady state system, which sounds like a slow miserable death for a competitive scene.
Pats example of 10000 coin flips is an example of a truly "fair" system and that is a system which causes massive loss streaks and massive win streaks. Natural is what our standard of fair should be. Not this bullshit.
Elo Hell is a tired topic by now and it was never proven to be real by anything substantial. I personally subscribe to the thought that it's a complete myth, an excuse as to why you are silver, "it's them, not me!", "it's the system that's flawed I'm not doing anything wrong!". I played league on and off since 2011, and I have seen people play thousands of ranked in a season and use this excuse, my brother in Christ, if you played above 100 games in a season and you are hard stuck in some rank, YOU BELONG THERE! It's your cap at the current time, and the only way to move up is to improve. Case and point: many league players pay actual fucking money to get them out of Elo hell, after the service is provided they immediately start tanking their rank to the previous state because it is literally their skill level, they can't compete in platinum or gold. Then they autopilot another 500 games, without improving a single bit of their strategy or actually learning patterns or understanding why and when they lose or win and blame it on Elo Hell because it can't be them, right?
Rule #1: Never tell the players what matchmaking is used
This I think is one of the biggest key factors.
The second you introduce any kind of system that categorizes participants into "better" or "worse" groups you immediately get people trying to game it. From the Tryhards to the Hackers to the Griefers and the Smurfs and the Carried.
I think the best case scenario is the one described in Futurama: "When you do things right, people won't be sure you did anything at all."
@@hyperon_ion9423 The people who reverse smurf by buying an account and then...get shitstomped every game I guess? I don't get it.
@@ThisNameIsNotTaken99 That's called being boosted and I think people do it so they can tell their friends that they have a high ranked account. Thats the only reason I can think of that makes sense.
@@CoreyTF2Its also a blaming your teammates thing, people become so convinced that their team is the issue that they legitimately believe theyll be able to compete at the highest level if they just get boosted up there
Rule 2: don't tell players when you put them into an offline Lobby of bots only 😅
"Life is a skill issue" is a bombass title
The talk of "do the people who want easy wins just not like knowing the thrill of a close match? Do they not have fun knowing they pulled through with their own skill?" comes up from Woolie a few times on the podcast, when talking of cheaters or smurfs, and the like, and the answer that comes to my mind is usually: "Maybe they would prefer it, but they'd have to actually experience it first. And that requires reaching the top of a hill they are either unable or unwilling to climb, and have no way of knowing if it'll be worth the effort beforehand."
preach
Man what a really profound way to call someone like that a bitch
I've had this conversation with a few ppl in Overwatch. They tell me I should only be having fun and not try as hard to be playing the game, or winning. I ask them, why can't I do both, and they never have a reply.
@@DA-zc7kr what they mean is learn to enjoy the process over the result. Its is fun to win but wins should idealy be a bonus, you should like the game first. I had to learn that the hard way, childhood shenaningans made me hate losing therefore making me hate competitions, works wonders liking the process above the result.
@@DA-zc7krthey never have a reply cause when someone says what you said, they realize you’re not ready cause you’re not listening
Woolie was a victim of SBMM when he went against Daigo in SF4 during Pools at EVO
don't worry, he played footsies
He already established that he knows how to play
One part of the conversation that I'd like to hear their opinion on is the reduced prevalence of custom lobbies. Cause, yea sbmm is fantastic for ranked, but a lot of games now only offer "ranked" and "random lobby"(which is still usually using sbmm). But I remember the old CS1 days where you'd have a server list and if you wanted to goof off and not have to try there'd be severs for that, so then all the stoners would be in one sever and all the try hards in another, and the new players in another, and I feel like there was less toxicity. Maybe that was just because I was in a stoner sever.
I have little experience with shooters, but by my understanding, the biggest provider of custom lobbies right now is Halo Infinite. There's ick attached to that name, but from every person I've heard mentioning its lobbies, they are the way to maximize multiplayer fun.
Lethal Company is the only other custom lobby-heavy game I know, and that's due in large part to mods applying per lobby.
servers also foster a community around them. so you can gain a familiarity with players you're fighting against. so even if you're on a 'casual but trying to win' server that has some pro players on it, you can eventually learn how to overcome them.
its something that cant be done if you're going through a rotating door of people. where it's just sink or swim.
@@RougeMephilesClone Well, there's always TF2 (not the one Woolie loves)
I do miss the time when onilne FPS map cycles included recreations of the Simpsons Town, rat maps, some guy's highschool and "the dopest map you've ever played, made entirely out of orange default textures."
...I miss "Hal's Playground 24/7 2fort_rainy"...
Recently got back into WoW, friend of mine loves PvP. Brought up SBMM to him as a way to handle the PvP issue of player retention, maybe balance it around gear level with caps in place so you never fought someone vastly weaker or stronger than you and using their match making record to populate battlegrounds.
His honest to god response was “But I don’t want that, I like two shotting dudes with no gear”
That’s what we’re up against to make SBMM the norm, the idea of “But this is fun for ME”
*Insert Spider-Man comic panel here*
Every form of wow pvp has mmr and so SBMM except for random battlegrounds which are about as casual as it gets.
You can watch your number go up and down in WoW from match to match.
@@Kaarl_Mills *insert Captain America "I understood that reference" meme*
I don't get why those guys just play PvE? It's not like you're opponent can do anything anyway when you that far ahead. Might as well stomp NPCs.
I know that people play games to have fun not to have a challenge, but I feel like people who do that should be immediately flagged and be put under something like being a sex criminal background check for being a sociopath
Engagement and playtime are the wrong metrics because your quality of life is not optimal when you're playing 1 game for 8 hours straight versus playing a few games with naturally occurring "alright that's enough" moments.
I can tell a game is great fit for me when I'm enjoying it even if I lose.
Can uou give some of the games that you have enjoyed please?
@@Dracobyte Smash Bros, Tekken, Rivals of Aether, Mark of the Wolves, Samurai Showdown, Gwent off the top of my head.
@@Kool212 thanks for the answer!
Sadly many man children never learn to take a loss. A loss screen is a reason to give up or throw a fit (accuse cheating, verbal abuse, ect) sorta like that irl too. People are NOT well rounded mentally generally speaking... unless you're referring to the grooves in their brain.
@@Dracobyte I very strongly enjoyed the original Conker's Bad Fur Day multiplayer for the N64. The XBox version completely changed the multiplayer, but the N64 version's multiplayer was asymmetric. I genuinely just enjoyed the shenanigans and cool moments, and didn't care much if I lost, which was nice. It nailed a very precise vibe that I've rarely seen done elsewhere.
33:29 - 'Be Calm, Ham Sandwich. For you are no threat to ME.' - Measurehead
Love the bit of statistics talk. As basic as it is, the psychological ramifications of that shit explain quite a bit about the world and the way people build their beliefs on personal experience, even against good evidence of the opposite.
I remember a similar discussion around Baldur's Gate 3 and the dice roll "smoothener" algorithm a while ago. Turns out, actual randomness sometimes feels like absolute shit, and it may be what you want, but having the Karmic Dice turned on by default makes more sense for most people trying to have a good time.
I'm also reminded of Fire Emblem's 2RN and "True Hit" systems, which make displayed chances above 50% WAY more in your favor.
@@RicochetForceX-com *is" mostly fair though, you only get benefits on streaks where you're missing, ayyyyys are hitting, or you've lost soldiers. Which is significant, of course, but for like 95% of a successful campaign it won't be super relevant. And it shows, people butch about X-Com percentages all the time.
Trust the multi billion dollar company. They have your best interest in mind, don't worry about the board of directors.
30:30 i got a deep hatred for people who dont do the "i am back wiggle"
To wiggle is human, to not is Monstrous
Pretty sure the guy behind the Matchmaking of MW2 that Pats talking about is Max Hoberman, who was the matchmaking dev for Halo 2. Dude does not get enough credit for creating matchmaking as we know it today.
MW2 was, is, and always will be MechWarrior 2.
@@Ozymandias2x You might as well be saying CS was, is, and always will be Cool Spot and not Counter Strike. It ain’t the 90s anymore lmao
The games I develop are really small. One of them has a button to automatically join a match that simply connects you to whoever clicks that button immediately before or after you click it (depending on whether someone is already waiting). Since the playerbase is so tiny, nobody bothers clicking that button and they just manually connect to each other's matches through a chat room.
The other game with matchmaking is slightly larger, but still not big enough for skill-based matchmaking to work (plus, it's a co-op game). So the "algorithm" we use is the exact clever algorithm you're probably subconsciously inventing right now in your head. We show the player a list of lobbies that they're allowed to join and then let the player pick one. That's it, that's the entire algorithm. We still have some knobs we can turn - the default ordering of the list, the placement of various data points about each lobby on the screen, etc. But at its heart, the algorithm is a big black box that data goes into and a decision comes out. And the algorithm is different for every player because the algorithm *is* the player.
(And no, I'm not going to advertise them here, so don't ask.)
Where would you advertise them?
@@spideralexandre2099 in a place where it would be appropriate to talk about my own projects by name; not the comments section of someone else's content.
@@BenLubar I appreciate your uncommon integrity.
Good luck on your projects!
Are the games peer to peer, or will the multiplayer become inaccessible once the central matchmaking servers shut down?
my only experience with sbmm is dead by daylight where one team mate will be *way* over your skill level and 2 teammates will be *way* under your skill level, and the devs consider this 'blanaced' matchmaking
well, imagine how the guy way over your level feels.
@@miguelnewmexico8641 imagine how either of the two way below feel. nobody's having fun. it's great.
That's how Overwatch works. Sucks for everyone.
Dealing with ranked gaming requires a degree of ego death, I think. If you are thinking, "I deserve to rank higher than this" you're gonna have a bad time.
Cod pretty much always had some type of sbmm but it was always fun to play. Now the game tries too hard to force a strict 50% win/loss ratio by making you get stomped 50% of the time and then trying to keep you engaged by giving you noobs to stomp the other 50% of the time. Neither of these types of games are actually fun that's the problem.
This is EXACTLY it. Sbmm has been around for a long time. It’s existence is not the problem.
The problem is that it’s been tuned WAY WAY too tightly in more recent games.
This this this. The idea of matching players based on their skill level is a good idea, but the ideal outcome in my eyes is extremely balanced matches that constantly come down to the wire because they're so evenly matched, not the game intentionally placing you in situations where you either stomp or get stomped
And they immediately disband the lobby ur in so u can't make friends, or get a runback.
While that is often called "Skill Based Matchmaking", it's not really true SBMM (more like "Win Based Matchmaking"). True SBMM would not even look at your winrate when matchmaking, as it would try to find players mostly based on the skill level it thinks you are. That skill level would of course change based on wins etc., but not wildly enough to completely turn a stomp into being stomped (at least after the player has played enough matches). It's one of the reasons why I usually play ranked in competitive games, as it often is closer to that than casual modes.
You would still have some players that only know one thing and win/lose depending on if the opponent can handle that one strategy/cheese. Like a Ryu that always jumps in or a DI spammer in Street Fighter, as examples.
Super beast match making
Smash brothers melee melee
@@TurtleGalaxies
This is what my stupid brain sees every time I read "SBMM"
Ranked team games can be the worst, but I'll always take a kid learning how to play over someone who says 'I'll be doing this exact thing over and over, I refuse to do anything else and you guys need to do the objective'.
My favourite is those times you'll play an extra hour because you don't want to lose a random team you're doing well with. It's not even that you're winning, just that it feels close.
The biggest problem is when that focus is placed squarely on a 50% winrate, so you ping-pong between stomping and getting stomped with nothing in between. And neither is really all that fun in the long run.
18:17 Literally one of the biggest problems with Overwatch and got called out a ton when everyone’s win ratio was hitting 50%
I think there is a small aspect about CoD that makes it different from other multiplayer games, it's the kill streak system. The game was built around the pursuit of not just winning, but winning so hard that you're rewarded with free kills.
Everyone who has played CoD for a long time is just chasing those highs of those ridiculous kill streaks and I don't think that's compatible with SSBM.
There are a lot of other aspects of CoD specifically that I think muddy the water here. If you try to play a game with your friends who aren't in the same skill bracket as you, somebody is guaranteed to have a bad time because the rubberbanding algorithm will still put you into the higher "ranked" player's lobbies (even though you the game isn't polite enough to actually tell you your rank). Combine that with the game's historic focus on casual camo grinding fighting with the matchmaking system that encourages you to always play as efficiently as possible, and the whole experience becomes very frustrating very quickly. I absolutely understand the need for a matchmaking system in games like this, but CoD's handling of it repulses me.
In addition to that last part - there's also a demographic of people who KNOW where they are and are just, like, okay with that? Even in the competitive sphere, there'll be a not-insignificant group of people who'll be like "hey newbie, I just started like 2 weeks ago but i've learned some cool shit - try this out!"
and that's honestly even more fun, imo, because like hell yeah, man, let's learn together!
I know where I am: "hard-stuck in bronze after years of experience."
I'm the dude who knows he's shit but I'm cool with it if I can still find my own enjoyment in a game. I see a new player and am like "Good for you man, I hope things go well and you have your fun too." The skill issue toxicity never really was an issue for me because I accepted just kinda being shit at certain things.
@@Partypoopersgroup ✊
Recently I played some Teamfight Tactics with a friend, and I just had two just... abominable games. Didn't get any units I was looking for, my items were all wrong, just terrible. Came in last place super fast
I was proud of myself for being able to laugh and be like "That might be a sign of God just telling me that tonight is not it, I think Im good for the night" because a younger me would have def spiralled
33:00 Pat describing the difference between Get into Fighting Games and Get out of Fighting Games.
Pat talking about sports winstreaks made me remember the Florida State Seminoles getting screwed out of a national championship contention despite being totally undefeated last season because of how bullshit college football's seed system is
Undefeated Power Conference champion and they still couldn't get in! Absolute madness. I almost prefer the COD scrubs over the College Football Playoff Committee.
Not the first time either. It's like they hate money. Everyone loves an underdog story. Let the local team that could in even if they might lose in the end. If they win, though, everyone will go nuts! It's win-win for everyone involved because at least they got their shot.
reminds me of the Leafs every single year :(
GOTTA GET BAMA IN CAUSE DURRRRRRRRRR SEC IT MEANS MORE
How bad the system is? I am not for the US.
Call of Duty has had SBMM since Black Ops 2 but no one ever realized. Let's be honest, SBMM isn't even the problem. It's the scapegoat to the real problem: Lobby disbanding. Ever since Modern Warfare 2019 you can no longer rematch players or stay in lobbies, as the matchmaker disbands lobbies when it detects an MMR disparity. Just keep SBMM as it is, but stop the lobby disbanding. If I had fun that game and wanna stay in the lobby, let me
That sounds good, except the issue is several players from the losing team left. So now it's either reshuffle the teams - which most people hate - or disband the lobby and go back to matching, which is effectively the same thing, annoying but fair.
"no one ever realized"
YES WE DID. WE COMPLAINED LOUDLY AND LONG
In my experience, the problem with SBMM in Call of Duty was that wasn't TRUE skill based matchmaking. The game would throw you into a lobby with terrible players, you win like 5 games in a row, and then you'd get thrown into a lobby with players who pub stomp you instead for 5 games in a row, and then back to the baby table. It never feels like I'm ever really playing against people at my skill level. It's either sweats or actual children. No middle ground. I'd much rather play a game where both teams are balanced with two sweaty dudes and three morons than the former.
one of my most memorable matches in a pvp shooter was Battlefield 3, noshahr canals, Rush, attackers.
defending team had prevented my team from taking a single objective and stolen all our teams helicopters.
it was a 999 ticket match and by the time I joined we only had about 400 tickets left.
my team had been being spawn camped for god knows how long.
and then I made history.
sniped a helicopter pilot, jumped off the ship and stole the helicopter before it hit the water.
captured an objective before anyone noticed what had happened.
attackers won the match with 3 tickets left.
Good for the developers who are getting unionized!
I was under the impression that layoffs were happening as retaliation for forming unions, and the people who joined were always "coincidentally" always first on the chopping block compared to scabs
But we KNOW that companies do mass layoffs to make their numbers look good. They would happen regardless of their employees unionizing or not.
@@Necrikus
I don't think it would prevent layoffs regardless, just pull the good old "The studio wasn't performing to expectations" excuse out, and cry to shareholders for more money
Some of them, certainly. That's why wall-to-wall unions are so important compared to ones for a specific department or location, because it's everyone. They can't lay off the entire company without destroying it.
I'm pretty sure that's a union-busting strategy. Executives bully individuals with micromanagement, third-party groups, and whatever layoffs they can afford to prevent a union from forming. The reason why layoffs are so prevalent right now is because they've become the most affordable strategy due to years of poor planning - and are part of it, because they just make the ongoing talent bleed worse.
Once a union forms, it's a lot more expensive to get rid of the people part of it, which in turn gives employees leverage in changing company policy for their benefit. There are ways that unions can go bad or become self-defeating, but in an industry that is already falling apart, there's no meaningful downside to attempting one right now.
Yes, a company within our current system for profit will naturally resist something that eats into said profits. Whatever action is taken to do that is just the current flavor. Remember return to the office? IIRC from a recent study it was around a third of companies used heavy requirements returning to office as a way for people to quit, and not issue layoffs. All around pure evil
I don't know why it's so controversial to say you should be playing against people of your own skill level more often than not, I understand a lot of games have more insidious tactics than just SBMM to enforce their matchmaking but uh, here's a tough pill to swallow for everyone: If you're playing against people of your own skill level, you're going to win half your games, and lose half your games. If you want to win more of your games than not, that's going to come at the expense of someone else losing more of their games than not.
"Misogyny is a skill issue" - Pat
4:30 Sajam covered this earlier this weak too. Smurfing is super common in nonfighting games so you can get those juicy montage clips
i think people really underestimate how common smurfing is in fighting games. i didn't get a single match in sf5 bronze that wasn't a smurf.
@@LieseFury thats probably not so much smurfing as it is people that are higher ranked with another character or in another game playing a new one but not enough to rank up to their skill level
@@GuelermeDias SF5 does not have per character rank
@@gusbabiski true but people actively make new accounts for the sake of being able to rank up a character without being thrown in a rank they cant handle with said character. streamers have done it all the time. regardless its not really that big of an issue since the only difference between it happening in SFV vs SF6 is that SF6 doesn't make you jump through hoops to do it.
I always love it when someone calls you trash for beating them. Like okay, so what does that make you for losing? If the character, gun, whatever i'm using is bad how was it I was able to beat you? Someone who is using the meta pick. 9/10 they usually call me a slur and that's when you know you've won.
No, you're using meta shit and that's why they're calling you out, dude. Trash.
My favorite is when, in a shooter, you actually use your brain and tactics instead of the usually just sprinting around the map, causing the other team to go “man wtf how could that possibly happen?? Report this mf”
As you use a sniper and spotter correctly, for instance.
@@UCannotDefeatMyShmeatNothing is funnier to me than literally standing still with something like a shotgun in a room and shooting the same two people over and over again. My guy. Pattern recognition. If you got shot from the left the last four times you went into this SPECIFIC doorway, maybe try any strategy other than sprinting full tilt into the room and looking to the right.
@@lacarthcinclair5401 thank you, yes
Its just people protecting their ego. Unearned ego.
The problem is that after every single match you get put into a new lobby, when before it would just scramble the lobby based on the performance of everyone accordingly. And the comparison of sbmm to real life sports or even flipping a coin just doesn’t work because that’s a naturally occurring statistic. What cod has been doing is basically trying it’s absolute hardest to make the coin flip to heads whenever you get a tails and vice versa. It has almost no margin for error either maybe that 30-5 game was just a fluke, well the game doesn’t see it that way, so it “rewards” you with 15-20 match and that’ll probably be your experience for the next 5 matches. It’s like when you don’t do that well you don’t really sink or swim but on that off occasion when you preform beyond what the game expects of you it keeps you it’s like “nuh uh” and pulls you back. Not to mention there’s TONS of gaslighting in that document. And to the people defending them, have you already forgotten the tried and true “we’ve investigated ourselves and found that we did nothing wrong” and also the company that this is even about?
do you have proof of the system actually functioning this way outside of "vibes" kinda hard to take this point seriously when everything you've said has mainly only gotten to become a popular defense from the same people who said they missed stomping on kids
I agree that SBMM is good for the majority of circumstances but when I played CoD last in the most recent MW2, if my friends played with me, they’d have to be in lobbies with significantly better players where I and one other person might be the only people going positive on a team, making even the wins feel exhausting.
I love close matches but man do they get exhausting
Elo hell isn't just about being pulled down, in League's case it's also possible for the point gain/loss to become completely fucking broken and you just stop gaining as many points per win because it recognizes your skill level is higher even though your rank is trapped by the player distribution, and now by the points themselves requiring those win streaks just to finally move.
Elo hell in League is worse than 20%... its actualy 10% because it also takes into account the skill level of the enemy team
about pick-up games. We had the opposite in football. Blowout games were too boring so I was used as the balancing rod. The team of great players with a trash goalkeeper vs the team with trash players and a great goalkeeper. The other team could easily get through the players on my team, but I could stop them from scoring again and again. But if my team ever got close to their goalkeeper? Basically a guaranteed win. It was a game of who would break first. Me, the good goalkeeper or the one dude that accidentally got past them and scored
Insert David Szymanski's quote about esports runing multiplayer.
literally who
Iirc for studies in maintaining the fun factor in play, winning 30% of the time is the minimum as going below that feels bad and one loses interest in playing anymore, be it humans or other animals. So that's another factor with the loss feeling twice as bad as a win, and not setting the sbmm parameters to shoot for a 50/50 win loss ratio as that gives you the wiggle room for win streaks here and there.
"Fair does not feel fair" reminds me of XCOM. And how everyone always makes the memes about how much the game cheats and is bullshit and the classic "that's XCOM, baby!" meme. Only for it to come out that yes, the game DOES cheat! But in the PLAYER'S favor. And that the difference in the difficulty levels is just adjusting how much the game cheats in the player's favor.
True that!
people have a seriously difficult time understanding probability and percentages.
they will throw tantrums about missing a 85% chance to hit because they the 15% to to miss really isn't that unlikely at all.
There's also an important distinction between having balanced teams and having everyone at the same skill level. I think there is value in having teams that are evenly matched but have skill disparity within them. A team where Pat and Chris are on the same team vs the skins isn't fun (even oftentimes for the winners). But more balanced teams can be fun in a different way than exclusively skin vs skin and pat vs chris matches. Of course this also comes with game design where less skilled players can still contribute.
I'm convinced that mitigating loss aversion is the reason so many games will have you drop ranking/MMR (when losing a match) twice as fast as you will gain it (from winning a match).
Dropping rank your rank further is more likely to put you with someone you will win against, your odds of winning will favour you.
We're really struggling! - Pokemon Unite ranked 90% of the time
Man I just hate losing in Halo because a teammate in a 4v4 goes 2-19
I think the biggest problem is that SBMM is a black box to some extent.
And gamers at least in the people I’ve talked to more assume it has to do with Carodon stick attention retention as opposed to actual fair matchmaking.
I’ve talked to a lot of people about this and have told me they believe it works in a system that lets them win just to keep playing, but only enough, pretty much matching them against players that are better than them the majority of the time until it decides to let them go against someone of lower skill.
Now it doesn’t matter if this is what’s happening and I doubt this is what’s happening, but the people I’ve talked to this certainly seems to be a widespread impression.
Where there's smoke.
When it comes to statistics, one of my favorite games to look at is Blood Bowl. People assume that in a 1d6 system that you're bound to fail only 1 out of 6 rolls. However, there's a lot of dice being rolled and the odds of a game where you fail every roll will always be 100% guaranteed to happen to someone at some point.
SBMM is great when you want a game to be more centered around competition and wanting to improve.
CoD players ***don't want that.*** if they did? They'd use the ranked play mode. They want to hop into a random game, on a random map, with random people of random skill levels, with the only common factor being decent ping, and the fact they're playing the same game.
SBMM may indeed work for what the *company* wants, but the players, the ones that have been around for a long-ass time, have been playing since ye olden days, even the new ones, they hate it.
I have no strong opinions on it. My main complaint with modern CoD games is how every gun sounds like ass, they don't keep lobbies together between matches, and how the unique co-op modes, Spec ops and Zombies, seem to be getting turned into *just* zombies.
Skill based matchmaking only works when it's not cheesed which is a problem with Higher skill levels.
So many people in overwatch for example, made alt accounts to go "haha bronze to gm" mainly to just to harass players that weren't at their level. Still a thing and overlooked by the company.
I dont know how the high-level Overwatch players are " harrassing" lower-level players with their bronze to gm videos: They're barely staying in those low rank for two or three games at best. It's literaly a speedrunner. Add the fact that those kind of video are often requested by their own community.
Its not like when Redshell made a bronze account just to watch bronze player being stupid in ranked.
I also don't blame those guys for making alt account especially when you see their 20-30 min queue-time to find a game in their elo. At least they can play the game and keep themselves busy for a moment.
In a odd way , "Bronze to gm" in OW is also due to bad (GM games with a lost diamond 1 on your team) and super slow matchmaking, bored viewers and viewers who wants that "Educational bronze to gm" so they can get some tips to be better in their own elo.
@@starcilio4962 Mostly unrelated but I finally have some niche knowledge I can share since I was an ex-pretty high elo player around season 3 of overwatch 1 and this chance will never come up again.
Here's how high-level overwatch players are harrassing lower level players.
There were entire discords for high elo players who would int or hard carry low elo games on alt accounts to prep for climbs with an added incentive being bounty systems for targetting specific players. Mostly streamers "Oh this player is on the enemy team, spawncamp their entire team. Then let them take the first objective to extend time, and then spawncamp them all again."
Games dragged out for up to an hour of this. And you only really need 2 players on a team who are masters+ to manage it in gold/silver/bronze.
Some people didn't care about this aspect, a lot of people were just throwing games to set up for a high winrate climb so they could get some ridiculous numbers like 112 wins 0 losses or 60 elims a game on tracer to show off on the stat sites that tracked that.
I don't know if this or target inting low elo players is still a thing in today's overwatch. But there were absolutely coordinated groups of really good players who would go out of their way to fuck up low elo. Both ways, going down and going up and I would not be shocked if that community is still going.
All the people who say defeating underskilled players is how they have fun were or wanted to be bullies in school. That is the literal same mindset.
Says the grown adult who wants eomm to help him pubstomp literally elementary students.
This reminds me of that story where a guy gets a bunch of xboxs to play with a bunch of terminally ill children, just to farm clips on them
even cold war dystopian novels can't get this level of sociopathy
Cranking 90s in the pediatric cancer ward
Its truly amazing to me that people are so engrossed in their own behavior that they get to that point.
As an FF14 player, playing DPS is a double-edged sword because of how long you have to wait in queue or if someone drops mid-dungeon/trial. It’s partly why I started playing tank classes.
So it always sucks when expansions have both new classes be DPS; I absolutely get the frustration from some people during those times because they have finite time in a day like everyone else.
There has been one standout to SBMM that has actual ruined the game for my friends and myself and thats the Hunt Showdown star system were you have a skill rank of 1-6 stars but it fluctuates actively as you have successful games at 4 star (were my group usually sits) that feel like normal games were its challenging but not stomping, but the moment we win like 2-3 runs we move up to 5 star and get put against 5-6 star groups that rush spawns and are just WAY too sweaty. So a session of playing Hunt for my friends and myself just boils down to now is we play a few in 4 star get moved up to 5 star then get stomped on every game until we get pushed back down to 4 star.
Legitimately as a former Call of Duty player, SBMM should never be a non-variable. Having the matchmaking be THAT strict makes the game boring. Most of the mechanics that would be interesting with customization goes out the window since you're now fighting for a couple percent chance more to win gunfights watching TH-cam after every patch. No diverse builds, just what's the best 2 ARs and SMGs. Honestly pushed me back to fighting games since at least there I can see myself getting better or worse. If there was a rank or number to actually show any progression whatsoever the complaints wouldn't be as bad.
this right here? this is the shit that i tune in for. this is what makes my nerd brain happy.
This actually helped me realize that I am insecure about my ability to draw. Thank you for that.
I miss the days of 1.6 private servers. One of the servers I played on had something like 4 tiers of players. I was somewhere between tier 2 and tier 3 depending on the day. But then a tier 1 player would show up and completely own me. The server had about 150 active players, which would cycle over time during the day. I was not in /top15, but I was in the group of people that could sometimes get in and then get pushed out. but if someone from the top 5 showed up everyone was getting shot down.
Why say all this? Because I learned from that and that's how I was able to sometimes get into top 15. I had to go against someone better to understand that my bullshit isn't so hot and that I'm making mistakes. Kind of like fighting games. Then matchmaking came and I lost that.
I don't like any kind of matchmaking because it tends to make you plateau because you don't encounter people better than you so your nonsense doesn't get called out. But if there's going to be matchmaking, at least make it skill based. It's boring to curb stomp
My main critique of the SBMM paper was that it still showed that it could give you unbalanced matches. By their matchmaking logic, a valid match would have one team with one high-skill player and a bunch of low-skill ones vs a team of all middling-skill players. Players on the higher-end of the skill bracket are far more likely to end up in matches where their teammates are far, far worse than them and likely the enemy team. Sure, it's balanced but it's in no way enjoyable for the high-skill players to always have to carry.
I just realized I'm really high and I haven't been listening to anything being said for 10 minutes and instead have been watching Woolie's beard scratch against the mic guard wondering what that sounds like.
randomness is interesting, lack of weird patterns in large sets of numbers is how fraud/fudged values can be detected
I've got a funny story about the sf6 win streak bonus. I play modern controls Zangief (I'm bad at fighters and grabs make the dopamine go brrr) and after a while I didn't play the game so much but when I did, I would just hop on rank get some matches and hop off. problem is that I had a week of just winning match's in like 2-3 fights per day before hopping off. I am NOT good sf6, barely know how to drive cancel and combos? not happening. My rank was I think at mid/top of bronze and when I ended the streak, I was at the top of silver almost getting into gold. my streak was I believe was somewhere in the 15+ range so the scaling was crazy on the elo boosts. This is all fine and dandy, but when I finally got in the mood to just sit down and play for a while, I got utterly obliterated. I rightfully got my rank back down to a reasonable level but I'm still just stuck at the very beginning of silver because of the derank protection. I cant play Zangief anymore cuz I fucked up my elo and everyone beats my ass. straight up made me switch to Manon because I never went on some wild SPD spree to fuck up my rank XD.
The funniest part of the just play ranked argument in cod is i would of they didn't force me to play specific game modes with a limited weapon pool
12:22 I've seen the pattern like that a few times, but with scratch tickets. When I do I know it's time to cash out. I walk away making more money over all that way.
Makerbot should've unionized after Stratasys' buyout...
Personally, one of my biggest problems with COD's matchmaking system is that it basically invalidates anything not considered meta. Once your MMR gets high enough, you will not see anyone using anything but the like 5 best guns in the game, all customized the exact same way. Deviating from the meta basically guarantees you will lose the vast majority of gunfights you get into. It gets incredibly boring having to use the same thing game after game after game when there's like 60 other guns in the game to use.
that's not a COD problem thats a video game problem. all games always have metas the issue isn't the matchmaking its that in the vast majority of all "realistic" FPS games there is only so much you can do with a gun to actually give it values that are separate from others outside of shotgun close range, rifle medium range, sniper long range. Everything aside from that are very small changes for the most part. even games like TF2 that has alot more ability to make guns weird and different still suffers from most people using a very small selection of the weapon list.
Honestly alot of this is due to the reality that real world guns 100% fall under the aspect of meta guns being the only viable ones if you dont want to die.
there are thousands of guns in the world but 99% of all militaries use weapons that are almost exactly alike from eachother.
Sbmm makes sense in small scale games like 5v5 or 6v6 on maps designed to accentuate player abilities and skill expression
Sbmm doesn't make sense in battle royale games which is where the vast majority of people who encounter it have problems with its implementation
i'm too high for this...
so sad to hear 500 devs at blizzard getting laid off
I don't mind close games. It's the games where your team is bad and you are hard carrying to the point of frustration at teammates just dragging you down.
Ignoring the True Hardcore types who just want to stomp on children, the problem most normal people have with matchmaking is that more often than not, it's just really badly implemented.
Halo Infinite took an entire year to start giving both teams the same player count; League of Legends used to frequently ignore its own 'Too few players' warning causing 3v5 stompings; Team Fortress 2's 12-against-4 matchmaker is objectively complete crap, and unlike in a server browser game there's no scramble button to try and sort the numbers out.
"I don't want to play against sweaty tryhards; I just want to own some noobs and have fun." - people with absolutely zero self-awareness
"Competitive" players don't want to compete, they want to beat people, the harder the better.
might be true enough, but i balk at anyone using terms like "self-awareness" or "media literacy" now, i only bring up the media literacy thing because i stole this opinion from someone else when that was the topic. it reeks of people trying to sound smarter than everyone else. i should know, i've played the self-awareness card many times, and look at how big of a bunghole i am!
@@miguelnewmexico8641 so this is where my mustached clone went
Leopards ate my face
I prefer it when literal children are able mash buttons hard enough to get on top of elite leaderboards.
why would you prefer that?
@@DeliriumTrigger2 I think he's being sarcastic.
@@DeliriumTrigger2 for the memes
@@Kaarl_MillsFor the sheer rage.
The winstreak bonus is interesting because to people who enjoy improving and getting a challenge this is a reward but for people who just like stomping noobs it's a penalty.
ELO hell is the idea that you are more skilled than your team you are stuck in currently, but not enough so to drag them kicking and screaming to victory. I personally believe it's a myth because you aren't stuck in that same team over multiple matches (usually) and if you really truly are more skilled than your current rank then your skill should likely be the deciding factor in the match.
That being said I remember back in my 2016-2018 OW days specifically hopping into group chats saying "kill that mf (insert character here)" and you can bully those better players out of being able to impact the game as significantly as they would with divided attention
If your actual skill level is higher than your ranking indicates, you should be able to flip enough games in your team's favour to move up the leaderboard over time.
But it's gonna take a lot longer than in a 1v1 game, where your individual influence is higher. Especially in a game like LoL where if you have 2 hours to play, then you're *maybe* getting 3 matches in.
There's countless stories of Overwatch players seeing their win rate skyrocket once they just learned they could get on voice and say 'no more ults'.
It can be very real depending on what role you play
yeah elo hell has never been real. people dont realize how bad they are.
@@williampounds5191Elo hell is real and you're delusional if you think it isn't. There are so many people who don't deserve to be in the rank they are but they are stuck because of their team or BS like smurfs. You can be a silver player in league going against a smurf who is diamond. Are you bad because you can't beat a guy 4 divisions higher than you? Are you bad if you are playing well but bot lane is griefing/inting? Are you bad if your mid laner gets diffed mid and he decides to rage quit the game leaving you in a 4v5 unwinnable game. To sit here and say Elo hell doesn't exist is beyond stupid.
7:10 that one dude that keeps losing the 50/50 in hoyo gachas 💀
I feel a reverse problem in Fortnite where any easy fight often feels like it's probably a bot, even if it wasn't. Which can make it feel kind of empty to win.
"If you're not on ethernet why are you even logging in?"
And then you have games like Hearthstone, where your win rate and your rank directly affect your ability to play the game (since you're rewarded for winning and having a high rank, and that's how you get cards). The stress was real, the salt was high. I'm so glad I'm out of there.
No kidding. I still look back and can't believe that silly card game legit made me more mad and stressed out than any other game I've ever played.
SBMM should only be used for ranked. If you're doing pick up games/quick matches it should be a mixed bag. End of story.
Skill based matchmaking would be much easier to swallow if the game had some kind of ELO system. The game nunerically ranks all players, so games will be an unbalanced mess on day one, then everyone filters out over time until every game is a relatively even match. Using ranking systems doesn't have that level of precision, so no game is guaranteed to be truly balanced with some players getting up in ranks by fluke accidents only to get stamped back down into games they steamroll, creating a cycle of pain for everyone.
I’m a fun guy. I just like to play. For example I have like a 3% win rate on Street Fighter 6 and that’s still one of my favorite games.
Meanwhile I’m more of like a 50/50 guy on Tekken 8. Same deal.
Having a perma 50/50 is garbage game design, just let some players be slightly better and slightly worse. I actually don’t find the sbmm for cod so bad, Halo Infinite had the worst IMO where if you did well one round with a team it would take your high skill and have you teamed with low skill players while the enemy team was made up of middle skill players and you’d get stomped trying to carry your team.
Oh, i thought the title was talking about Smash Bros Melee
The loss of players was minimal lmao
They also don't tell you that strict modern SBMM is hated but the looser shit the old Halo games had is what made them the hottest games on the planet for years
SBMM disincentivizes using anything but the best guns in COD. That's why it's looked down on. Every lobby is a sweat factory. Unless you're also using an STG-44 or MCW, you're gonna have a rough time.
Found the pubstomp guy
literally all forms of competition disincentivizes using anything but the best strategy and equipment. the simple act of wining and losing inherently rewards those for using the best methods to achieve victory because victory is the intrinsic goal of all competition.
People have been chasing the meta since the dawn of time.
we've been throwing spears because human mains learned quickly that spear throwing is way more op for killing Gazelle then strangling them even though salty Lion mains called us tryhards for it.
@@Dee-Mellow I AM the one who gets stomped in pubs. Gtfo
the real solution to making a game be able to have the addiction of winning and also have an actually good competitive experience is to have bot matches where you can shit on some dumbass cpu enemies who fall over to make you feel better, star wars battlefront 2 the original game at least, never played the ea ones, was one of the best games ever bc of this way to make you feel really good about yourself
I think my biggest issue with this whole thing is games should stop doing Ranked and un-ranked modes have different gameplay mechanics. Overwatch 2, for example, don't play full length of the match if you play casual. In Ranked you play both Offense and Defense, but in casual you only play one or the other and game ends, so you can get 20 games on defense in a row. Dota 2 is another example. Back when i played, Ranked would have ban phase as well as pick phase and in casual whoever pick first going to play that character.
I hate what Ranked matches do to people and how shitty it is to play, whether it's stomps by smurfs or just people being insufferible, but unranked game modes not fun to play, because they don't have depth of ranked games.
So it sounds like we nees three options:
1. Casual Mode
2. Competitive Mode
3. _Streamer_ Mode 😅
I'd love to find the white paper they're talking about.
My mom experiences the skill level to hostility to newbies ratio in fucking soapmaking! It really is everywhere.
Tekken 8 hackers have me confused on my actual skill level, I just made it to purple and alls I do is grab and stomp feet with steve fox. Im basically never allowed to do any of my good moves. I just have to stare and watch them whiff. And it feels so funny they dont know what punishing is and just keep kinda doing moves at me.
In the weird gacha gundam extreme versus clone i've been playing, I'm in a situation where i've been using unranked to try out new characters and apply tech to my game plan, so my rank has fallen so far behind my skill level that playing ranked just results in me 3-0 a bunch of mashers and I'm more likely to get a decent match from a random dice roll than the algorithm
God reminds me of when I played Overwatch competively back in 2016 to 2019. Could call myself a mid diamond ranked player but due to either extreme sweat 6 man team or the fact my friends and I would have 1 or 2 random that would botch the game so hard I was always stuck in high Platinum.
Fighting game players are there for the thrill of battles not whatever the fucking results screen say. Mind you, I think shitty systems force people to rely on what the results say more than the journey it takes to get there and that shit sucks.
FGs stay winning.
I am correct and different.
I want all matchmaking (aside from 1v1 games) to be replaced with the older and better system which is dedicated servers wheer you join.
Open dedicated servers are the BEST, simpler times
The real issue is two factors: The actual data doesn't show a meaningful depreciation, it shows a small percentage. And also it's a study done by the people promoting the model. Who have a stake in the use of a model that has the sole focus of retaining players.
That doesn't make it a *good* model. It makes it an effective one. But if you conflate effectiveness with good, you might be a moron. Especially showing how this impacts people's stress.
Exactly. People believing this study are complete hypocrites.
what value would it have for them to lie on their own model when the point of the system is to be effective.
stress? motherfucker its a video game if you're playing it and feeling stress then thats on you for having a shit attitude.
if you are gonna be this critical of the only data we know then go make your own
one day I'll make a popular video recommending battle garegga to a bunch of FPS fans
I will lay back and watch people complain about it's rank system
If fair means 50/50 winrate then your entire playerbase will stay at roughly the same rank forever. Minor variations aside it sounds like a steady state system, which sounds like a slow miserable death for a competitive scene.
Pats example of 10000 coin flips is an example of a truly "fair" system and that is a system which causes massive loss streaks and massive win streaks. Natural is what our standard of fair should be. Not this bullshit.
Elo Hell is a tired topic by now and it was never proven to be real by anything substantial. I personally subscribe to the thought that it's a complete myth, an excuse as to why you are silver, "it's them, not me!", "it's the system that's flawed I'm not doing anything wrong!". I played league on and off since 2011, and I have seen people play thousands of ranked in a season and use this excuse, my brother in Christ, if you played above 100 games in a season and you are hard stuck in some rank, YOU BELONG THERE! It's your cap at the current time, and the only way to move up is to improve. Case and point: many league players pay actual fucking money to get them out of Elo hell, after the service is provided they immediately start tanking their rank to the previous state because it is literally their skill level, they can't compete in platinum or gold. Then they autopilot another 500 games, without improving a single bit of their strategy or actually learning patterns or understanding why and when they lose or win and blame it on Elo Hell because it can't be them, right?
Does lol have microtransactions?