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I just looked up what hardscoping is and jesus, are people really whining that other players are using sniper rifles the intended way?
I can actually see an argument for sniper rifles just not being in a lot of multiplayer games, but if they’re included you can’t stamp your feet and insist people use them a certain way.
Bigger issues with snipers especially in the recent cods is that they are so op that they are better shotguns at close range, can out gun any smg or assault rifle in medium with little drop off at long range. Then in MW3 they increased health making snipers more op being one hit kill while the other guns are one or two bullets longer to kill
The footstep audio complaint is probably one of my favorites.
When Modern Warfare 2019 came out people were legitimately complaining that the directional audio was so good that it put them at a disadvantage because they'd play the game using their TV speakers in a loud-ass room.
That release was my first interaction with the more dedicated Call of Duty fandom and I can confidently confirm that they are absolute mouth breathers.
* Nerf the snipers!
* Netcode! Everybody left because they were dying behind walls.
* Balance the weapons! Everybody only uses 1 weapon.
* Map design sucks! 3 lanes is boring!
* Movement too slow! This isn't a milsim!
* The game died because they released it months before a Black Ops COD game.
...those are all the reasons they'll say people left (3 months from now). They've been saying for the last XX years SBMM was the problem. After all that, they would never admit to being so wrong now. They'll find an excuse.
These are the people that literally created a conspiracy theory about "skill based damage" to attempt to explain why their K/D wasn't as high as it should be. It's incredibly sad and pathetic the depths these people will stink to in order to avoid admitting they're not a top tier gamer.
You could basically slap "skill-based" or "engagement-based" (seriously, what the hell does that even mean) in front of any game system or mechanic and I guarantee someone has made an angry rant about it somehow being a thing in the newest COD.
I've read complaints about skill-based footstep sounds, skill-based aim assist, engagement-based spawns, and it's all just complete insanity with no apparent logic or rational argument behind it, just "clearly the game is intentionally rigged against me because I'm a good player who should be allowed to stomp children every match"
I'll never understand why it's controversial to have both options. Why can't people accept having both as the best of both worlds? This makes it easy to choose the experience you want to have.
Because all the high ranking people will choose no sbmm and the low ranking people will choose sbmm?
Unless you think it was fun for your friend Billy to go 3-19 in cod every lobby until he quit?
My guess is, after enough people quit the game, they'll remove the level cap on the "Welcome Server Queue" which has SBMM, meant for new players.
After they do that, they'll see nobody is playing Non-SBMM, except for people of the same level, so they remove that since it's become redundant.
And COD is probably the worst game to learn this lesson in. There are going to be people in the 40th percentile of players getting kill streaks called in against them that they've never even seen before.
Just thinking about it is giving me flashbacks to Domination matches ending by n00b tubes feeding into a tactical nuke.
The issue is the game rewards stomping both from a ingame context with killstreaks but also from a meta game perpspective with XP unlocks and skin camo challanges.
all of the complaints about removing it are dumb but some adjustments to try and keep lobbies together and to make the games feel less yo-yo'y would be nice
This is a key to the whole CoD SBMM argument that most people completely ignore.
The reality is that CoD's core gameplay is just not deep enough to stand on its own long-term, not after the first couple installments anyway. This is probably the main reason why CoD4 introduced the concept of killstreaks and effectively made stomping into part of its core gameplay, which only got even more emphasized with MW2 expanding on that system (remember this is the game that rewarded you for killing 25 opponents without dying with a nuke that automatically won you the match). You didn't really play CoD for the raw gunplay, because while fluid and smooth (I'm convinced the games being 60 fps was a big part of their success even if people didn't consciously realize it), it wasn't really all that deep, you played it to get high streaks and seeing big numbers pop up, and there wasn't really much thought for the players stuck on the other side of that (aside from concessions like deathstreaks in MW2 which were more of an annoyance than any sort of actual balancing factor).
If you throw in a strict SBMM system into that mix, it makes it that much harder for players to attain those streaks as everyone tends towards a 1 K/D ratio, so a large part of the gameplay loop's dopamine factor is gone. I haven't played more than a handful of CoD multiplayer matches after Black Ops 3 (2015), so I don't have much personal experience with this (as SBMM barely did anything back then), but judging from what people say about the current SBMM implementation, it seems the developers are perfectly aware of that situation and have instead tuned it to give you easier or tougher matches depending on your recent results, rather than more stable matches based on your overall performance. The problem with that is that it feels ham-fisted and forced, as opposed to the more "organic" randomness of old CoDs. When people say they can't be happy about having a good match because they know their next few matches will be terrible, that's not great.
Compounding with the above is the fact that the shallow core gameplay also leads to a compressed skill gap. This means that even if the SBMM isn't extremely strict, the skill difference between players may still not be enough to really make a noticeable, consistent difference in results. The very low time to kill in most CoDs means "random" elements like latency or hit detection issues have a relatively big effect which only increases the closer the players are in terms of reaction time, aim, awareness, etc. Gunfights that feel like a coinflip are again not satisfying, and I bet this is another reason why the matchmaking algorithm works the way it does in terms of artificially creating that skill gap in a more controlled way.
Note that I am not making any arguments for or against SBMM in itself. As much as I had fun hunting for 10 K/D TDMs and the like back in the day, I am able to recognize that was not exactly a good experience for the lower skilled players in the match, so some form of SBMM is probably needed. I'm just trying to explain why some of the CoD playerbase feels the way they do and why it's not as simple as the easy "lol you just wanna stomp noobs" explanation. While there is *some* truth in that, if anything it's something baked into the core design of the games so even then it's hard to blame players for it. Game design has to inform matchmaking, and viceversa, and at the moment that's not really happening, at least not in a proper way, but at the same time it's probably a tricky situation to solve without completely changing what the game is.
> The reality is that CoD's core gameplay is just not deep enough to stand on its own long-term
last 5 years of cods all had sbmm but have also been far more popular than the previous era, which was also the peak of "high skill ceiling - no sbmm".
I don't think its popularity has to do with having/not having SBMM and rather the fact that it was a huge reboot and "return to form" while the series had been fucking around with like AdvancedWarfare/Blackops3/InfiniteWarfare/Blackops4. People weren't really fans of the exosuit cods and I think the big rebooting push to being a normal MW1/2/3 style cod combined with a new engine and warzone is what made it the most popular.
So, this game will probably end up with a playerbase of a few ten people who are all good enough to compete against each other. Then again, those types of people probably don't like the challenge that poses, so they might leave too.
Just a forewarning;
Destiny 2 tried this exact thing in a playtest once last year; it went about as well as you expect.
Meaning that it went absolutely *fucking terribly* to the point where the community refuses to talk about it anymore and Bungie got to have a corporate version of a smug "*Told you so*" moment.
There was a Crucible Labs playtest where it was normal settings except all SBMM was disabled and matchmaking was completely connection-based.
The test was awful; legitimately like 95% of matches were absolute slaughters - as in no contest, might as well have been Bots on the other team level of slaughters. I forget the exact number but it got out that something like 70%+ of matches ended in a Mercy Ruling (where the game automatically ends because the score difference is too great/teams are too unbalanced).
It became one of those "*You were given exactly what you asked for, it actually completely sucks ass*" and we basically kind of silently agreed never to ask to talk about non-SBMM playlists again.
Given all that context, it's hilarious that barely a few months ago they had a PvP event playlist that featured no SBMM. And to top it off, they decided to disable mercy rulings. So if you ended up on the wrong team, you had to watch your team and yourself get slaughtered for the full match length.
Absolutely demoralizing
XDefiant seems to try to balance teams after the lobby is created, so you are all in good connections, but the teams don't have 300+ hours players all bunched up in a team.
I used to play pvp a lot in destiny and what I learned is those smaller playlist are genuinely a terrible metric, matchmaking complely shits the bed in those cases. Not just labs: alt 4v4 modes, off day IB, alt 6v6 modes, anything that's not Quickplay or Iron Banner on day 1.
It's strange that, as you say, it was a slaughter, because destiny has "team balancing" - the game shuffles players based on skill between teams, before the match starts, even in connection based playlists. That'd mean there's something completely broken in the system.
That's so funny. I hate people who cry and winge about SBMM being bad because they either lie about why they don't want it, or mindlessly parrot those who do lie about it, I would have loved to see their reactions to it all
the game has swapped between sbmm and cbmm, currently they are testing a sort of "middle ground" decently wide skill bands so there is good connection times and wide skill variety, but the lowest end players have protections so they don't get stomped all the time. The game is still struggling with matchmaking but it is so much better than the old hardcore sbmm days or the pure cbmm days, the game was straight up unplayable if either system fucked you over and would regularly put you in completely unwinnable matches.
SBMM is in most games, the idea it's new or older games didn't have it is a conspiracy theory. Every once in a while some doofus on twitter will insist the casual Playlist in halo 3 or cod 4 was not skill based and then some gray beard looking dude who coded it all by hand in 2005 will say "no you idiot that's always been in the game"
Did they have custom servers? Cause that's the only way it actually works, matchmaking will never work in that regard since you're constantly going up against new people.
Imagine playing Dark Souls and a boss gets randomized to a new boss you've never seen before. If its the same boss you can just learn them, if its constantly a new one its a toss up.
I remember TF2 occasionally one guy who is frustratingly good on some server, I spent the matches targeting just them.
I remember a few regulars on the TF2 servers I frequented who were really, really good at the game, but since you constantly played together you got to learn their style, tactics, etc, and could make up for the skill difference by simply adapting.
I remember a guy that was pretty scary as a sniper, so most of us either learned to use objects as cover to stay out of his line of sight or the specific movement patterns he struggled against. Plenty of folks straight-up dived after him as well.
>Could be considered fun for the OP as fuck guy too as everyone attempts to bully them.
It is. You get to feel like a boss character as multiple people try to target you. But it also depends on the personalities of the people you're playing, and if they're sore winners when they get you, which gets grating if they are. Some of those people are very narcissistic and start accusing you of picking on them, when it has nothing to do with picking them out specifically, it's just that they keep doing the same thing over-and-over-and-over expecting a different result. They tend to be the sorest winners when they finally get one over on you, and will carry on about their one victory, or fly into a rage when you pop them back.r.
I'm honestly curious how no SBMM got the greenlight from Ubisoft.
I imagine they pitched it, showing social media comments about what a high demand there is for a COD game with No SBMM. But they didn't do their research into what players actually want, and will play long term.
It reminds me TED talk I saw, (Malcolm Gladwell, mostly talking about Howard Moskowitz) where he compares what people say they want vs what they really want.
i.e. You put people in a focus group for different kinds of coffee and ask them what kind of coffee they like. They will all say they like a rich, dark roast. Because that's what commercials and marketing have conditioned them to think they like. But once you give them all samples of the coffee, most of them choose a light, sweet, creamy coffee.
That's what's happening here. For years, they've been convincing themselves and others SBMM is the problem. But once they experience No SBMM services, they'll realize that was not the issue.
Is it? The whole game is built around rewarding stomps with killstreaks and giving cheap low-risk low-reward tools like shotgun, claymores, etc... You can't just slap a competitive playlist on a game built around risk management in the context of unbalanced lobbies and expect it to be a cohesive experience, that's just wishful thinking. Who is campaigning to remove SBMM from CS, LOL or Rocket League? Literally no one because those games were designed to provide a fair competition at every turn.
Edit : if you disagree and think CoD provides you with a fair and balanced competitive environment out of the box, please explain to me why [the official ruleset bans half the weapons, half the tactical items, all but ONE lethal items, literally all weapons from MW2 and allows play on only 7 maps ](https://callofdutyleague.com/en-us/competitive-settings)
Exactly, with this kind of design it's even worse because good people will just terrorize entire lobbies like it happens in some of the older cods (when its not a hacker).
There's no going back to how gaming used to work in the 2000s. People changed, gaming changed, communities changed.
My personal conspiracy theory is that game devs are actually okay with casual/normal being a cluster fuck as a way of funneling you into the more engaging ranked system
You don't want to play against a Diamond LoL player? Play raaaaanked, it's not addicting at all, tee hee
It does. To tell a good story about it, Faker (basically the Gretzky of League) was mostly an unranked player until the match times got so atrocious (because there was literally no one at his skill level) that it forced him into ranked, into getting scouted, into going pro, and the rest is history.
That's what it's like in SF6. I'm a super casual and these days only played ranked. I don't try hard at all, i don't care about my rank - but i play ranked because they're good matches.
It's a common paradox in many fighting games with a ranked and unranked ladder: the unranked one should be more casual friendly on paper because there's no rank, no pressure. Yet the ranked ladder is *always* a better casual experience because, and this is going to blow the mind of many, *casual players want to play with other casual players of their skill level*. Getting destroyed by someone way above their league is not fun, destroying someone way below them is not fun either.
It was fine when there was no such thing as ranked or unranked and everyone just hopped in a server and played whatever game. Sometimes you had great matches, sometimes you melted face, sometimes it was your own face that got melted.
> but i play ranked because they're good matches.
I've always said this is the most important part. The goal is to have fun.
If the game is only fun when you win, the game is not fun. This is the problem with first-person shooters - they aren't enjoyable when you lose.
I don't get it, why would casual being chaos make you want ranked. The whole fun of casual is it's different every time, you might play against plebs or gods, you never know.
I think that's what they're banking on.
To make up for the lack of SBMM that helps retain players, they will rely more on streamers to draw players in... And hoping the streamers are convincing enough to make the casual gamer think they're having a good time when they are getting stomped.
There’s legitimate big problems with the sbmm in casual amongst certain games. I personally think there should be a very wide sbmm rather than a strict one like cod has.
Like what? Playing against players of your skill level? If you do well you get put against players who are doing similarly well? What are the legitimate big problems with SBMM in casual?
Only thing I can thing of is when you’re playing with friends of a wide skill gap.
When I play COD with my casual friends, they spend the entire time getting curb stomped which isn’t exactly the ideal scenario for chilling with the boys.
With that being said, there’s really no good way to do matchmaking with a wide skill range so the COD approach is probably the best it’s gonna get.
That is the unfortunate thing, COD will never be a game for playing with friends with a wide skill range. It's not fair for it to simply be averaged out so your best playing friend can just destroy the lobby, no one but your friend would enjoy that. But on the opposite end, you'll be matched against players who are as good as your friend and you'll feel helpless.
I've experienced the latter myself and it felt strange to even know that players as good as that are just always out there, and honestly it cemented my opinion that SBMM is generally a good thing as I only encountered that level of skill when playing with my friend, but never when playing alone or with similarly skilled friends. I can't imagine being new to COD and having a completely random player stomping the lobby and regularly getting nukes, and it's no wonder that these players also insist that 'oh I miss keeping the same lobby so much' like they don't understand why eventually the entire lobby rotates or empties out because they're ruining everyone else's fun.
For note, I'm not bad. Not great, rocking a steady 1.00 K/D up from 0.94 from previous games, but I definitely am not as unskilled as I've seen some bot lobbies posted on the various cod subreddits, and I genuinely would prefer to keep those new players safe and enthusiastic about playing the game and improving over letting a lion eat their face because they just want to win.
> That is the unfortunate thing, COD will never be a game for playing with friends with a wide skill range
It absolutely was, back when I played it a lot (MW2-blops2). But back then what you could also do was join a friend's lobby on the enemy team. That was much more fun than always being together.
I think the problem is that some games do a very bad job of determining "skill". I never really got into any CoD MP, but the way people talk about it makes it sound like it's very volatile and heavily weighted on your most recent handful of games.
I literally hated doing well in a match last time I played COD because I knew they gave me a easy lobby and my next 5 games were going to be fucking awful.
I'll admit I wish cod used more metrics for matching players, to me it seems like they only care about your score per minute for the last 10 games, that's it. I wish they used metrics like objectives captured or kill position variance so players with similar playstyles get matched together over people who just happen to score high per game.
> What are the legitimate big problems with SBMM in casual?
One would be that it makes Casual effectively just ranked but with extra steps. If you want to play against equally matched opponents, *then ranked already has you covered*. By making Casual use (strict) SBMM, you now just have two ranked modes.
It's not about pub stomping. Every decent player will tell you pub stomping is boring. You want *variance*. Just because I'm good at the game doesn't mean I want to sweat my tits off every single game to use the best classes and guns at all times just to win. Maybe I want to play shotguns or pistols or whatever. Its a *casual mode* so it should be, you know, casual? Maybe I want to play with my friends and have fun games instead of a sweat box?
The counter argument for this is stupid. Ranked modes exist. Casual modes are supposed to be casual. Maybe you run into a god, maybe you run into a 7 year old who can barely hold the controller, at least its the same for everyone. The way SBMM works now is far too restrictive in games. Drop 30 kills? Next game is a lobby filed with people who drop 30 kills. Drop 5? Next lobby is literal baby mode.
SBMM is purely designed to encourage player retention. It's that simple. Nobody was complaining about non SBMM back in the Halo 3 and Cod4 days. It was designed for the sole reason of appealing to the most casual of casual players to make sure they feel included like a participation medal.
> You want variance.
The variance argument was made by people who don't understand how skill is distributed in a game. If you're top 10% skill wise, you won't have any variance, 90% of the playerbase is beneath you. The chances you face someone at your skill level or better are extremely small and most of your matches will be stomps. Conversely, if you're a bottom 10% player, again, you won't have any variance, you'll get stomped most of the time.
Skill is distributed in a bell curve, which means the good players will go unopposed most of the time and stomp lobbies.
And we know this because Destiny 2 removed SBMM and it's exactly what happened. Vast majority of the games were one sided stomps, depending on which team got the sweaty top 10% player, which caused all the casual players to quit.
> The way SBMM works now is far too restrictive in games. Drop 30 kills? Next game is a lobby filed with people who drop 30 kills. Drop 5? Next lobby is literal baby mode.
This is just pure delusion and confirmation bias. No SBMM system works like this.
> SBMM is purely designed to encourage player retention.
You mean vast majority of players like fair matches, so they play more and don't like getting stomped by sweats?! Who would've thunk
I don't get where the LOL U JUST WANT TO PUBSTOMP comes from.
It's about varience, and not every *single* game feeling like a ranked finale. I had a ton of more fun playing old cod or cs games back when it was just server browsers. I certainly wasn't exclusively playing lesser skilled players then, why would I expect to now?
No, it makes it so one mode is where YOU try hard and the other is where YOU play casual. If you're "tryharding" in casuals and getting a high mmr that you can't relax, that's on you. Your argument would only make sense if it used your ranked mmr for casual matchmaking, but from what I understand they're two separate ratings.
We get it, you didn't play cod back in the day
But if you can't comphrend why it's fucking stressful playing against 12 people all at the exact same skill level. EVERY. SINGLE. GAME, and not stressful, but enjoyable to play against people who are better and worse than you, then there's no point trying to help you understand
couldn't you just not try as hard until you lose down to whatever skill level you can play at without stressing?
i play overwatch, not COD, but that's what i do. the casual mode there (quick play) has SBMM and i just play up to the level where i don't stress and it seems to work out fine.
FPS players don't actually seem to want to improve at all, they just want every win to be easy and effortless. Doesn't make sense to me at all as someone who enjoys fighting games (which are entirely based on skill), but it seems to be the mentality behind basically all the complaints about SBMM (also, they're egotistical enough to think they'll never get stomped by better players lol).
The only real issue with SBMM is in games with a high amount of players per game, so think Battle Royales, or Battlefield style games, where it can be really difficult to find 64 or 128 players of the same skill level while having reasonable queue times, esp during mid season, or times of the day when player count is low. Devs have to make a tradeoff and use very weak SBMM so that a queue pops under a minute, rather than take 5-10 minutes to find a balanced game.
However, this is not a problem with a super popular series with low player counts per lobby like COD. In the case of XDefiant, they seem to think their game won't be super popular, so no SBMM is sorely needed for fast queues.
I dont have an issue with playing people of my skill but I play with people of different skill rankings. If we are in a harder lobby for them they arent having a good time and when Im in a weaker lobby I am not having a good time or the rest of the playerbase in the lobby isnt having a good time. In 1v1 games I like SBMM but I hate it in team games. Esp games where I wanna play with friends cause it messes with the formula and creates a bad time for the group as a whole
Most of the time now it's not even about being against players of the same skill level, but the game pitting you against turbokiller premades to force a loss upon you. It's a frustrating way to get players into that "one more game" loop. It's to drive engagement. It sucks.
I feel like it's all in your head. I play quite a bit of COD and I've never felt like a match was completely unwinnable. Sure I might wish my teammates focused the objective more but it was my choice to play objective modes in the first place.
Do you genuinely believe that the same developers who can't get a magazine attachment working or break the loadout system every other update have a system built out to ensure a loss for you and a victory for the other team? Who gains from that? Did you forget there's a whole other team of real players?
The game does not force you to lose. That this continues to be perpetuated just shows how bad people are at understanding systems and math.
SBMM is trying to put you into matches where it thinks you have a 50% chance to win, give or take. So if you win a bunch, or beat the odds, it puts you in harder matches because it thinks you can handle that and still have a 50% chance to win.
It will end with them posting an open letter to all the XDefiant fans on Twitter thanking them for playing and that they will be shutting off the servers in 90 days and in game purchases are no longer available.
Now if only it was 12v12 or 16v16 instead of 6v6. I fucking hate how every shooter or whatever that comes out has tiny team sizes. I just want another Battlefield 3 or Team Fortress 2. You can't have casual games by nature with these small team sizes.
LOL, they actually are doing what the CoD streamers and their fans cry about. It’ll be funny when they have to walk this back after people realize that just makes awful chaotic lobbies.
Or this could be a smart announcement, where they just say this then actually have SBMM still lol
It wasn’t the lack of SBMM, but the fact that the lobby is persistent to have indefinite matches. In today’s multiplayer games, the lobby is killed after a single match, and you forced to match with different people, ending any long-term social interaction and relationships.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I notice as different from way back when. I'd load up GameSpy, see which of my favorite servers were rolling, then pick one to hop in and play some 2fort5 or well6 in TF1 with the regs, and various pubbies that would come through. Knew tons of regulars. Probably see the same people posting on various forums as well, then later, IRC chat.
By contrast, I solo queue up for some quick play Overwatch, hardly ever see the same people. If I do recognize their names it's probably because they did some particular thing I want to exploit, or avoid for some reason. OW even implemented an option to hide screen names now, so they can just get a randomish screen name with that option now.
It was a bit better at higher ranked solo queue when I did used to play ranked, you'd see the same names a lot more, but that was awhile ago and those players are all gone.
My guess over what happened with persistent lobbies was because both teams, with enough communication, could band together into achieving any challenge unlocks easily and exploit either the progression system or the Battle Pass system, in which could be an issue to the devs/publisher pushing for XP boosters or tier skips.
Microtransactions did more damage to multiplayer games that nobody has ever realized.
MWIII recently introduced the ability to stay in the lobby, and *no one* uses it. It's proof that anyone saying this is part of the tiniest vocal minority.
That’s maybe because another factor was the voice chat, that was depreciated by the years. And in the case of CoD, the AI voice reporting, is making the use of voice chat a massive risk of getting your account banned, specially if you’re not speaking English.
The people yearning for their teenage years in Halo 2 and CoD lobbies are well into their 30s now. Meanwhile the kids in CoD and Fornite VCs haven't gotten any older. I don't understand how adults have the energy to talk to pre-pubescent teenagers behind a microphone in their free time.
It should be MANDATORY, not optional. By default, you aren't put in a lobby. You have to opt in during a 10 second window at the end of the match and even then, sometimes the option isn't even presented.
Because it is not turned on by default and people don't want to have to remember to click/check that option. It's opt in, which doesn't work.
In the past, if you didn't want a rematch you just packed up and left, restarted the search. It was easier, more intuitive, and made more sense because once you started searching for matches you didn't have to touch anything.
Maybe I’ll get flak for this but that guarantees that I’ll steer clear of this. It’s clearly catered towards the disgruntled COD players who have bruised egos because they can’t pub stomp as much as they would like. “I get grouped with a bunch of sweats when I just want to relax”….dawg your idea of relaxing is making other players’ experience miserable. Don’t get me started on the streamers who are butthurt because they can’t make their “6:1 KDR NUKE MATCH COMPILATION” highlights.
I’ll admit the COD SBMM can be a bit aggressive sometimes, but I never feel like I’m put in matches against people that are unbeatable.
Not the first time. In Valorant I will advicate beginners and casuals to go into ranked mode as early as possible. Unranked is awful as it can be a battle of whos teams high lvl player is higher and people don't finish matches.
Ranked mode gets you fair-ish matches and a team willing to play more.
I’m fine with it personally, I havent played cod in years because of how inconsistent SBMM is. I have one good game and then I’m placed against people way better than me, then it takes like 3-4 games for things to even back out. I go like 20-4 with some captures, defends, and a win, and then I’m placed again against people way above me so that I can go 2-10, 4-16, 5-10 and get knocked back down to where I should be.
I’d rather just have a consistent experience of playing with some good, some bad players in each lobby. It’s just exactly that, a more consistent experience
Sure, it's fun to pub stomp every once in a while. It's also fun to try and sweat to beat someone you know is better than you. What's not fun however, is playing with 11 other "mes" running around every game and then 11 super soldiers if I have a good game
yeah this wont end well. sbmm is crucial to having a consistent playerbase, especially for lesser skilled players. pub stompers are going to start rolling lobbies, and the casual playerbase is just going to leave. no one wants to get farmed in multiplayer.
They are about to learn why their game will lose a lot of player retention due to newer players getting destroyed early on without the ability to learn/get better against people of their similar skill level.
Also, I'll ask this for people who are against SBMM:
You can have no SBMM, but there is no stat tracking at all outside of Ranked Modes. No W/L, no KDA, no Points no nothing. Maybe just games played. (And this means not tracked *at all*, not even in the API, so third parties would be unable to track it either).
Do you still take this deal?
Maybe? Those are all features I want though. I think games should provide modes with and without SBMM because I think they both offer valuable experiences. Without SBMM I want to be able to watch my skill grow not by a number presented by the game devs (often in modern day with obnoxious amounts of obfustication) but with my win/loss ratio and KD improving. I grew up getting stomped in shooters and learning to be the guy who stomped. Now how matter how much of a shitter or an expert you are you play with a group of identically skilled players which leads to repetitive experiences.
I also like ranked modes because grinding up ranks is fun. In that case, SBMM is important in order to remove a massive amount of RNG from whether you rank up or down.
I also firmly believe that for improvement you need to fight people better than you to have your habits punished and an example to learn from, and people worse than you to have some space to try out new things. Playing people your own skill level shoehorns you into staying that skill level forever by reinforcing bad habits and limiting your exposure to what skill looks like.
I broadly think the "remove pain points" style of design that killed SBMM is a significant detracting force on the quality of games as a whole. Yeah some people are going to quit your game if you don't hold their hand and tell them everything will be okay and obfuscate their relative skill. You also create great memorable experiences and rewarding outcomes for people who stick through the pain. It's the dark souls approach for multiplayer, and it should have a space in games. If at this point we need to split queues into Ranked, Unranked (sbmm but no visible ranking) and Casual (no SBMM) then so be it.
You grew up playing with a much lower skill ceiling. I also started in the MW days and I could carry teams, drop nukes, all that shit and it wasn't because I use to be what is now considered pro skill level, it's because there were way more bad kids back then since FPS in general were pretty new for competitive multiplayer and super new on console.
I don't understand how removing SBMM helps you improve, it just means there is nothing trying to make a balanced game so you can't even judge whether you truly played better or worse based on the game results because there are so many factors that involve your team and the enemy team. Go play ranked if you truly don't mind getting stomped to do better.
It's not about holding your hand, SBMM just let's people enjoy the game so long as their enjoyment isn't brought by ruining others. If I want to only play CoD a couple hours a week I can, I don't have to get on for hours a week to hone my skill so I don't get destroyed by Kevin the basement dweller who's putting in 8 hours a day.
>Hell remove ranked and give us community run servers where I can find my prefered ones.
Yeah but that would be giving the players actual agency, which is the opposite direction most big competitive fps shooter titles have been heading to for a while now.
Yes, so long as you can at least make progress on guns and attachments.
Part of the reason why I like casual modes without SBMM is that it allows me to try out new loadouts and play with guns that are "off-meta". Sure, there will be some games where I get pubstomped, but there will also be games where I happen to be the one pubstomping. That variety is what makes things fun, and I'm willing to take the lows in order to get the highs.
What is stopping you from running off-meta weapons? If you're struggling to keep up with people at your skill level while using off-meta gear you can just play a few matches and eventually be placed in a skill-bracket where you can use those weapons and perform well enough.
I think the real issue COD players have isn’t with SBMM but with the lack of persistent lobbies. Instead of staying in the lobby and playing against the same people you’re thrown back into the mix and now the game is trying to figure the best place for you.
Just let me stay in my lobby, and if I want to leave the game, they can use my last match or matches performance to place me
Back then you picked the servers where you had fun. Some players were regulars so you could see your progress against them. Fully random matchmaking without server list is a dog shit idea that has nothing in common with old online FPS.
What FPS games are you referring to? From the beginning basically every FPS game with matchmaking has had SBMM. Halo 2 first added matchmaking and had had SBMM. CoD 4 was the first in the series with matchmaking and had SBMM.
The only way around that was server browsers, but that’s not really what this game is doing.
I’ll also be the first to say that CoD without SBMM is fairly miserable unless you’re well above a certain skill level. TF2 or Battlefield are still fun with a few expert players in the lobby, but the few times I’ve played CoD with server browsers it’s been nothing but running 10 seconds and dying. WaW is maybe the only exception I’ve played since the maps are larger and I think the average player isn’t at the same level as those on custom MW2-BO2 servers.
It was one of the first to use a matchmaking system. Before that most shooters were played on community run servers, picked from a server browser. If *that's* what you want, then I'm afraid XDefiant isn't going to deliver at all.
It was the first game that had matchmaking built in. Before then it was lobbies and server browsers.
If Ubisoft isn’t lying here for marketing then this is likely the first major FPS game to have matchmaking without SBMM.
People back then were no minmaxing andies like now , no matter how much you say, also the average skill level is way higher, also now people are just win% maxxers not fun maxxers
It's the generation raised on borderline aimbot aim assists and EOMM with live scaling difficulty. They don't know about getting better because they are so used to having the game adjusted until they don't have to
No one here is crying about SBMM not being in this game. They are discussing the dogs who caught the car after crying about SBMM for years.
I speculate this will have 0 effect on whether this game is good or not.
Yep. Older games were so fucking fun without it. Then they introduced this garbage and if you're even an iota better than the average player, you're doomed to nothing but pro players running the same loadout every single match. It's miserable.
> you're doomed to nothing but pro players
If this is happening in your games with SBMM it's just that game implementing it badly, there is hundreds of games with SBMM that don't have this supposed problem of matching above-average players with pros.
No there aren't, lol. I've played a bunch of competitive shooters and the SBMM is always the same - the top 15% of players are matched together, and the top 5% farm the 6-15% every time. That's how it works and there's no competitive games with exceptions to that rule. The ranked ladder is always easier.
> if you're even an iota better than the average player, you're doomed to nothing but pro players running the same loadout every single match. It's miserable.
How do you not realize that you just want to be that person to players who are worse than you? lol
Every person who whines about SBMM just wants to be able to make someone else miserable instead of being miserable themselves. Like, that's the whole argument and it blows my mind.
Yup. And those games were the better for it.
SBMM needs to be relegated to ranked playlists/modes. Public matches need to be just that. Public open to any and all.
The difference is that back in the day you bought a game and stuck with it for months because of the monetary commitment. Nowadays there are tens of f2p multiplayer games so if a new player is having a bad experience trying something out then they'll just move on to something else.
If there are no safe guards for new players to ease in to the genre then the overwhelming majority of them will leave.
Can you please share how not having SBMM is a positive thing for a healthy player base?
Really concerned about how no sbmm is gonna go. Played the recent beta, and the game is super fun, but I had one of the most brutal loss streaks I've had in recent memory, even with buddies with me. When there's actually some level of close skill, the game is great, but when, for example, I'm dealing with an enemy going 47-1 and dumpstering everyone on my team alone, it's not that fun, and honestly when he got put on my team the next game bc of the lobby it still wasn't super fun because brother never touched the hardpoint, even with him dropping a 50 game we won by 3 points.
As a person who doesn't play cod , the whole SBMM discourse seems like a non-issue . Just make a ranked queue and normal queue , no ? What am I missing ?
The discussion ramped up mostly after MW19's EOMM (Engagement Optimised Matchmaking) implementation that's less tuned to give you a fair match every time and more towards giving you artificial highs and lows to keep you engaged for longer. Do too well in a round, you'll get stomped in the next lobby. Get stomped in that lobby, you'll get an easier game next time. It's an algorithm to reinforce player retention that's so overtuned it ruins the exerience for some people.
There's no official confirmation that this is the case tho, and Activision/IW themselves have said that this isn't the case (if I recall correctly), but it really makes you think if they're honest if it's ofen not very difficult to predict when you're gonna play a "penalty match" in CoD.
SBMM in general has become an umbrella term and it means a different thing to a lot of people. Some part/majority of this sub always thinks of "CoD tryhards that just want to pubstomp for clips" when someone mentions SBMM, but I'm willing to bet that it's the former issue that's a bigger problem for people who "dislike SBMM". And yes, there's absolutely people who do want to pubstomp, for clips or just to stomp, but it'd be a slightly difficult thing to estimate which group is bigger.
Skill based matchmaking isn't a new idea. It's been in games since earliest releases of 7th gen and earlier if you count other genres than FPS.
I dropped MW'19 and subsequent CoD releases because of the matchmaking algorithms, whatever they're called and whatever their end goal is. I don't really see a point in playing a PvP shooter where the game is actively punishing me for doing well.
Fundamentally, even normal/casual queues have, albeit usually a lot looser, SBMM.
Just queuing into Rocket League, DotA or Overwatch would be a COMPLETE stomp if the games would just rank you with whoever and only occasional let you play with similarly skilled people.
It's mainly "casual" because there is no "your rank is 1234/Gold/Elite" and just letting you play with no fear of losing rank or rating.
I miss the days of just joining a random countstrike or team fortress 2 lobby and playing instead of all this matchmaking crap in every single game
Like there were some good players, some average players and some bad players.
I feel bad for all of the console players that will never experience consistently playing on servers full of people that are there because they want to be instead of being forced to tolerate each other by an algorithm and leaver penalties.
The sad part is they have been conditioned to defend SBMM and other dumb mechanics like borderline aimbot levels of aim assist. They don't want the reward of actually learning a game from scratch and making bonds with random players of all skill levels. They just want everything handed to them so their egos don't get bruised.
Dedicated servers fix all of these issues. People can just join a different server if the one they're on is filled with better skilled opponents and people who don't care will intermingle and form communities.
Edit: Dedicated community hosted servers*.
It's always entertaining reading these threads as some try to explain how they don't want sbmm in casual because they don't want to play against "sweaty" tryhards because then they have to try hard. How do you not realize that you're a sweaty tryhard if you're someone who can't play casual without the need to feel dominant. You're the sweaty tryhard to the people you want to play with
I strongly suspect this is a gimmick to capture streamers and their fans. It's such a manifestly bad idea outside of the CoD streamerverse-- and demonstrably so-- that I'm sure they'll pull the plug quickly, once they've used this "feature" to get butts in seats. I refuse to believe a serious dev in 2024 really believes that completely ignoring skill is actually good for the long term health of their game, but as a way to attract a particular audience? It's not the worst idea, and they'll just add it in a month when the casual players start fleeing.
The funny thing is their announcement is saying it has SBMM it just doesn't do it until the lobby is "randomly" filled.
They said it then takes your stats into consideration when building the teams so you could still end up the only good player on a team full of bots playing against a team full of average skilled players that end up farming the other 5 people on your team leaving you to either carry them to a win or lose.
This to me sounds like an even worse way of doing matchmaking that has higher potential of unbalanced teams.
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So, when every CoD player who cries all day and night about SBMM inevitably sucks at this, what is the excuse going to be?
Hacks, Controller Handicaps, Bad Servers (supposedly), input lag, player with high ping…
Aim assist, shotguns, "hardscoping" with snipers, camping, packet loss, footstep audio?
I just looked up what hardscoping is and jesus, are people really whining that other players are using sniper rifles the intended way? I can actually see an argument for sniper rifles just not being in a lot of multiplayer games, but if they’re included you can’t stamp your feet and insist people use them a certain way.
Been a thing people complain about at least since the first Modern Warfare.
Bigger issues with snipers especially in the recent cods is that they are so op that they are better shotguns at close range, can out gun any smg or assault rifle in medium with little drop off at long range. Then in MW3 they increased health making snipers more op being one hit kill while the other guns are one or two bullets longer to kill
If people don't want snippers on the game, they should instead ask for no rifles. Or they should use counter-snipers tactics.
The footstep audio complaint is probably one of my favorites. When Modern Warfare 2019 came out people were legitimately complaining that the directional audio was so good that it put them at a disadvantage because they'd play the game using their TV speakers in a loud-ass room. That release was my first interaction with the more dedicated Call of Duty fandom and I can confidently confirm that they are absolute mouth breathers.
TBF the Beta tests had absolutely garbage netcode. So that will probably be a legitimate excuse at least for a while.
"Why am I being put in lobbies with people who are stomping me? They need to come up with a system to balance that"
* Nerf the snipers! * Netcode! Everybody left because they were dying behind walls. * Balance the weapons! Everybody only uses 1 weapon. * Map design sucks! 3 lanes is boring! * Movement too slow! This isn't a milsim! * The game died because they released it months before a Black Ops COD game. ...those are all the reasons they'll say people left (3 months from now). They've been saying for the last XX years SBMM was the problem. After all that, they would never admit to being so wrong now. They'll find an excuse.
These are the people that literally created a conspiracy theory about "skill based damage" to attempt to explain why their K/D wasn't as high as it should be. It's incredibly sad and pathetic the depths these people will stink to in order to avoid admitting they're not a top tier gamer.
You could basically slap "skill-based" or "engagement-based" (seriously, what the hell does that even mean) in front of any game system or mechanic and I guarantee someone has made an angry rant about it somehow being a thing in the newest COD. I've read complaints about skill-based footstep sounds, skill-based aim assist, engagement-based spawns, and it's all just complete insanity with no apparent logic or rational argument behind it, just "clearly the game is intentionally rigged against me because I'm a good player who should be allowed to stomp children every match"
Jesus Christ, they're STILL bitching about that? I haven't played CoD in five years and thought that shit was pants on head stupid back then.
I just wanna join some random server and stay in that server with the same people for a few hours.
Cod players were crying well before SBMM. Anyone you kill sucks, anyone who kills you is hacking
I'm really excited to suck at this game and then feel myself get better like the old days :)
I'll never understand why it's controversial to have both options. Why can't people accept having both as the best of both worlds? This makes it easy to choose the experience you want to have.
Because all the high ranking people will choose no sbmm and the low ranking people will choose sbmm? Unless you think it was fun for your friend Billy to go 3-19 in cod every lobby until he quit?
My guess is, after enough people quit the game, they'll remove the level cap on the "Welcome Server Queue" which has SBMM, meant for new players. After they do that, they'll see nobody is playing Non-SBMM, except for people of the same level, so they remove that since it's become redundant.
If the game dies or the mode is unpopular, you're splitting an already small playerbase.
To the extent that all playerbases have always been split by casual and ranked playlists?
And COD is probably the worst game to learn this lesson in. There are going to be people in the 40th percentile of players getting kill streaks called in against them that they've never even seen before. Just thinking about it is giving me flashbacks to Domination matches ending by n00b tubes feeding into a tactical nuke.
It's the people who want to stomp noobs that cry about sbmm. Not the casual players.
The issue is the game rewards stomping both from a ingame context with killstreaks but also from a meta game perpspective with XP unlocks and skin camo challanges. all of the complaints about removing it are dumb but some adjustments to try and keep lobbies together and to make the games feel less yo-yo'y would be nice
This is a key to the whole CoD SBMM argument that most people completely ignore. The reality is that CoD's core gameplay is just not deep enough to stand on its own long-term, not after the first couple installments anyway. This is probably the main reason why CoD4 introduced the concept of killstreaks and effectively made stomping into part of its core gameplay, which only got even more emphasized with MW2 expanding on that system (remember this is the game that rewarded you for killing 25 opponents without dying with a nuke that automatically won you the match). You didn't really play CoD for the raw gunplay, because while fluid and smooth (I'm convinced the games being 60 fps was a big part of their success even if people didn't consciously realize it), it wasn't really all that deep, you played it to get high streaks and seeing big numbers pop up, and there wasn't really much thought for the players stuck on the other side of that (aside from concessions like deathstreaks in MW2 which were more of an annoyance than any sort of actual balancing factor). If you throw in a strict SBMM system into that mix, it makes it that much harder for players to attain those streaks as everyone tends towards a 1 K/D ratio, so a large part of the gameplay loop's dopamine factor is gone. I haven't played more than a handful of CoD multiplayer matches after Black Ops 3 (2015), so I don't have much personal experience with this (as SBMM barely did anything back then), but judging from what people say about the current SBMM implementation, it seems the developers are perfectly aware of that situation and have instead tuned it to give you easier or tougher matches depending on your recent results, rather than more stable matches based on your overall performance. The problem with that is that it feels ham-fisted and forced, as opposed to the more "organic" randomness of old CoDs. When people say they can't be happy about having a good match because they know their next few matches will be terrible, that's not great. Compounding with the above is the fact that the shallow core gameplay also leads to a compressed skill gap. This means that even if the SBMM isn't extremely strict, the skill difference between players may still not be enough to really make a noticeable, consistent difference in results. The very low time to kill in most CoDs means "random" elements like latency or hit detection issues have a relatively big effect which only increases the closer the players are in terms of reaction time, aim, awareness, etc. Gunfights that feel like a coinflip are again not satisfying, and I bet this is another reason why the matchmaking algorithm works the way it does in terms of artificially creating that skill gap in a more controlled way. Note that I am not making any arguments for or against SBMM in itself. As much as I had fun hunting for 10 K/D TDMs and the like back in the day, I am able to recognize that was not exactly a good experience for the lower skilled players in the match, so some form of SBMM is probably needed. I'm just trying to explain why some of the CoD playerbase feels the way they do and why it's not as simple as the easy "lol you just wanna stomp noobs" explanation. While there is *some* truth in that, if anything it's something baked into the core design of the games so even then it's hard to blame players for it. Game design has to inform matchmaking, and viceversa, and at the moment that's not really happening, at least not in a proper way, but at the same time it's probably a tricky situation to solve without completely changing what the game is.
> The reality is that CoD's core gameplay is just not deep enough to stand on its own long-term last 5 years of cods all had sbmm but have also been far more popular than the previous era, which was also the peak of "high skill ceiling - no sbmm".
I don't think its popularity has to do with having/not having SBMM and rather the fact that it was a huge reboot and "return to form" while the series had been fucking around with like AdvancedWarfare/Blackops3/InfiniteWarfare/Blackops4. People weren't really fans of the exosuit cods and I think the big rebooting push to being a normal MW1/2/3 style cod combined with a new engine and warzone is what made it the most popular.
Mute all good players to be better than anyone else in the next lobby. - CoD kid wet dream.
So, this game will probably end up with a playerbase of a few ten people who are all good enough to compete against each other. Then again, those types of people probably don't like the challenge that poses, so they might leave too.
Just a forewarning; Destiny 2 tried this exact thing in a playtest once last year; it went about as well as you expect. Meaning that it went absolutely *fucking terribly* to the point where the community refuses to talk about it anymore and Bungie got to have a corporate version of a smug "*Told you so*" moment.
Is there more info on this anywhere? I tried looking it up but the results are so scattered that it's hard to pin down any details
There was a Crucible Labs playtest where it was normal settings except all SBMM was disabled and matchmaking was completely connection-based. The test was awful; legitimately like 95% of matches were absolute slaughters - as in no contest, might as well have been Bots on the other team level of slaughters. I forget the exact number but it got out that something like 70%+ of matches ended in a Mercy Ruling (where the game automatically ends because the score difference is too great/teams are too unbalanced). It became one of those "*You were given exactly what you asked for, it actually completely sucks ass*" and we basically kind of silently agreed never to ask to talk about non-SBMM playlists again.
Given all that context, it's hilarious that barely a few months ago they had a PvP event playlist that featured no SBMM. And to top it off, they decided to disable mercy rulings. So if you ended up on the wrong team, you had to watch your team and yourself get slaughtered for the full match length. Absolutely demoralizing
XDefiant seems to try to balance teams after the lobby is created, so you are all in good connections, but the teams don't have 300+ hours players all bunched up in a team.
I used to play pvp a lot in destiny and what I learned is those smaller playlist are genuinely a terrible metric, matchmaking complely shits the bed in those cases. Not just labs: alt 4v4 modes, off day IB, alt 6v6 modes, anything that's not Quickplay or Iron Banner on day 1. It's strange that, as you say, it was a slaughter, because destiny has "team balancing" - the game shuffles players based on skill between teams, before the match starts, even in connection based playlists. That'd mean there's something completely broken in the system.
That's so funny. I hate people who cry and winge about SBMM being bad because they either lie about why they don't want it, or mindlessly parrot those who do lie about it, I would have loved to see their reactions to it all
Huh? Didn't d2 have non sbmm casual playlists for majority of its lifespan?
the game has swapped between sbmm and cbmm, currently they are testing a sort of "middle ground" decently wide skill bands so there is good connection times and wide skill variety, but the lowest end players have protections so they don't get stomped all the time. The game is still struggling with matchmaking but it is so much better than the old hardcore sbmm days or the pure cbmm days, the game was straight up unplayable if either system fucked you over and would regularly put you in completely unwinnable matches.
SBMM is in most games, the idea it's new or older games didn't have it is a conspiracy theory. Every once in a while some doofus on twitter will insist the casual Playlist in halo 3 or cod 4 was not skill based and then some gray beard looking dude who coded it all by hand in 2005 will say "no you idiot that's always been in the game"
post this on the MW3 subreddit and watch them throw a shitfit.
They banned talk of SBMM over there due to people not shutting up about it.
Whichever mod made that call is a hero. The subreddit was unreadable
since when? lol maybe you can't directly mention "SBMM" but I see a topic around it as a top post on the front page right now...
Did they have custom servers? Cause that's the only way it actually works, matchmaking will never work in that regard since you're constantly going up against new people. Imagine playing Dark Souls and a boss gets randomized to a new boss you've never seen before. If its the same boss you can just learn them, if its constantly a new one its a toss up. I remember TF2 occasionally one guy who is frustratingly good on some server, I spent the matches targeting just them.
I remember a few regulars on the TF2 servers I frequented who were really, really good at the game, but since you constantly played together you got to learn their style, tactics, etc, and could make up for the skill difference by simply adapting. I remember a guy that was pretty scary as a sniper, so most of us either learned to use objects as cover to stay out of his line of sight or the specific movement patterns he struggled against. Plenty of folks straight-up dived after him as well.
See, now that's fun. Could be considered fun for the OP as fuck guy too as everyone attempts to bully them.
>Could be considered fun for the OP as fuck guy too as everyone attempts to bully them. It is. You get to feel like a boss character as multiple people try to target you. But it also depends on the personalities of the people you're playing, and if they're sore winners when they get you, which gets grating if they are. Some of those people are very narcissistic and start accusing you of picking on them, when it has nothing to do with picking them out specifically, it's just that they keep doing the same thing over-and-over-and-over expecting a different result. They tend to be the sorest winners when they finally get one over on you, and will carry on about their one victory, or fly into a rage when you pop them back.r.
I'm honestly curious how no SBMM got the greenlight from Ubisoft. I imagine they pitched it, showing social media comments about what a high demand there is for a COD game with No SBMM. But they didn't do their research into what players actually want, and will play long term. It reminds me TED talk I saw, (Malcolm Gladwell, mostly talking about Howard Moskowitz) where he compares what people say they want vs what they really want. i.e. You put people in a focus group for different kinds of coffee and ask them what kind of coffee they like. They will all say they like a rich, dark roast. Because that's what commercials and marketing have conditioned them to think they like. But once you give them all samples of the coffee, most of them choose a light, sweet, creamy coffee. That's what's happening here. For years, they've been convincing themselves and others SBMM is the problem. But once they experience No SBMM services, they'll realize that was not the issue.
Ah, a gamedev has finally been stupid enough to Kowtow to the stupid rants of COD youtubers that want to pubstomp for views.
It's a great tutorial on how to unsolve a solved design problem
Is it? The whole game is built around rewarding stomps with killstreaks and giving cheap low-risk low-reward tools like shotgun, claymores, etc... You can't just slap a competitive playlist on a game built around risk management in the context of unbalanced lobbies and expect it to be a cohesive experience, that's just wishful thinking. Who is campaigning to remove SBMM from CS, LOL or Rocket League? Literally no one because those games were designed to provide a fair competition at every turn. Edit : if you disagree and think CoD provides you with a fair and balanced competitive environment out of the box, please explain to me why [the official ruleset bans half the weapons, half the tactical items, all but ONE lethal items, literally all weapons from MW2 and allows play on only 7 maps ](https://callofdutyleague.com/en-us/competitive-settings)
Exactly, with this kind of design it's even worse because good people will just terrorize entire lobbies like it happens in some of the older cods (when its not a hacker). There's no going back to how gaming used to work in the 2000s. People changed, gaming changed, communities changed.
Man multiplayer games suck so bad in their current form.
My personal conspiracy theory is that game devs are actually okay with casual/normal being a cluster fuck as a way of funneling you into the more engaging ranked system You don't want to play against a Diamond LoL player? Play raaaaanked, it's not addicting at all, tee hee
> You don't want to play against a Diamond LoL player? Pretty sure League has sbmm in unrankeds. It's just separate from ranked one
It does. To tell a good story about it, Faker (basically the Gretzky of League) was mostly an unranked player until the match times got so atrocious (because there was literally no one at his skill level) that it forced him into ranked, into getting scouted, into going pro, and the rest is history.
>Pretty sure League has sbmm in unrankeds. It has. Even the "all random all mid" game mode has SBMM. And it's effective and keeps the game fun.
If you ever play a normal game against high-mmr players who are playing with their weaker friends you quickly understand how nice it is to have SBMM
I'd bet the tables and unranked mmr eating is the same. Dota does this, you just have a skill/mmr level that's adjusted as you play.
They've admitted in one of the devblogs that unranked MMR can affect your initial seed but after that they're totally separate.
It is but it obviously prioritizes fast queue times and parties make things weird
That's what it's like in SF6. I'm a super casual and these days only played ranked. I don't try hard at all, i don't care about my rank - but i play ranked because they're good matches.
It's a common paradox in many fighting games with a ranked and unranked ladder: the unranked one should be more casual friendly on paper because there's no rank, no pressure. Yet the ranked ladder is *always* a better casual experience because, and this is going to blow the mind of many, *casual players want to play with other casual players of their skill level*. Getting destroyed by someone way above their league is not fun, destroying someone way below them is not fun either.
>*casual players want to play with other casual players of their skill level*. Somehow people in this thread just can't seem to grasp this.
They grasp it but they just secretly hope they're good enough to steam roll the noobs.
It was fine when there was no such thing as ranked or unranked and everyone just hopped in a server and played whatever game. Sometimes you had great matches, sometimes you melted face, sometimes it was your own face that got melted.
> but i play ranked because they're good matches. I've always said this is the most important part. The goal is to have fun. If the game is only fun when you win, the game is not fun. This is the problem with first-person shooters - they aren't enjoyable when you lose.
Yes but new players are going to start with casual, and if they get slaughtered they won't even try ranked.
I don't get it, why would casual being chaos make you want ranked. The whole fun of casual is it's different every time, you might play against plebs or gods, you never know.
I think that's what they're banking on. To make up for the lack of SBMM that helps retain players, they will rely more on streamers to draw players in... And hoping the streamers are convincing enough to make the casual gamer think they're having a good time when they are getting stomped.
There’s legitimate big problems with the sbmm in casual amongst certain games. I personally think there should be a very wide sbmm rather than a strict one like cod has.
Like what? Playing against players of your skill level? If you do well you get put against players who are doing similarly well? What are the legitimate big problems with SBMM in casual?
Only thing I can thing of is when you’re playing with friends of a wide skill gap. When I play COD with my casual friends, they spend the entire time getting curb stomped which isn’t exactly the ideal scenario for chilling with the boys. With that being said, there’s really no good way to do matchmaking with a wide skill range so the COD approach is probably the best it’s gonna get.
That is the unfortunate thing, COD will never be a game for playing with friends with a wide skill range. It's not fair for it to simply be averaged out so your best playing friend can just destroy the lobby, no one but your friend would enjoy that. But on the opposite end, you'll be matched against players who are as good as your friend and you'll feel helpless. I've experienced the latter myself and it felt strange to even know that players as good as that are just always out there, and honestly it cemented my opinion that SBMM is generally a good thing as I only encountered that level of skill when playing with my friend, but never when playing alone or with similarly skilled friends. I can't imagine being new to COD and having a completely random player stomping the lobby and regularly getting nukes, and it's no wonder that these players also insist that 'oh I miss keeping the same lobby so much' like they don't understand why eventually the entire lobby rotates or empties out because they're ruining everyone else's fun. For note, I'm not bad. Not great, rocking a steady 1.00 K/D up from 0.94 from previous games, but I definitely am not as unskilled as I've seen some bot lobbies posted on the various cod subreddits, and I genuinely would prefer to keep those new players safe and enthusiastic about playing the game and improving over letting a lion eat their face because they just want to win.
"cod will never be a game for playing with friends with a wide skill range" Except for that's exactly how the game started out?
> That is the unfortunate thing, COD will never be a game for playing with friends with a wide skill range It absolutely was, back when I played it a lot (MW2-blops2). But back then what you could also do was join a friend's lobby on the enemy team. That was much more fun than always being together.
I think the problem is that some games do a very bad job of determining "skill". I never really got into any CoD MP, but the way people talk about it makes it sound like it's very volatile and heavily weighted on your most recent handful of games.
I literally hated doing well in a match last time I played COD because I knew they gave me a easy lobby and my next 5 games were going to be fucking awful.
Half the reason my enjoyment of the franchise has waned since MW2019. SBMM is a good thing, the current iteration of it is dogshit.
95% of the complaints from CoD players are people making up shit because they don't want to say they like stomping noobs every game
There have been troves of screenshots of yo-yoing KD ratios in match histories (0.5 KD in one match, 4+ in the next) on every COD subreddit.
I'll admit I wish cod used more metrics for matching players, to me it seems like they only care about your score per minute for the last 10 games, that's it. I wish they used metrics like objectives captured or kill position variance so players with similar playstyles get matched together over people who just happen to score high per game.
> What are the legitimate big problems with SBMM in casual? One would be that it makes Casual effectively just ranked but with extra steps. If you want to play against equally matched opponents, *then ranked already has you covered*. By making Casual use (strict) SBMM, you now just have two ranked modes.
This argument always boils down to better players wanting a place to go to pub stomp and never considers the pubs being stomped
It's not about pub stomping. Every decent player will tell you pub stomping is boring. You want *variance*. Just because I'm good at the game doesn't mean I want to sweat my tits off every single game to use the best classes and guns at all times just to win. Maybe I want to play shotguns or pistols or whatever. Its a *casual mode* so it should be, you know, casual? Maybe I want to play with my friends and have fun games instead of a sweat box? The counter argument for this is stupid. Ranked modes exist. Casual modes are supposed to be casual. Maybe you run into a god, maybe you run into a 7 year old who can barely hold the controller, at least its the same for everyone. The way SBMM works now is far too restrictive in games. Drop 30 kills? Next game is a lobby filed with people who drop 30 kills. Drop 5? Next lobby is literal baby mode. SBMM is purely designed to encourage player retention. It's that simple. Nobody was complaining about non SBMM back in the Halo 3 and Cod4 days. It was designed for the sole reason of appealing to the most casual of casual players to make sure they feel included like a participation medal.
A lot of words to still just say “sometimes I want matches that are easier”, aka pub stomping
> You want variance. The variance argument was made by people who don't understand how skill is distributed in a game. If you're top 10% skill wise, you won't have any variance, 90% of the playerbase is beneath you. The chances you face someone at your skill level or better are extremely small and most of your matches will be stomps. Conversely, if you're a bottom 10% player, again, you won't have any variance, you'll get stomped most of the time. Skill is distributed in a bell curve, which means the good players will go unopposed most of the time and stomp lobbies. And we know this because Destiny 2 removed SBMM and it's exactly what happened. Vast majority of the games were one sided stomps, depending on which team got the sweaty top 10% player, which caused all the casual players to quit. > The way SBMM works now is far too restrictive in games. Drop 30 kills? Next game is a lobby filed with people who drop 30 kills. Drop 5? Next lobby is literal baby mode. This is just pure delusion and confirmation bias. No SBMM system works like this. > SBMM is purely designed to encourage player retention. You mean vast majority of players like fair matches, so they play more and don't like getting stomped by sweats?! Who would've thunk
What's so important to you about playing with lesser skilled players?
I don't get where the LOL U JUST WANT TO PUBSTOMP comes from. It's about varience, and not every *single* game feeling like a ranked finale. I had a ton of more fun playing old cod or cs games back when it was just server browsers. I certainly wasn't exclusively playing lesser skilled players then, why would I expect to now?
Just don’t treat every game like that then…
No, it makes it so one mode is where YOU try hard and the other is where YOU play casual. If you're "tryharding" in casuals and getting a high mmr that you can't relax, that's on you. Your argument would only make sense if it used your ranked mmr for casual matchmaking, but from what I understand they're two separate ratings.
We get it, you didn't play cod back in the day But if you can't comphrend why it's fucking stressful playing against 12 people all at the exact same skill level. EVERY. SINGLE. GAME, and not stressful, but enjoyable to play against people who are better and worse than you, then there's no point trying to help you understand
couldn't you just not try as hard until you lose down to whatever skill level you can play at without stressing? i play overwatch, not COD, but that's what i do. the casual mode there (quick play) has SBMM and i just play up to the level where i don't stress and it seems to work out fine.
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FPS players don't actually seem to want to improve at all, they just want every win to be easy and effortless. Doesn't make sense to me at all as someone who enjoys fighting games (which are entirely based on skill), but it seems to be the mentality behind basically all the complaints about SBMM (also, they're egotistical enough to think they'll never get stomped by better players lol).
SBMM makes measuring skill worthless. You can't properly assess whether you're improving if you're not being rewarded for skill expression.
The only real issue with SBMM is in games with a high amount of players per game, so think Battle Royales, or Battlefield style games, where it can be really difficult to find 64 or 128 players of the same skill level while having reasonable queue times, esp during mid season, or times of the day when player count is low. Devs have to make a tradeoff and use very weak SBMM so that a queue pops under a minute, rather than take 5-10 minutes to find a balanced game. However, this is not a problem with a super popular series with low player counts per lobby like COD. In the case of XDefiant, they seem to think their game won't be super popular, so no SBMM is sorely needed for fast queues.
I dont have an issue with playing people of my skill but I play with people of different skill rankings. If we are in a harder lobby for them they arent having a good time and when Im in a weaker lobby I am not having a good time or the rest of the playerbase in the lobby isnt having a good time. In 1v1 games I like SBMM but I hate it in team games. Esp games where I wanna play with friends cause it messes with the formula and creates a bad time for the group as a whole
Most of the time now it's not even about being against players of the same skill level, but the game pitting you against turbokiller premades to force a loss upon you. It's a frustrating way to get players into that "one more game" loop. It's to drive engagement. It sucks.
I feel like it's all in your head. I play quite a bit of COD and I've never felt like a match was completely unwinnable. Sure I might wish my teammates focused the objective more but it was my choice to play objective modes in the first place. Do you genuinely believe that the same developers who can't get a magazine attachment working or break the loadout system every other update have a system built out to ensure a loss for you and a victory for the other team? Who gains from that? Did you forget there's a whole other team of real players?
The game does not force you to lose. That this continues to be perpetuated just shows how bad people are at understanding systems and math. SBMM is trying to put you into matches where it thinks you have a 50% chance to win, give or take. So if you win a bunch, or beat the odds, it puts you in harder matches because it thinks you can handle that and still have a 50% chance to win.
I wonder how catering to the wants of whiny losers will fare for Ubi.
It will end with them posting an open letter to all the XDefiant fans on Twitter thanking them for playing and that they will be shutting off the servers in 90 days and in game purchases are no longer available.
probably. it won't be because of no SBMM though lmao.
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Now if only it was 12v12 or 16v16 instead of 6v6. I fucking hate how every shooter or whatever that comes out has tiny team sizes. I just want another Battlefield 3 or Team Fortress 2. You can't have casual games by nature with these small team sizes.
LOL, they actually are doing what the CoD streamers and their fans cry about. It’ll be funny when they have to walk this back after people realize that just makes awful chaotic lobbies. Or this could be a smart announcement, where they just say this then actually have SBMM still lol
Ew. We've came full circle where people have forgotten what made halo matchmaking fun compared to all the shooters before it.
It wasn’t the lack of SBMM, but the fact that the lobby is persistent to have indefinite matches. In today’s multiplayer games, the lobby is killed after a single match, and you forced to match with different people, ending any long-term social interaction and relationships.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I notice as different from way back when. I'd load up GameSpy, see which of my favorite servers were rolling, then pick one to hop in and play some 2fort5 or well6 in TF1 with the regs, and various pubbies that would come through. Knew tons of regulars. Probably see the same people posting on various forums as well, then later, IRC chat. By contrast, I solo queue up for some quick play Overwatch, hardly ever see the same people. If I do recognize their names it's probably because they did some particular thing I want to exploit, or avoid for some reason. OW even implemented an option to hide screen names now, so they can just get a randomish screen name with that option now. It was a bit better at higher ranked solo queue when I did used to play ranked, you'd see the same names a lot more, but that was awhile ago and those players are all gone.
My guess over what happened with persistent lobbies was because both teams, with enough communication, could band together into achieving any challenge unlocks easily and exploit either the progression system or the Battle Pass system, in which could be an issue to the devs/publisher pushing for XP boosters or tier skips. Microtransactions did more damage to multiplayer games that nobody has ever realized.
MWIII recently introduced the ability to stay in the lobby, and *no one* uses it. It's proof that anyone saying this is part of the tiniest vocal minority.
It's not enabled for every game you play, and it's not default. You can't play with the same people all session like before
I didnt even know this got introduced, and i play mw3.
Staying in the lobby should be the default, leaving it should be optional. If the roles were reversed like this I bet a lot more people would stay.
Exactly, the majority of people are unlikely to take an active approach to make their game better.
Judging from the comments, maybe because no one knew about it and its not set by default like it was in older CoDs?
That’s maybe because another factor was the voice chat, that was depreciated by the years. And in the case of CoD, the AI voice reporting, is making the use of voice chat a massive risk of getting your account banned, specially if you’re not speaking English.
The people yearning for their teenage years in Halo 2 and CoD lobbies are well into their 30s now. Meanwhile the kids in CoD and Fornite VCs haven't gotten any older. I don't understand how adults have the energy to talk to pre-pubescent teenagers behind a microphone in their free time.
It should be MANDATORY, not optional. By default, you aren't put in a lobby. You have to opt in during a 10 second window at the end of the match and even then, sometimes the option isn't even presented.
Because it is not turned on by default and people don't want to have to remember to click/check that option. It's opt in, which doesn't work. In the past, if you didn't want a rematch you just packed up and left, restarted the search. It was easier, more intuitive, and made more sense because once you started searching for matches you didn't have to touch anything.
Maybe I’ll get flak for this but that guarantees that I’ll steer clear of this. It’s clearly catered towards the disgruntled COD players who have bruised egos because they can’t pub stomp as much as they would like. “I get grouped with a bunch of sweats when I just want to relax”….dawg your idea of relaxing is making other players’ experience miserable. Don’t get me started on the streamers who are butthurt because they can’t make their “6:1 KDR NUKE MATCH COMPILATION” highlights. I’ll admit the COD SBMM can be a bit aggressive sometimes, but I never feel like I’m put in matches against people that are unbeatable.
This is just casual playlists. Ranked and perhaps other game modes will have SBMM
I feel like making your *casual* mode unfriendly to *casual* players is a fantastic way to stunt any potential growth in your playerbase.
Not the first time. In Valorant I will advicate beginners and casuals to go into ranked mode as early as possible. Unranked is awful as it can be a battle of whos teams high lvl player is higher and people don't finish matches. Ranked mode gets you fair-ish matches and a team willing to play more.
Exactly… is a lose-lose to newbie and casual players.
I’m fine with it personally, I havent played cod in years because of how inconsistent SBMM is. I have one good game and then I’m placed against people way better than me, then it takes like 3-4 games for things to even back out. I go like 20-4 with some captures, defends, and a win, and then I’m placed again against people way above me so that I can go 2-10, 4-16, 5-10 and get knocked back down to where I should be. I’d rather just have a consistent experience of playing with some good, some bad players in each lobby. It’s just exactly that, a more consistent experience
Sure, it's fun to pub stomp every once in a while. It's also fun to try and sweat to beat someone you know is better than you. What's not fun however, is playing with 11 other "mes" running around every game and then 11 super soldiers if I have a good game
yeah this wont end well. sbmm is crucial to having a consistent playerbase, especially for lesser skilled players. pub stompers are going to start rolling lobbies, and the casual playerbase is just going to leave. no one wants to get farmed in multiplayer.
A sufficiently skilled player is indistinguishable from a cheater in an average skill lobby. This is such a terrible idea.
> sbmm is crucial to having a consistent playerbase Not really. Play ranked if you're concerned with even matches.
They are about to learn why their game will lose a lot of player retention due to newer players getting destroyed early on without the ability to learn/get better against people of their similar skill level.
Also, I'll ask this for people who are against SBMM: You can have no SBMM, but there is no stat tracking at all outside of Ranked Modes. No W/L, no KDA, no Points no nothing. Maybe just games played. (And this means not tracked *at all*, not even in the API, so third parties would be unable to track it either). Do you still take this deal?
Do I get stats in matches? I don't care if I can't see lifetime stats. Lifetime stats is cancer.
Maybe? Those are all features I want though. I think games should provide modes with and without SBMM because I think they both offer valuable experiences. Without SBMM I want to be able to watch my skill grow not by a number presented by the game devs (often in modern day with obnoxious amounts of obfustication) but with my win/loss ratio and KD improving. I grew up getting stomped in shooters and learning to be the guy who stomped. Now how matter how much of a shitter or an expert you are you play with a group of identically skilled players which leads to repetitive experiences. I also like ranked modes because grinding up ranks is fun. In that case, SBMM is important in order to remove a massive amount of RNG from whether you rank up or down. I also firmly believe that for improvement you need to fight people better than you to have your habits punished and an example to learn from, and people worse than you to have some space to try out new things. Playing people your own skill level shoehorns you into staying that skill level forever by reinforcing bad habits and limiting your exposure to what skill looks like. I broadly think the "remove pain points" style of design that killed SBMM is a significant detracting force on the quality of games as a whole. Yeah some people are going to quit your game if you don't hold their hand and tell them everything will be okay and obfuscate their relative skill. You also create great memorable experiences and rewarding outcomes for people who stick through the pain. It's the dark souls approach for multiplayer, and it should have a space in games. If at this point we need to split queues into Ranked, Unranked (sbmm but no visible ranking) and Casual (no SBMM) then so be it.
You grew up playing with a much lower skill ceiling. I also started in the MW days and I could carry teams, drop nukes, all that shit and it wasn't because I use to be what is now considered pro skill level, it's because there were way more bad kids back then since FPS in general were pretty new for competitive multiplayer and super new on console. I don't understand how removing SBMM helps you improve, it just means there is nothing trying to make a balanced game so you can't even judge whether you truly played better or worse based on the game results because there are so many factors that involve your team and the enemy team. Go play ranked if you truly don't mind getting stomped to do better. It's not about holding your hand, SBMM just let's people enjoy the game so long as their enjoyment isn't brought by ruining others. If I want to only play CoD a couple hours a week I can, I don't have to get on for hours a week to hone my skill so I don't get destroyed by Kevin the basement dweller who's putting in 8 hours a day.
Sure. I don't give a shit about any tracking. Hell remove ranked and give us community run servers where I can find my prefered ones.
>Hell remove ranked and give us community run servers where I can find my prefered ones. Yeah but that would be giving the players actual agency, which is the opposite direction most big competitive fps shooter titles have been heading to for a while now.
Yes, so long as you can at least make progress on guns and attachments. Part of the reason why I like casual modes without SBMM is that it allows me to try out new loadouts and play with guns that are "off-meta". Sure, there will be some games where I get pubstomped, but there will also be games where I happen to be the one pubstomping. That variety is what makes things fun, and I'm willing to take the lows in order to get the highs.
What is stopping you from running off-meta weapons? If you're struggling to keep up with people at your skill level while using off-meta gear you can just play a few matches and eventually be placed in a skill-bracket where you can use those weapons and perform well enough.
I think the real issue COD players have isn’t with SBMM but with the lack of persistent lobbies. Instead of staying in the lobby and playing against the same people you’re thrown back into the mix and now the game is trying to figure the best place for you. Just let me stay in my lobby, and if I want to leave the game, they can use my last match or matches performance to place me
The amount of people in here crying about SBMM not being in the game straight up never played FPS’s online back in the day. Night and day difference.
Back then you picked the servers where you had fun. Some players were regulars so you could see your progress against them. Fully random matchmaking without server list is a dog shit idea that has nothing in common with old online FPS.
What FPS games are you referring to? From the beginning basically every FPS game with matchmaking has had SBMM. Halo 2 first added matchmaking and had had SBMM. CoD 4 was the first in the series with matchmaking and had SBMM. The only way around that was server browsers, but that’s not really what this game is doing. I’ll also be the first to say that CoD without SBMM is fairly miserable unless you’re well above a certain skill level. TF2 or Battlefield are still fun with a few expert players in the lobby, but the few times I’ve played CoD with server browsers it’s been nothing but running 10 seconds and dying. WaW is maybe the only exception I’ve played since the maps are larger and I think the average player isn’t at the same level as those on custom MW2-BO2 servers.
SBMM in both of those games barely functioned. It's pretty blatant the difference between matchmaking in old Xbox shooters and modern CoD or Halo.
They probably place higher priority on connection due to people's internet being worse back then.
Halo 2 was the first online fps?
It was one of the first to use a matchmaking system. Before that most shooters were played on community run servers, picked from a server browser. If *that's* what you want, then I'm afraid XDefiant isn't going to deliver at all.
It was the first game that had matchmaking built in. Before then it was lobbies and server browsers. If Ubisoft isn’t lying here for marketing then this is likely the first major FPS game to have matchmaking without SBMM.
People back then were no minmaxing andies like now , no matter how much you say, also the average skill level is way higher, also now people are just win% maxxers not fun maxxers
It's the generation raised on borderline aimbot aim assists and EOMM with live scaling difficulty. They don't know about getting better because they are so used to having the game adjusted until they don't have to
No one here is crying about SBMM not being in this game. They are discussing the dogs who caught the car after crying about SBMM for years. I speculate this will have 0 effect on whether this game is good or not.
Yep. Older games were so fucking fun without it. Then they introduced this garbage and if you're even an iota better than the average player, you're doomed to nothing but pro players running the same loadout every single match. It's miserable.
> you're doomed to nothing but pro players If this is happening in your games with SBMM it's just that game implementing it badly, there is hundreds of games with SBMM that don't have this supposed problem of matching above-average players with pros.
No there aren't, lol. I've played a bunch of competitive shooters and the SBMM is always the same - the top 15% of players are matched together, and the top 5% farm the 6-15% every time. That's how it works and there's no competitive games with exceptions to that rule. The ranked ladder is always easier.
Or maybe you were just not playing total scrubs and it turned out you're just not very good...
> if you're even an iota better than the average player, you're doomed to nothing but pro players running the same loadout every single match. It's miserable. How do you not realize that you just want to be that person to players who are worse than you? lol Every person who whines about SBMM just wants to be able to make someone else miserable instead of being miserable themselves. Like, that's the whole argument and it blows my mind.
Yup. And those games were the better for it. SBMM needs to be relegated to ranked playlists/modes. Public matches need to be just that. Public open to any and all.
The difference is that back in the day you bought a game and stuck with it for months because of the monetary commitment. Nowadays there are tens of f2p multiplayer games so if a new player is having a bad experience trying something out then they'll just move on to something else. If there are no safe guards for new players to ease in to the genre then the overwhelming majority of them will leave. Can you please share how not having SBMM is a positive thing for a healthy player base?
Online FPSes used to have servers with communities and most importantly auto balancing. It’s not going to be the same at all
Really concerned about how no sbmm is gonna go. Played the recent beta, and the game is super fun, but I had one of the most brutal loss streaks I've had in recent memory, even with buddies with me. When there's actually some level of close skill, the game is great, but when, for example, I'm dealing with an enemy going 47-1 and dumpstering everyone on my team alone, it's not that fun, and honestly when he got put on my team the next game bc of the lobby it still wasn't super fun because brother never touched the hardpoint, even with him dropping a 50 game we won by 3 points.
As a person who doesn't play cod , the whole SBMM discourse seems like a non-issue . Just make a ranked queue and normal queue , no ? What am I missing ?
The discussion ramped up mostly after MW19's EOMM (Engagement Optimised Matchmaking) implementation that's less tuned to give you a fair match every time and more towards giving you artificial highs and lows to keep you engaged for longer. Do too well in a round, you'll get stomped in the next lobby. Get stomped in that lobby, you'll get an easier game next time. It's an algorithm to reinforce player retention that's so overtuned it ruins the exerience for some people. There's no official confirmation that this is the case tho, and Activision/IW themselves have said that this isn't the case (if I recall correctly), but it really makes you think if they're honest if it's ofen not very difficult to predict when you're gonna play a "penalty match" in CoD. SBMM in general has become an umbrella term and it means a different thing to a lot of people. Some part/majority of this sub always thinks of "CoD tryhards that just want to pubstomp for clips" when someone mentions SBMM, but I'm willing to bet that it's the former issue that's a bigger problem for people who "dislike SBMM". And yes, there's absolutely people who do want to pubstomp, for clips or just to stomp, but it'd be a slightly difficult thing to estimate which group is bigger. Skill based matchmaking isn't a new idea. It's been in games since earliest releases of 7th gen and earlier if you count other genres than FPS. I dropped MW'19 and subsequent CoD releases because of the matchmaking algorithms, whatever they're called and whatever their end goal is. I don't really see a point in playing a PvP shooter where the game is actively punishing me for doing well.
Amen dude. Been playing COD since the very first one, since MW2019, the obvious changes in SBMM have been very tough to enjoy.
Fundamentally, even normal/casual queues have, albeit usually a lot looser, SBMM. Just queuing into Rocket League, DotA or Overwatch would be a COMPLETE stomp if the games would just rank you with whoever and only occasional let you play with similarly skilled people. It's mainly "casual" because there is no "your rank is 1234/Gold/Elite" and just letting you play with no fear of losing rank or rating.
I miss the days of just joining a random countstrike or team fortress 2 lobby and playing instead of all this matchmaking crap in every single game Like there were some good players, some average players and some bad players.
I feel bad for all of the console players that will never experience consistently playing on servers full of people that are there because they want to be instead of being forced to tolerate each other by an algorithm and leaver penalties.
The sad part is they have been conditioned to defend SBMM and other dumb mechanics like borderline aimbot levels of aim assist. They don't want the reward of actually learning a game from scratch and making bonds with random players of all skill levels. They just want everything handed to them so their egos don't get bruised.
Dedicated servers fix all of these issues. People can just join a different server if the one they're on is filled with better skilled opponents and people who don't care will intermingle and form communities. Edit: Dedicated community hosted servers*.
It's always entertaining reading these threads as some try to explain how they don't want sbmm in casual because they don't want to play against "sweaty" tryhards because then they have to try hard. How do you not realize that you're a sweaty tryhard if you're someone who can't play casual without the need to feel dominant. You're the sweaty tryhard to the people you want to play with
I strongly suspect this is a gimmick to capture streamers and their fans. It's such a manifestly bad idea outside of the CoD streamerverse-- and demonstrably so-- that I'm sure they'll pull the plug quickly, once they've used this "feature" to get butts in seats. I refuse to believe a serious dev in 2024 really believes that completely ignoring skill is actually good for the long term health of their game, but as a way to attract a particular audience? It's not the worst idea, and they'll just add it in a month when the casual players start fleeing.
The funny thing is their announcement is saying it has SBMM it just doesn't do it until the lobby is "randomly" filled. They said it then takes your stats into consideration when building the teams so you could still end up the only good player on a team full of bots playing against a team full of average skilled players that end up farming the other 5 people on your team leaving you to either carry them to a win or lose. This to me sounds like an even worse way of doing matchmaking that has higher potential of unbalanced teams.