Lobby balancing is used to describe how matchmaking works after a group of 8 players have been selected to create a lobby. Essentially what happens is, the best player on the team will get paired with some of the weaker players to even things out. However, 343 is currently balancing teams a bit too lopsided, causing frustration for the entire team. Basically, the best player in the lobby is forced to play flawlessly to give their team a shot to win, while his/her 3 teammates get obliterated for the entirety of the match. I linked three matches below that this occurred within the same play session of Team Slayer. Itās nice to balance teams and make matches fair, but this method is a bit too aggressive, hurting both sides of the spectrum.
Itās often a case of the match maker being forced to create such match ups.
Either because of squads or low population on the server.
Generally the match making is accurate enough. At least in Slayer. The matches go fairly close - or players start quitting out for the reasons you mentioned above and the whole thing becomes lopsided with JIP and/or bots filling out the time.
Itās even worse in objective games. Itās harder for the carrying player to cover the team if there is no team work happening.
Not sure what can be done though. It has to balance as carefully as it can - otherwise you are going to end up with even bigger blowouts.
The only alternative is to SBMM harder on the individual skill of the player. But that means fewer friends to play with - and longer wait times for the better players.
Snake draft in context of just 2 teams would be team A gets the 1,4,5 and 8th best players, team B gets 2,3,6,7.
Which just looking at the first game listed - is actually what happened lol. OP was on team A, and he was #1, his gold teammates were 4/5 (#5 is likely mid/high gold caliber player) and the new player was #8. Team B had 2 platinums, a lower gold and another very bad player.
The thing is when you have this large of a skill gap in your match - itās a race. Can you kill the other teamās bad players faster than the other team kills your bad players. Thatās really all it is. Add in the fact that people CAN have bad games, people can search in groups and communicate, ping, desync, real life things like some one knocks at the door, batteries die - and you get some people who play below their projected value for any given game and the match up looks uneven. The #5 player in your first game probably was on a cold streak and/or distracted and played more like the 7 and 8 were expected to play.
I get the impression that is how most games work out.
Not necessarily by deliberate algorithmā¦ but naturally as you take 8 players and sort them into the two evenest teams.
The problem, as always is when one team is deliberately off centre. i.e when an Onyx type is playing with their āSilverā buddy.
If you match like for like you get an Onyx player on the opposition balanced with a random Silver player. But thatās horrible for both of them. The Onyx player has to carry HARDā¦ and the Silver player is a lamb to the slaughter - especially because their bestie isnāt following them around protecting them.
So you end up having to balance the teams by putting up a bunch of high plats and low diamonds against them.
Still not great - but what can you do?
Well, ideally you would create handicapping games. Where players of all levels can compete on the same playing field. And then you wouldnāt have to worry about SBMM at all!
But sadly, those same Onyx type players who complain miserably about having to ācarryā tend to complain even harder if they canāt go double figure KD in a Social game.
@Freak_A_Fan Excellent rebuttal. Insightful as always.
I donāt think you can look at it as a drawback per se. More a consequence.
The alternative is to loosen SBMM - but the uneven teams would create even more mismatches and blow outs.
When you look at it - most of the games appear to be even. Invariably the āblow outsā that people complain about involve bots. But we donāt know what circumstances were involved that caused people to quit in the first place.
I would love to see them try a handicapped game type. Where scoring and/or abilities were dictated by your in-game K/D.
Weāve just started mucking around with a script that gives people with low K/D an OS on spawn (timed proportionally to how badly they are going). We are still looking for the balance to players doing well - next we are going to try removing their ability to pick up weapons and equipment after hitting a streak of three kills.
Seems to work out so far. Creates a fun and friendly game environment.
I honestly believe that social shouldnāt really have any SSBM. Let Gold 3ās and lower just mostly only match other, and everyone else should have a chance to match against basically any opponent.
Youāll be hard pressed to convince me the a super over engineered SBMM matchmaking algorithm is more enjoyable more often than just random groups from a totally random samples of players off the bell curve matching against eachother.
SBMM seems like it only really benefits the top and bottom 5-10% of players, and the rest of us get a worse experience.
All these thoughts are completely my subjective opinion though. Not saying Iām claiming a universal truth or anything
Noooo. Itās like believing in Flat Earth, Lizard men illuminati, or that Santa Clause isnāt real.
In an ideal ranking spread a G3 has a 3 in 4 chance of beating a S3. Thatās already a big skill gap. Let alone taking on a B3.
So, G4 is fair game for Onyx squads?
The engineering is in the match maker predicting which players are available to play each other based on location and expected finish time of the games currently in progress.
The SBMM is essentially taking the cohort of available players, grabbing a group that is closely matched, and then mixing them into the evenest teams.
That part doesnāt need an engineering degree.
No. It benefits all players.
Any mismatches that slip through are due to low population and/or squads.
SBMM definitely doesnāt benefit the top 5-10%. In that SBMM tries to match them against each other - and they hate that.
Subjective opinions are perfectly fine. Itās those who donāt realise that who are the problem.
Your ideea of a handicap system has a lot of merits. I like it a lot as a balanced mechanism but unfortunately will never work in the modern gaming industry.
The way I see it is that halo type of multiplayer (which was loosing popularity since H2), the arena based gameplay emphasis the skill and fairness in chances. So the only advantage is by gaining powerups through active gameplay(weapons, equipement, etc). Any attempt to handicap the equality of chances and the few people liking the arena mechanics will furiously complain.
The other type of gameplay is the streak rewarding gameplay(Cod like). Kill x opponents here is your reward as advantage. This type of gameplay is more popular those days as it tends to stroke the power fantasy ego perfectly. This system is against any kind of handicap by design since you allready by design reward better players with more opportunities.
Your handicap type of gameplay while awesome can only work on a new title unfortunately. One were the population is open minded to new since they are not living in the past. And Halo is one of the most conservative and living in the past franchise. A different game, different mode(ala warzone or the speculated tatanka mode) may try that but the as a mode it will get a lot of backlash because itās not true halo and as another game will just be that not halo a spinoff.
Maybe something less intrusive? Like working with spawn time? Handicap the good players with double the spawn time while reducing spawn time for all other players while the top ones are dead? Less of a personal skill handicap for better players more of a system handicap to balance opportunities to contribute. Iām sure it will fail though since it does not play the power fantasy tropes but rather tries to balance enjoyment
It was a bit condescending and not needed but your response is even more unnecessary.
Ultimately youāre telling us that the SBMM system people complain about for producing uneven matchups, should be abolished in favour of a free for all with wildly uneven matchups. It does sound a little out there to me as well.
Iām yet to hear any logical argument as to why the removal of SBMM would be an improvement over the system that is admittedly struggling with the small player base. Unless you count the people that find numerous clever ways to say that they want easy matchups that they can win without trying to hard (and Iām in no way saying that you are one of those people).
If the ridiculousness of comparing to flat earth and lizard men wasnāt silly enough, surely the addition of Santa Clause NOT being real was a give away.
And then just in case there is literally a winky face there.
And even if the humour wasnāt quite your cup of tea - thatās not chill.
They do. 343 (via Josh) have said this multiple times.
Variety only works if itās the same for everyone. Sure, the people in the middle of the population game get a good mixture of good, equal, and bad opponents.
But on the tails itās one way traffic.
For someone hovering around the middle of Onyx - they are going to be +100 team CSR points in 2/3 of their games. Compared to about 1/20 for -100 CSR.
And the opposite is true for a mid Bronze players.
I think itās more the attitude of modern gamers.
People donāt seem to be able to play Social and Ranked differently any more.
They go in with the same tactics and mindset but want Social to be a chilly double figure KD (and an easy win so they donāt feel they had to carry the team).
Not really. H3 had SBMM.
I guess TrueSkill was bit slacker than TrueSkill2 - but it was still there.
What it didnāt have though is the same intensity of skilled play (I imagine we are all better at playing these sort of games 20 years on) - and a larger population to draw from to minimise the skill gaps across the teams.
I donāt think people have any grasp about what completely random match ups actually entail.
You have to take the random players from the area of the bell curve.
Someone who is Onxy 1650, for example, is the highest ranked player in nearly 97% of their games. Only about 13% of their randomly assigned games have teams within plus or minus 50 average MMR. About 3/4 are more than 50 points in their favour. Over 2/3 are more than 100 points. Just under half are over 200 points. Nearly 1/3 are over 300.
Thatās a lot of stream-able content!
Taking 8 random players and matching teams is a lot better. You can get pretty much close to 98% of teams matched to within 50 MMR points. But the spread of teams is probably going to be even wider than what people are complaining about now.
And the real problem is when people squad up. If you have two Onyx buddies playing together then it gets much harder. Your 98% above plummets to 14%.
Canāt say Iāve ever found a conversation that starts with an attack on someoneās education to be fruitful.
It just tends to go downhill from there.
And there we goā¦
And for the record I donāt think Iāve ever really taken a stand for āhisā SBMM. Iāve been quite vocal about the ranking / TrueSkill2 stuff. For sure.
Iāve very pro SBMM over random -yoink-. Why you would even want the latter makes no sense to me.
And in fact Iāve made multiple suggestions over time on how we could get rid of SBMM altogether.
But just not by going back to the caveman days of random matching.
The key to improving things is to identify what is working and what isnāt. Labelling a whole complex system as -yoink- is not productive.
There is always room for improvement.
But why this knee jerk reaction to throw the baby out with the bath water?
Do you have another definition?
Or are you just assuming that your specific retention is the be all and end all.
Not sure which bit implies they thought it was garbage.
As for making adjustments / improvementsā¦ or trying new things. Thatās never a bad thing.
So you think every game developer is just too scared to make this decision but really itās the key to becoming the most popular modern competetive FPS? Colour me dubiousā¦
ā¦you think that people having to play people of similar skill level caused them to leave the game?
Right, I bet all those bronze players want to play gold players or better every game. Iām sure they will enjoy 2-14 every game more than maybe going 10-12 against other bronzies. Do you actually know people with varying skill levels? Bronzies gonna get stomped all day by golds and higher. Same applies to any similar skill gaps.
Halo is dead for various reasons, SBMM isnāt one.
