I love Halo and have for over 20 years despite some of the other games not being so great. Infinites MP is amazing. The problem I have with it despite the lack of map variety is the SBMM. I’m all for being put against a team that has relatively the same skill as me and if I lose because they just happened to work as a team better than fine, but the problem is my teammates for some reason this game 99 percent of the time gives me teammates who don’t do anything. Let’s say we are playing TDM. I’ll end up with like 20 something kills the person under me will have like 5 or 6 and the other two bounce between 1 and 0 kills so more often than not I end up losing games because I’m just unfairly put with brain dead teams.
I have barely even touched the game the last few months. I’ll come back to check out the events, but end up leaving again before even finishing them because it just gets to frustrating to even continue when you lose 90 percent of the games because your team won’t get kills or do the objective.
343 really needs to fix the SBMM if it wants to keep people playing. Being out against players the same skill works fine, but the game doesn’t do the same for your team where you are put with players the same skill as you. If they can’t I don’t think I’ll ever really come back like I do with MCC where it’s a little more balanced.
As someone who’s been playing shooters since Wolfenstein 3d, and online Shooters Since Quake 1. The things he says plague today’s shooters and matchmaking, I’ve always felt in games that heavily relied on matchmaking since Halo 2.
When it came to casual experiences, matchmaking was never even remotely as good at pulling it off as a custom game browser does it.
Some of the points he tries to push happened in the older games too. Want to use silly fun weapons, it’s good till people start figuring out which weapons are top tier. Then when people start getting destroyed by those weapons more will start focusing on those weapons. Soon you’re going to have a fun time trying to use anything but those weapons. There’s a reason why the Battle Rifle + Plasma Pistol in Halo 2 was considered the newb combo, or hell, just BXR with just battle rifles.
I kind of want to see what would happen though if they removed SBM from the game. Mainly just to see if it’s removal would actually benefit the game more or not. Although I’d be a little afraid that new players over time would get paired up against people who will constantly destroy them, to the point they’re quickly lose interest and move on to other games. With no new blood coming into the game, it would slowly just die.
It’d most likely feel like super smash bros for me where if I try to play now, I just get curbed stomped every match because the people who mostly play it are all really good.
I 10000% agree with you man. It happens to me like way way to often… I know Im not supposed to win them all but its like dang man… Why am I being put against people who seem to be Pros playing on Smurf accounts but yet, my team mates DO NOTHING… People have said to me “oh its a skill issue” “Oh just get better at the game”… Its only so much I can do individually. You cant make heroic plays like you could in Halo titles of the past because the maps are terrible and camp friendly and I dont even have to mention the servers and desync… I take major breaks from this game each day. I remember enjoying older Halo titles and playing them ALL DAY LONG, Win or Lose, I still enjoyed them. Infinites MP overall is just not enjoyable and over time I just cut the game off and move on to something else… SBMM is not fair and its not working out. Maybe because the Player count isnt high enough but I seem to get put in matches quickly no matter what time of day it is… Idk anymore man…
CSR matchmaking is still SBMM just a different variant of it. The main difference is that it’s transparent rather than hidden in the background, which is a good thing. The downside is that it’s less flexible for temporary changes in form and won’t adapt as quickly when people are smurfing. I’m interested to see how it plays out.
But the difference is that older games, e.g. Halo 2 were not “live service”. So, unlike today where we have some eSport wannabe whines about being ki!!ed some so-called “low skilled” weapon that all the fun gets nerfed out of the game.
I mean, seriously, are they going to continue making the SPNKR (Rocket Launcher) blast radius so small that you’re going to have to get a head shot to actually ki!! anyone.
It being a live service doesn’t really change the aspects about SBMM to me in the slightest. At least anything that I could recognize personally. I did also mention that towards “some” of what he claims too, not everything.
I don’t really see the issue with the Spanker Rocket Launcher either. Landing hits with it isn’t remotely difficult with how it currently is. The worst part I’d say is that some instances it doesn’t seem like the damage is consistent. Direct hits for instance on vehicles sometimes one shots them, but I’ve had instances where 1 and even 2 direct hits won’t waste a warthog. I’ve also landed 3 direct hits on a tank and it failed to kill the tank.
Maybe but at the end of the day people can look at the game and see what level players were expected to perform at and make judgements on who did or didn’t let the team down. Your team gets smashed, you can see that your highest ranked teammate had a bad game, so you accept it and move on instead of assuming that the matchmaking screwed you over.
Sometimes simplicity is what people want. If you are ranked Plat 2 you’re expected to perform on the level of other Plat 2 players every game. You will of course have good and bad games but it’s now easier to tell if you performed to the level the matchmaking expected of you. Sometimes that counts for more than having the most accurate system.
I read something a couple of months ago about a test that 343 (alledgedly) did on H5 a couple of years ago, where it just turned off SBMM for a while. The results where pretty bad, for what i read people played for significantly shorter periods per session and significantly more people stopped playing the game during that period then in the periods with SBMM, and way more people complained about the matches.
Not directly. But as Yeags was trying to point out in his video, SBMM acts as the catalyst to distill the player base into sweat-fest “homogenous eSports play-style”. Why? Because this elitist player base are the ones most likely to buy season passes, cosmetics, etc. And as a result, they have a disproportional influence on how and what gets changed in this “live service” of a game.
This month’s revenues are running a little low, lets tweak this next update for the game to trigger a better dopamine hit for the people still playing.
There may have been some kind of SBMM in older Halo games. But before “live service” the game sandbox for the most part was fixed. Why? Because the game came on a disc…
I only referred to the SPNKR (Rocket Launcher) as an example. I could have simply stated how the blast radius and the number of grenades was nerfed because the “try-hards” complained about grenade spamming.
That may or may not have happened but that is exactly the result I’d expect. Out of all the AAA FPS out there game developers have plenty of data to prove that SBMM retains more players than free for all matchmaking.
It has its drawbacks and there are always ways to fine tune things but it’s absolutely here to stay because the majority of the player population don’t want to get repeatedly curb stomped by the top 20% of players.
At least he was honest in his video. His #1 reason against SBMM was that is doesn’t allow him to measure his progression of skill relative to the player base in casual game modes.
ie. he just wants to smash noobs.
He didn’t need to waste time with the four other reasons. They were weak and dripping in hyperbole.
But at least he was honest at the end.
And it’s no surprise. SBMM is the #1 enemy of streamers.
I struggle to see how this has any meaningful difference compared to the way it was before. 343 is claiming to give players what they want. But it’s only on the surface while still actually doing the same things as before underneath. (What’s that saying? Something about putting lipstick on a pig?)