SBMM is drving me away from this game: Socially

Games Halo Infinite
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The player reacts to the game, not the other way around. If I am matched with Onyx players then I will have to sweat. So the suggested solution is that I need to let myself die over and over again for the game to decide I want to relax and give me easier opponents? You realise how ridiculous that is, right?

It should be the responsibility of the matchmaking system to give me a mixture of sweaty and easier games so that I don’t always feel like I need to play at my best to even avoid going negative. The player shouldn’t even be aware of the matchmaking, let alone be taking actions to make the system stop punishing them.

And I’ve said this before, there aren’t enough Onyx 1700+ players to populate social games, so they just pull in high diamond/low Onyx players to fill up their matches. I’m seeing that all the time now. I mean for goodness sake, the SBMM matched me against Mint Blitz (Onyx 2000) in social yesterday, with another Onyx 1700 in the same match. I only get the downside of the SBMM, it isn’t pulling golds up to fill up my lobbies, but it pulls Onyx 1700+ players down.

Basically every game I play there is at least another Onyx, usually two or three. Season 2 is miles worse than season 1 for SBMM, which I assume is because the game is now nearly dead.

I’ve started transitioning away from the game at this point. I play other games and then I’m like, ‘Oh maybe I should keep going on infinite, I like the gameplay’. Then I play three or four matches in team slayer in social and immediately realise why I stopped in the first place.

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64

The stricter you make sbmm, the more smurfing happens. On xbox, you can make infinite accounts for free so the problem won’t go away.

You could make people pay for new xbox live accounts but…
In Overwatch, you need to pay 20 bucks to play with another account but guess what? There are sooooo many smurfs, really a lot of them. You also have to play for 25 hours before you can play ranked but guess what? ranked is full of smurfs anyway.

It would take a large amount of resources for 343 to monitor and ban most smurfs… and they can’t even deal with the game itself, given it’s so broken and unfinished

I don’t understand why you are against non-sbmm or light sbmm modes.
there could be social playlists with light sbmm and some ranked ones with sbmm, paying attention so that every playllist has enough population.

If someone complains that he’s getting “stomped” too much, he should go play ranked ( but the players complaining of stomping often exaggerate the situation, because even with light sbmm most matches aren’t “stomping”, most games would be balanced because most of the players have average skill). Others don’t mind, like in destiny.

(THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF THIS MESSAGE) With your logic that most people enjoy sbmm like it’s the best thing that happened in gaming, everyone would go playing ranked instantly. In social the “stompers” would be left playing with themselves and everyone except the sweats would be happy .
^
This second option is what happened with MCC: the complete lack of sbmm except the yoink team balancing encourages people to party up with sweats so that you don’t ge tthe random teammate who goes 1-20 everytime and almost every average player left. But since mcc has such a low population, the ranked playlists are dead or it takes a long time to find a match. Also, lots of smurf even in there

Destiny PvP has no sbmm in 6v6 but the majority keep playing those game modes and i can assure you that it’s full of lopsided matches, they don’t play the “competitive” mode with sbmm that much. WHY?

All i’m saying is, let people CHOOSE

65

More than happy with lighter SBMM in Social. That’s how it should work.

Very against random MM. That’s just unfair. And of course, I’m pro-choice. There probably should be a H5 type slider (where you could emphasise connection over skill matching). But I remember a comment (not sure by who) that very few non-Onyx players ever pushed the slider far away from skill.

Not fussed about what other games do. My kids play Destiny and they have mentioned quite a few times about the ongoing debate about SBMM. A quick google and the very first article that popped up was about Bungie looking at re-introducing SBMM to fix the lopsided games. Something about the crucible? (whatever that means). Maybe not everyone is as happy as you thought?

We know that SBMM increases player retention by 20-30%. And that it reduces quitting by 6-8x. So it should be the focus going forward.

Most players can differentiate the different intensity and vibe of Social vs Ranked. They appreciate they both can be close and competitive, but in different ways. You don’t have to like both. But they both should be fun, for everyone.

It shouldn’t be a case of be stomped or play ranked.

I get it that the very good players struggle. They are competitive beasts, they only know how to go 100%, and the matchmaking can’t find them a mix of players above and below them.

But the solution isn’t feeding them lower ranked players.

66

Maybe for FIFA but not for Halo Infinite.

Anyone can throw around made up stats that are impossible to quantify. Honestly, I expected more from you.

Personally, I have seen more quitting in Halo Infinite than any of the previous Halo games. It is rare that I complete a game without at least one player quitting. And Halo games have been retaining less players with each game since Halo Reach.

Not only are people complaining about it on the forums, Twitter, and Reddit. But people are even complaining about with the in-game chat. I don’t know if the SBMM itself is that bad or if it’s just broken and not actually working the way it’s supposed to. But if you really think the current iteration of SBMM in Halo Infinite is retaining players… I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

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I can’t find the quote for player retention. It was in the old waypoint. I think it was also in one of Menke’s GDC talks. But there is four or five of those and some of them go for over an hour. So I’m not going there.

But in previous discussions 20-30% has been mentioned as conservative. I think one of the Apex games or something mentioned 80-90% drop off in player retention if they turned SBMM off.

My apologies. I did get it wrong. It was 4-6x. I was close.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgq5w8/why-players-blame-skill-based-matchmaking-for-losing-in-call-of-duty?utm_content=1606921452&utm_medium=social&utm_source=VICE_twitter

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And as an aside. A new bit of respect for Max Hoberman;

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This I completely agree with. I think a big thing that Halo Infinite suffers from is a lack of multiple Ranked playlists. Plus, the way the Ranked system works in Halo Infinite is difficult to understand and frustrating for many people. This combination results in “all the hyper-competitive people—and a lot of the -Yoink!- holes, to be blunt—” not going to the ranked playlist and so the unranked playlists are not “a much more casual, friendly environment.”

I am not advocating for getting rid of SBMM. I just think 343 doesn’t understand how to use it correctly. So while it may be retaining players in games like Apex or COD, it isn’t doing anything to retain players in Halo Infinite.

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None of this is about Halo Infinite.

The entirety of matchmaking in Halo Infinite, not just the SBMM, is a mess.

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That, and the lack of customs and a PvE mode.

I don’t think everyone is enjoying being shoe-horned into the same boxes.

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Would you mind telling me which article? Destiny had sbmm once but they removed it or lessened it because too many people were complaining. Of course i think they had some data to support this conclusion.
And destiny isn’t the only game where they dialed back the sbmm.

I watched a video from Menke “matchmaking from engagement: lessons from halo 5”. In theory it’s a good video explaining his reasoning but some of the things he said are certainly questionable, it makes me want to not trust him about sbmm benefits

He said that waiting time doesn’t matter for player retention: completely false, most people work all day so when they come back home, they don’t want to sit in front of the screen playing “lobby simulator” . In fact popular games have very short matchmaking times
And if you play 12 matches in a day, which aren’t even a lot for some people, waiting 5 mins for every match means wasting an hour of your day.

He said that Ping doesn’t matter for player retention: I don’t believe this, under any circumstances. Maybe for people living in the USA ping isn’t a big problem, but for everyone outside america it is. i know i stopped playing halo 5 because it simply refused to make me and my frineds play on Eu servers 95% of the time

He said that losing streaks don’t matter: this literally contradicts the argument about sbmm, think about it: if players don’t mind losing streaks, why should they complain about NOT having sbmm

Losing streaks are a PARADOX: with sbmm, most people shouldn’t go on losing streaks or winning streaks at all or maybe very rarely, yet it happens all the time, it also happened to me many times

but somehow we are supposed to believe him just because he said that “data” explains everything. I don’t buy it…

i don’t consider myself a very good player but definitely above average, i can’t play relaxed when someone else is sweating his yoink all the time

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https://gamerant.com/destiny-2-skill-based-matchmaking-sbmm-better-competitive-option-balance/

It was 1am. I was still at work. Confess that I only skimmed it.

I can’t watch it again because I’m at work. But I thought the gist was more along the lines that it didn’t seem to correlate with quits or people leaving early. And he has the data to back it up.

Doesn’t mean the players didn’t like it. Or eventually drifted to “more popular” games.

Again, in the context of the player sitting there. I think he mentions that providing the game felt fair the players didn’t tend to quit and kept playing. This makes sense. While a bad connection is -yoink- you are more likely to pull the plug if you are getting stomped.

I’ve had plenty of games that were good value despite the 200ms at the top right of screen. The other day we won despite 300+ and it didn’t really feel THAT bad to play.

And he wasn’t saying there weren’t people who quit or turned the game off. Obviously there were. Probably you as one of them. Just that it wasn’t a significant factor - especially in relation to the aforementioned effects of personal and team skill gaps.

It was a presentation to other developers - to help them decide on what factors they could focus on / control to improve.

I did just double check this one (thank God for YouTube and automatic subtitles). What he said was that players don’t mind losing streaks as long as the games felt fair.

“Maybe our players are just more concerned with how fun the match was”.

It’s not a paradox because SBMM tries to remove the stompings that clearly cause people to quit.

No, you shouldn’t automatically just believe everything he (or anyone says). You should look at it as critically as you can.

Having said that, what he is presenting is millions of real life data points. It’s hard to refute that on your own anecdotal evidence.

How do you know they are sweating?

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The most interesting bit of data from that GDC presentation was when Menke showed that a single stack of four good players can be responsible for up to 20 players dropping out of the game an hour!

WOW.

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This is just an opinion of the writer, nothing official yet. And if bunige turned it off, i’m sure there were reasons. I’ll keep watching the situation

And how does this happen exactly? not using sbmm means using connection based matchmaking. So how can you have unbalanced matches AND bad connection at the same time? It doesn’t make sense at all, it can happen only in dead games like MCC

in fact it’s proven that strict sbmm increases ping in general and for higher skilled players in particular, not just in halo, it happened in COD advanced warfare, destiny 2 when it was using sbmm and also in halo 5

I played many matches on halo 5 with 180-200 ping on west us server and while you can still play and win against worse players than you, it’s a lot more frustrating when the enemy team knows what it’s doing.
You can consider 200+ ping playable but i’d bet that many players would disagree

This is very subjective. When i’m the best player in my team and i lose even by a few points many times, the game doesn’t feel fair. I remember one day losing 9 matches in a row, no stompings . If the chance of winning with sbmm is really around 50%, there’s a 1 in 512 chance of that happening. And i know that it’s not always 50%, someone may be underperforming and someone overperforming etc. But that doesn’t feel fair at all and again many players would say the same.
And you know what? I don’t think i’ve ever gotten a 9 win streak in halo 5 or infinite playing by myself, because the system is so quick at raising my MMR as needed so that there is no risk of winning too much, whatever that means to 343

This is subjective again, but when i see: people timing power weapon spawns perfectly (especially this one), camping with said power weapons, trying to stay alive at all times, crouch strafing, the pace of the match slowing down a lot when there are only a few kills left to win, people using “meta” loadouts and weapons ( in other games) these are the biggest signals of people sweating imo.

I know because i played a lot of halo 4 which had light sbmm so i know perfectly how the matches felt in that game: people running around in the middle of the map, people using “troll” weapons like the suppressor (or the spiker in halo 3 socials for example) , people not slowing down when one team is about to win, not paying much attention to the objective etc.

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76

Uhm, no. You can have no SBMM ánd no CBMM, just like you can have SBMM ánd CBMM. They are not connected to each other. Ofcourse it affects waiting times though.

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In every game that i played which doesn’t have sbmm, i always have low ping so cbmm must have been active. The only time i get connected to servers outside eu are in games with sbmm

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That could be, but it doesn’t mean that no SBMM per definition means CBMM and SBMM means no CBMM. In fact, the last is not even the case in HI, since there is a combination of SBMM and CBMM. But to limit search times (or to even be able to get matches in unpopular times) both SBMM and CBMM are not strict.

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What? No way?!?! People who are below average lie below the 50% point in a perfectly distributed normal curve??? Who could’ve known that? You must be so highly educated taking that freshmen level statistics course. Bravo.

Here’s what you don’t get. Being below average, makes you. Are you seriously trying to argue that someone with an IQ less than 100 doesn’t just reek of their own stupidity?

And to reiterate my point, to be actually TRYING to win at the game and still be performing below average makes you an idiot.

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Refer to my my last comment to Darwi.

You still can’t seem to fathom or understand the idea of what SBMM is or what it’s goals are if you keep insisting that it isn’t “strict”. Maybe if it wasn’t garbage and built more like Halo 3, most people wouldn’t have left the game.

And are you actually trying to argue that Halo 3 had the same SBMM as Infinite? I literally said “Halo was at it’s most popular before this SBMM was implemented”. What do you think the word “this” means?

Also, you’re dead wrong about Halo 2. Halo 2 still has SBMM, so, try getting your facts straight. People loved Halo 2 and the people who sucked didn’t care if they lost because they knew it was their own fault.

And those last two points are based on literally nothing.
The weapons have virtually remained unchanged since the inception of Halo. The only changes to the weapon sandbox are how bullet magnetism, aim assist, and hit scan work. Secondary fire modes are irrelevant, too.
The other point is just straight up projection. Which statistical analysis are you using to determine that players are suddenly trying their best to win every game in social? And definitely what evidence suggests that wasn’t the case in Halo 2-Reach?

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You’re blatantly admitting that you don’t play the game as intended unless it’s ranked and that’s what I don’t get. The ONLY objective in a Halo Infinite match is to win. There are no other goals aside from Challenges (which in their own ruin the gameplay of Halo Infinite).

So what I don’t get is, why are you deciding to play the game nonsensically and objectively wrong in social? Why are you using that as an argument in the first place? Why should I be forced to play like an idiot who has no desire to win just so that SBMM can place me in lower heat matches?

Proper SBMM in Halo Infinite should prioritize the only goal their game has, which is winning, and it should do that in a way where I don’t have to start playing competitively to win a close match that solely depends on my ability to win.

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I am actually highly educated. Thanks for noticing.

It certainly doesn’t help me to work out what the Hell you are trying to say.

That’s a tad offensive. And gives a fair idea of your moral grounding.

I know quite a few people who try hard and still struggle to break out of Silver or mid-Gold.

Your dismissing of both them and me is disconcerting.

Obviously it’s to keep the status quo of you lording over all the idiotic players out there.

It’s very easy to separate the two ways of playing.

In one you are going at 100% and taking no risks.

In the other you are going at 80% (or whatever) and taking lots of risks.

Play with a completely different intensity and mindset. One sweaty. One chill. Still going for the win. Not affecting team mates because you are only here to perform as your MMR advertises.

So you want to play the game exactly like you do in ranked. But win easily?

Lucky for you there are so many below average idiots out there who really don’t mind being smashed by players like you. They know they deserve it.