The entire problem with the SBMM is that it’s ranking based on Kills. Like not even KDA. Kills.
You kill alot, then you just never gonna match with people who kill on your level.
Guess how many kills Mint gets on average? It’s around the 20s to 30s, even for a FFA game.
Challenge swaps have no business existing in the first place.
Anything decreasing that market is good.
Video not available anymore.
I think the truth is Infinite is just the most depressing thing to ever happen to any Halo fan and 343 is so disconnected by majority to its core audience and fans its almost impossible to have hope.
Unfortunately, I don’t think anything will be done about SBMM no matter how much we voice our opinion.
CoD fans have been complaining about it for years, nothing has been done to lessen the restrictions.
Heck, even Fall Guys has SBMM, which I downloaded after Epic acquired it and made it FtP. I won 4 games within two hours and the next time I played I kept getting elimed within the first two rounds because the hidden rank system boosted me higher than I am.
As a casual player that doesn’t really play ranked modes, I don’t like having to be playing hard mode every game. It wears on my boredom meter. I keep running into the same people every BTB game now since they silently slid SBMM into it, which shouldn’t be happening in the most populated mode.
You do know that as a casual player your would otherwise always have hard matches, since a lot of players are more skilled then you? For you Fall Guys example you would otherwise be eliminated in the first round most of the time, since you would always face off against way better skilled players and would never have won a crown.
And that the SBMM in BTB is upped is still a question. I have only seen Mint Blitz claim that he encounters stricter SBMM (with only evidence longer search times, not even with closer KDA’s ingame…). The same time you have XLR8 saying that he only experience longer search times when searching with a team of more then 4 players. Mint Blitz also searches with stacked teams a lot (and in his complain he also says it was ‘with friends’). So i do question if the SBMM is realy stricter, since i already hear some people here say they don’t see any difference in skill gaps in their BTB matches.
I think it’s rather that they implemented a form of party matching in BTB, so that full stacked teams of 12 don’t face off against 12 solo-players. There were a lot of complains here on this forum about that, so it may be that 343 did something about that. That is however not a limit on skill searches, but on party size.
Being a casual player doesn’t necessarily mean I’m bad. 
I’m sure if I were to play ranked and get decent teamates I could get Onyx. In fact, when I play quickplay I usually match Onyx players and am able to hold my own.
Don’t get me wrong here, I don’t want SBMM to disappear, I just want it to be much less restrictive. I shouldn’t be matching the same people, in BTB, over and over in one night. Now, it might also be a side effect of the game losing players, but it’s a weird coincidence that it started happening after the update.
I usually remember most peoples’ name, especially if I know they’re skilled. I actually used to match up against XLR8 and his viewers regularly, and was doing pretty good against them. Not multiple times in one night mind you, moreso every few days I’d run into him once.
This industry is simply sick. Sbmm is made to let everyone win at some point, no matter if a person is willing to put effort in it. Gamers are instead Punished for improving skill.
“Let everyone win so they stay into game”
If you like a game you keep playing it, and naturally you will improve your gameplay, but no. Today they treat people’s like that kid that if he loses he stop playing and go home.
Probably.
Close. SBMM is made so that everyone can have fun. Part of that is having a chance to win.
You are assuming there aren’t any “average” gamers out there that don’t put the effort in.
There are so many factors that decide a player’s skill.
I for one put as much effort as I can given that I work professionally full time and have a family. But I’m still not great at the game.
If by “punished” you mean not getting to run around and smash lower level players all day. Then yes.
It’s interesting that virtually every other “sport” rewards dedication and improvement by moving you up to the next grade or division. You don’t see A grade soccer players running around demanding that they have the right to run around in D grade and smash people. It seems to be a video game thing.
You do. But only up to a point. And that point may be defined by age, natural skill, disability, time, etc.
And that point shouldn’t define how much fun you get back in return.
The thing is that kid isn’t going to stop playing if he loses. They are only going to stop playing if they are continuously being beaten and ridiculed by the bullies.
And about 5 minutes until my stalker hits the “missed the point” button.
Indeed sbmm is very welcome in any game who use it, right ?
I work full time, I know I cant be as good as a teenager, but that doesn’t mean that they need to be Punished for it.
I suck? I accept it. But todays alot of peoples has become snowflakes who can’t emotionally accept that they bad.
I agree with most of what you say, from the perspective of ranked. A player needs to feel rewarded. If they move up to the next tier that is a tangible reward. Same in football, you visibly move up the levels of the game. In ranked you visibly move up the levels, so it doesn’t frustrate me to have close games there, because that is what I expect.
However, in social there is no such visible indication that you are average, below average or above average. So when you get 50-49 games against Diamond/Onyx teams constantly that feels frustrating, because you are a ‘good’ player, why are you a struggling to go positive in a social playlist. Using the football analogy, it’s like everyone goes to the park, the good players are split out and sent to play against each other and the bad players the same. But they aren’t told who is good and who is bad. How do you think the good team who lose 4-0 feel? Pretty rubbish? Especially because the other losing team only lost 1-0 despite playing against awful opponents.
In all of that rambling I’m trying to say that sbmm is for ranked. If you want to bring it to social you have to reward good players in a different way. Infinite does not, it creates stress with no payback.
Yep. Your reward for all that dedication and hard work is YOUR RANK.
Everyone keeps saying that Social should be a place to chill. Muck around. Meet some people. Chat. Have fun.
But we keep coming back to defining the experience around being able to show off how good they are?
That’s why I would love 343 to explore more options for evening up matches (eg. handicapping players on scoring and/or traits).
But when I go 50-49 vs player at “my level” it’s awesome fun.
At some stage the players have to take responsibility for why they aren’t enjoying themselves.
I think the problem is the super competitive players can’t let go. They have to go full tilt. And if, for whatever reason, their team falls behind they go even harder to catch up and win. They play social games exactly the same way they do ranked. The same movement, tactics, and intensity.
And then they wonder why they feel all sweaty.
The only escape is to play that way against opposition who can’t handle it.
Imagine you a pro-baseball player… and you’re having a social game in the park. You could either join in and have some fun mucking around - batting cack-handed, deliberately dropping catches, throwing the ball overhand etc. Or you could straight to the mound and start pitching 100mph zingers to show everyone how good you are.
One of these is a -yoink- move.
PS. Apologies if the baseball analogy is a bit creaky. Cricket fan here. Absolutely no idea about baseball outside of the movie “Major League”.
Surely the mindset for social should be how much fun can I have. Why is the focus on whether you won or not?
I just played a couple of hours in customs with mates.
I honestly couldn’t tell you a single K/D or stat for the whole night (except for one game where I had 100% accuracy - that was funny). I’m pretty sure I would have struggled to be over 1.0 in many of them.
What reward do you need other than to get out there and create your own fun?
My underlying point is that if 343 want to force sbmm in to social then they need to treat it like ranked in terms of rewarding performance.
If, as I would strongly prefer, they toned down the sbmm, then people could relax and enjoy themselves and wouldn’t care about rank or skill or anything like that. That was the recipe that made social a success in previous games.
343 are currently giving you the worst of both worlds. The intensity of ranked, with the lack of rewards from social. The two do not mix. And I strongly disagree that it is up to the player to deliberately throw games to force the game to lower the intensity of their social matches. The player reacts to the game. It is the matchmaking in the game that triggers a competitive player to sweat.
For example last night I was playing chicken with a shock rifle player. Tea-bagging and deliberately thrusting out of the way as soon as he aimed, over and over. But that got shut down in about 2 seconds flat as his onyx teammates 4 shotted me with coordinated shots from all sides. You know what I did after a few deaths? Started to sweat.
Let me preface this by saying I only play ranked, so I don’t know what the experience is like in social gamemodes with the mmr matching.
My ranked experience has been hell. I currently am diamond 5 and am unable to move. I play with one of my friends and he is diamond 6/onyx. We both reached onyx in season one. During season two I have a 55.8% win percentage. My win rate has been slowly increasing over the past couple months but my rank has not changed. There was a period of time where I won 72% of my games over a 25 game stretch but only climbed 6 CSR. Every win was roughly 3 to 5 CSR and every loss was -8 to -10 CSR regardless of performance. There was one match where I beat two onyx 1620+ players and was the best player on my team in nearly every metric but received 0 CSR for beating them. Our team had lower ranks too. I submitted a ticket about receiving zero car for winning several times and all the support team replied was we are investigating this issue and will keep you posted. This game’s determination of CSR rewards are critically flawed which invalidates using them as ranks. If I am routinely winning games but not climbing the system isn’t a ranking system.
On the other hand the game does not even match you with players of the same rank, it matches with players of similar MMR which is also problematic because that further invalidates rank as a metric. As a diamond 5 I’ve played against people onyx 1900 and above and people as low as silver 2. Diamond 5 is 1400-1450, is like 700 or something. That is an insane range of people to have in your matches. 1900 is like top 200 in the world. I should not be playing against someone that high but I also shouldn’t be playing against someone in silver either. A regular match typically is unbalanced against me slightly. My friend and I have been tracking our opponents CSR (because we can’t see individual MMR) and routinely we are facing higher ranked opponents roughly diamond 6+ where as our teammates are usually lower than us. When we win these games we also notice strange CSR effects too. If I’m the best player on our team, i should be going up the most as follows conventional logic for performance, but in this system this isn’t the case. It bases CSR reward on expected performance and if you perform as expect your reward is nearly zero because the game thinks its correctly found your rank. This however is regardless of actual CSR rank, you can routinely play against onyxes while being a diamond 3 and never move even though they are several hundred CSR above you. This is the major flaw in the system.
In addition the system tries to make the player base fit a normal distribution with rank barriers. This means that players who play a lot get clumped up at these “checkpoints” or “funnels”. When a lot of the players get to these location I believe the system tries to correct its CSR distribution to more strongly enforce negative performance penalties to thin out these clumps. This makes moving up impossible even at a 60% win rate because each loss is worth 3, 4, or even 5 wins. (sidenote- this is aggravated by the fact that if you have a leaver you are almost guaranteed a loss unless you play out of your mind but that isn’t fun, just stressful)
I had hoped that the devs would see from the anguish of the community that these issues were very prevalent and destructive to their game, but it seems that I must make a post about it since my support tickets are going no where since the support team recommend I bring this to community attention.
I have several potential solutions that I’d like to propose all of them have limitations and imperfections.
One option is to remove skill based mmr matcmaking and use CSR as the way to select your teammates and opponents. That way you can guarantee they are in the same ranking range as you. No more playing with top 500 or silvers. All the teams would be balanced based off minimizing the standard deviation of each players rank with respect to the team. So no more super high super low on the same team and calling it balanced. The other change that would go along with this is that winning is the most important thing. The majority of CSR is based on winning or losing the match; not based on your own self-relative performance. For instance you could set the bar at 10 CSR for a win and -10 CSR for a loss. That would fix the not gaining anything on a win problem. It should be also noted that at the end the game it recalculated the CSR of each team to determine if their has been a leaver. It will do that by keeping track of how much time a player spent playing in the match and then total the CSR×time and then divide by the total time to get the average CSR during that whole match. If you were short handed during the match the players on that team would lose no CSR. The winners would only gain a small portion of CSR based on the difference of the aftermath CSR. If the short handed team wins then they gain an absurd amount of CSR as a relation of their aftermath CSR. If there is no leaver than a small +1 or +2 CSR bump is given to the under ranked team to mitigate the offset. This is applied regardless of match outcome. (note the leaver is penalized as a relation of the time they missed) Then you factor in performance. If you were the best on your team +2, second +1, third +0, fourth -1. Overall your CSR will then be OUTCOME + RANKDIFF + TEAM PLACING. Very simple and completely understandable in the post game results. This would have a typical win range of +10 to +14 and a loss range of -10 to -6.
This makes it so the player feels like the games actually matter like you are actually achieving something. This also causes a problem. This now means that players who play a lot and win more often will have huge CSRs. That solution is having dynamic ranks. The ranks are based on the distribution of players CSRs. Each standard deviation is another rank. This also means that as the player base plays those ranks actually move somewhat as it settles into a location. This also means that if you don’t play for a while you have natural rank degradation without your CSR changing which I believe makes sense. This also causes a smurfing issue though which I admit I don’t have a good remedy for other than messing with the performance payout… But I don’t like making performance any more than 30% because winning is the most important factor.
I hope that this message is received with the best intentions. I want this game to succeed. I enjoy the foundation of the game. Its all the little things that I find that are sapping the life out of it. I hope that this message reaches the developers as well. I’m tired of submitting tickets for the skill based experience.