So I read through a chunk of this thread and have to say that it’s painfully obvious how many people here didn’t grow up playing 3 in particular in its prime. You get stomped on you don’t quit. You keep playing. You get better. It takes time time but eventually you get to the point where you’re stomping consistently til you meet the bigger fish because no matter how good you are there is always a bigger fish. I loved Halo 3s social mp for that. There was games you’d straight murder, games you’d get murdered, and the even cut 48-50 matches sprinkled in between. It’s supposed to be random. The thing’s I learned while playing from higher tier players while they stomped me under their boots helped me become the powerhouse I was back in the day. SBMM I understand for ranked and have no qualms with that but in social play it has no business. Also idk if I speak for anyone else but I really miss the mayhem of the pregame and post game lobbies. Infinite while it plays great, has barely any content and lacks the soul of the community that previous games had. That and I will never back off the cancellation of splits screen co-op and the exclusion of any form of split screen from mcc and infinite pc. We want to play on the couch too wtf 343i.
Not necessarily. I am a staunch supporter of SBMM. Yet I am a 20 year veteran of Halo.
May have been true 15 years ago - when players didn’t know better - or didn’t have other options.
It’s so much easier to play something else now.
That’s not the truth though is it?
As we can see in ranked - only 3-5% of the population will be Onyx. No matter how they try.
So your narrative only holds for those who are good enough to be Onyx.
And as you get better the pool of available players that are better than you gets smaller. Exponentially smaller.
And even if you do find someone better than you - it’s not the same skill gap as an Onyx player stomping a Bronze or Silver player is it. Not even close.
An Onyx level player will face an Onyx level opponent in less that 1 in 10 games. In the other nine they will dominate.
The chances of coming up against two Onyx level opponents - and your fabled “get murdered” situation. About 1 in 200.
I’m glad you mentioned business.
Because business is all about player retention.
And what clearly defines player retention is close and competitive games.
So I’m gonna gloss over everything you mentioned save the end because you missed the point of me talking specifically about how halo 3 itself worked and not the broken systems of today. If you want to talk player retention halo 3 had a dedicated player base for well over a decade without today’s matchmaking implementations. Which brings me to the end of your rebuttal. They want to draw business. Release content. Fix desync. Satisfy promises they made and go back to the halo 3 rank system. Game will sell like hotcakes and last for a decade.
I didn’t gloss over it.
And you do realise that Halo 3 had SBMM?
It’s needed. And we can argue about it’s implementation. I just don’t think there is a good argument to abandon it.
Different era. Different options. Different gaming population.
Chalk and cheese.
And not everyone loved it. Personally one my least favourite Halo games.
All very good points. No arguments there.
But that doesn’t change the fact that player retention is improved with SBMM. And the biggest factor to players logging off in Halo 5 (for more than 8 hours) was being beaten in an uneven game. Even more than losing streaks, bad connections, or poor personal performance.
Whether you like it or not - the population at large just want a contest.
First up, why would you wind TrueSkill2 back to TrueSkill. That makes no sense at all.
And secondly, which part of the Halo 3 ranking did you want to return to? Was it the 1-70 system (with 20 hidden ranks), the awful rank locking that made progress nigh on impossible, or the black market for selling accounts.
It hasn’t been an issue for the series when bungie was running it. How is it suddenly a requirement to have SBMM to protect the less-skilled players, when it clearly wasn’t an issue that was harming the franchise before?
Isn’t that what Ranked is for, though?
EDIT: I’m personally fine with SBMM because I like to sweat and have even matches, that’s what’s fun for me. Thought I should add my personal opinion to this.
Then play ranked…? That’s literally what the mode’s for. The SBMM shouldn’t be in the Social playlists.
Bungie introduced SBMM into H3.
So it’s not Bungie vs 343.
And over the last decade and a half developers have got better. At ranking. At match making. And at collecting data.
SBMM increases player retention. And it increases time played in any session. And that’s money for developers.
If you want something different you are going to have to come up with an alternative. Something that is not random.
Snow flakes spin money now
It doesn’t appear to be any where near as strict in Social.
I can sweat in ranked and chill in social.
A close game is a good game.
I uninstalled this game yesterday for the same reason. BEST DECISION EVER!!! I feel so good now 
this game isn’t balanced anymore, at least not now.
Bungie had SBMM too (CE was the only one without it, because it didn’t exist yet back then). The only reason it “wasn’t an issue” was because 1) most people didn’t even know about it and 2) the more skilled players weren’t that extremely entitled that they believed lesser skilled players should function as they personal cannon fodder and they can only have fun when they are allowed to stomp those lesser players (and completely ruin the game for them).
They introduced it in H2, they just bettered it in H3. CE was the only one without SBMM
I love that being good at a game now makes you a ‘bully’. In the past people used to have some testicular fortitude, and everyone knew that to win games consistently you had to get good, put the effort in.
The fortnite generation just don’t want to put the effort in, everything has to be given to them on a plate. So if they don’t win matches on a game they’ve never played before they throw their toys out of the pram. So now, instead of letting the skill curve naturally reward people who put the effort in, we are at a position where all the good players are lifted out and put in their own little box to bang their heads against the wall over and over again, all so the people who don’t want to put the effort in can get the free wins that they so desperately need. All so they will buy a little sparkly hat from the shop.
Modern gaming.
It is exactly the oposite. Like mentioned SBMM was in the games before. But the more skilled players never cared about it. Only now they seem to care, because they want to get free wins and stomp the enemy.
It’s that entitlement, that because they are good they think they deserve free wins and deserve to play against weak players so they can stomp and humiliate them. Never before was that a problem. Only now.
And you also don’t see that in sports. You don’t see Real Madrid whine about having to play against Barcelona in the competition or Manchester City, Juventus and Bayern Munich in the champions league and demand they get to play against weak clubs like FC Andorra, Torquay United or 1.FC Kleve. In fact: it’s the opposite, they want to play more against teams about their own skill, because that makes them better and is more exciting.
But not the good Halo players, they demand to have no fight, but free wins. They don’t want to face competition so they can get better and they keep having exciting matches. They want boring stompfests, because they only care about free wins and clips. They don’t have any sportmanship in them, they don’t want to be tested. No, they want everything handed on a silver plate and don’t want to put in any effort. Free wins and clips is the only thing they care about. THAT is modern gaming.
And lets be honest: it’s only a small section that wants it (most good players DO want to play against people their own skill and some even complain about having lesser skilled players in their games), because everybody else realises that otherwise the game would be dead quickly. The lesser skilled players would leave, because it’s not fun to only be stomped upon (and you also never get better that way!) and a lot of better players would also leave because the game would be completely boring.
Every sport knows that, every game developer knows that. it’s just a percentage of spoiled players without social skills (empathy and sportmanship is lacking) who don’t realise it.
It’s kind of weird that low ranked players are happy to play low ranked players in a social setting and just have fun.
And mid ranked players are happy to play mid ranked players. Just for fun.
But (some) high ranked players just can’t cope with the thought of playing each other in a fun and friendly manner.
You just need to squeeze “entitled” in there somewhere for the perfect summary.
That is absolute nonsense. It is widely accepted that sbmm has been focussed on much more heavily in the last 10 years. It was in games prior, but it was nothing like it is now. So that’s just borderline lying. It is not the same now.
You guys have a really backwards view of entitlement. Entitlement is wanting things for free…. Exactly what sbmm is designed to create. It interferes with competition to LITERALLY give free wins to players who otherwise wouldn’t get them. And you blame the people who have put many hours in of practice? Again, that literally makes no sense.
Gaming is not a sport, so the analogy fails. It is meant to be fun. And the big difference is that in those scenarios you get RECOGNITION for doing well. You get put in better leagues, get paid more, get well known. Countless ways in which you are rewarded for the effort you put in. A better analogy would be if all the Madrid players got the same pay and recognition for beating Barcelona as they get for beating a Sunday league team; ie nobody cares. This is why you don’t see me complaining about sbmm in ranked, because there is RECOGNITION attached to getting a high rank. If you don’t recognise the difficulty of somebody’s opponent and reward them for it then you have created a scenario where the player gets no benefit from getting better. Go see how many people would pay football for a living, practicing hours and hours on end for £10 an hour.
No. I want a place where there is fairness. Ranked is already the place for super tight matches. That ALREADY EXISTED. I want a MIX of opponents, some better some worse. You people seem to forget the fact that there are better players than everyone. I am locked away from them in social as much as I am locked above worse players. What you are supporting is ranked 2.0, except this time there is no recognition or rewards.
And I refer back to the entitlement point. You completely misunderstand what the term means. Putting hundreds of hours in to something and expecting to be able to see you outcomes improving is not entitlement. Entitlement is those who don’t want to put the effort in but want equal results. THAT is entitlement.
When people want this they go to ranked, as they have for 30 years of gaming. People didn’t leave in halo 2 or 3, with much less sbmm. Yet they’ve ran from this like a nuclear bomb.
This is the controversial topic in multiplayer gaming. Saying everyone knows it is obtuse.
It’s not weird at all. Playing against skilled players requires a huge amount more focus and stress. That is actually complete common sense
In shooters SBMM has already been the case for a long time. The only difference is that earlier that was never mentioned by the devs, so players (mostly) didn’t even know it was there. Nowadays they do mention it, so players now just blame everything they don’t like to SBMM, where they didn’t even had problems with it when they didn’t even know SBMM was there… Point and case the people in this forums who glorified H3 for the fact that it didn’t had SBMM, even though it had SBMM. And yes, even in H3 the SBMM was already ‘strict’, just like now. Because skill gaps within matches can still be very big. Silver and gold players can still match up with/against high diamond and onyx players.
And for some games (mostly PvEvP games) that didn’t have it yet, those often either have to make easy content so players can avoid PvP, or had to introduce SBMM or even had to make it so that players first had to opt in before they could be PvP’d against, because players where fleeing because of it.
Exactly the opposite. SBMM is so you always have to put effort in your match to win. Without it the skilled players just get free wins and don’t have to put effort in the match. It’s those entitled higher skilled complainers who demand free wins (sometimes they don’t even try to hide that and outright say it)
False, PvP gaming is also a sport. And just like every sport the fast majority is recreational. The recognition is only for the top players in that sport. No one knows the players of a local sport club in the middle of the football/soccer piramide, since those are just unknown amateurs (the pro sporters are just the top 0.1%, the rest is mostly fully unknown, unless its your local sporters, but thats just because you personally know them). And you only get better pay within those highest ranks, since the others are full amateurs who don’t get paid. And in Halo Infinite also the highest ranks are getting paid. Those are players like Lucid who because they got so good they got picked up. And the reason they got so good is also because they play against other good players and therefore learn and improve. If Lucid had to play against lower players, he would never have gotten that good, because you won’t learn from that,
No you don’t, Because unwinnable matches where skilled players pile up against noobs is everything but fair.
H2 and H3 didn’t have less strict SBMM. The only difference was that you didn’t know it back then, so you didn’t notice it that much.
And people haven’t ran from this because of to strict SBMM (in fact, the people i know who stopped because of SBMM stopped because it’s way to weak and they were tired of having to fight high diamond and onyx players as a silver or gold player). But the fast majority of players stopped because of the bugs and desync issues. Problems you deliberately don’t mention when stating this because it doesn’t fit your narrative.
This here is again the entitlement and the lack of empathy (you can’t place yourself into someone who is not as skilled as you are). A player with skill level 10 facing of against another player with skill level 10 needs just as much focus and ‘stress’ as someone with skill level 5 facing against another 5. The focus and ‘stress’ you need is relative and its based on the skill difference. A level 5 vs a level 5 needs to be fully focussed to be able to win, just like a 10 vs a 10. The fact that you don’t even realise it, is very telling.
Flat out not true. SBMM was not as strict in h3. The guy who made the matchmaking literally said that they deliberately put you with a wide range of opponents.
I completely disagree with your interpretation of ‘entitled’. I’ve said why so I won’t repeat.
Halo ranked is what you are talking about when you compare it to football. That structure exists already in ranked. You get recognised by moving up from gold to plat to diamond to onyx and so on, in the same way you get recognised for moving up the leagues in football. That is recognition.
Regarding the point around money, I wasn’t literally talking about money, I’m talking about rewarding the player in general. I thought that was obvious in my response, but I guess not. However in social there is absolutely no reward. The reward in social historically before this mess was brought in to gaming was the scoreboard and the fact that you didn’t have to sweat to beat most players. You improved, your scores in your game improved, and you could chill out more. Now they have turned everything on its head, told the good players they aren’t welcome, and everything now caters to new players. Because that is who will buy these stupid little trinkets in the shop.
Lucid plays ranked. You really don’t seem to understand that these are two distinct things. If I want to sweat and play tight games and improve my game then I go to ranked. It already exists. If I finish work and want to chill out, have a beer and play for fun, I used to play social. Now I cannot do that because team slayer in social is almost as sweaty as ranked.
Yes, I can. I was one. I played and improved and am no longer one. That is my exact point. Entitled kids now don’t want to put the effort in, they just want to get a glittery gun and rack up killing sprees without earning it. And I completely disagree with the point around stress being equal regardless of level. It just isn’t true. Mechanically you are having to think much quicker and react in split seconds. Objectively that requires much more focus. In fact, focus is one of the key things that makes a player better.
Got bored at work… so ran some numbers through a script. It was 0230, so don’t quote me on super accuracy)… but,
If you take a player with MMR of 1650 and select random opponents - they will be the “top dog” in 96.7% of the games played.
Isn’t that kind of boring?
If you are just matched randomly into two teams then only 6.5% of the matches are within an average team MMR of 25 points.
That’s definitely not sweaty.
About 2/3 of the matches will be to an advantage of over 100 MMR points. Which I assume is now definitely “chill”.
Just under 1/3 will be by 300 or more MMR points!
And so much for the “some good” and “some bad” argument as only 0.6% of matches will put the player in a team 300 points behind.
So I can definitely see why “streamers” are anti-SBMM.
If you take those eight random players and sort them into even teams the picture is much better. About 90% of the matches are within 25 MMR points. Nearly all of them are within 50 MMR points. So probably acceptable for “social” SBMM.
But the key point remains that the average skill of everyone else in the game is Gold 6. So not a lot of fun for your team mates.
Now, the other bit that is less discussed when it comes to SBMM, are what I’ve decided to call a “sauna squad”. Two sweaty buddies coming together for a bit of harmless fun.
Random is NOT pretty. Only 2.7% of the matches are withing 50 MMR points. A whopping 2/3 of them are 300 or more (compared to 0.1% in the other direction). It’s pretty much feeding time in the zoo.
And attempting to match teams just fails miserably.
Well over half the games are still with a MMR gap of 150 or more. More than one in eight are still 300+ MMR. And your hapless team mates (who you amuse yourself by bagging mercilessly for not carrying their weight) average out at Gold 1.
I don’t see why the six or seven other players in the game have to have a miserable time so that the privileged minority can “chill”.
I just want games based on the best connection. I don’t care about anything else, except having bugs fixed etc.