Haven’t expressed this anywhere yet, might as well be here - the SBMM in this game is really hurting the multiplayer experience for me and my buddies, to the point that Season 2 has barely begun and we’re already losing interest as a group because this primary issue has still not been resolved.
It’s a problem for us (and many like us) because I’m a diamond-onyx skill level player whereas most of them are silver-gold, meaning that whenever we play together, we are more often than not matched against people I can stand against individually, but which collectively we struggle to beat as a team. If we do manage it, either way it is usually a very sweaty affair, whereas in previous Halos, the balance between games where we got roundly defeated, games we roundly won, and games that were somewhere in between felt much more even. In Infinite though, we almost never get a game we can walk anymore, and it is that balance that is key to creating an enjoyable social multiplayer experience.
In ranked of course, this imbalance is not an issue, it in fact should be a feature, and allowing us to avoid this strict skill-based mm, but in all the social game playlists, this should just quite simply not be a thing. Whoever thought it should is highly misguided. Certainly Halo has its competitive scene, but the majority of its players are interested in playing with friends, and friends come in many skill ranges. As a group, we’ve always played Halo together with this social focus in mind, playing to win of course, but mainly playing to have fun together, whether win or lose, but the fact is the balance is all off. Instead, I’m the one that 90% of the time is carrying the team, putting an unpleasant amount of pressure on me at times, game in, game out, whilst frustrating my friends with how difficult it is for them to compete against higher level players on the opposite side.
In other words, to even begin to enjoy this game in any significant way, where every match is not a sweat-fest, we can’t play together, and that is essentially a self-defeating scenario, as the main reason we enjoy playing Halo multiplayer is to play with each other! If we can’t do that, soon enough, we won’t be playing anymore at all. If 343 don’t fix this by years end, they’ll have lost another group of long-time Halo fans that continue to be disappointed with how they have handled this franchise from the start.