Titile says it all.
Just played a btb match and the final score was 100 to 24.
Maybe in seaon 20 it will get fixed? But even then that’s still too hopeful.
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Honestly? I’d like to see SBMM toned down a ton, if not removed,
I can’t play with friends because my SBMM is far too high. (They end up fighting against full Onyx teams and get completely stomped)
Back on MCC (Reach) we would play BTB and do pretty well. People would then message us and we’d group up. It’s how I made a ton of friends and made some great memories. Heck, I’d say I had better memories made then than back in the Bungie days.
Halo Infinite is designed to be competitive (their own words). They fundamentally misunderstand what makes Halo fun, which is why with Halo Reach (a game which many in the competitive community dislike) brought some of the best memories years after its release.
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Changes to SBMM are on the way. The first round should launch with season three.
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I imagine it’s a nigh on impossible problem to fix.
Let’s say your team is Onyx (you) + three Gold/Silver (your buddies).
How would you design a match maker to assign your opponents? That’s fair for them AND keeps your friends happy?
My friend group ranges from Silver all the way up to Onyx - and we’ve yet to work it out.
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That’s the thing, I’m not a ranked player.
I don’t play ranked because the desync is just so awful and I’m simply not interested in playing competitively anymore.
I know that if I get a good connection, I can go against some of the top players in FFA, but if we say I’m Onyx and my friends are gold, why am I going against constant 4 stack Onyx teams?!
It’s just ridiculous
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I guess the game is trying to balance the teams.
I don’t know what number’s we’re talking here. But if you are a very high Onyx playing with decently high Gold friends - then your average team MMR could be quite high. Like 1100+
Throw in weightings for squads and form - and your team MMR climbs even further.
And don’t forget that those “Onyx” players you are taking on may have a lower Social MMR than their ranked value. So you can’t always take it on face value.
Bottom line is that your team structure is always going to lend itself to you having to carry hard, and your mates fighting to survive.
There isn’t much alternative.
If the opposition was graded to give your buddies a chance 1v1 - then it wouldn’t matter anyway as you went on a double figure K/D rampage and stole all the kills anyway.
Personally I would love to see a playlist with a handicapping system. For this very situation. Set up so player’s of all skill ranges can duke it on the same playing field. And if done right, you wouldn’t need SBMM in that list at all.
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Yes there is. Randomized teams are literally better than this. I’ve never had friends so quickly drop out on me after asking me to play some Halo, until infinite. My friends can’t stand playing more than 3 games with me because they’re getting stomped so hard, and I’m not even that good. None of the older games were like this. Idc what kind of quotes you want to pull from the devs, my 20+ years of playing Halo online tells me it wasn’t like this before “modern” sbmm became a thing.
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Really isn’t.
Draw a normal curve. Put a dot for yourself way to the right.
And then start imagining dots being randomly from the area under the curve. Not the width of the curve - but the area of the curve.
It’s not hard to see why it isn’t fair.
Then put yourself as a dot to the left of the curve. ie. a new player. Randomise some more dots. And imagine how long that player is going to stick around.
It doesn’t matter how good you think you are.
It’s how much better you are then them that matters.
If the gap is significant, and it sounds like it is, you are are always going to draw opponents that are closer to you then them. Which means you have to carry, and they have to survive.
Again. Think of a game where your mates are evenly matched with the opposition. What influence do you think you will then have on that game. How are your hapless opponents supposed to enjoy themselves in this situation? Hell, will your friends even have fun as you rack up kill after kill at their expense?
Yeah. Pretty much from H3 onwards.
I don’t think a lot of people noticed it much earlier - because the gap between themselves and their mates wasn’t as marked.
If you wanna go back that far (and I’m with you)… it was a different time.
Player’s have different expectations now. Other things to do. Being stomped in game after game is not going to hold their attention. Developers can’t afford to run a business model of “get gud or go and spend your money doing something else”.
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@TotalTeeto117 - wow. I never actually considered that.
Your insight, as always, is greatly appreciated.
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Yes, actually it is better, or at least it 1000% would have been at launch, because this depends entirely on average skill level of the player population. At launch we had 20 million people showing interest in the game, most of those people would have been people new to the series due to it being a pc release, and they would have fallen on the left side of the curve.
Wouldn’t ALWAYS be like that if teammates were randomized. Which is the entire problem. If teams were more randomized my lower skill friends would sometimes get players like me who stomp them, but as I said earlier, if it was randomized from launch 90% of the time they would have been matched against lower skill, newer players.
So what you’re saying is it’s better to put new players in my lobby while I’m queueing with me friends, essentially feeding me kills, while they go -15, and that’s more enjoyable than completely randomized teammates?
Lol. Lmao.
This wasn’t an issue in H3/Reach because we had in game solutions to the problem. Those being guest accounts (which I would assume didn’t effect skill matching) as well as being able to pull the better players from your enemy teams through the lobby system, so most of the people on your friends list would be around your skill anyway.
That’s literally what the current system causing, if people can’t play with their friends they quit the game.
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The arguments that try to use steam numbers as something indicative for halo infinite are very misleading. First of all PC players with the hw equipment capable of running halo are not casuals usually when it comes to FPS games. They tend to play a lot of FPS games so at least their aiming is good. Their only skill they lack is map IQ but again they are also probably going to get it faster. Then numbers on steam for a F2P game are misleading. Of course, they were curious to see what the game is about. This does not mean they will enjoy it or not, or that they will still play the game in a week.
Being a PC game means nothing except you have steam numbers and can presumably gouge popularity.
If we look at the xbox achievements (Steam uses xbox accounts so they share the achievents), today after 1 month of a free game pass that is reported finished by many on this forum numbers still show that only 2.59% of players have completed a battle pass. So those big numbers on steam means nothing when it comes to MP revenue. I find it less probable that a player not buying a battle pass will buy cosmetics and once you bought a BP probably just by playing you would have finished it already, especially giving how fast a BP can be completed and HI had long seasons.
So the numbers on steam do not true represent interest in game more of a curiosity because it was free to play and then again most PC players would not fall to the left of the curve in the first stages of the game when aiming matter the most since people did not yet had time to learn maps.
They would be matched with people their skill if they would not party with you would they not? And you would not stomp other players if matched with people like you. So where is SBBM problem here? The only problem here in the context of enjoyment is trying to find enjoyment by stretching the matching using a large skill gap.
Not SBBM fault that you abuse the system with the skill gap in your team. Gather your friends use LFG system, discord or other systems and play custom games. Balance the teams by moving better and worse players around and have fun.
Matchmaking can’t provide good experience for all concerned when it’s abused with high skill gaps either intentional in the case of playing with friends or unintentional in the case of low population. But SBBM does provide a way better experience for solo players or players around the same skill as opposed to random. Random is only good for better players because it feeds their power fantasy.
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No. It depends on the relative skill of the player’s involved in the match up.
Actually, if they were “most” of the population, they would have been the middle of the curve.
But regardless, TrueSkill2 would have sorted the population pretty quickly. This gives the match maker everyone’s relative skill, and would quickly render random matchmaking pretty useless.
What I am saying is that it is better to put whatever players are required to make the match as even as possible between the two teams.
You have made your choice to skew your team’s rank spread. It is your choice to play with your lower ranked mates. It you who chose to create a team dynamic where you go +15 and they go -15.
The matchmaker has two choices. It can try and match your team player for player… or it can select a bunch of closer ranked players.
TBH, neither is great for the opposition team. But the first one really sucks for lower ranked players - as they didn’t choose that dynamic - and their Onyx level player isn’t a mate who is looking out for them.
That’s an interesting point. I wonder if TrueSkill tried to adjust and if it did, how long it took?
So the best solution to your SBMM problem is to play with friends who are the same skill as you.
I guess 343 are -Yoink!- if you do, and -Yoink!- if you don’t.
I don’t play a lot of other FPS - but I understand that Halo is the exception in this regard? Most games have stricter limits. And it’s interesting that 343 have begun squeezing squads in ranked.
Friends at least have the option of custom games or splitting into groups of similar skill levels.
Neither of you are addressing the core issues. You can’t play the game solo because sbmm anchors you with a bunch of trash cans who go -12 or worse (gotta force that 50% winrate), and you can’t play the game with friends because they get btfo because the entire enemy team is weighted to the highest skill player on your team. And this brings up another point, while solo queueing games regularly have 6 players going hard negative, with one other decent player in the lobby to match me. How’s that experience for 3/4s of the players in my matches? The game is functionally unplayable unless you have a full stack at your skill level. If social was randomized these consistent problems wouldn’t exist, because it would be random.
I feel like most people only play ranked because it is the closest thing to a progression system Infinite currently has. No one complains about these issues in CoD or Apex ranked play.
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That’s a population issue.
If there were enough players of the same rank available on the server then the games would have a much lower range of ranks.
The match maker is doing the best it can with who is available.
I don’t know what the answer is… but I know it’s not making it “random”.
The idea isn’t to “force” anything.
If you have evenly matched contests the 50:50 just evolves naturally.
Again. What else are you going to do?
Apart from get better friends…
And the enemy team is weighted against your team MMR. Not just you.
You certainly can’t weight it against the lowest ranked player. That would be ridiculous.
Low population.
Finger’s crossed 343 continues the good work and we see improvements into S3.
Not as good as it could be. Or should be.
But at least the teams are evenly matched. And the contest is good.
And from the research into H5 it is clear that the contest is the important thing. More than pings or individual performance.
I wouldn’t say unplayable.
I have mates ranked way below me and those ranked way above me. I’ve had a lot of fun playing with both of them - even though my role/performance is completely different depending on who I run out with.
Not ideal, sure.
And I guess I’m lucky that I get to mix it up a bit. Carry the game with one group, and damage sponge the other.
But this a pretty unique circumstance - most other sports or endeavours divide you into your skill group and only let you compete against players of your ability.
You just introduce a whole new bunch of consistent problems. All of which are easily predicted by maths.
And the one of those consistent problems is the ONE you want to avoid - uneven matches.
eg. you can predict that completely randomised players/teams would result in an Onyx player of 1650 being the highest ranked player in 96.7% of their games. And that nearly half of their games (47.5%) would have an 200 point advantage in average team MMRs.
Yep @Freak_A_Fan , once again you’re right.
We’re missing the point here.
We know that random doesn’t work. The only people it suits are high ranked bullies and streamers.
And SBMM works best if you have a solid population to match from… and if you have limits on who plays together in squads. Which isn’t practical.
So what else can we do?
Again, I think there should be some sort of handicapped playlist. Where Onyx and Bronze can run around together. You can adjust the scoring based on skill. You can adjust the map based on skill (or at least who can pick up power weapons and equipment). You can adjust abilities based on skill (eg. struggling players get OS off spawn).
If you did it right you could do away with SBMM altogether. You just have to convince the very good players that it’s not their God given right to go double figure K/D every time they want to “chill” in a Social game.
I completely agree with Darwi on this. SBMM is a necessity for any modern competitive FPS if they hope to maintain any sort of broad playerbase.
Not that I think Halo Infinite have done a good job of it. It was definitely sub par in the early months when the players base was large and now with the dwindling player base it’s hard to tell if it’s still not doing a great job or if it’s just not possible to do any better with the players currently available.
I am 100% sure that ranodmising the matchmaking would have killed off the player base even faster by only really catering to the dedicated and/or highly skilled players and completely alienating anyone new trying to learn.
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Fixed? You mean removed, right? Honestly, SBMM should be called BSMM, because it ignores and puts away all the players near me, from my city/region/country, and matches you with people thousands miles away due some stupid made up policy/narration. So of course it’s gonna be a bad experience when you put together people from entire continent (Europe) with so much different pings.
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I play from europe too. Population of halo players in Europe is very low. I’m only put on EU servers half the time
The SBMM killed the game for me and my friends. It was impossible to play together even in social.
I get it SBMM makes even games and closer contests but a less strict non existent sbmm would be in my book - a game I would enjoy.
I’m not a pro I’m an average Joe… I don’t mind getting stomped just as much as I like to win. Playing really good players and having that challenge was part of the fun. So as much as people say that close games are better. I believe they are either inexperienced in the other or believe in the science too much.
Random is fun, competing 24/7 is exhausting. You could say if you like fiesta and think SBMM should be in the game - you’re hypercritical.
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