'Segregating high skill players from the population at large, forcing long wait times on them, is a form of discrimination': former Halo multiplayer lead on the 'failure' of SBMM in modern games
'Segregating high skill players from the population at large, forcing long wait times on them, is a form of discrimination': former Halo multiplayer lead on the 'failure' of SBMM in modern games
Just how skill-based should skill-based matchmaking be?
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Honestly I hate sbmm. I don't really want every game to be a sweat-fest. Rather than three sweaty, stressful matches, I'd like the following 3 games:
- sweaty, stressful match
- we get annihilated by higher ranked players (game goes quickly)
- I go on an insane spree against noobs
That's still best achieved with SBMM (just a less strict version). With random matchmaking, you are only equally likely to see better/worse players if you are in the 50th percentile.
Also, each player is independently selected (when random). This means there will probably be a mix of high skilled and noob players in every game. You would not see a team of mostly noobs or mostly pros. For a player in the 50th percentile, with a team of 6, the chance of being better than every player on the other team team is only 1.5%. For the 25th percentile, it is 0.02%. So a very significant number of players would (almost) never experience an "insane spee on noobs". However, the chance of having at least one player in the 75th percentile on the opposing team is 82%. So they would frequently encounter situations in which they feel hopelessly outmatched.
The only way to solve this is to use matchmaking that attempts to take skill into account.