Again? Really?
Apparently it’s that time of year again. It’s time to talk about Skill Based Matchmaking. It’s inevitable really. Whenever a new Call of Duty releases, invariably the complaints about SBMM crop up. Nothing ever changes about them, and the scrungaloids complaining are always unequivocally wrong. But why is that? And what even is Skill Based Matchmaking?
For those who don’t play many competitive multiplayer titles: Skill Based Matchmaking is when a title tries to put you into games with similarly skilled players. The game will watch how you play, and make a decision about where to place you based on a handful of key data points. Or it’ll just assign a default number, which goes up or down based on how good or badly you perform. Either works really.
The intention of this system is to increase consistency in the play experience for the majority of players. Most players don’t like losing, but it’s even worse when they feel like they weren’t given a fighting chance. Wendy Wall-splat who has been playing Brimblo Breaker Versus for 500 hours shouldn’t be put up against Corey Combo Dropper that just started playing. That won’t provide either with the rich, competitive experience that the developers intended. Instead, both players should be matched according to their ability so they can exist in an environment where they’re able to compete.
Unfortunately, that’s not what most Call of Duty players think.
Twitter is – or was depending on when you’re reading this – flooded with complaints about SBMM this past week. Claims that it is ruining not just Call of Duty, but all of gaming were foisted out into the open for everyone to see like an unwelcome turd in a swimming pool. If my language didn’t already make it apparent, I am very in favour of SBMM. Even though I lambasted Strive’s poor implementation of it earlier this year, I’m still glad it exists. The quality of games would be so much worse if who you played was always a complete free-for-all.
What really pisses in my Cheerios’ though, is the reason that many of these chuds are parading around as their justification. The argument against SBMM boils down to the game not being fun if you’re trapped in a match with a bunch of sweats – players who want to compete on a serious level with one another. This, some would argue, is the whole point of playing a competitive game. Games like Among Us, or Fall Guys don’t feature SBMM because they’re focused on providing a fun party experience. By contrast, Call of Duty, and Guilty Gear Strive are about competing, so they use SBMM to help facilitate that competition.
However, what really gets me is how completely egocentric that argument even is. You can’t have fun if you’re not dunking on other players, getting an insane kill streak, or popping off on stream? Ok. What about the other people in the match. Why should a bunch of less-skilled players be stuck in a match with hypothetical bro-gamer who plays Call of Duty for 6 hours a day on Twitch? Why should they have to endure the ultra sweaty gamer chad? They shouldn’t – you’re a selfish prick for insisting that only your experience matters.
And that is why I can’t take the argument against SBMM seriously. It comes from an incredibly selfish mindset. All players should be able to have fun. That doesn’t mean that everyone wins, obviously that’s not possible in a competitive environment. However, everyone should be presented with an experience that they can engage with. An experience where they feel they can compete. Insisting you’re somehow more important is ridiculous.
This whole rant may or may not have been motivated by a particular clip that’s been doing the rounds on Twitter. Where do you stand though? Feel free to sound off in the comments – I promise I’ll use more restrained language than I did in the article.
Frostilyte Writes 
Yes. I agree. Having fun also should not be limited to only winning or getting killstreaks.
And especially in a competitive scenario, it makes sense to have people not getting wins because the other player is brand new or is still in early stages of getting better. Imagine wanting to compete in basketball, but only if your ranked competition is junior high school kids.
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I mean yeah – your comparison pretty well hits the nail on the head.
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For those complaining about SBMM making it hard to stomp on opponents, I hear single-player games come with an “Easy Mode” to facilitate that exact experience.
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I didn’t know that there was an arguement against SBMM. In my experience most games who have the aim of being competitive most of the time have have ranked and unranked modes to cater to those who want to play competitively and those who don’t.
With that being said, maybe the people complaining about will never be good enough at a game to stomp anything other than new players and the whole arguement is about projecting ones incompetency.
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The problem for most parts is that SBMM have moved into the unranked matches aka quickplay… Also the idea that competition should be fair is just untrue.
Watch any sport or any other sort of competition be it in the marketplace of business or ideas, it’s never truly even.
Even as Steve here is saying that the experience of streamers are not more important, same can be said about the dad’s with 47 jobs, 7 wives and 250 kids.
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I think the motivation is less “fair” and more “consistent”. I have to imagine, despite not having the data to back it up, that players play for longer both in individual play sessions, and in how long they continue to play the game on a week by week basis when SBMM is in use. It’s not even new – every year the complaints come up current, or former CoD devs will state that SBMM has been in their titles since as far back as 2007 (Modern Warfare). Just seems that now people are more aware of it, and/or have platforms in which to vocally complain about it (facebook, twitter, reddit, etc.)
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SBMM have no place outside of games that are purely 1v1.
And on the subject of it being a yearly occurrence, that is not entirely true as it have come down to how harsh SBMM have been implemented.
In a fighting game it makes sense to keep it harsh, as you are only going 1v1.
But as soon you move to team based games, other problems begin to arise… One being a fully stacked team vs a team of randons, P2P servers with someone from Qatar, people playing with lesser skilled friends.
And now regarding SBMM being a net positive, is hard to prove either for or against… If it were such a positive, Bungie would probably not had to tweak it for the better part of 5 years, where they have turned it on, off, on, off and on again.
The most popular mode in FIFA doesn’t have SBMM and the ones that due are played the least….
Sure people can mention LoL, Dota, Smite and such and that is a fair point, but that also tends to stay in a competitive mode.
Quickplay should not have harsh SBMM in them and to be honest I will forever die on that hill, no matter how dumb that is.
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First off, since the rest of my comment might sound rather contrary: I do also agree with SBMM in the context of competitive games. Being a new player and getting consistently roflstomped isn’t likely to enhance said player’s experience or give them much inclination to stick around in order to improve.
Having said that, I think this is the PvP equivalent of PvE’s levelled lists/dynamic levelling. And not necessarily a good implementation, but some of the early ones where it never felt like your character was improving. The difficulty was relatively static.
There was no sense of progression.
I imagine to some, SBMM might feel largely the same. If you’re improving but consistently having the competitor level move up with you, it could become rather difficult to sense or otherwise feel that improvement in yourself.
Why would you want to spend x+ hours a day ‘improving’ when that improvement can’t really be felt?
I don’t play CoD, so for all I know, this is exactly the implementation already, but I think it is best where there are both Unranked and Ranked modes. Unranked, just complete random with some balancing for group vs group match-ups. Sometimes you get to stomp, sometimes you get to kiss the pavement, hopefully, a lot of in-between too.
You go ranked though? You just have to expect that SBMM is absolutely a thing.
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I suppose my counterpoint to that would be that ranked play has always, and will always be a terrible way to get one’s fix for progression.
I’ve run into it a lot while playing fighting games – the early days contain a lot of learning, and so there is a lot of improvement daily. But the further along you get, the harder each next step up takes. It’s like climbing a mountain only to obtain a few of more mountains off in the distance. Except all of them are way harder to climb. Thing is – the folks that are motivated by that climb will continue to climb. If you just want to see the numbers go up, there are several other games that offer that kind of experience. Going to a competitive ladder looking for progression is like ordering a salad, and getting mad when the waiter brings you said salad instead of a steak.
I actually think they still use SBMM in unranked as well. The logic there remaining the same – players tend to have a better time (on average) when they have a more consistent play session. Also wouldn’t be surprised if there was a bigger incentive for this because of how micropayments drive the majority of in-game revenue now, but I don’t know that I could find any data to support either of those claims.
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I live under a social media rock now so I have to ask… what the popular clip thingy that inspired this article? 😅
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Hahaha – no worries. It was one by TimTheTatman, which I later learned from Valo is something he (Tim) complains about every year around this time. XD
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