Counter point:
The majority of players do not have the time to invest or inclination to get gud.
All they want is to have an enjoyable playing experience. Getting ganked in every game is not an enjoyable playing experience.
“Designers should strive to find a way that players of all skill levels can have fun together.”.
The way that is done in a game like golf is handicapping. Would the high skill players be ok with shorter wait times if they were handicapped?
My guess is: Fuck no.
Give them handicaps and they’ll wear them like badges of honor. They kicked so much ass, their bullets do half as much damage… and they still have even odds to win. Or make their accuracy garbage. Or slow down their movement. Or make them visible from anywhere on the map. That last one even teaches newbies about prediction.
Team-based modes are simpler: pile on more newbs. Unbalance the shit out of those teams. Give the tryhards an opportunity to say a pair of them took on ten guys, and won. Even if they roll the other team, it’s hard to say the loss feels cheap, if you outnumber them so drastically.
Engineer a response that goes ‘fuck, that guy is good’ instead of just ‘fuck that guy.’
Also, it would also solve the streamer smurfing phenomenon as well, since it would be obvious if you were doing it on a stream.
Bullets do quarter damage, they get 1 HP, if they get hit they go into last stand until someone heals them or someone from the other team graciously double taps them. Only 2 pro members to a team, the rest are all bots with no med packs and accuracy that would make even the worst storm trooper look like a sniper. Oh and FF is on for them, that includes their bot team mates, so they have to constantly worry about being in their team mates line of sight and getting fragged… or just a stray bullet as they goof around launching bullets in every direction.
That sounds like newbs playing Halo against pros playing Siege.
This, I already never play anything online because it’s not fun to suck, either constantly getting killed in competitive matches or being a drag on my team in coops. And I don’t have the time or energy at the end of the day to do that, but I do like playing games with others
I do feel for the folks that are very good and have to wait long times because that ruins the game for them but is it really an enjoyable competition if you’re just annihilating everyone every match, does that not get boring? Handicapping can keep it interesting for everyone it just needs to be scaled properly
The problem is that as unfun as talent mismatches are, latency is worse.
Give an option in the menu to add levels of handicap to artificially drop your skill rating an appropriate amount. Then, during the match, display what handicap that player is using with a cool badge, or a flaming skull, or something.
Next: chess grandmasters complain they can’t find enough matches.
They already play at least 2 tournaments a year, now they want more?!
bring back community servers
Community Dedicated Servers are always the answer. Every game I enjoyed growing up had amazing servers that were ran by fans. I was a mod on some of my favorite TFC ones. It’s a great way to keep cheaters out and build a sense of comraderie amongst the regulars.
But…but…think of the profit margins when they release a
reskinversion 2 and everyone stays playing V1 on community servers.Didn’t the Master Chief Collection add a server browser for finding wacky forge games?
Ah yes hardcore gamers, truly the most oppressed minority.
This type of discourse only works in a world in which there isn’t a subset of players for whom playing the game is their professional career (or at the very least, they are pursuing that end). Variance may have made sense when the ratios of experience, skill and time played per day between top level and beginner were like 3x, 4x, 5x… but nowadays, in most games with some degree of competitive element, those ratios are in the 100x.
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.
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Well this dude is clearly using Smurf accounts.
Chess solved this problem a long side ago, with odds - a stronger player may remove pawn(s) or piece(s) from their side of the board, to give the weaker player a winning chance (and to give themself a challenge). And it’s completely transparent (well, you do see the initial board state, right?).
With some good design, plenty multiplayer games could implement the same idea - giving the more skilled player a bigger cooldown, less HP, or perhaps even restricting a few combos deemed too powerful.
This is bever gonna work. People who hate sbmm hate it because they have to play with player of their skill level, instead of just stomping bad players
People who hate sbmm hate it because they have to play with player of their skill level
I don’t rule out that a lot of players simply want to stomp bad players, but that is not the only reason why people hate SBMM. The article mentions other two - long wait times and lack of variability. I believe that chess-like odds solve both.
And, sure, it wouldn’t solve the “WAAAH I WANNA DESTROY NOOBZ!11 LOL LMAO” “issue”, but… is it even fixable?
People who hate sbmm hate it because they have to play with player of their skill level, instead of just stomping bad players
Not entirely. While it’s definitely true for some players (mostly content creators), people generally hate SBMM because they often end up in laggier lobbies. Nobody likes getting killed while you’re behind cover, and CBMM directly remedies this.
For instance, I play Destiny 2, which switched from CBMM to SBMM a while back. I’m not a top player (top 48% in casual game mode according to D2Tracker), and even I hate SBMM since the games have always been of much lower quality since that switch. I’m actually playing lower-skilled players than I was in the CBMM days, because my region has a decent amount of high-skill players that I’d previously match up against. But now I’m playing lower-skilled players in higher-latency matches. That’s not a good experience.
I’d rather lose to a player because they’re better than me, not because their internet is trash.
CBMM should always be the default, no matter what the game is. SBMM can be used as a secondary filter, but making it the primary matchmaking factor is always going to be trouble for players of all skill levels.
Some fighting games let you filter games by connection and even connection type (wifi warriors you should be ashamed), but the primary matchmaking is skill based, and that still seems to work.
They should run proper goddamned metrics. I go to considerable effort to ensure good quality wifi.
The solution is simple: Create lobbies by ping and then split the teams by skill. I think titanfall 2 does that, I’ve been playing for a long time and if I meet another veteran, they are usually on the other team.
That still doesn’t solve the problem of playing cannon fodder for low skill players.
Just nerf the shit out of them. Bullets do quarter damage, 5 HP, automatic last stand and have to be revived twice, FF is always on for them, they can be seen on the map at all times.
If you’re bad at a multiplayer game, you’ll die a lot. That’s just part of it. Any good game will give new players a way to fight good players (TF2 has the anti titan weapons for example).
Poorly designed games will punish bad players for being bad (like unavoidable COD killstreaks for example).
SBMM is just a band-aid for a problem that lies much deeper.
I haven’t played multiplayer competitive FPSes since players ran their own servers, so I’m not really up to date.
But if my understanding of the situation is correct, it seems like there’s a pretty straightforward workaround.
Have skill-based matchmaking by default. List an estimate for how long it will take for the match to be made.
Have an option for people willing to maybe be placed into a lopsided game to skip this and go into a general pot, first-come-first-served regardless of skill.
That keeps people who want an even match happy and people who don’t care and want to jump into a match happy.
Turns out only the top players get long queues with this system, so they’re the only ones going into the not-skill-based queue and the wait times are still long; anyone not at the top then gets matched exclusively against top players and that’s no fun for them so they keep to the skill-based queue.
I do not know where your “turns out” comes from, but LOL does something similar and you won’t find skilled competitive players in non competitive queue. For top 0.1% queues are still long, though.
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The game already takes way to long to get going. The last time i played i booted the game and just picked a random, popular game mode. It took me 15 minutes from start-up to playing.
I haven’t been following the current state of the art in competitive multiplayer FPS land. While waiting for a match to be made, are you just staring at a progress bar, or do they let players do stuff like play warm-up play on the map?
Just staring a loading screen essentially, most games will let you click around on the menu still and look at your skins or your settings or whatever. TF2 lets you queue mid match to find another game so you can play on a community server while you wait, and overwatch does let you do warmup DM last I remember (which was years ago so it might have changed). Can’t really think of anything else another game does off the top of my head.
