Activision Blizzard released a 25 page white page document with an A/B test from early 2024 where they kept loosening the constraints of SBMM and monitored retention and turns out everyone hated it.
Activision Blizzard released a 25 page white page document with an A/B test from early 2024 where they kept loosening the constraints of SBMM and monitored retention and turns out everyone hated it.
I mostly play games that are so niche that the matchmaking simply consists of "whoever's available". But the idea that being matched against opponents at your skill level is somehow a negative might be the most bewildering discourse I've heard in a long time. Genuinely why?
That's not what the paper says. This is specifically COD games that this was tested with
The loosening the skill matchmaking found players leaving from the bottom and continuing as new players found themselves at the bottom. Higher skilled players liked this as they got treated as having lower skill as lower skilled players left.
Tightening it found higher skill players leaving due to longer queue times and having less lower skill players to beat on in their matches. Lower skilled players had higher retention due to being more likely to be matched with their peers.
In other words high skill players enjoy stomping noobs more than fighting each other. Noobs don't like being stomped.
It's not entire untrue to say "everybody hated it", but it also misses the point.
Yeah so matching players with opponents at their skill level is a good thing. Should've been obvious to anyone with half a brain, but somehow there was a whole saga where people were radically opposed to it for some reason. And it turns out they were full of shit.
It's the eternal debate: Should you, as a parent let your kid "win" when playing games, or should you play fairly and crush them until they either give up or get skilled enough to actually beat you?
There are pros and cons to either solution and ultimately it depends on what the individual wants; the immediate satisfaction of a balanced experience, or the assurance that every win or loss was earned fair and square.
I don't play these types of games anymore, but as a teenager I played a lot of Battlefield and I went from noob who would get absolutely crushed every game, to good enough at some game modes that my presence in a 32 player lobby would be sufficient to tip the whole game in my favor and my team winrate was well over 50 %. That is a meaningful, long-term reward that does not quite compare to the modern approach where no matter how many hours you sink in honing your skill, you'll still only win about 50 % of the time. Yeah sure you have a fancier badge or whatever, but it doesn't feel like improvement.
Of course Activision makes a compelling argument that SBBM is overall better for the health of the playerbase. I do feel like we lost something though, and that it is another area in life where algorithms decide what our experience is going to be and smooth out any meaningful challenge.
Hard disagree. I neither like dunking on or being dunked on. The best games are when it’s a close match, and you know you played well but the other team did too.
I don't think that analogy makes sense. The parent and child would be two players with a massive skill gap between them. The point of matchmaking is that you don't match them against each other to begin with, rather than asking the parent to hold back.