Instead, every single game now is optimized for streamers, content creators, and a small "Professional" scene. So now, when a single popular youtuber wants a meme gun, the devs add a powerful slug to the double barrel shotgun and a red dot sight, so that youtuber can make a highlight reel of headshotting people across the map with a damn shotgun while throwing the entire tactical part of the gameplay out the window. The community spends 6 years complaining about a tactic that is basically just spawn camping, and the publisher gives radio silence, but there's a weird, niche tactic using your favorite character in the pro scene that is SLIGHTLY better than random in effectiveness, and you better believe that character is getting a hard nerf.
Now I boot up the game, and if I have a good match where I did better than expected, the system responds to that by putting me in a much harder game, where I'm expected to lose, because that 50% win rate must be ENFORCED. Even if you constantly improve at the game, you just get put in front of more and more talented people, wiping out any joy you might experience from your improvement. Meanwhile, you continually get destroyed by 12 year olds that don't have to cook dinner every night and have plenty of time to hone their skills. These systems are even implemented in """Casual""" game modes, which are then full of pro players on new accounts making youtube highlight reels.
So yeah, excuse my old man anger, I just literally lived through a better time. Right now it is impossible to sit down with my friends and enjoy a PVP game together, because casual multiplayer has been thrown to the wolves, often in service to memes.
Even games that did have a global list of servers, one wouldn't necessarily always play on random servers, but have some favorite servers (often ping-based, which means geographically local, to some degree) and play on those.
Using Counter-Strike as an example: no matchmaking system - relied upon community hosted servers offering a wide range of game modes (official and community created). More competitive matches (pick-up games) were often found via IRC.
Now I dunno...
Persistent servers mean they can have distinct cultures and you get your favourite servers and start to notice the regular players. This doesn't happen with matchmaking so much.
And I think the point about the 50% win rate is important - I am a person and my mood and skill varies day by day, but ranking stats are measuring the account not the player. Some days I wanted to stomp noobs, some days I wanted a challenge, and some days I wanted to turn my brain off and run fy_iceworld. You could also change your name at will if you were worried about your reputation due to any of the above.
The way my friend plays Rainbow Six Siege gets him killed every single time without fail. But following "the meta" is really not fun for him. Instead of being able to find a community where we can play with people who might not be as bad at the game as us but are interested in everyone having fun, he gets thrown into the same generic "Casual" pool as everyone else, including kids who play 24/7 and streamers on smurf accounts building a highlight reel. There's no room for playing around, for trying different things, for just playing unoptimally. If you do anything not in "The meta", then you lose, repeatedly, and then the system forces you against literal children to ensure you win often enough to keep that 50% winrate.
Like I said: In the past I could choose when I wanted to have fun, be lighthearted, and screw around by joining more casual servers. Then if I wanted to be competitive, I could join a more serious server, with more strict rules and systems, and play against both people much better than me, and much worse than me at the same time.
Now you have no choice, because everyone is in the same pool, so if you don't play "the meta" or do something nonstandard to have fun, you will be crushed, and then placed against terrible kids, and then placed against really good kids, over and over again. There's no room for casual gameplay because the "casual" section of matchmaking isn't casual.
The most fun we ever had playing Siege was getting a group of 8 people together to play "custom" games. The variability of skill was a huge and important part of the experience. We knew we had to carefully balance the teams for things to not be absurd, and we knew that playing "the meta" wasn't the best strategy in this case because you couldn't assume your teammates to play like perfect robots, giving you the freedom to try different strategies. This is also why people get so damn angry when you don't follow the meta and play like a perfect robot who has memorized all the strats, because if you don't, your team will most certainly lose. You could enjoy games you were bad at in 2001, because game design wasn't so aggressive about "perfect matchmaking" and "perfect competitiveness". I don't want my fun afternoon game to be a damn esport.
What you really want is win rate distribution over difficulty level.
that's exactly why casual multiplayer lobbies suck, it's a 'Find Now' magic button with no data other than your previous games, rather than a lobby where I , an expert, can join "Experts Lobby #3030", create a small friend network on that server, enjoy repeat sessions, etc.
Yes, they tried to fix the social aspect with friend lists/etc, but they also got rid of the homeopathic solution of user self determination for the sake of making the game more onboard-able for novices and casual players.
I say '... the game' a few times, you can apply these ideas to practically any modern multiplayer game out there nowadays that's even a bit popular.
I hate the games I lose because there is usually (9 times out of 10) nothing I can do to affect the outcome.
I hate the games I win because the win mostly comes down to how bad the other team is, or a superstar on my team, and I was mostly a spectator.
The games I enjoy are where it is a hard fought battle with decent teamwork that pushes me to my limits and beyond, and in those cases I don't care if I win or lose.
I've had 20 game winning streaks, 20 game losing streaks. Between the match making, smurf accounts, and weird balancing issues, it's very hard to know what is dictating the outcome. The psychology is so destructive if you place any value on the outcome.
But overall, it's still possible to have a lot of fun and great matches enough of the time that it is still worth playing.
I'm around low diamond, which is definitely my skill ceiling. It relatively easy for me to assess higher diamonds and masters. It's also easy to asses plat players. Anything below plat looks very similar to me.
Nearly every one of those matches I ended the game with the best stats and still lost horribly.
My favorite though were the team mates that threw at the start of the match or when my team would decide they would rather argue than play the game. Such a toxic experience of a game. Having one amazing match of great fun and teamplay just wasn't worth the 2-5 matches of absolute toxicity.
When playing quickmatch there were certain heroes that you could play and force a win (assuming the map didn't fck you over). For me those heroes were murky and the lost vikings (and usually abathur). My TLV winrate was over 70% because I could just soak and PVE my team to a 2+ level advantage fairly quickly. Murky was a similar experience but I could also assassinate enemy heroes fairly easily.
Sadly those were the only heroes I played that consistently made me feel like I was effecting the outcome of the match. Getting +30 kills as valeera with no deaths and still losing cause you can't get your team to do any objectives is just infuriating..
Winning is generally fun, but the interesting bit about using Fun as a guiding light in matchmaking design is that its a non-zero-sum game. Losing teams can also have fun. Maybe not as often, depending on the game and such, but its definitely a number larger than 50%.
I know this seems reductive and whatever, but I think its a really critical discussion that the gaming industry isn't having. Skill-based matchmaking and ELO are pretty tuned-in to, well, "skill" (whatever that means in modern gaming), such that you're pinned at that 50% rate to the best of the system's ability. Some would argue that this pinning actually results in less fun games, for two extremely valid reasons:
1) If the system is constantly adjusting to keep your win rate at 50%, you never have the opportunity to see yourself improve through the metric of your win rate. This effect is especially pronounced in games like Call of Duty, where the metric we're talking about is really something more like your KDR; if the system is engineered to constantly keep your KDR at 1.0, there's startlingly few metrics to judge your own performance by. Many games have tried to address this through the award of opaque ranks and badges; weirdly, Call of Duty doesn't, but some games do. In other words, your ability to feel like you're getting better is replaced by being told that you're getting better; many would agree that while it can feel good in the moment to get that badge, its less satisfying in the long-run.
2) A perfectly balanced skill-based match making system would reasonably want to keep every player's win-rate at 50%, over a long period of time (or, KDR at 1.0, or in Apex a win rate of 5%, or whatever is balanced for that game). But that isn't necessarily what happens over short periods of time; and players experience games in the moment, players aren't statistical databases of their entire gaming history with some title. Thus its normal to ask not just the win rate, but the standard deviation of that win rate. People play the lottery, and find it fun, for a very real psychological reason: fun can have an outsized impact relative to the odds of some game if the game has an abnormally high/unfair standard deviation of expected success. If you paid $1 for a lottery ticket, and you were guaranteed to the best of the system's ability to win $2 every 2 lottery tickets, no one would have fun playing the lottery (and the system wouldn't make any money, but that's beside the point). Yet; this is how SBMM is quite literally designed; to reduce the standard deviation of your performance as much as possible. Variety is the spice of life, as they say; but the better and more consistent SBMM systems get, the less spice the matches you play tend to have. Put another way; "popping off" for a game is supposed to be a fun, rewarding experience; but players are now universally trained to know that the system will actually punish you for being abnormally good in a match, by placing you against better players next game.
My overall point being: there's a gulf of difference between "players have to have an average aggregate win rate of 50%" and "all players should have an individual win rate of 50%", and systems which try to guarantee the latter can actually be less fun.
I also find it interesting to think about an ELO system which tries to operationalize the concept of Fun, to try and guarantee a Fun game for as many players as possible. What would that look like? Most simplistically, and probably ineffectually: ask players after the match "did you have fun?" A player's performance in the game influences their own skill rating; but a player's response to this question would instead influence every other player's "fun rating"; asserting whether or not the competitors (and teammates) were fun to play with; as well as signaling internal metrics to the development team for tuning of things like map, weapon, and game design.
But for my own psychological health, just telling the matchmaker how I felt about the match would go a long way to taking the bite off a bad experience.
Another lost opportunity due to a corporation being more concerned about the next quarterly reports than anything else..
Sometimes I had more fun losing but those were exceedingly rare cases that generally involved a friend or two in the group.
I still played the game chasing those rare highs where I actually enjoyed the experience. After losing 30something games in row spread out over a week of nightly playing I just rage quit. Even today years later the game's MM still pisses me off. Mostly because I found the game play mechanics to be fun and I miss the experience of the good games.
I did a Quake mod a bit like that, infinite rockets with massive explosive damage that did very little to your health but blew you right across the map. You could take about four or five direct hits from a rocket if you were pinned somewhere but mostly you'd take falling damage from bouncing the hell off the skybox.
Yes, it was stupid.
Yes, it was more-or-less unplayable.
Yes, it was as fun as it sounds.
I should resurrect that, if I can still find the code.
I don’t understand the part about 12 years old. The game naturally shifts you towards players of your level. If you get destroyed, next game will be easier. Seems like you somehow feel entitled to winning.
Sorry but I think you might indeed be that guy. You are basically complaining that you don’t want to compete. You can play a solo game if that’s the case. They are perfectly good fun.
Well, yes. If you spend hours and hours playing the game, I can imagine that at some point you feel like you should be getting better than most people.
This was definitely true for dedicated servers anyway.
I'm sure they feel the same way.
I personally like matchmaking, but I get it. Sometimes I want to play people who are way, way better than me and “suck”. Like I used to.
The situation that you described is so incredibly uncommon that publishers will never specifically address it. This isn't good, but the general (instead of specific) approach of "getting rid of skill-based matchmaking" has so many more downsides that that's going going to happen either (and it would be very bad).
The only way you could implement this feature in a fair way (for both teams) is if you allowed an "MMR boost" when your entire team is a single party. And that would be fair! I'd support that feature, even if I never use it.
So basically you are complaining that you don’t get to connect and smash opponents weaker than you and instead are faced with even competition?
Unless you derive an unhealthy pleasure in bullying people who pose no challenge to you, that’s seem like a net improvement. Facing no opposition is just plain boring.
Honestly, my already fairly low opinion of the average online video game player is not really being improved by our current discussion.
Otherwise, you're just doing what the previous generation did mocking people with their 'nintendos' because the problem is not relatable.
I have little interest in "serious" competitive video games. Most of them are not very fun to me. Plus, to put it bluntly, everytime I tried, they were shockful of abusive idiots regardless of the proefficiency level. Still, I don't remember finding the matchmaking particularly painful.
In the past you’d know you were getting better because you’d start winning more often than losing. Conversely, you’d know you needed to get better when you were still mostly losing. This was all in games with a completely level playing field, so the only differentiator was skill (for me those games are tiberian sun, gta 2, warcraft 3 or unreal tournament).
This was, fun? I’d look up to the people that could defeat me.
Then the new generation of games, where you literally got advantages as you played more (Call of Duty MW2) things became crazy, because you’d need to play against people that had wildly different advantages. Matchmaking often isn’t very impressive, and you get matched with people much stronger than you.
Now, you just boot up the game, drop a few hundred 100’s of dollars, and start whacking noobs.
Usually there are ways to play besides the ladder, if you can find players willing to lose much more than 50% of their games against you. But for understandable reasons, those are hard to find. So people make new accounts and start at the bottom of the ladder again instead. (In many games, the publisher makes money off that, so they don't fight it too strenuously).
(alternatively, in extremely snowbally games like League of Legends, that's an argument for fixing the game balance such that wins and losses feel less like stomps)
From my experience in overwatch, the system tends to favor win and loss streaks instead. You'll get 4-5 wins in a row, where the enemy team had no chance. Then 4-5 losses where your team was hopelessly outclassed. Maybe you'll get a couple of games that are close and feel fair. But not many.
No, the system puts you in an easier/harder game, where you're expected to play _with and against_ people of your skill level (including if you want to play strictly meta or if you want to play with only one hand or whatever).
I've been playing one of the most popular (for PC anyway) online game for 10+ years now and it only has skill-based matchmaking, in both ranked and casual mode. While plenty of people rail against the fairness of its matchmaking, I've rarely heard anything against the concept of skill-based matchmaking. It's the only kind of matchmaking that makes any sense to me. Why would I want to play against people that are way better/worse than me where I have no chance to have a good game either way?
While my friends no longer play it regularly, when they used to play we'd just... play however we wanted in casual mode. Why does it matter if some people are better/worse or meta/casual? You can play the most random stuff you want and you eventually get matched against people of your skill level. Or if you don't enjoy the current match for whatever reason (winning/losing too much, or trying too much/little), just go next and let matchmaking do its thing until you get games at your level, wherever that level happens to be.
If anything, your complaints sound to me like the developers care too little (rather than too much) about competitive balance/integrity across the entire playerbase.
Then game companies took total control, made you play on their servers and introduced all these problems.
Well, when you're on a 5-person team on Counterstrike and your fifth player doesn't want to buy guns and even try to complete the objective, they just want to run around and knife chickens and hide in corners the whole game, it can be a little frustrating to the other 4 players.
Like, I get its casual, and you shouldn't necessarily expect everyone to always try as hard as they possibly can to win, but when one person not even trying to do the objective of the game it sours the experience for the other four.
But this is kind of true of any team-based game. Imagine playing Spades or Rummy where your teammate is just always purposefully playing junk and never even trying to play their hand properly. You're probably going to have a frustrated time in that game.
In causal its definitely forgivable to make mistakes and try something different, but if you're just in a casual match to sniff the proverbial flowers in the game you end up ruining the experience for your teammates. Ultimately in a team based match-made game all players really should at least try and observe the objectives of the match to some level, at least in my opinion.
Whenever you have a sentence that has 'these days' and is describing human behavior, just leave off these days.
Humans have been cheating pieces of shit throughout history, especially when they are in a position where there is no recourse from the other parties in the transaction.
Being that humans have been cheaters in one way or another in significant numbers. For example modern infidelity figures are around 25% based on surveys. Somehow I just don't think your statement here is backed up by observation.
"It's just a game" is a lame excuse. A game is using real time.
And you know what would be especially satisfying to do against these pathetic losers? Cheating against them and watch them rage.
Seriously, I don't think the "man children" and the people complaining about them are all that different. You were clearly not engaged in traditionally approved adult activities either, if you were there for the very first matches of a competitive computer game.
For instance, I played a free to play game. The servers just went live and it was the VERY FIRST MATCH of the game. It wasn't soon before one guy on our side was crying because we all sucked. I see this type of behavior everywhere.