There's a trade-off between how long you wait and the skill spread of the team. IIRC at the very top, for DOTA2, the pros complained enough for the devs to make a "wait longer" matchmaking mode.

SBMM also a double-edged sword. Some people like to play game relaxed. Random matchmaking gives them chance to win. But SBMM means having sweaty games all the time. I do prefer SBMM but I’ve seen people upset about it

People who complain about SBMM being "sweaty" are typically stronger players who want to dunk on casuals. For them, it's true that non-SBMM is sweaty, because if you're even a top 10% player, you're gonna dominate most other people.

But what if you're a bottom 10% player? How non-sweaty is non-SBMM then? Is it not-sweaty to get absolutely demolished all the time even at your best?

That depends on the game I think. Games like Battlefield have no problem with players of all skills playing the same match - some are trying hard, some are chiling out, some are doing something silly, either way the scene is so large you can usually choose what you like the best, it all organizes itself naturally. BR games like PUBG always have very different players in one high-ish level match (as it's not possible to pick that many players of a matching skill) and that's completely fine.

Games and leagues where you're expected to try hard are entirely different. I'd say custom tiered PUG queues are much better than common huge pools, this way top players can filter people they're training and playing with. In the end I think I rather agree with the grandparent than not, communities typically feel more lively and diverse than blind ladders.

If the game has a sufficiently large group of players then yes that's not as bad. But you'll still end up with weak players fairly consistently having a bad time.

> SBMM also a double-edged sword. Some people like to play game relaxed.

That's just a different way of saying some people like to play games where their opponent has no chance. So your "relaxation" comes entirely at the expense of others.

Single player campaigns are a better way to accomplish this because then you can do whatever you want as far as difficulty goes.

I think automatic global matchmaking is a bit of a cursed problem because how people want to play a game is multidimensional beyond just their skill level at the game, it may change from session to session, and some players are incentivized to lie about it.

You can see some attempts to address this with having casual 'unranked' and competitive ranked matchmaking modes, but this still runs into whether casual means 'just fuck around and not even try to play the objective' or 'play the game as a team but not be quite so focused on winning at any cost'.

People who complain about SBMM it because they just want to pubstomp are mostly just whining and want their fun at the expense of 1-11 other players, though. (I recall a conversation on here where someone was saying that the optimum winrate for chess to keep someone engaged is about 80% and did not seem to understand that there was no way to have a group of people playing chess against each other with an average 80% winrate each)

I used to really enjoy this aspect of older games like Warcraft 3 and TF2.

You'd get the one guy on your server who was just in another league compared to everyone else, and it was so satisfying to get the kill on him. And sometimes, it would be you pubstomping.

Then again, back then I don't think people cared as much about winning and losing.

Something definitely was lost with the addition of ranked ladders and global skill-based matchmaking systems. It was quite a long time, maybe 10y, before TF2 even got one.

And yet it had a healthy, if unhyped, competitive scene long before that.

> There I wish games were even more aggressive and exact at matching you to players around your skill level.

PvP involves sandbagging and a variety of fragile gimmick strategies. (Oh, and cheating. For slow enough turn-based games, players can cheat with a separate physical device, which can't be detected.)

The system can't measure skill level accurately against a player base that's actively antagonistic to such measurement, so of course it can't match players well on that basis.

Even abstract games of perfect information, like chess and Go, have this problem online.