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Penny Arcade - Comic - Esbie Ememm
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Esbie Ememm
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Well that's what the skill based matchmaking aims to fix, no? This is like watching a professional heavyweight boxer complain that he can't fight under-16s to get his win:lose up. We have leagues and rankings for a reason.
In MOBAs, people often refer to something called "ELO Hell" which is when they feel like they are trapped in a specific bracket even though their perceived player skill is above that. Usually though, if a person is in ELO Hell, that means the matchmaker has done it's job and they are now ranked where they need to be. If a person is in Silver, and they are unable to carry so hard that they win every game, that means they probably really do belong in Silver. (As an example).
I don't know how complex the OW2 ranking/matchmaking algorithm is. (I assume this is about OW2 since that's the hotness right now?)
Basically, widespread belief in a "meta" below where such concepts can even begin to apply.
It's about Modern Warfare 2 (the recent Modern Warfare 2). Some dude who goes by TimtheTatMan" apparently said they won't play the game because it will match him against people as skilled as him.
Usually what it boils down to is mediocre players who get matched with great players once or twice and think they're that good instead of just being hard carried.
Proper matchmaking feels bad because you wind up losing half the time, but that's the point - when these algorithms are working you win only slightly more often than you lose as you improve.
Surely MW1 didn't just randomly grab the first 3 (or 7 or w/e) other players from a global lobby and throw them all into the same match. That sounds like a nightmare.
What's funny is I don't think of Tim as a particularly skilled streamer. He's an entertainment kind, so its even weirder he's taking this stand when that's not where he makes his money.
So it literally feels like an ego thing, he can't take losing.
pleasepaypreacher.net
If by MW1 you mean 2019 MW1, then no--that used SBMM as well. And they complained about it.
If by MW1 you mean CoD4:MW, then...more or less. The predominant factor was connection; it found the best connection to other players it could and stuck them together regardless of skill level (there may have been other factors as well but not SBMM as we know it).
I don't think it's that he doesn't like losing, it's that he can't provide maximum entertainment by dunking on lobbies full of people who are less skilled than him. He and his chat can't stay hyped up if he ends up getting killed or stalemated in fights where his opponents use good map knowledge, movement and tactics.
I don't know if MW was doing it completely randomly. I vaguely recall some other shooters eschewed skill based matchmaking for matchmaking based on connection speed.
I can understand some streamers having complaints about matchmaking on skills. They're dependent on putting on an entertaining show for their income and a lot of people don't enjoy watching close matches compared to blowouts. Even those that are more into the game itself might not feel like watching streams of a 50% winrate for very long when the matchmaking is doing its job. People are going to complain when something happens that makes it harder for them to earn a living.
In all other respects though, it's a dumb thing to complain about. I'm not above labeling viewers that only are interested in seeing blowouts as dumb too whether in streaming or elsewhere.
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I guess its because I enjoy a skill vs skill vs a pub stomp, watching him dumpster literal children holds no entertainment for me
pleasepaypreacher.net
Yeah it really is something that varies from streamer to streamer. For example, watching ItzTimmy play Apex Legends, you will see him dunk on people very often, but you will see that these people he's playing against, are incredibly skilled as well, so it's really interesting to watch someone who is really good at outsmarting people that are pretty much on his skill level.
And while I'm mentioning Apex Legends, that game has a huge issue regarding SBMM, the game very clearly prioritizes filling servers up quickly than making them fair matches, so it ends up being a very common thing that you're fighting a 3-stack squad of players that have 300K kills all three of them, or you're stomping on some guys that have been playing for a few weeks. Neither of those are fun to play for me.
This is Mike, so it's rather likely on purpose.
One of the comparisons that jumps to mind is wrestling. In the US, professional wrestling is a lot more popular than actual wrestling/grappling competitions. Most people would rather see an entertaining, slowed and dumbed down depiction of what they think a fight looks than an actual fight where a few seconds and inches can decide the outcome (more so because the average male thinks they know how to fight around 4000% less than they actually do). Or to ride on the boxing metaphor a few people here and elsewhere have mentioned, a lot of people don't like watching Floyd Mayweather Jr. box despite him being one of the most skilled boxers the sport has seen because he isn't a big knockout artist. He is instead a technical master who wins fights with precision and avoiding unnecessary risk (in other words, concussions and other brain injury). Lots of people who might watch a boxing (or kickboxing or MMA match if it's on) aren't so much fans or martial artists as they are people who want to see blood and damage. The same principle applies with streaming competitive games.
With streaming, there's the added quirk that not all extremely skilled gamers are going to make for good streamers either. Stuff like engaging the audience matters and that's not a perfect overlap with excelling at a given game. A known pro might be able to bypass that need to a degree, but there are a lot of people who are really good at a game even if they're not going to make a living off of it but who can't manage the 'never stop talking' aspect of streaming.
With the Apex Legends thing in particular, I've seen variations of that and attempts to deal with those extreme matchups in other games that haven't always worked out. Heroes of the Storm tried things like making sure that people queuing as a full team only got matched with other full teams or a mode for dedicated teams that queued together only. There weren't a lot of those and some folks on this forum who made a casual team once got matched with a professional team despite the game having SBMM. There were also groups that would deliberately queue as a 4 stack to avoid fighting other 5 stacks because they knew that a 4 stack + 1 rando would clobber 3 stacks +2 randos or other combinations but then get upset when they matched against another 4 stack + 1 rando. People who weren't trying to game things and did queue up as a 5 stack would often have complaints that finding matches took forever and some eventually shifted to queueing as 4 just to actually find games in a timely manner. I am strongly pro-SBMM and the like but I recognize there are a lot of hurdles it can have in regards to actually getting people into games and more so if it's not a huge gaming community like Modern Warfare will have.
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Call of Duty community has a specific issue with skill-based matchmaking even though other games have been using it for decades now. CoD is just late to the party for some reason and it always stirs up a shitstorm when they try to do it.
There is a legitimate argument that unskilled random matching rewards people for improving at the game with a more accurate depiction of their skill in general. That becomes a very sticky problem though because nobody wants to lose more than they win, so everyone below average will filter out of the game. I think SSBM is just basically industry standard at this point, I would certainly not launch a game without it.
That IS the problem though, like on overwatch, just buy a new account (or get a free one) and bam, you win the next 100 games, as long as One friend cycles in every couple dozen games. The matchmaking algorithm cant catch new players being top 500, so smurfs just destroy the fun in a game (streamers smurf for the above listed effect).
It's just an issue inherent to any game aspiring to the eSports scene with automated matchmaking in particular and where players can change digital identities, unlike meatspace sports where pulling off the equivalent of smurfing would be on an entire different level of complexity. People are going to recognize Shaq if he shows up to a pickup game for example, and he'd have to deal with the reputation hit of bad faith interactions like that.
And the small team sizes in such a game don't help in that regard, as it reduces the number of variables that anyone gaming the system like that has to control. Outright preventing smurfing at a player level would require an absolutely intrusive level of identity verification that could easily lend itself to rights and privacy abuses outside of the gaming sphere, so I hesitate to suggest such.
At least with games that use larger player team sizes and larger total population within a match, it both dilutes the impact of a single smurf as well as increases the odds that an equivalently skilled one is also on any opposing teams, since you know, more people total.
Edit: or another alternative that I am sure would make a lot of people shriek is that new accounts are simply not allowed to use automated matchmaking in ranked play, and you have to play a minimum amount of unranked play modes as well. So you can't just buy a new account in advance and throw your placement matches.
Kind of makes all the rootkits devs keep sneaking onto our systems seem pretty worthless from a consumer standpoint.
Edit: no, worse. Anti-worth. They're security holes.
Overwatch already has this, so did League, it's not crazy or uncommon. Smurfing is kind of high effort nowadays because a good skill analysis system can identify good players *very* fast. You have to continually throw at various points to not get thrown up to your rank after like 10 games or so.
I feel like new players are the ones that most need to be playing against other new players so they don't just leave in frustration at getting curb stomped.