Re: Skill-based Matchmaking is mandatory for better player experience.

Please use the battle results to make 5-7 (not too small) groups of players!

BR says nothing about your abilities...

Calculate K/D or use avarage dmg per match or combine them and  other values showing the strength of a player.

I dont wanna play against PROs and I dont wanna play against newbies.

Right now the funfactor drops a lot for me...

Matchmaking is absolutely necessary in any player vs. player game.  Even more so in a game mode like battle royale that is very unforgiving.  The only potential drawback is the wait time, because if you implement matchmaking there will absolutely be a wait.  That's something I'm perfectly fine with, as long as it doesn't start going beyond a couple minutes.  Even by matching players of a similar level you already reduce the amount of elitists in the lobby.  Of course there is going to be smurfs, but that's inevitable and not as big a problem as people like to make it out.

@zennorian Strong disagree. Completely getting stomped with no realistic chance to win the round at all for the average player because there's one team of full-time streamers in your game just shouldn't happen.

Yet again strong disagree, BR’s are supposed to be random, and plus you can’t put new players against new players and not expect them to get better....faster at looting, better at aiming, and game sense to know the feel of what to do and when to do it.

skill based match making will just stagnate people’s skill level.

I would like to see a match making along with a casual non-ranked/rated lobby also or something that has a buffer for new players vs experienced. Honestly, I think most players I've ever head upset at the idea of a MM system really are just upset that they'll have to actually compete from the sounds of it. But having a higher skilled bracket will always improve all players game play because they will learn things from the higher skilled players having to play even better.

More than that, I'd like to see a penalty for leaving a game before your squad has been eliminated. It seems to happen more and more that players decide to drop hot, get popped then immediately leave before they can be recovered. Or what is also happening more often now is being queued in to a match being short one player or even sometimes solo. It's kind of annoying, but I milk it for all the xp I can and lay low most the match. Beats leaving and ending up in matches where your squad gets aced in the first 30 secs because everyone else wanted to go bunker or even that random spot.

tl;dr MMR system would be good if a casual mode was still available and add a queue timer if a player leaves a game early, maybe 5-10 mins or perhaps zero xp or stats contribution for that match if not staying until your squad is eliminated.

@zennorian Do you think getting vaporized by a Shroud wannabe in 1 second every game makes someone better at aiming and looting and finding out where the good stuff is and what are good paths to take?

Or actually getting to play the game and getting to shoot the weapons?

Or to use a different example. Do you learn chess by getting crushed by Garri Kasparov or by playing against similarly experienced players? 

Do you learn the piano by forcefully trying to play the hardest piece you can find or do you work your way up from simple pieces?

Did 5 year old you get thrown in a Bugatti before learning how to ride a bike?

Both, but you’re not going to come across as you put it a shroud wannabe, every game you play, and if so, spectate them, find out what guns they are using, see what paths they take for each situation, learn off them, don’t hate them, people have put a lot of time and effort into the game to hone their skills as a gamer, let other people do the same.

Only saw this after my last reply and your examples are rediculouse and extremely situational, and extreme, gaming is different, I believe getting stomped on is the only way to get better, my first FPS was CoD4 and I never went positive on any game, and when I did I would rejoice, then by the time MW3 came around I was entering competitions and come 2nd and 3rd constantly. 

Constantly getting stomped on increased my reaction time, my hand to eye coordinasation, and the ability to adapt to certain situations.

Getting on stomped on is the FIRST learning curve to ANY game, you are new and other people are better, now improve!

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@zennorian wrote:

you can’t put new players against new players and not expect them to get better....faster at looting, better at aiming, and game sense to know the feel of what to do and when to do it.

skill based match making will just stagnate people’s skill level.

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First of all I think you added 1 "not" too much, what makes your sentence making no sense....  I corrected it above, no offense!

Second, I believe that your aiming ability your looting behaviour are not affected by the players you play with...
I mean there is noone who permanently tells you  "aim 1 m in front of the enemy"  or "aim higher" since your teammates cant see what you do.

You learn this things by yourself if you play, maybe you change your mouse sensitivity to feel better.
You get knowledge over the items you see if you see them more often and you stop reading or deactivate the descriptions.

I really don't see any influence of others in the game here. Maybe you get good informations from helpfull threads...

"the sense to know the feel of what to do  and when to do it" can be influenced by players talking to you and giving you hints right in the game...

But seriously, how many squads you have that use voice?

10% ?

Last but not least:

If the skill level stagnates, why is that a problem? they get ranked a  little bit lower and still feel fine and happy.

And better players still don't need to play with them...

You seriously think learning in gaming is different than EVERY SINGLE OTHER ASPECT IN LIFE? School subjects, you start with easy stuff and work your way up. Work, you start out doing the easy stuff and work your way up, any sport, you start easy and work your way up, any other skill in the whole world you start simple and gradually get to more complicated things as you get better. Gaming? Nah bro you have to get stomped on with no chance to register what the hell even happened to get better.

Does that make any sense to you?

I got better at all those things by actually getting the chance to survive long enough to try them out. Do you think a 0.5 second long firefight where you're instantly downed teaches you more about how to aim with a Wingman than actually shooting a few mags of it in an extended firefight against someone who doesn't instantly knock you down after you miss your first shot?

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@zennorian wrote:

Yet again strong disagree, BR’s are supposed to be random, and plus you can’t put new players against new players and not expect them to get better....faster at looting, better at aiming, and game sense to know the feel of what to do and when to do it.

skill based match making will just stagnate people’s skill level.

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You get better by playing competitive matches.   This is how athletic sports work.  You start in the playground,  then highschool tiers,  college tiers,  pro level tiers.    The game has to be fun for everyone too,  not just torture.  If theres no motivation people wouldn't play.     People want to gradually get better at their own pace.  Which actually works contrary to your opinion.

The sad reality is that BR genre has no set concept of what a skilled player is. The ultimate goal of the game is to be the last one surviving yet most of the community ranks players by how many kills they score. And unfortunately respawn failed or just refused to address this by putting so much highlight on kill counts. If you play to win, scoring a lot of kills means you messed up a lot, it means you played bad, not good, because you took way more risk than you should have. And yet we have these arena-wide announcements of who the new kill leader is. It's a complete mess. It does not have to be this way, BR is capable of providing an awesome competitive experience, but Apex appears to be designed as this casual gambling deathmatch arena where just like in deathmatch everyone's goal is to frag except here we got gambling aspects like hot drops where you can just get frags for free. I don't think there's much point talking about skill-based matchmaking in this kind of situation.

Honestly, at this point I just want them to make a deathmatch shooter out of this game, because combat mechanics are really good. It's like a better Titanfall without the gimmicky mech combat.

The thing is, there's people entirely capable of getting in firefights with half the server and coming out on top consistently because of the lack of skill based matchmaking, it's not a risk for them.

You can play the game for survival and get in the last two teams and then you get crushed by those guys 10/10 times. Not only because they are good at shooting but also because they can stock up on weapons, ammo, attachments and healing items from the people they killed who will already have gathered only the best loot they found themselves, vs. You who took what you could get.

And you will have to kill at least one team if you want to win a round, so being good at killing definitely is an important skill to have and should factor into skill based matchmaking. Because a round that you were doomed to lose from the start no matter how intelligently you try to play because whoever you are up against is just so far above your shooting ability that you are down before you can process what happened is bad game design. A game that is impossible to win should never happen .

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@stevencloser wrote:

The thing is, there's people entirely capable of getting in firefights with half the server and coming out on top consistently because of the lack of skill based matchmaking, it's not a risk for them.

You can play the game for survival and get in the last two teams and then you get crushed by those guys 10/10 times. Not only because they are good at shooting but also because they can stock up on weapons, ammo, attachments and healing items from the people they killed who will already have gathered only the best loot they found themselves, vs. You who took what you could get.

And you will have to kill at least one team if you want to win a round, so being good at killing definitely is an important skill to have and should factor into skill based matchmaking. Because a round that you were doomed to lose from the start no matter how intelligently you try to play because whoever you are up against is just so far above your shooting ability that you are down before you can process what happened is bad game design. A game that is impossible to win should never happen .

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You know how Shroud was never actually ranked high in PUBG back when they had MMR? That's what I mean, it's rather pointless. You start ranking people - you get Shroud in the bottom half with the noobs. As long as we are not clear on what the goal of the game actually is, you can't really rank people.

What you suggest is to rank people purely on what fights they win/lose and completely ignore what placements they get. At which point the game would probably need to stop calling itself Battle Royale. Not to mention that due to size of the lobbies there will probably never be enough high level players to match them together while also trying to match by other factors like ping.

The player numbers are up to 2 million at once. Even if just 1% of them are high level, that's 20k players. 

And maybe Shroud wasn't that high because matchmaking actually made it so the players he was up against by and large could fight back semi competently instead of half the server being actual noobs like we have with the random matches? But you can't make videos like "40 kills in ONE game?!?!?! *Shocked emoji times 3*" out of fair rounds .

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@stevencloser wrote:

The player numbers are up to 2 million at once. Even if just 1% of them are high level, that's 20k players. 

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Even when there are 2 million playing at once, only a tiny fraction of them are sitting in the queue at the same time, and then they are also divided into regions. But none of that matters anyway if you have no good way to rank people. Giving some weight to some performance stats is proably a good idea, but rather not a priority considering the situation. More useful would be to separate pre-formed squads from randoms, match randoms by whether they are using a mic and by what languages they speak. And of course, matching by ping is important as well. All of these offer very clear benefits, while "skill-based" MMR - not really.

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@stevencloser wrote:

And maybe Shroud wasn't that high because matchmaking actually made it so the players he was up against by and large could fight back semi competently instead of half the server being actual noobs like we have with the random matches? But you can't make videos like "40 kills in ONE game?!?!?! *Shocked emoji times 3*" out of fair rounds .

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Shroud was always one of the most consistent players at getting high kill counts. The reason he was ranked low is because he would often get 5-10 kills and still die in the bottom half while anyone who doesn't hot drop is guaranteed to be in the top half. Technically, he was always a terrible Battle Royale player. Just really good at fragging. And that's how you get him consistently matched against weak fighters - thanks to "skill-based" matchmaking. What you ask for would still get you exactly what you complain about, possibly even more of it (in fact, since AFAIK there was no word on this from the devs, it is entirely possible this kind of MMR is active right now - it is not a hard thing to implement at all). The only way it wouldn't is if you rank players purely by combat skill, that is by who they won/lost fights against. But then again, better just make a proper deathmatch game instead.

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@2deski wrote:

The sad reality is that BR genre has no set concept of what a skilled player is. The ultimate goal of the game is to be the last one surviving yet most of the community ranks players by how many kills they score. And unfortunately respawn failed or just refused to address this by putting so much highlight on kill counts. If you play to win, scoring a lot of kills means you messed up a lot, it means you played bad, not good, because you took way more risk than you should have. And yet we have these arena-wide announcements of who the new kill leader is. It's a complete mess. It does not have to be this way, BR is capable of providing an awesome competitive experience, but Apex appears to be designed as this casual gambling deathmatch arena where just like in deathmatch everyone's goal is to frag except here we got gambling aspects like hot drops where you can just get frags for free. I don't think there's much point talking about skill-based matchmaking in this kind of situation.

Honestly, at this point I just want them to make a deathmatch shooter out of this game, because combat mechanics are really good. It's like a better Titanfall without the gimmicky mech combat.

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I disagree,  first of all let me just say titanfall 2 has a much wider skill gap and learning curve then apex,  and probably why it was never that popular.

Secondly,  Its the players who make the apex what it is.   The problem is we are in an impatient generation that play auto chess and not real chess for the same reasons.  Does that mean classic chess is not a competitive skill based game.

Even in a gambling game like poker,   the pros are the ones who rank high consistently.  Consistently being the key phrase.   

Kills,  damage done, all  those stats still mean something because we are talking about MULTIPLE matches.   Even if they are hot dropping and going for frags,  the better players will be consistent and have higher stats over time.

But I still any game is about winning and not the stats.  And if people feel that is too luck based,  then they should have multiple matches and the best player will still come out on top almost always in a best of tourney.    They keep saying anybody can just hide and survive till the end in a BR.   Yet they can't prove that * because then they say its all about luck.

As if hot dropping on random noobs isn't also about luck......Auto Chess is more popular then classic chess among gamers for the same reasons.   Its a generation with a short attention span and these pros only care about that twitch money.

There is nothing wrong with BR being competitive at all.

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@stevencloser wrote:

The thing is, there's people entirely capable of getting in firefights with half the server and coming out on top consistently because of the lack of skill based matchmaking, it's not a risk for them.

You can play the game for survival and get in the last two teams and then you get crushed by those guys 10/10 times. Not only because they are good at shooting but also because they can stock up on weapons, ammo, attachments and healing items from the people they killed who will already have gathered only the best loot they found themselves, vs. You who took what you could get.

And you will have to kill at least one team if you want to win a round, so being good at killing definitely is an important skill to have and should factor into skill based matchmaking. Because a round that you were doomed to lose from the start no matter how intelligently you try to play because whoever you are up against is just so far above your shooting ability that you are down before you can process what happened is bad game design. A game that is impossible to win should never happen .

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Well said man.  Kill help you win the game.  But they shouldn't be counted as a win.      Society will never respect a sport or any game,  that is not actually about winning.   That's a joke.   Seeing the  team who spent most times as champion squad at the end of a match,  but they lost the tourney cause they didn't get enough kills?    I really don't like the ESL format.  and could care less how boring it is for these players streams.   Most of them are just sore losers with good aim but no strategy.   They are not playing the game  differently then any other random noob streaming......  :They need to go back to quake, overwatch and cs if they don't want to play to win in a BR.

The consistent players should  know when to be aggressive and know when not to,  to win consistently.    And multiple matches should determine a tourney winner to account for RNG.   As you said killing players helps you get good gear.  Sometimes looting does.   They shouldn't even be streaming.  We should be able to watch all teams play with camera angles and all players perspectives like overwatch has. to keep the tourney intersting.    The only reason this will not be a viable e-sport is because even the pro players don't respect it as such.  


See the real problem is,  the way they would have to play to keep followers on their streams,  is not the way they would have to play to win a tourney>   And doing so would only lessen their skills for a tourney.    So they want to base the tourneys around what keeps followers on their single streams....   and imo that is corrupting e-sports.

i come back and see how naive people are.

People want to argue that only wins matter but here's the deal: That approach make playing the system easy. The "pros" who want to look good will simply throw the game so they don't rank up.

Suddenly you have a system that doesn't do half of what it's supposed to do. Because suddenly the "good" players have the option of playing against noobs. And i'm aware of smurfs but that takes extra steps and a proper system should boot said players out of the kids league fast.

Trying to discuss how society see victories and success is funny and all but utterly pointless in this moment, since the point is not about how the players view themselves, it's about how the GAME views the players.

For all i care the system shouldn't even show the MMR to the player. It should be a system to make the player be matched against players of equal skills, not a system to be bragged about.

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@TrueDivinorium wrote:

i come back and see how naive people are.

People want to argue that only wins matter but here's the deal: That approach make playing the system easy. The "pros" who want to look good will simply throw the game so they don't rank up.

Suddenly you have a system that doesn't do half of what it's supposed to do. Because suddenly the "good" players have the option of playing against noobs. And i'm aware of smurfs but that takes extra steps and a proper system should boot said players out of the kids league fast.

Trying to discuss how society see victories and success is funny and all but utterly pointless in this moment, since the point is not about how the players view themselves, it's about how the GAME views the players.

For all i care the system shouldn't even show the MMR to the player. It should be a system to make the player be matched against players of equal skills, not a system to be bragged about.

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A skill rating is different then a rank.   Skill rating is more based on your tactics and aiming ability.  That is what a match maker should be going on. It doesn't account for strategy or teamplay.   ELO's in team games never work as well imo,  because its designed for 1v1.   

And ELO is only accurate in a team game with dedicated premade teams.  When it comes to random teammates you need a skill rating for individual players to match players and teams.

Further more a  rank is based on a  single stat to rank on and I would pick wins. That is what any game is about.     A skill rating should be based on all stats combined.

It might be easy to get 2nd or 3rd place by hiding in a BR.    But its not easy to kill the last team.....    The pros will still win consistently.  In fact the scrim matches of all pro players I have watched,  hiding is not even that easy.     That's not even the argument most pros have,  the argument is that it would be too boring to play and watch.   I disagree and I guess that makes me a minority.  I feel only a single stream would be boring,  but thats their problem.

As for what society thinks?  Well I would like e-sports to be a billion dollar industry,  but for reasons like this it never will be.   Online players don't even believe in skill matching players.  They have no sports sense at all and their definition of competitive is serverely warped.  Its why quake died and cs is still strong.   

And I agree with you skill rating should be hidden.  But displayed win ranks is fine by me.  As for kills and damage done etc... To me thats just as much about time played as it is skill.   Especially if you just hot drop for kills.  But leaderboards for these things do make people happy.

We should have separate modes.  those who want a skill rated match maker mode with ranked stats recorded.  And a mode for those who don't give a crap about nothing.

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@RichAC wrote:

I disagree

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What are you disagreeing on exactly? I mostly agree with what you just said.

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@RichAC wrote:

Its the players who make the apex what it is.   The problem is we are in an impatient generation that play auto chess and not real chess for the same reasons.  Does that mean classic chess is not a competitive skill based game.

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Just as I said, most of the community ranks players by how many kills they score. And play accordingly, view the game accordingly. Streamers are definitely part of the reason why. But, PUBG highlighted kill counters in red from the start. Apex goes even further by introducing kill leaders and listing squad's kill counts and damage next to each other after each game. Lets not pretend that when a game pushes people to care about kills and damage like this it's entirely their fault when this is all they care about. In fact, it's extremely wrong to pretend so when kills and damage are literally the only individual metrics the game focuses on (survival time, players revived/respawned are rather meaningless). Imagine if instead of those two numbers the game showed your current win percentage and top 3 percentage, or average placement among the last 3 and 10 games. Imagine if kill counters didn't exist at all.

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@RichAC wrote:

Even in a gambling game like poker,   the pros are the ones who rank high consistently.  Consistently being the key phrase.   

Kills,  damage done, all  those stats still mean something because we are talking about MULTIPLE matches.   Even if they are hot dropping and going for frags,  the better players will be consistent and have higher stats over time.

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You are missing the point. You first mention poker where ranking is very simple based on order of elimination. And then you say that kills and damage should matter. How do you see them mixed with the win-rate (or are you talking off topic)? People that hot drop all the time may have a decent combat rating but they will never have a great average placement. Kills and damage do not have a straightforward correlation with win-rate.

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@RichAC wrote:

Kill help you win the game.

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Kills help you win the game only up to a point. Technically, a win never requires more than 3 kills. Scoring more than that is often reasonable when opportunities present themselves but again, up to a point. For example, if you killed half the server, you almost certainly played very wrong (assuming your goal is to win). If we're including kills into rating, then your rating should be reduced for that, not raised. But the exact point of how many kills are too many is impossible to determine. It's like rating goalies in hockey by the amount of spectacular saves they made - it's pointless because the best goalies position themselves better and make easy saves instead.

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@RichAC wrote:

There is nothing wrong with BR being competitive at all.

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I agree, the constantly repeated mantra of "RNG means the game is not competitive" is complete nonsense born out of extremely shortsighted views. But a competitive game requires a clear consensus on what the goal of the game is. The reality is we don't have that.

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@RichAC wrote:

Society will never respect

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You'd be surprised...

@2deski   I agree with most of what you said except i'm trying to explain how Skill Rating is diff then a ranking.  Especially on a team game.  Yes kills partly determine your skill but they don't necessarily determine wins.  Especially in a team game.  You can't have ELO in a team game unless its dedicated premade teams, imo.  A skill rating can be per individual to match players to a team and then used to match teams to a matched game.

IN pro athletic sports you have rankings based on many diff stats.  Sure its what makes the game interesting,  its fun.  Stats are what make sports period.     But it doesn't necessarily  mean a win, nor should it.   Some of these so called pro players have some serious entitlement issues.  Then again thats the internet in general.

I stand by what I said about Poker and luck plays a part in any sport.   There is a reason its on ESPN and e-sports is not.   And in no way do I think Michael Jordan should have been entitled to a win every game just because he had the best stats and considered the best player.  Understand?