A better approach to skill based matchmaking
So, currently, the biggest on-going complaint is SBMM, which is justified in my opinion. SBMM in my, and I believe many others' opinion basically defeats the purpose of ranked queue. The reason you play ranked is that you want to climb and know you'll be facing tough opponents with a high possibility of the strats we all know come into play in ranked. But, you're ready for them because you know that's simply what ranked is.
This is all fine IF it weren't for the fact that as soon as you've played for a good amount of time and your "hidden" MMR is basically the same in the regular queue as it is in ranked queue. It gets to a point where it doesn't matter whether you play ranked or not, it all may as well be ranked because that's how the games feel. You play non-ranked to have fun, mess around, potentially fight much stronger people or much weaker people, and not wait on actual queue times because there's plenty of people actually playing the game if all ranks are combined. Except, thanks to SBMM that isn't a thing. You queue non-ranked but you basically fight the same people you would as if you were queuing ranked... That's not how it should be. It completely defeats the purpose of ranked. It's a thing in a lot of fps style games recently and in each of those games people complain about it... yet companies still feel the need for it to be a thing.
So how do you make it more random but still skill-based? Simple, you place a limit on which rank can queue with which, and I'm not talking diamond can only queue with diamond and above and maybe plat 1. No, you limit it to 2 whole tiers instead, you make it semi skill-based i.e. a diamond 4 player can get into a game with pretty much any predator but can also get into games with gold 4 or plat 4. However, they can't queue with a bronze 4 for example because they're most likely new to the game and have no idea what's going on. So you limit the queue pool to 2 tiers higher and 2 tiers lower.
Honestly, though, this is just a middle ground because for some reason companies are hellbent on SBMM. In my opinion, I say remove it completely, who cares if u run into a player worse than you and you completely destroy them? A minute later you could get the exact same treatment from someone that's twice as good as you, that's the whole point of the game. You play ranked if you want to play seriously against equally skilled players, you play non-ranked if you want to f*ck around and don't feel like sweating every game.
Finally, if you really want an unranked mode that still queues people against equally skilled players, you know to practice while not actually losing points? It's quite simple, add a "scrims queue" that mirrors your current ranked MMR, this mode would not affect your MMR whatsoever and can only be changed by actually playing ranked. This way people can still practice against the players they would normally face in ranked but without the pressure of losing points.
Now I'm sure there are some flaws that would need to be worked out with this but, honestly, the way regular queue works right now needs to change. And it's not even a difficult change to make. This is just my take on things, I'm sure there will be people that disagree but the majority right now seems to be against SBMM and I agree with the said majority.
