Matchmaking. Why is it so bad?
Im only level 359, and I've only ever reached plat. SO PLEASE EXPLAIN WHY THERE ARE MULTIPLE PREDS IN EVERY SINGLE LOBBY.
Forum Discussion
25 Replies
- @JayJackbat Because EA wants to please their fellow players who buy every skin and every battle pass that was ever created. Under that category fall mostly predators, masters and people who generally play a ton of Apex Legends daily. Give them fodder to give them reasons to stay.
But to stay a bit more real, I honestly think EA doesn't want the matchmaking to work. I have been pointing this out since season 4. I'm still wondering why I still keep pointing it out. Yes, I'm really tired of repeatedly being put into matches that are over before they begin.
- @JayJackbat Their matchmaking they use is EOMM (engagement optimized matchmaking) and it's very evident they're using it and the devs keep on denying it. They should be explaining why we casuals/bad players match against master/apex pred players almost every match. Is that SBMM? It isn't it's the exact opposite.
- @Butter_F4ce I mean... I'm not feeling engaged, to be honest. They should just call it matchmaking, because that's all it does. It slaps people together. Whether that enemy wraith has been around since season 1 and has accumulated 100k kills against someone who has 400 kills on Rampart or not doesn't make a difference. I mean the difference is just that she probably hits all shots, lands all 3 arc stars perfectly on me and my team mates, can walljump-cartwheel bunnyhop while using phoenix kit at full speed perfectly. Hey, that's fully fair and I'm pretty sure every newbie immediately things "Wow, this game really keeps me engaged and wanting to keep playing!"
Sad part is, it does. - @JayJackbat Yeah, it's a big problem. Out of my group of friends, I tend to play the most. When we party up in pubs, we're usually stuck in Pred lobbies with no chance at a fair game.
Out of the five friends who introduced me to AL last summer, only one is willing to play anymore. Apex matchmaking is actively alienating and disincentivizing casual players, Arenas included.
If AL is willing to put silver and gold players in Pred pubs, I don't see why they can't allow the same skill spread for mid/low-tier players on occasion. - @Butter_F4ce All I know is that if I am getting put against sweats especially in Arenas Im logging off and hopping on Rogue Company or some other game because Im not playing in sweat fest lobbies
- @JayJackbat
I wonder what your actual lobby composition is on average?
I see a lot of players saying “SBMM doesn’t exist, it should be stricter!”
But I continue to drop into lobbies that are primarily Diamond/Master/Pred. I often share my findings here on the forum. For the most part, my pubs are consistently 70% plus Diamond/Master/Pred based on dive trail composition. I’m a Masters player myself, so I am (for the most part) exclusively playing people in my “skill range”.
I’m not dropping into “easy” lobbies and steam rolling people, like people are claiming is happening. For the record, I am a Diamond player. (and this is a year old post)
Apex match composition could very well be what you say; they might only place people of somewhat close skill together. Its just psychology that you focus on that possibility. You are skilled and you know you aren't winning every match you join; its those other skilled players you play with that are beating you and winning. You see, though, that of Ranked players in Apex, only 1% make it to Masters and Predators and you are in the 1%. Only 30% of Apex players play ranked at all, meaning you are in a really really small group of very skilled players. Public matches, by just numbers, will contain far more players that don't play ranked than those that do. So by not controlling for ranked play and player skill, Apex matchmaking is introducing a highly toxic element to causal play.
Lets even say that Diamond players triple stack before queueing up for casual matches. The vast majority of Apex matches are queued solo (casual all the way to Platinum rank). Just by matching up with friends of similar skill, they increase their chances at pub stomping by a lot. This only gets worse when it is Masters or Pred players. Lets say that they only place 3 or 4 higher skilled players in an average lower-skill lobby. They have the skill, the knowledge of the map, the knowledge of the weapons, the instinct to reload or use abilities. They may not win every match they queue into, but they will get those 4k badges and they will farm kills on Lowe rlevel players who will, by all accounts, probably not enjoy being fodder every single match they queue up for.
I started playing Apex at launch and I would never recommend this game to a new player, not anymore. The bar to entry is excruciatingly high. Games to get into FPS don't exist anymore and casual play is definitely dead.
Causal lobbies of "70% diamond/master/pred casual" do exists, no doubt. I peaked at master but am more of a Diamond3+ player tbh and I always end up in those "hot" lobbies when I play 3-man full stack with two premades of equal or higher skill than me. But whenever I play solo queue, I almost never get matched in those lobbies; on the contrary are my solo experience quite easy. I usually get 1-2 kills 3-700 dmg even in a very bad game when I lose to the first squad I meet. I pretty much always out-damage my both randoms combined damage, sometimes with a factor of x2, x3 etc and those few games I actually get 1 or 2 randoms that performs equally well as me, we almost always win that match or at least get 2-3rd place with 10-15 squad kills.
So I would guess that your individual skills makes you end up in this "hot" lobbies which mostly consist of high elo and full 3-man premades, also when you play solo queue. There is probably some threshold that I with my 2.6 K/D havent crossed which saves me from that. But I think the majority of SBMM complainers on this forum are just very average give or take and play in the same casual lobbies as I do but just havent reached a skill level that allows them to win more fights than they lose regardless of their random teammate do in the fight and therefore start to blame everything and everyone.
Wow, a year later and people are still having this problem.
My 6 friends and I started playing Apex in August of 2021. We thought we'd try Apex out. Had we known that the matchmaking would very clearly be rigged against us, I guarantee we would have never started.
I have peaked Gold 4 (No, I'm being serious) and my friends have peaked Silver 2 (Yeah, seriously.) I'm the only one that still plays this game, because 100% of our matches are now Diamond/Master/Pred players.
When we started, we actually had beginner lobbies. But ever since I hit Gold 4, the game believes I'm equal-to-or-better-than aceu, ImperialHal, iiTzTimmy, you name them.
So, I will do exactly what I did, and what 25,000,000 players did in order to get problems in League of Legends fixed: Actively tell people NOT to play this game. Don't waste your time. Don't think you'll have a different experience. When Apex Legends loses 1/4 of its playerbase, exactly like League of Legends did, THAT is when these developers will finally start to listen.
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