Re: Solo Q experience - Respawn is biggest cause of death

@heme725 You can still have SBMM within premade squads so that it is balanced. And communication is not really the issue, I can make weird calls with my friends and they can understand me, randoms wouldn't.  Besides, I've gotten Spanish speaking only teammates and think about Shiv, he always uses mics but his teammates do not listen, hell I'm pretty sure there are people that literally play without sound believe it or not. The point is, no matter how good you are, no matter what you do even if you do not make mistakes and use mic, being solo will still be an unfair advantage, hence why I called it cheating to have squads against solos

@Skaro07 

Just out of curiously; how do YOU think the current SBMM works right now? I think its funny that many complain about the current SBMM but many of them seem to have totally different understanding how it works =) 

@Midnight9746 

Well, I was more referring to his idea of the casual SBMM since that usually is the subject of frustration. But if we are talking about ranked SBMM, I guess that I agree there should be a limit how far an account can derank, perhaps 2 ranks down, meaning that a Master/pred account can never derank below Platinum, a Diamond account never below Gold etc etc

The question is if this would stop people who feel the need to smurf far below their skill level the entire split. If such player wanted to only play in low elo, they could easily just have multiple accounts dedicated for bronze to gold and switch account every time they are close to reach Platinum.

But regarding the trend of putting you into sweater lobbies if you win a lot; I dont know if I see a super strong correlation tbh. Ive had several 2-3 wins in a row with randoms. Sometimes its easy to only remember the times when you have a super good game match 1 and then gets killed by a pred match 2, but forget all the times you have a good game match 1 and then have exactly the same level of opponents the next match, and the next, and next. etc. But if you are correct about this; isnt that a good thing then? I dont see a problem if a player that keep preforming very well against a certain level of opponents could be tried vs harder opponents?

@Midnight9746 

Its so hard for anyone to say anything about these kind of stuff because much what happens in a match from your POV depends on things that you dont control, like who kills who far away  from your position etc.  I mean, there is a possibility that the average skill level of each causal lobby is exactly the same every match every time you play as a solo queuer but sometimes, you land with the best squad in the lobby and dies right away and you think its a "pred lobby", sometimes you land with a bad squad and kills it and the best squad in the lobby lands far away from you but survives the early game and kills you in late game after you won 2-3 more fights and you think its an "average lobby" or that the best squad in lobby dies right away and takes with them the second best squad and you go on winning the match with 15 kills and you think its  a "bot lobby".. Three examples of the exact same lobby but three totally different experiences for you, if you get what I mean.

I think many issues that many people seem to have could be solved if Respawn implemented some transparency in the game. For starters; a kill cam could solve many of the "no foot step issues" or "wall hack suspicions" people have. I am fairly sure that many no foot step issues comes from sneaking enemies, enemies jumping down close to you from elevated positions or Pathfinders that grapples to a position close to you etc. Many wall hack situations comes from people who spotted you earlier and tracked you for a while but didnt take a shot right away etc.

Also, I think it would be nice if you, after the game when your squad is eliminated, would see a graph of the KD of every player in the lobby in comparison to your KD, perhaps even how the these players were distribution in the squads of the lobby etc. Then people could determine how sweaty the lobby really was and how well you performed in relation to your skills. I think this actually would prove that most lobbies arent as hot as people think-

@CrazieAtesPS4 

I was referring to what seems to be the current matchmaking in casual so in this context, it makes sense. Seems like you are referring to your preferred type of matchmaking which is a super strict SBMM where ideally everyone in the same lobby is more or less equally skilled. 

But Ive said it many times before; such matchmaking for casual is literally impossible to achieve; So you want a matchmaking that puts every player, regardless of his skill, in a lobby that has 59 more or less equally skilled players?

1) How many different skill based lobbies would theoretically be necciserly to be open at all times to achieve that the entire player base, from the bottiest of noob bots to ALGS pro player level, would have such lobby? 20? 30?  Probably more tbh. Just consider Diamond rank, which last split seemed to include only Diamond4 to Diamond 1 players. Only the skill variation of the players playing in ONE of the diamond tiers, like Diamond 4,  would require at least like 5 different lobbies for everyone to be "equally skilled" with their lobby mates... And now remember that Diamonds are only like 4% of the entire player base. Just imagine how huge the skill variation is for all the gold players!

2) Now consider how the player skill distribution over the player base looks like. Its with almost 100% certainty normal (bell) distributed, with a skill mean value probably around high silver/low gold gold ranked player. So in the bottom and top percentiles, there would ofc be very few players queuing. Now remember what we said in 1) about all the necessary lobby intervals.. Combine these two points and its easy to see that there literally would be impossible to find enough players for the top and bottom percentiles of players.

3) But if we ignore 1) and 2) and just assume that there are infinite number of players at all skill levels so every lobby can be filled within reasonable time:  What "skill variable" should such system use as base for the SBMM? KD? Win rate? Damage dealt? Not possible since all these stats are 100% correlated to the current matchmaking. Its not a definite measure of a players skill, but just a relative measure of the players skill in the current matchmaking. 

I am not gonna explain this further so you have to do some thinking of your own . But take my word; its logically not possible to base a matchmaking on a variable that is strongly correlated to the skill level of the opponents in a game that doesnt have 1 winner and 1 loser.  It will just be a big mess where players from all skill levels are randomly mixed. 

With all the cheating going on, Aimbots, PSlient, Wallhacks, Strike Packs, etc., these Solo cheaters will not do as well, that's for certain.

Solo will help level the playing field.

So what, who cares you don't have all the other Legends abilities and support, playing Solo will be just fine.

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@Balladalidila wrote:

@CrazieAtesPS4 

So you want a matchmaking that puts every player, regardless of his skill, in a lobby that has 59 more or less equally skilled players?

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No...

I want an algorithm that can pair teams up that are similar to their counterpart.

And all 3 players don't need to be of equal skill, but rather the teams they face have similar pros and con-s in regard to skill.  EDIT since that term needs a hyphen??

For instance...the endless amount of games where I might be paired with 2 of the newest players in the game getting steamrolled by either a partied team, or a solo queued one that is by far more skilled than mine on every level. And yes I have continued to watch many teams that steamroll me, and all 3 players are always on point! While my 2 teammates are pinging P2020's 10 minutes into looting and staring at walls like they've never seen anything in the game before. That kind of matchmaking should never happen IMO and there are PLENTY of more combinations of incompetence vs gods between the games with competent teammates.

Math is a wonderful thing, even though I lost my love for it in Calculus, but they literally have all the data for all aspects of the game, and can manipulate the game codes in any way they want to matchmaking wise. Also pretty sure they can afford someone, or a team, to create an algorithm for matchmaking that is better than the current one...

But why haven't they?

I don't know their mission statement, but I would think endlessly pissing off lots of people with god awful matchmaking wasn't in there. 

I think the Match Making reasons are simple, there is simply not enough of a large player base, to match people up evenly, that's all.

@CrazieAtesPS4 

I think their mission statement is make as many players as possible to quickly press "Ready" every time they get out of their previous lobby and totally forget about the last game =)

Ok but I see what you want but isnt that KINDA what the current matchmaking is doing, or at least try to do with regards to the queuing time? I am not a pro but I am good enough to get out of Diamond but not good to gain a single RP in Master/Pred lobbies and I also get two teammates that are much worse players than me in the majority of causal matches with randoms. And Ive said in many times before, but when being totally honest and objective, I am the first to admit that the majority of enemy squads also are of similar constellations, many times even worse than my squad. 

But yeah, I think we can agree on that I would rather wait another 10-15 seconds to find a match than sharing lobbies with 3 or 2-stacks of premade Predators. Because IMO, that  is the one variable that breaks the game. I dont care how well you play, you WILL not be able to carry two silver-to-gold skilled random teammates against a a premade duo of predators, let alone a full 3-man stack.  But the question is how to handle those players. Because I dont think there are enough players on a predator skill level that are queuing for casual games that they could be sorted in a separate lobby. 

@Balladalidila Sorry for the late reply. You guys had a pretty good back and forth convo between SBMM/stack matching, but I think we all agree the current system is no good. When I was a solo Q Diamond, I would match in games against like #1 + #4 + #20 pred (obviously stacking) which is ridiculous. Once I hit Masters once, it feels like SBMM takes into account your highest level ever achieved because even PUBs is full of 3-stack preds. I could stop playing the game for weeks and come back playing like crap, 1-2 kills at best and losing all 7 games I would play straight, still same level of SBMM. Hell I constantly match in the same lobbies with Pros/streamers and my K/D is only like 2

I can only reference what I know, but Halo had the best MM experience I've seen. If you full stacked, you knew you were in for a higher, 2 min+ MM time, but you would get a competitive experience. Back in H3, game was ranked 1-50 and if you were 50 and it matched fast, you knew you were matching a lobby of 50s, if it took a little longer, 48+, a little more than that, 45+, then 5 mins in would match 42-44+ level players but never lower than that. So you could tell it expanded the range of skill through time, with a limit, and never matching full stacks vs solos. Apex has levels within the same rank so it could do something very similar. It's all about balance between time and fairness, with the BIGGEST thing being the no stacking vs solos issue, like you said you may defend yourself against 1 but you're not going to carry 2 silver teams against a full 3 stack of preds. 

@r1ggedgame

I know the Stats, but a lot of these are also newer players to the game. If you play Apex every day as a Random player you will see a higher percentage of lower level newer players.

This is what I am talking about.

I've been playing 95% of Apex as a Random since Season 1.

80% of the players I am matched against are very low level players, around LVL 30-150....

LVL 150-200 I play against maybe 10% of the time...

LVL 200+ I play against maybe the other 10% of the time...

so if you know the numbers, it doesnt strike you that your numbers might not add up with the rank distribution of the game ?
New players wouldnt be Plat 4 or higher, but that is round about 20% of the players. And if i count Gold into that, which are also players that actually should know how to use a characters ultimate and have at least some aim expereience,  we have at least 40% of the Playerbase. 
But thats not mirrored in either your nor my lobby experience ... we can be happy when our mates manage not to die at drop and do above 200dmg in total
And also the fact that skilled Players are more likely to play longer sessions and more often  than the majority of  new unskilled players should reflect itself in the lobby behavior but it doesnt.
https://apexlegendsstatus.com/game-stats/ranked-distribution

Also the Octane general distribution is odd on my end, officially round about 15% but i get Octanes nearly every 3rd game ?!?
And we all know that 95% (some might even say 99%) of the Octanes are "the best mates you can wish for" ... not !