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 .
@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 .
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 .
@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.
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.
@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 .
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.
@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 .
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.
@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.
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.
@stevencloser wrote: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.
You are so right man, of curse the matchmaker should take your K/D into account. If you are skilled at killing yoor K/D should be way over 1.
On the other hand I was watching a match where the winning team had 0 kills and just 300 dmg! Sounds unbelievable but it's really possible...
I myself also won a match with a teamresult of 3 kills and 450 dmg, and we all were surprised it was allready over!
So survival skill (avoiding firefights in bad positions/ with bad equipment, looting the right areas silently, ...) is important too!
Not sure which data you need to analyse to calculate it, maybe number of top 3 results divided by number of matches...
@Flashshark1980 wrote:
@stevencloser wrote: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.
You are so right man, of curse the matchmaker should take your K/D into account. If you are skilled at killing yoor K/D should be way over 1.
You completely misunderstand the way a matchmaking system works. If your goal is to match people with equal skills then in a perfect system K/D ratio of everyone should be 1.
