A Proposed Rework to Skill Based Matchmaking

I think Season K/D, accuracy and achievements. You should not meet anyone outside 0.5 of your K/D. So if your K/D is 1.5 your opponent window will be 1 K/D to 2 K/D. 

Putting players with a K/D of 1 or below in a lobby with players  who have achieved the 20 kill / 4K badges is absolutely pointless. These could be paying customers being used as fodder. 

Noob stomping is not good.

But for me, I think the SBMM being addressed is as important as implementing Two Factor verification for accounts.

@SquishyVaderPush it even further I say. Only put people in lobbies who have the exact same stats. This way everyone wins and loses at exactly the same ratios. Everyone should be equal and no one should be enjoying themselves more than others. Skill shouldn’t matter. Everyone deserves a trophy.

All I did was try and create a fresh new idea and we're back to the same old tired argument of K/D = skill.  I know quite a few sweats with 4ks and 20 bombs with tanked K/D's.  K/D's that range between 1 and 3.  If someone has a tanked K/D for whatever reason they're still going to be in your lobbies with much more skill then the rest.  I wrote out all of that to really analyze a player realistically in real time and honestly I'm just disappointed with the people of this forum for being so one track minded all the time.  This is why nothing ever gets done around here 

@ErectRainbow Why have you created another thread when you covered most of the points mentioned here only yesterday?

I think your suggestion is a bad idea as you're trying to build a skill profile that's overly complicated which will be very very difficult, if not impossible to account for all factors that are either completely random or don't do justice to the player.

Who engages first for example.. I could be dealing 1000+ damage to a team only to be shot as i try popping a bat round a corner. Random guy engaged me first and won so he's gets 20 odd damage but i'll have a negative rating even though i was pinched amongst 3 teams, surviving in the chaos for nearly 5 mins and dealing the most damage against the ones we were engaged with initially and potentially getting several knocks but they were revived due to the unforeseen circumstances. That doesn't equate to skill.

Different legends, roles and RNG. This isn't a team death match where everyone starts on equal terms, same size hitbox or engages combat in the same way. Some might play area denial and supportive roles compared to a more offensive character/player but the success (increased skill rating from your suggestion) on one can be almost totally dependant on the other being a team game. Someone on my team could be getting a rez off when the the enemy are peaking round the corner and if i have sufficient ammo then i'll beam that corner to secure the rez and if the enemy poke they'll be shredded. I most likely wasted an entire mag or potentially several effecting my accuracy but secured getting my team member back in the fight.

Just the fact that when your stats increase they'll inevitably drop back when being put in harder lobbies will give a constant fluctuation and similar result to what we have now anyway but with a lot of time and effort wasted when other more critical things could and should be prioritised.

I could go on but honestly there are so many holes with this...

@ErectRainbowHere's my point of view.

There are many things in your post that can be easily circumvented. For example, if I want to stomp noobs, I just need to do an awful performance in the placement matches and there I am.

Accuracy doesn't mean much in this game, there are moments where you can put up some cover fire to keep the enemies behind cover and thus gaining your teammates time to push, flank, heal, escape, revive, etc.. Also, the fact that Apex uses projectile based weapons (implying bullet travel time and fall off) makes accuracy even less relevant, as some prefer to aim or track the target a bit longer to be sure they land most of the shots, while others start firing early and make adjustments based on bullet traces and hit marks.

Who engages first doesn't matter, I've actually seen many skilled players firing later, because they prefer to do the bullet dodging dance to force their enemy into emptying the mag while also "locking the target" then start firing back as the enemy tries to reload or switching to their secondary. Some even risk taking a few bullets as they pop a full shield battery, knowing very well that all the shield damage will reset in a few seconds, giving them control in the situation. By the way, things like these are really hard to quantify, but they make a huge difference.

K/D doesn't mean that much either. I've recently seen someone posting his stats after extensively looking for lore stuff. Almost 1000 games, K/D was 0.17. Now imagine this guy going up to a k/d of around 1 in the next 300 matches. He'd seem average judging by the stats, but for those 300 games he would actually have a k/d of 3.76, which is waaay above average, I'd dare to say even pred/ master worthy.

I could probably keep rambling on about other things, but there are key factors that matter much more than fine tuning of SBMM. First is the queue number. The SBMM formula can be the best of the best, it will have almost no effect if the queue is barely above 60 people. Judging by how the percentages of players are distributed per rank, SBMM would need thousands of people in a queue at a certain moment to make sure no wolf gets among sheep. That roughly translates to having many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of concurrent players consistently, not just at peak times.

Then, there the waiting time. Let's say you have the ideal formula and enough active players in an area. if it takes 10 minutes for the queue to fill enough so that SBMM creates ideal brackets, the time spent actually playing would be less than the time spent in the lobby area. This is a problem in multiple ways. Generally, players don't like to wait, and some of them would break from the queue by cancelling, while the beginning of the match would catch others away from the keyboard, mouse or controller. Then, grinding the season battlepasses and limited events would be slowed significantly, resulting in a much higher failure rate, so a lot of unhappy people. Another huge issue caused caused by long waiting time is the broken flow. Long pauses can make most players lose focus and perform below their own expectations. Worse than in those matches where you only loot and move around for 15 minutes and, when you inevitably get into the fight, you're too slow to the draw and lose with an awfully small amount of damage. All in all, a long waiting time would eventually result in large numbers of players abandoning the game, basically early death, so SBMM needs to be compromised often because of this.

@apostolateofDOOM you're dealing 1000+ damage which implies you're hitting shots.  That indicates something about your skill rating.  You could have always positioned yourself better or heard the guy.  That indicates something about your skill.  But this guy walked up behind you while you were healing.  He hit you so that indicates he's good enough to hit a person which gives him a very tiny boost to his skill rating based on accuracy and engagement rules.  You lose a tiny bit because of your poor positioning.  But I want to stress how little you would lose in such a circumstance.  You could not lose any at all.  This is an open forum.  Hitboxes factor into accuracy and while Respawn suggests certain characters are used certain ways, you don't HAVE to use them that way.  I got an aggressive 19 Kill 4600 damage game with Rampart and used her walls 4 times that game.  I didn't even use Sheila.  The aim assist system in this game is how they track accuracy.  You really think that if you shoot 30 bullets into a wall Respawn decreases your overall accuracy?  You'd be put into skill brackets very similar to ranked with with RP.  Except RP becomes your skill rating.  There'd be a range to allow for plays having better or worse games still in the same bracket.  Keep having good games, keep moving up the ladder.  

And you're absolutely wrong.  There is NO FLUACTUATION WHATSOEVER in the lobbies now.  That's the whole point.  That's the key point to all of this.  Fluactuation.  Dynamic.  Always changing.  Real time.  That's exactly my problem with SBMM now.  You're hardstuck in pred lobbies with nothing to do about it.  There is NOTHING YOU CAN DO.

@DoYaSeeMe 

In reality, you can circumvent ANY SBMM formula if you tank your stats.  Not just mine.  Let's remember that.  That's the whole reason Respawn doesn't reveal how it works.  Because then people would tank the needed stats to exploit it.  

I've already addressed cover fire with aim assist.  Respawn measures accuracy through when your aim assist goes off on a target.  In case you're wondering, on PC, or with aim assist disabled, they use the same aim assist boundary framework, you just don't get aim assist.  I said using weapons at different ranges.  How does that make accuracy less relevant?  But yes you could track individual weapon performance and pair that against where the 50th percentile is at to decide whether to raise or lower the skill rating of that player.  All of that literally had to do with accuracy and someone aiming.  Someone with a lot of skill at aiming will do that and have higher accuracy.  And if you're saying the first 10 shots are missed to gauge the range, imagine the other guy only misses 2 shots and you die in the other 8 before your bullets hit him.  That says something about the skill of the 2 players doesn't it? 

If someone engages second and still wins that says a great deal about their ability for whatever reason.  Dodging bullets has to do with movement, and the movement is factored in like I described.  I guess you could implement a system to factor in live health percentages and how they coincide with accuracy and who gets the knock in the end.  

I'm glad you tore down K/D so I didn't have to.  

You also tore down SBMM and how it is essentially flawed.  There's an entire study about how queue time has a negative impact on players within skill based matchmaking systems.  I can't remember the university that published it.  You would certainly have to widen the skill brackets enough to allow enough players to queue.  Which you're right, would defeat the point of all of this.  Like I said.  SBMM is essentially flawed.  Or you could just remove SBMM entirely.  I hate SBMM.  I'd love that.

@ErectRainbow There's to many random elements to it.

You can do your best to avoid getting pinched in bad positions or 3rd partied but it's bound to happen at times no matter how good you are. Audio and such might not be heard in part because it doesn't always work as intended (ie completely broken at times) or intense fights where it's over saturated and footsteps just won't be heard. You can also have 2 very good players who just don't mould well together because of different playstyles.

Let's say hypothetically that 19 kill game was only because you had a Caustic to secure an area to fall back to. Your stats can be dependant on others in your team and should they then get an increased rating because of teams success or just the person that secured the most damage and kills? That Caustic might not be able to shoot to save his life but without him giving you that safe space to heal up you wouldn't have such a high rating... team synergy in a team game. I used to troll about in low ranked games doing 720 grapple spins round the enemy team, they used to focus fire me as i was up close while my teammates took them out. They get the rating but i don't even though my i played my role in the teams success.

1000 damage can be from playing risky aggressive or camping safe taking pot shots and as @DoYaSeeMe said, i see this being easily exploited.

The hard stuck in pred lobbies is overblown too.

I sympathise because yes it happens often being mentally taxing and frustrating leading to burnout but it's not ALL games like some make out.. My personal grievance with SBMM is why should i learn to improve only to get the same end result or even potentially worse? Less wins for getting better? Makes no sense and no incentive to actually improve unless you want to join ALGS. As the game is catered to casuals (they have made that abundantly clear) then i expect most here play casually, not competitive. I want to play the game casually and even be rewarded for getting better, not punished and have lesser skilled IRL friends in my team not leading to a depressing experience for all as they can't keep up while i'm expected to carry or circumvent those protections negating the point of them in the first place. This has absolutely nothing to do with slaughtering low level lobbies and always having easy game like some defend or even at Respawn make out but that's their counter argument to keep bringing in new players and the cash flow coming in. With so many regular smurfs now and including rank split it's actually counter productive with how harsh it is for new players but engagement is up and money rolling in while burning the candle at both ends.

I don't think this is healthy for the game in the long run... 

As i said in your other thread, we've had literally thousands of SBMM threads over the past 2 years and the ONLY amicable solution that most people agreed with was giving players the choice. These lobbies with it turned off are likely to be much harder but you could give incentives for people playing in them, like ranked but with actual rewards you could earn or even crafting materials but they would probably need to remove duos for this now which is highly unlikely.