A Proposed Rework to Skill Based Matchmaking
NOTE: It's only lengthy because I tried to answer as many questions as possible It NEEDS to be much more dynamic, adjusting your skill rating after every game, either raising it slightly or lowerin...
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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 Regarding circumventing, different stats take different amounts of effort to raise or tank. To mess up accuracy you just need to empty some clips in the sky, so all your loss would be some ammo, but to lower your k/d you need to kill yourself, messing up many other stats at the same time and having an unrewarding experience. This matters a lot, because a formula containing more tweakable variables is weaker, producing a lot more inconsistent results.
Aim assist is all about decelerating your pointer when you're within a certain radius from a target. This can actually make the calculation of accuracy inaccurate.
I mentioned the bullet travel time and fall off over distance because these don't just make targets harder to hit, but are also very much affected by lag. You can hit the perfect shot on your client, only for the server to call it a miss.
Another thing to consider is the authoritative server. It has an important influence in your stats, because it adds lag to the mix. Your perfect 100% accuracy on the client can be a 50% accuracy on the server. Your perfect movement to dodge bullets may make you appear like a bullet sponge on the server. Lag is something out of our control, so it would be making the formula more inaccurate.
Calculation of skill score matters, too. If's better to be a simple formula, that doesn't need much additional calculation during gameplay, ideally none at all. The more complicated the formula gets, the more it needs to have parameters calculated in real time, preferably server side, taking off some of the computing power from other things. That's kind of a big no-no.
Aim assist is all about decelerating your pointer when you're within a certain radius from a target. This can actually make the calculation of accuracy inaccurate.
I mentioned the bullet travel time and fall off over distance because these don't just make targets harder to hit, but are also very much affected by lag. You can hit the perfect shot on your client, only for the server to call it a miss.
Another thing to consider is the authoritative server. It has an important influence in your stats, because it adds lag to the mix. Your perfect 100% accuracy on the client can be a 50% accuracy on the server. Your perfect movement to dodge bullets may make you appear like a bullet sponge on the server. Lag is something out of our control, so it would be making the formula more inaccurate.
Calculation of skill score matters, too. If's better to be a simple formula, that doesn't need much additional calculation during gameplay, ideally none at all. The more complicated the formula gets, the more it needs to have parameters calculated in real time, preferably server side, taking off some of the computing power from other things. That's kind of a big no-no.
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