Is SBMM babying players?

@aisthebestletter Pretty much. In essence it's designed to try and hold onto the most volatile of player, the casual. It's a marketing thing. The most volatile player is the casual one, the one that needs instant gratification, or they move on to something else. By tailoring their experience, you can effectively increase how long they play the game for, and thusly, how likely they are to keep spending money on the game. You feed them exciting / engaging / easy wins or matches, they're more likely to spend money through positive reinforcement. 

Its why the current gaming industry is so pathetic in my eyes. Halo 3, Battlefield 3, the original Star Wars Battlefront 2, early CoD, etc. etc. all multiplayer games that had no SBMM, and yet all  still great. Pushing out inspired creations with no regards for player statistics, profit margins, player-counts, etc. etc. Quality experiences that made the player want to keep playing not through hidden metrics or modified matchmaking, but through pushing forward a quality experience that made the player WANT to keep playing, regardless of whether they won or lost. Even then, if you as a level 50 in BF3 got trashed by some Colonel Level 500, you were free to quit the match and move to a different server. 

Current gaming industry is just another milking machine with every developer / publisher asking the same question of, "How do we keep players interested and playing the game that doesn't involve creating a quality experience that will last the ages?" "How many corners can we cut while pricing microtransactions as high as they can be?" "How can we implement a battle pass?" "How many gimmicks can we implement that keep player retention numbers high?". The bar is so low people cheer at a developer saying there won't be microtransactions in X title. There are gems out there, but they are few and far between, and the relentless grime of over-monetized nonsense really makes the industry as a whole look pretty pallid in comparison.