new skill distribution curve
Does EA even know what it means? Who does?
Forum Discussion
Haha thanks. My main question is, how do they measure skill?🤔
I mean, is it how many kills I get in a **bleep**ty team, or how many I get in a good team? Or how many kills I get full stop? Not factoring in EA's matchmaking "skill".
🤣
Or wait, if I cheat, am i more or less "skilful"?
😱
They will never openly state how they assess skill because players would use that information to manipulate their match quality (at least in theory they would - the truth is that the matchmaking in this game is too loose to allow for much active manipulation, and is even worse now with seemingly everyone playing on a secondary).
But it really isn't too hard to reverse engineer their formula by simply playing the game and observing the effects of your performance on your match quality. It was a lot easier to do this early on in the game before all the secondaries took over. Now it's harder. And the dev changes the secret sauce every now and then just to mix things up even more.
But essentially it's all the things you would expect it to be plus one that you wouldn't. The obvious: k/d, win rate, maybe accuracy, and I'm pretty sure also your quit rate. The unexpected data that I'm pretty sure they use is your average match length.
And when all is said and done, the game doesn't have a picture of you that says, "Okay this guy's good at cqc, bad at midrange, doesn't know how to drop, but does know how to rotate, etc." It simply averages all the data and assigns you a number. Then that number has a stickiness to it where it will change if it thinks you're improving, but will change more slowly if it thinks you're deteriorating. Because players don't typically get worse over time. They sandbag to try and convince the matchmaker that they're less good than they really are, but it mostly won't work unless you are seriously tenacious. And quit a lot. And fire your weapons randomly into the air for no reason. And then if you have one single god-like match then you'll snap right back to the mmr you had before you put weeks into lowering it.
Anyone please add if I've forgot anything, or tell me I'm full of it if this doesn't describe your experience.
Respawn has said in the past that they will not disclose how they measure skill because it could then be exploited.
However they do it is complete garbage though. Based on the skill curve in my matches, I'm apparently a very good player which I know is not true. I have a KDR <0.8 (and going down the last 4 seasons!) and get repeatedly melted match after match after match. Somehow I get put in the same lobbies towards the top of the skill curve over and over again, too.
My conclusion is that the skill curve, MMR, and matchmaking are all complete BS in Apex.
It's interesting. I've been watching that player skill range thing like a hawk since they introduced it. And one thing I've noticed is that it seems to react much more quickly to my intolerance than I would have expected. If I quit the match, early or late, I can almost be guaranteed that the next match will see the grey area on the curve move significantly to the left. The funny part though is that the actual difficulty of the match remains exactly the same. Which I'm assuming is down to two things: Thing one, the game is full of people on secondaries who are not yet recognized as anything other than new. And thing two, there are always many individual players in a match whose skill is outside the grey area on the curve. And being a player who only gets involved in the match when it's down to three squads, I tend to find those players. And the result is that even a match with a curve far to the left of the center... feels more or less unplayable. Or at the very least it feels un-fun enough that I won't bother to hang around just to give a free kill to some **bleep** diamond tier player who's on the second day of his 54th account. No thanks, Respawn.
