Re: Ok, so here is the real question.

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@reconzero wrote:
@Unitee01

"Seems everyone would rather play the same lobby over and over while being given a false sense of achievement"

If this is the result that Apex sbmm is producing for you then I would say that you are definitely an outlier. I doubt very much that there are five people in this game who would say, "Apex mostly gives me fair and balanced matches. My squadmates are usually at my skill level and so are my enemies." SBMM is so poorly implemented in this game that it either won't bother to match players of similar skill, or the skill range in this game is so incredibly wide that even players who are near-adjacent on the rank ladder have big differences in ability. I tend to believe the latter, although again, I think people vastly underestimate the role of luck in this game. And a guy who gets really lucky can certainly give the appearance of a guy who is a predator/streamer.

On the subject of games that do without sbmm Destiny 2 comes immediately to mind as a game that went without and went without and went without... right up until it didn't. And Call of Duty has used sbmm since 2007. If the trend over time is to adopt it rather than reject it, then I would call that proof-of-concept.

I'm not trying to paint a picture of sunshine and unicorns here. SBMM is an ugly, twisted, convoluted, opaque, and annoying feature of games which are intentionally designed to be incredibly difficult to play well. I would rather have games be less difficult, have shallower skill curves. But that will never happen, and that's why even the worst sbmm is a necessity, imo.

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Again my brother,

AMEN!

No online only game survives driving off the casual part of their player base.

The problem is, usually, they are the least vocal. You don't know they are unhappy, just one day they are gone and then the lack of population makes everything less for those that remain, and the slow bleed begins.

@KyldenarBruh, listen, you need to understand something. The very system you claim to be against is what you are rooting for, unintentionally.
You are promoting a system that's in place to make it supposedly easier on you, yet you fail to realize that for you to succeed you need to spoil someone else's fun too. This happens at all levels. The difference in a randomized lobby vs sbmm is that one is organic and will play out naturally vs one that is forced. No one wins with forced lobbies, and progress feels non existent. You might as well play a scripted game like God Of War where your choices are limited and you just go along.

Sbmm was originally not a bad thing. It was a way to automate the system so the user didn't have to manually search for a server to join in order to find a match, and the matches made were largely based on connection. I'll say it again, initially, lobbies were not created based on skill, it evolved into that later on - sbmm didn't exist with games who had server browsers. People didn't stop playing because of the lack of sbmm, it was never a selling point. People knew what they were getting themselves into when they bought the game. None of those companies went under as a result either. You play it or you don't, it was that simple. This instant gratification nonsense wasn't so apparent then.. No game's success hangs in the balance of everyone playing it, that's an illusion. Some will play and some won't. You can lose and still be around too, just like you in Destiny and Apex. You didn't seem to go anywhere in spite of your bad experiences? The issue is these developers are becoming unreasonably greedy as time goes on. Sbmm was so relaxed with earlier COD titles for example, that players were debating whether it was even in the game. FF to today and we all feel it, cranked up to 16. Why have it at all then when we both know they won't stop abusing it? And why have it when we also already have a sweat mode aka ranked? There's no new bleed, it's already causing veterans to leave in order to accommodate other players, we are already there, always have been.

@reconzeroWe can agree it's a bad system, but when you take away the randomness of lobbies you also take away some of that "luck" you speak of and you are doing it at the expense of other players. And when so many people are talking about the state of mm it seems more of a "proof of concept" that it's working in favor of the developer.

@Unitee01

Please describe the "good things" streamers do because I need the refresher. From where I'm standing they're pretty exclusively corrosive.

@gg123xyz

I don't care if you have 56 kills in one match. If you can't get #57 because #57 killed you then you're still dead. Which means you lost. You're just a dead loser.

There are two things I hate about this game. One is streamers and the entire streaming culture. Two is the very mistaken idea that kills are somehow more important than winning. I guess the second one is understandable as most players can sort of wrap their heads around the possibility that they might get a kill or two in the normal course of a match. But winning, they seem to believe, is some sort of strange alchemy that's beyond their abilities or control. So they spend every single match they play making decisions they think will net them kills, and they do it without even realizing that most of those decisions are actively pushing the win farther away from them. And to bring one and two together: it's the streamers that are largely responsible for creating that idiotic mindset, the mindset that says if you get a bunch of kills and then die that you're somehow still a winner. Sorry, but no.

Sorry. Rant over.

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@reconzero wrote:

@Unitee01

Please describe the "good things" streamers do because I need the refresher. From where I'm standing they're pretty exclusively corrosive.

@gg123xyz

I don't care if you have 56 kills in one match. If you can't get #57 because #57 killed you then you're still dead. Which means you lost. You're just a dead loser.

There are two things I hate about this game. One is streamers and the entire streaming culture. Two is the very mistaken idea that kills are somehow more important than winning. I guess the second one is understandable as most players can sort of wrap their heads around the possibility that they might get a kill or two in the normal course of a match. But winning, they seem to believe, is some sort of strange alchemy that's beyond their abilities or control. So they spend every single match they play making decisions they think will net them kills, and they do it without even realizing that most of those decisions are actively pushing the win farther away from them. And to bring one and two together: it's the streamers that are largely responsible for creating that idiotic mindset, the mindset that says if you get a bunch of kills and then die that you're somehow still a winner. Sorry, but no.

Sorry. Rant over.

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i dont think i said its ok to want kills and not a win. if you think i did i didnt. k?