Ruminating

@RaisinFlakes

What makes a shooter competitive?

@RaisinFlakes yeah, it sucks man. Games aren't like what they use to be. I blame Epic. Now all the big publishers are doing the same

@reconzero @hayhor I believe what most people consider a competitive game, is one they win frequently, almost like 1/3 of the time. They want 24/7 fighting, and good teammates. This is an incredibly hard thing to do, unless you hit drop with a premade pred squad every game. What people consider competitive is basically the same things that are considered player friendly, like rp refund if your teammate ditches. Apex is more about competitive fairness rather than player happiness. How they make up for it is by giving streamers easy lobbies, giving the appearance that they have a 1/3 chance and everything is winnable. In reality we know this not to be true, and that you lose almost every game. They are more fair than they are ideal. Also the reason you keep playing, hoping for that win, is the same reason people buy lottery tickets, a thing called the near miss. The near miss makes the objective seem obtainable and good as gold. Apex is no where near gambling, it’s just one bit of science matches. (The following is from my own in game experience and comes from no official source) the matchmaking in apex is not what you think it is, from my experience it involves 4 factors. KD, level, pre-made? and gun preference. If you are below level 100 and have a kd anywhere below .5 then you will have lobbies similar to your typical level 100 player. If you are in a pre mad squad, it takes your average kd, and level, say you have a team with 1, .5 and .75 kds, and are also at lvl 400, 39 and 256, the base skill in your lobbies will be a kd of .75 and level of 230, there will also be a slight increase in difficulty, because of the assumed communication of a pre made, even more so if you are in the same club and are friends. And for gun preferences, you will most likely find squads that prefer the same gun type as you, and only a couple will differ. Sorry for this being a little incoherent, I can answer any questions!

@RaisinFlakes what do you mean by "competitive" and why it doesn't feel like one? What makes you feel that way?

@swift07

That sounds like a typical arena shooter pro who wants to dismiss a more complex game because his skill set consists primarily of aiming and not of thinking about ways to mitigate the role of luck. Guess it all depends on your definition of the word "competitive."

@BigMacAttack8u

"matchmaking in apex is not what you think it is, from my experience it involves 4 factors. KD, level, pre-made? and gun preference."

My experience leads me to think there's more to it than this. My k/d is artifically very high, I'm a day-one player with around 19,000 matches, I almost always solo queue, and my happy load out is a c.a.r. and a charge rifle, and my win-rate is (just guessing here) above average. And yet I NEVER see these brutal, master/pred three stack lobbies that everyone is horrified by, unless I see them all the time and don't even realize it (which seems unlikely to me). This game mostly puts me in what I think are pretty low-experience lobbies. My teammates are usually fairly green, and my enemy squads are better, but only because the only enemy squads I choose to deal with are the ones who have survived to the end of the match. I'm not sure what any of this says about how matchmaking works in this game. There's definitely a pattern to it, but I'm hard pressed to figure it out. Unless the solo queue part is what keeps me out of the real trouble.

@reconzero “Unless the solo queue part is what keeps me out of the real trouble.”
As I mentioned, whenever you three stack, you see an increase in difficulty, partnering with only one is not as bad. Also these pred level people could be flying under your nose, as I mentioned earlier, the average does not mean you will encounter that specific lvl 200 person with a .75 kd, it’s just that you will encounter people of the same skill level and game positioning experience. So, these preds could be disguised as that lvl 30 player that always seems to be in the game. I don’t think the system uses lvl and kd as exacts, and just puts any level of player in that would fit the typical lvl 200 .75 kd player. I also do believe that apex uses give and take matchmaking, where you are 100 times better than your teammates, but you plus both of them averaged out meets the lobby average.

@reconzero you know who Shroud is, right? He does play BR's. Honestly, I agree with what and why he is saying that. There is a lot of RNG involved in BR's, which doesn't make the game truly competitive.