The past 2 weeks of Apex was the worst experience I had with Apex

Same.  I'm a below average player, but I've been in matches with more pro skilled players this past week than before.  9 out of 10 times I am getting my @$$ handed to me in record time.  Not fun for me & it can't be fun for the people I'm playing with or against.

People of my skill level should NEVER be in the same match with Pred or Pro players, but I am finding myself in them a lot more recently.  We all should be able to have fun, but nobody does when that garbage happens.

@Lord_Scorpion34I'm actually wondering if people are ending up in harder lobbies due to arenas splitting up players a bit and matching making still set with a speed priority. I'm facing harder competition than normal this season myself.

I know people don't like to hear this, OP, but...you just need to abandon more games.

There's really not that much of a penalty at all when you think about it.  And you really save yourself both time and sanity, rather than put up with a miserable game.  Let your mates go 2v3+ and save yourself some mental health

The Sbmm in this game is one of the most disgusting and disheartening things I have encountered in gaming as I love the gameplay and game mechanics, lore, character design, just about everything. But the SBMM just completely craps all over the whole thing and half the time you are playing you are miserable. Especially when you work hard to improve your game and the game makes it increasingly difficult to be successful the more skillful you become. It is just absurd. Even the majority of the top players have decided to forgo ever playing with real life friends in favor of finding other top players in the world so they can consistently get content or they are reverse boosting and smurfing their accounts to get into less intense lobbies. I recently switched to PC after purchasing a high end rig and after 30 years on controller finally made the switch to M/K. Now I was a pretty good player on console but my lobbies were always littered with preds or players with the top badges. I new it would be tough to switch to M/K but I thought at least I will get to play against some average gamers. Here is where it gets incredibly sad. I was of course atrocious for the first couple of weeks having to think about every button press and learning to aim with a mouse. But I started getting better pretty quickly. And then it finally just clicked as I was able to perform all of the advanced movement techniques and laser some fools. But just as I got comfortable and had my best game on PC of like 2800 damage which isn't even that spectacular my lobbies were suddenly again littered with 4k 20 kill bombs all over the place and stacks of predators. Tell me this, how in the heck am I supposed to be excited to get better at this game when I solo que going up against stacks of predators with only a month of experience ever on m/k. I don't know what the sbmm is measuring but I can assure you it is not just k/d, damage or whatever. I really believe it is considering things like movement and engagement rate. My gf is decent, pretty average but a vet playing a ton since day 1 but she still walks around in lobbies where 3rd parties are a sometimes thing, not a constant, and people are standing still out in the open, while I am already in lobbies where every single player is a dedicated wannabe pro. It is just crazy. Yeah I am a tryhard as well but it would have been nice to get a bit of time to become actually good before being thrown to the top 1%. I think I might finally walk away. Enough is enough.