REDSEC Sudden SBMM

"The only time SBMM comes into play is when all of the first 3/4 criteria aren't met.   I think it's Ping, location, games needing filling, and then SBMM in that order"

So if there are plenty of folks with an adequate ping in your region, a server might well fill totally based on SBMM?

Anyway, I've read a dev say they don't do SBMM like CoD, they do team SBMM (or in the case of RedSec, squad SBMM), ie. the players are all assessed due to performance criteria, but that is used to balance one team against the other, not to make a whole lobby of people of the same skill.

You end up with teams that have a wide range of skill levels but each team should have the same overall ability so as to make the match fair, but each encounter might be far from fair.

What I think though is that they are employing some kind of win-lose retention-based algorithm.

It was only discovered - a few years ago - because EA patented the design.

It basically says that they think players play longer if they have certain win-lose sequence/ratio regardless of how fair the games are, so the algorithm makes sides depending on who they want to engineer a win or loss for, not on trying to make it fair.

The other attractive part of that for EA/DICE is that it is much easier to arrange a one-sided victory/loss than it is to try and arrange a fair match.

The bad part is that a lot of players would rather lose and have a close/fair game than win a boring one-sided match.

Certainly I've noticed that, even though BF6 doesn't allow team-switching and it punishes people who quit (no XP) and it re-forms sides every match, it still doesn't manage to have better balance than BF1 which didn't do any of those things.

This is why I'm concluding there must be something else at play other than wanting to make even matches.

Either that or their matchmaking system is utterly rubbish.

Neither is a good look for EA/DICE.