Forum Discussion
SBMM isnt quite as easy as it sounds in a game like Battlefield. Even if you had teams of similar skill, this wouldnt stop some matches being one-sided stomps- just less frequent. Some players excel on certain maps but struggle on others, or you could get a couple of ace pilots or tankers on a team, and not to mention fully miked up squads. Plus what stats would you use to define skill? SPM is a fairly decent measure, but even this can vary wildly depending on game modes, so you'd have to apply some kind of weighting to each mode.
Ideally you'd want a good mix of skill levels within each team and not just a server full of try hards or 'useless noobs'. Novice servers are a good idea for the completely new people to get their heads around maps and mechanics but probably the best way to ensure fun and varied rounds would be to totally scramble the teams if there were a 2 or 3 stomps in a row. However this is unlikely with the way the game promotes squads and friends list, and too many people quit servers after one bad round.
I agree that a total scrample is best way to go. It should of course respect squads. For refinement it could also include some kind of measurement of player levels. so that accumulated level on each team is as close as possible. While level doesnt exactly say much about skill it does say much about experience and in 9 out of 10 cases i bet the level 100 is a better player than a level 50. There arent that many level +300 around so experience will be pretty fairly distributed between teams.
A low hanging fruit would be to populate the teams quickly after (or before) start of a round. Sometimes there can be 5-10 more players in one team for too long before teams filling up and then the short team are just behind from the start and never recover.