eden

gamer girl incarnate

𝄆 composer & percussionist 𝄐 excitable lesbian 𝄐 i play a lot of hardcore Destiny 𝄐 a sweet face, and funny little horns! 𝄇

twitter 𝄪 letterboxd 𝄪 backloggd

♭♮♯


only responding to this specific point that i’ve seen from several people in the last day, who generally make other better points alongside it, but A, sbmm’s goal is to put you in lobbies with people who are casual like you, and B, no that does not preclude you getting stomped or someone dominating a lobby or whatever because 99% of players have extremely inconsistent performance and can drastically over or underperform - like you. if your goal is casual fun try to actually have the casual fun before you spin up a narrative for yourself out of inconsistent data points

consider also that the nostalgia for server browser only lobbies as opposed to sbmm is more of a nostalgia for A) the internet feeling smaller and more intimate (partly because you were younger then! but also yes how the internet has changed) and B) people (including you) not knowing how to play the game! these games have existed for a long time now and people don’t play them like they did 10 years ago. got nothin to do with sbmm

literally just xkcd 386’ing about offhand mentions of sbmm, because it’s good


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @eden's post:

it's always weird when people bring server-based lobbies into the equation against sbmm because that was just a fundamentally completely different structuring of how multiplayer games work, it's not like studios are going "should we add matchmaking OR let people host their own servers"

I agree that sbmm is much lower effort for users than trying to join/host servers and generally does a great job at matching skill levels across all sorts of different multi-player genres. It's good to have, imo

That said, I wonder if the benefits from "I do/don't want this to be a sweaty game" or "I do/don't want to play with people who know how to play this game well" - things that could be expressed in text for server rooms with qualifiers like sweaty or noob - feel like they're lacking in sbmm today? I'm not sure what the solutions to these sorts of classification problems there are, especially given how finite and small the size of game populations generally are. But maybe what's being argued by folks opposing sbmm is that there's more than just "how good are you" that serves as user intention when they queue up for casual mm, and those user intentions don't feel as represented by current systems as they did by old ones?

that’s very true! i think there’s still something to be said for the higher skilled players in the hypothetical ‘just dicking around’ lobby naturally outperforming others in a way that complicates the dynamic, but the intent is definitely there. sbmm just has absolutely nothing to do with it; any matchmaking method will make that happen in a modern few-playlists format and sbmm makes it less likely to happen than cbmm and whatever else.