Coded Artist @coded_artist@gameliberty.club
- High Skill
- Coding, Unity 3D
- Low Skill
- Drawing, Memes
- Best
- To destroy your enemies, to have them driven before you, and to hear the lamnations of their women.
- Worst
- Python
I draw, code, and make memes sometimes.
Joined Mar 2019
Coded Artist
boosted
My autism activation word was passed around the public square of the internet recently, and of course naturally, everyone seems to be completely wrong about the subject. So you know what that means: Effortpoasting Time 🧵
OK frens, some of you in the FPS / Gamedev community may have seen this poast on your timeline this past week (picrel). Or perhaps you've seen one of the hundreds of bait videos made by other people who also haven't read the paper. SBMM is one of those topics that seems to be a free money glitch for anyone in the gaming space... In any case! I feel like it's my duty to inform you The Reader on what this paper actually says about player behavior, and how SBMM actually factors into all of this.
If you haven't already, I highly suggest reading my previous thread covering the *original* implementation of SBMM, and the history of how it was iterated upon by Bungie:
poa.st/@merchantHelios/posts/AewweNQUujSBwwmtdI
thread will continue below, writing this poast by poast
OK frens, some of you in the FPS / Gamedev community may have seen this poast on your timeline this past week (picrel). Or perhaps you've seen one of the hundreds of bait videos made by other people who also haven't read the paper. SBMM is one of those topics that seems to be a free money glitch for anyone in the gaming space... In any case! I feel like it's my duty to inform you The Reader on what this paper actually says about player behavior, and how SBMM actually factors into all of this.
If you haven't already, I highly suggest reading my previous thread covering the *original* implementation of SBMM, and the history of how it was iterated upon by Bungie:
poa.st/@merchantHelios/posts/AewweNQUujSBwwmtdI
thread will continue below, writing this poast by poast
Coded Artist
boosted
So we're left at this point:
- Devs see SBMM as something to control player retention, and to control the overall balance of a game's PVP ecosystem. In a vacuum, this is fine.
- Top players want LESS SBMM, because it is an artificial dampener on their skill. This is understandable, as they don't like being punished for putting in the time to be GOOD at a game.
- Mid and Low tier players want MORE SBMM, because it means they can actually play the game. The presence of a single (genuine) top tier player means their keyboard/mouse or controller is functionally turned off for the complete duration of a match. This too, is understandable.
- Both the top players and mid/low players are very often not able to accurately convey their criticisms of the system. This leads to endless flame wars and shitslinging. This is unproductive and undesirable, as it means getting to the heart of the issue is made more difficult.
- You have ignorant 3rd parties who have no stake in the matter criticizing top players merely as a matter of course, since "punching up MUST be right". These people should be ignored, but they are often extremely good at exploiting the anger of midwits. An unfortunate consequence and perpetuators of the cycle. (see picrel 1)
A key miscommunication often perpetuated is that "such-and-such group of top players want SBMM removed from Ranked too! So they can *stomp* players worse than them..." - this should be entirely discounted as untrue, as I have never once seen anyone remotely serious talking about game balancing suggest that SBMM be removed in any capacity from Ranked or Competitive modes in games.
So what exactly IS the heart of the issue? My personal suggestion, based off of my experience being extremely mid at some FPS, unquestioningly in the elite in one (for what little that's worth), and having actually tried to study SBMM as it was originally designed for multiplayer environments is this:
The current implementation of SBMM in most games today IS able to accurately determine the skill of players, but in its attempts at endlessly increasing playtime as a metric, it fails to provide quality matches for (conservatively) 10% of any given game's population. A possible solution to this would be to dampen the aforementioned "wave" effects to reduce the stressors of having to sweat your balls off in casual modes, without completely ruining the experience for lower skilled players either. Additionally, many SBMM implementations seem to aim for as close to a 50% win rate for each player as possible, with an increase in skill bracket directly correlated almost exclusively to this one statistic, this seems to be a dire mistake as it's disliked in implementation by players of most skill levels (as an example, see picrel 2). As such, implementations with this goal in mind should probably significantly lessen the weighting of this goal in the internal metrics of the SBMM implementation.
Honestly, there are other issues I could've pointed out with modern SBMM implementations as well, but honestly I think I've made my point decently enough and I've certainly put enough words into poasts for today. If you have any further questions, either about any of the papers talked about in this or the previous thread, or about my opinions on said papers / problems with SBMM currently / how we can start working to fix them, I would be happy to do so. However, fair warning, if you're obviously asking a question in bad faith having obviously not read the things you're asking about, I *will* simply block you.
I hope this thread has been enlightening to the few of you who've read the whole thing.
Cheers
- Devs see SBMM as something to control player retention, and to control the overall balance of a game's PVP ecosystem. In a vacuum, this is fine.
- Top players want LESS SBMM, because it is an artificial dampener on their skill. This is understandable, as they don't like being punished for putting in the time to be GOOD at a game.
- Mid and Low tier players want MORE SBMM, because it means they can actually play the game. The presence of a single (genuine) top tier player means their keyboard/mouse or controller is functionally turned off for the complete duration of a match. This too, is understandable.
- Both the top players and mid/low players are very often not able to accurately convey their criticisms of the system. This leads to endless flame wars and shitslinging. This is unproductive and undesirable, as it means getting to the heart of the issue is made more difficult.
- You have ignorant 3rd parties who have no stake in the matter criticizing top players merely as a matter of course, since "punching up MUST be right". These people should be ignored, but they are often extremely good at exploiting the anger of midwits. An unfortunate consequence and perpetuators of the cycle. (see picrel 1)
A key miscommunication often perpetuated is that "such-and-such group of top players want SBMM removed from Ranked too! So they can *stomp* players worse than them..." - this should be entirely discounted as untrue, as I have never once seen anyone remotely serious talking about game balancing suggest that SBMM be removed in any capacity from Ranked or Competitive modes in games.
So what exactly IS the heart of the issue? My personal suggestion, based off of my experience being extremely mid at some FPS, unquestioningly in the elite in one (for what little that's worth), and having actually tried to study SBMM as it was originally designed for multiplayer environments is this:
The current implementation of SBMM in most games today IS able to accurately determine the skill of players, but in its attempts at endlessly increasing playtime as a metric, it fails to provide quality matches for (conservatively) 10% of any given game's population. A possible solution to this would be to dampen the aforementioned "wave" effects to reduce the stressors of having to sweat your balls off in casual modes, without completely ruining the experience for lower skilled players either. Additionally, many SBMM implementations seem to aim for as close to a 50% win rate for each player as possible, with an increase in skill bracket directly correlated almost exclusively to this one statistic, this seems to be a dire mistake as it's disliked in implementation by players of most skill levels (as an example, see picrel 2). As such, implementations with this goal in mind should probably significantly lessen the weighting of this goal in the internal metrics of the SBMM implementation.
Honestly, there are other issues I could've pointed out with modern SBMM implementations as well, but honestly I think I've made my point decently enough and I've certainly put enough words into poasts for today. If you have any further questions, either about any of the papers talked about in this or the previous thread, or about my opinions on said papers / problems with SBMM currently / how we can start working to fix them, I would be happy to do so. However, fair warning, if you're obviously asking a question in bad faith having obviously not read the things you're asking about, I *will* simply block you.
I hope this thread has been enlightening to the few of you who've read the whole thing.
Cheers
Coded Artist
boosted
Coded Artist
boosted
Coded Artist
boosted
Coded Artist
boosted
Coded Artist
boosted
@ArdainianRight @CoQ_10 "it's gay even if the balls don't touch" - God
Coded Artist
boosted
Coded Artist
boosted
Coded Artist
boosted
Coded Artist
boosted
- High Skill
- Coding, Unity 3D
- Low Skill
- Drawing, Memes
- Best
- To destroy your enemies, to have them driven before you, and to hear the lamnations of their women.
- Worst
- Python
I draw, code, and make memes sometimes.
Joined Mar 2019
