It’s a tale as old as time. You yawn your way through eight hours of work and subpar coffee, you travel home with your headphones doing their best to drown out the monotony of a commute, and you flop down onto your sofa or swivel chair and boot up your system of choice. Time to run some games with your friends and have a laugh.
Sike, you get absolutely stomped by your second game and all of a sudden, the thing you love the most betrays you, and gaming feels like just as much work as the 9-to-5. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Destiny 2 player, or you’re hot-dropping into Warzone 2 or Apex Legends. Even solo-queuing the likes of Overwatch 2 falls prey to the invisible enemy: Skill-Based Matchmaking.
It is, unfortunately, a necessary evil when it comes to competitive online gaming, particularly in ranked modes. But it doesn’t belong in public matches, and its varying iterations across several live-service video games are slowly suffocating the casual experience. There is no denying that Skill-Based Matchmaking belongs in competitive modes of live-service video games. The two go hand in hand, given that the very nature of ranked matches pits you against those of a similar skill level, and whoever emerges victorious gets to move up in ranking. This all makes perfect sense.
But it can absolutely be argued that SBMM just does not belong in public matches. The majority of these games are based on RNG, and the concept of looting and map zones and having luck on your side should also extend to the random teammates you’re paired with, and the enemies you have to face off against. It’s what makes it fun.
Whether you get paired with a Predator in Apex Legends and get to enjoy the free carry, or you have a baby tank in Overwatch 2 that’s just trying to learn what all the different buttons do, it should be luck of the draw. Public matches are meant for the casual player base who are just trying to have a bit of fun. If people want to sweat and stack with their friends, then that’s exactly what ranked modes are for. But when games apply the same mentality for all modes, everything just starts to feel a bit stagnant, frustrating, and worst of all…boring.
SBMM means a more finite player pool gets drawn into a match, and that therefore means there is an inevitable lack of variety. Regardless of where your skill set begins, or how much you strive to improve it, lobbies are going to be sweaty always, every time. You’ll either consistently be outclassed, or you’ll barely manage to scrape by, and the latter is dependent on whether your teammates take pity on you enough to carry you through the hellfire.
There’s no surefire way that the algorithm can work out where to put players, and this then pushes everyone towards the meta. Gone are the days of old Modern Warfare 2 shenanigans like only running riot shields and knives, or everyone running Hologram in Halo Reach, and gone are the days of generally just doing stuff for the sake of it. No more silly experiments, no more goofing around spam-crouching with a fellow enemy sniper. Just a thousand-yard stare as you pick up the same weapon that everyone else is using and hope for the best.
If you happen to have a really good day, that euphoria is marred by the knowledge that come tomorrow, you’ll be losing every single match you drop into. Instead of the highs and lows of online gaming, players are left with a middle ground that brings nothing but stress and try-harding.
The main issue lies with its implementation. As it stands in most games currently, SBMM gives such whiplash to the playing experience because casual matches shouldn’t have you top of the leaderboard in one game, and then to the bottom of the barrel in the next. It removes any sense of learning, any sense of improvement, and well… any sense at all.
So yes, skill-based matchmaking does have a place in online gaming - in competitive modes. While it remains in public matches, SBMM is slowly strangling the life out of online multiplayer games, and we can kiss goodbye to honourable endgame fistfights, spam-emoting, and really anything fun at all.