SBMM is fine as an option for 1v1 games, but it’s so bad for team games. It actively foments toxicity between players, and it often doesn’t even work that well. I remember playing League of Legends and only one in maybe five or ten games was actually good. The rest were ruined by leavers, smurfs, toxicity, or just bad matchups that made the games lopsided. You win as many of those games as you lose, but winning lopsided games gets old.
It doesn’t help that a lot of these games aren’t even that much fun to begin with. A good game should be fun whether you win or lose, but a lot of these games are only really enjoyable if you’re winning. The play gets overshadowed by the competition and skinner box mechanics, leaving a hollow experience for the vast majority of players.
The rest were ruined by leavers, smurfs, toxicity, or just bad matchups that made the games lopsided
leavers
just ban them after a couple offenses
smurfs
matchmaking system should be able to detect smurfs (high KDAs, high win rates, other metrics) and boost their hidden ELO very quickly - thus making them no longer smurfs
toxicity
just ban them after a couple offenses
bad matchups
matchmaking makes this better, not worse. without skill based matchmaking you would have even more lopsided games with even more disproportionate skills
Seems like the real issue with League is Riot’s unwillingness to permaban players and enforce its rules, instead trying to retain the toxic players forever and coddling their behavior with special queues. Part of this is that toxic players pay just as much (if not more) money than other players, and the other part is that it would be expensive to hire enough GMs to actually review all the cases of toxicity in chat. The problem isn’t the matchmaking, it’s riot being cheap
Seems like the real issue with League is Riot’s unwillingness to permaban players and enforce its rules
Agreed. It’s possible to solve these problems, but Riot didn’t care enough to solve them, or they had an underlying motivation to keep toxic players around. It does seem like a problem that’s not unique to Riot, though. I think there are some structural issues in these games that makes it easy for companies to ignore the player experience in favor of just keeping people playing. It’s probably similar to all the attention economy websites where they don’t care if you’re getting value, they only care that you’re still on the platform.
mostly agree, although I also think they need to put resources into making the team queue more popular as well, really weird that no one takes the team queue seriously and only plays solo/duo queue
yep maybe have an improved lobby where people looking to team up as 5 could LFG, get in voice comms and play together for a while. Promote making friends and preparing your party with people you trust.
My recent experience with skill based mm in team games has been similarly bad. It feels like it uses a very bad flat score-like system that makes games quickly devolve into extremely lopsided slogs because the system thinks pairing a slightly higher ranked player with some number of slightly lower ranked ones is a good match for several average ones. Practically every game I played would have most of one team’s players doing exceptionally poorly with one or two doing exceptionally well, while the other, winning team would consist of mostly everyone doing averagely well.
There is usually a very small window after updates where it feels like everything gets reset and then it’s possible to get some more enjoyable matches before it returns to the norm where you can probably determine who will win within the first few minutes.
you can probably determine who will win within the first few minutes.
This is a big part of the problem with a lot of these games, imo. The matches take too long to resolve, or have too much lead time to get to the part that’s actually fun and dynamic. It’s easy to criticize, but it’s a genuine problem if half of any given match is spent either ramping up or winding down to the natural conclusion, with the other half being the game that everyone actually wants to play.
Yeah it makes a lot more sense for some types of games than others, RTS games are a good example. Even so, the lobby/custom game browser setup mostly worked fine for Red Alert 2 and Generals and Blizzard RTSes always had that option alongside the ranked modes.
this is only true at the very highest of levels and with very certain matchups (at least for league as that’s the one I’ve played), most players are like me and get bored playing the same champ over and over and so they will pick random champs they’re not good with, and even when they try to counterpick they don’t know the champ they’re playing well enough for it to be an actual counter if the other person plays the champ alot. Jayce was the only character I ever actually could main without getting bored, and I could beat every single one of his counter picks other than malphite (his only actual unplayable matchup that I permabanned), because they didn’t actually know how to play the counter-pick and weren’t comfortable with it, and so I could beat them, even though I was trash at jayce.
I was more talking about generalities like picking lategame powerspikes into a push lineup, or similarly drafting single target control exclusively against a mobile core and a save support.
which MOBA is this? league doesn’t use these exact terms but I kind of get the gist, but even in league I used to win with terribly constructed team comps all the time because everyone was on a comfort pick and the other team wasn’t
ok yeah I tried playing it a couple of times and I was so hopelessly lost, does individual skill with piloting a champ (or whatever they’re called in dota) matter less in dota than in league?
I haven’t played nor watched league enough to make an informed comparison.
The biggest difference design wise are
-variable turn rates making kiting harder, which opens up the design space for melee adcs without a dash
-denying giving reduced xp, which makes lanes with large skill gaps absolute blowouts
-most abilities are smartshot, which de-emphasizes mechanical skill in favor of macro knowledge on when to push your buttons
-woods does not spawn for the first minute, meaning that dedicated jungle isn’t a thing.
The entire roster is free without any grinding, which is what made me get into it over league ten years ago.
Here is a guide for making the LOL>DOTA switch written by the most popular third party stats site:
If you understand csing, and the general concepts of vision and timings, you are over the majority of the hard part, and will likely calibrate at a higher rank than me.
I sometimes play head games and make them choose a hero they thought I was gonna pick but then after getting my teammate to choose their hero, I choose the REAL hero I was gonna use the whole time. Simply the biggest brain. I know
this is just a problem with league or any other game that has win more mechanics, by winning the early game it makes the mid and late game easier, putting the winning team in the drivers seat in terms of agency. Of course riot has put in ways to mitigate this, like bounties and some champs being better at different points in the game than others, but there’s a limit on what they can even do to fix it because it also feels horrible to dominate your opponent for half the game, make one mistake and then the game is on even footing or you’re now even behind, it’s just an inherent flaw to games like this. Counterstrike for example is technically never over, there’s a slight win-more mechanic in terms of the economy but ultimately you can come back from 12-0 to tie and win the game at a rate that league could never hope to match
SBMM is fine as an option for 1v1 games, but it’s so bad for team games. It actively foments toxicity between players, and it often doesn’t even work that well. I remember playing League of Legends and only one in maybe five or ten games was actually good. The rest were ruined by leavers, smurfs, toxicity, or just bad matchups that made the games lopsided. You win as many of those games as you lose, but winning lopsided games gets old.
It doesn’t help that a lot of these games aren’t even that much fun to begin with. A good game should be fun whether you win or lose, but a lot of these games are only really enjoyable if you’re winning. The play gets overshadowed by the competition and skinner box mechanics, leaving a hollow experience for the vast majority of players.
just ban them after a couple offenses
matchmaking system should be able to detect smurfs (high KDAs, high win rates, other metrics) and boost their hidden ELO very quickly - thus making them no longer smurfs
just ban them after a couple offenses
matchmaking makes this better, not worse. without skill based matchmaking you would have even more lopsided games with even more disproportionate skills
Seems like the real issue with League is Riot’s unwillingness to permaban players and enforce its rules, instead trying to retain the toxic players forever and coddling their behavior with special queues. Part of this is that toxic players pay just as much (if not more) money than other players, and the other part is that it would be expensive to hire enough GMs to actually review all the cases of toxicity in chat. The problem isn’t the matchmaking, it’s riot being cheap
Agreed. It’s possible to solve these problems, but Riot didn’t care enough to solve them, or they had an underlying motivation to keep toxic players around. It does seem like a problem that’s not unique to Riot, though. I think there are some structural issues in these games that makes it easy for companies to ignore the player experience in favor of just keeping people playing. It’s probably similar to all the attention economy websites where they don’t care if you’re getting value, they only care that you’re still on the platform.
mostly agree, although I also think they need to put resources into making the team queue more popular as well, really weird that no one takes the team queue seriously and only plays solo/duo queue
yep maybe have an improved lobby where people looking to team up as 5 could LFG, get in voice comms and play together for a while. Promote making friends and preparing your party with people you trust.
My recent experience with skill based mm in team games has been similarly bad. It feels like it uses a very bad flat score-like system that makes games quickly devolve into extremely lopsided slogs because the system thinks pairing a slightly higher ranked player with some number of slightly lower ranked ones is a good match for several average ones. Practically every game I played would have most of one team’s players doing exceptionally poorly with one or two doing exceptionally well, while the other, winning team would consist of mostly everyone doing averagely well.
There is usually a very small window after updates where it feels like everything gets reset and then it’s possible to get some more enjoyable matches before it returns to the norm where you can probably determine who will win within the first few minutes.
This is a big part of the problem with a lot of these games, imo. The matches take too long to resolve, or have too much lead time to get to the part that’s actually fun and dynamic. It’s easy to criticize, but it’s a genuine problem if half of any given match is spent either ramping up or winding down to the natural conclusion, with the other half being the game that everyone actually wants to play.
Yeah it makes a lot more sense for some types of games than others, RTS games are a good example. Even so, the lobby/custom game browser setup mostly worked fine for Red Alert 2 and Generals and Blizzard RTSes always had that option alongside the ranked modes.
In pickup mobas it is inevitable that ~1/3 of matches are straight up lost on the character select screen.
Love to spend 40 minutes executing a single round of very convoluted rock paper scissors.
Rock, paper, scissors meets chess
If it’s a hard counter and not just a skill issue, it’ll be over in about a half hour, but that’s a nitpick. Point taken.
this is only true at the very highest of levels and with very certain matchups (at least for league as that’s the one I’ve played), most players are like me and get bored playing the same champ over and over and so they will pick random champs they’re not good with, and even when they try to counterpick they don’t know the champ they’re playing well enough for it to be an actual counter if the other person plays the champ alot. Jayce was the only character I ever actually could main without getting bored, and I could beat every single one of his counter picks other than malphite (his only actual unplayable matchup that I permabanned), because they didn’t actually know how to play the counter-pick and weren’t comfortable with it, and so I could beat them, even though I was trash at jayce.
I was more talking about generalities like picking lategame powerspikes into a push lineup, or similarly drafting single target control exclusively against a mobile core and a save support.
which MOBA is this? league doesn’t use these exact terms but I kind of get the gist, but even in league I used to win with terribly constructed team comps all the time because everyone was on a comfort pick and the other team wasn’t
I am a DOTA 2 player.
ok yeah I tried playing it a couple of times and I was so hopelessly lost, does individual skill with piloting a champ (or whatever they’re called in dota) matter less in dota than in league?
I haven’t played nor watched league enough to make an informed comparison.
The biggest difference design wise are
-variable turn rates making kiting harder, which opens up the design space for melee adcs without a dash -denying giving reduced xp, which makes lanes with large skill gaps absolute blowouts -most abilities are smartshot, which de-emphasizes mechanical skill in favor of macro knowledge on when to push your buttons -woods does not spawn for the first minute, meaning that dedicated jungle isn’t a thing.
The entire roster is free without any grinding, which is what made me get into it over league ten years ago.
Here is a guide for making the LOL>DOTA switch written by the most popular third party stats site:
If you understand csing, and the general concepts of vision and timings, you are over the majority of the hard part, and will likely calibrate at a higher rank than me.
Draft is all about metagaming baybee.
I sometimes play head games and make them choose a hero they thought I was gonna pick but then after getting my teammate to choose their hero, I choose the REAL hero I was gonna use the whole time. Simply the biggest brain. I know
You’re blaming things on SBMM that it is designed to fix and does so pretty effectively compared to not having it
this is just a problem with league or any other game that has win more mechanics, by winning the early game it makes the mid and late game easier, putting the winning team in the drivers seat in terms of agency. Of course riot has put in ways to mitigate this, like bounties and some champs being better at different points in the game than others, but there’s a limit on what they can even do to fix it because it also feels horrible to dominate your opponent for half the game, make one mistake and then the game is on even footing or you’re now even behind, it’s just an inherent flaw to games like this. Counterstrike for example is technically never over, there’s a slight win-more mechanic in terms of the economy but ultimately you can come back from 12-0 to tie and win the game at a rate that league could never hope to match
mobas need the little league mercy rule
Yesn’t. Sometimes it can be winnable. Othertimes it’s just a matter of time.