Why did skill based gaming in multiplayer games get replaced by engagement based matchmaking?

It's the free players that get put on losing streaks so they can lose to paying players... if you feel like you're being forced to lose, it's because you are.

Nobody's gonna spend money on a game they don't enjoy, and go figure, people enjoy winning more than losing

skill based gaming

Also bad. Random match making and community servers or bust

Skill-based matchmaking does not work with team games at all because someone can make up for someone else's slack.

It does, but it requires effort on the devs' part that they don't want to put in. It's completely possible to measure someone's contribution to a game and scale the MMR appropriately. C&C Renegade did this 23 years ago where your team's gain and loss is based on ELO difference and your individual gain/loss is related to kills, deaths, amount healed, vehicles destroyed, vehicles repaired, etc within the game in relation to the rest of your team. But that requires a game-specific system that they can't just drag and drop.

Is it really that hard to implement "higher number = more mmr"?

join a losing match late in progress

lose

join a winning match late in progress

"the teams are imbalanced"

"you were assigned to the other team"

lose

Apparently

nooo it's a conspiracy!

If you're matched with people around your skill level, your win rate should naturally average 50/50, it's not a shadow cabal creating an algorithm to make you lose because apparently losing is what motivates people to play more (?).

but the loses have to be rigged because it's ALWAYS my teammate's fault

And your teammates think it's your fault because people in general are absolutely incapable of admitting that maybe they're not as skilled as they think they are.

but look at the KDAs!

Games like LoL are balanced around fast snowballing in order to try to keep match times short so once you lose the advantage you get massacred unless the other team royally fucks up. But I'm sure the times when YOU had a negative KDA it wasn't actually your fault.

used to play league of legends a lot

noticed any time I would take a long break the game would seemingly forget to employ its engagement algorithm

games would always be 10x more fun and less stomp or get stomped

after about 5 or so games every match goes back to 50/50 even in normals

quit league

so sick of listening to insecure sbmm schizos for two decades

oy vey

People are very good at gaming systems like that and it also requires either all characters to be cookie cutter copies of one another or take into account a million different variables which guarantees it's literally never gonna be balanced and every other day someone will find an edge case they can exploit.

On a winning streak

All of a sudden, just lose game after game after game nonstop with no end in sight

Now games are stupidly easy again and just steamrolling through

The only way to cheat this system is if you lose 2 in a row, quit the game for 24 hours, then go back, games will be easy again.

I said EOMM

I grinded premier pretty early and was always ahead of the curve. 15k isn't at the average but it's only top 25% so you still get shitters that get carried or just luck streak for others.
Around 20k is where I plateau'd and I'm getting generally good games back to back even if I'm not winning them all. Basically matchmaking works but only for top 10%.
It was the same in CSGO btw. Anything below DMG was mediocre and you'd have to be at least legendary pidgeon rank to get good games.

Because when you take a long break your mmr decays, then when you come back you get matched with people under your skill level which is why it feels easy to stay in control of the match regardless of what your teammates do.

publishers want money

getting people to stay in game longer increases the odds they drop some money

devs make games that maximise time spent in game

Money, the cause and solution to life's problems.

Yeah individual contribution is a really bad idea, it should be just win/loss. The problem with these games is instead of finding a 50/50 match it will do things like alternating giving you 3 matches at 20/80 odds and then 3 matches at 80/20 odds

It's better for the metrics to the shareholders.

don't like the 50/50 win rate? Play starcraft or fighting games

premier is not worth playing at all
the games are not balanced, smurfs, cheaters and bots sway your rating by like 5k and its a lottery if you win or lose no matter what you do
on my alt that was at the same rating im now facing cheaters every ~2nd game and get lucky if i have one on my team
funniest thing that happened: we kicked a guy that cheated with scout/deagle to play a fair game, only for one of the enemies to toggle full on after because we still managed to do well 4v5 lmao
im hovering around faceit lvl 5-6 atm, wouldnt play the game if not for free money id get every week through cases tbqh

Because it makes people play longer unironically

Win 3 games in a row

"That was fun, I'm off to go do something else."

Lose 3 games in a row

"FUCK THIS GAME I FUCKING HATE THIS FUCKING STUPID SHIT FUCK OFF, NEXT GAME IS MY LAST ONE YOU FUCKING DIPSHITS!"

Lose 3 more games in a row

Only servers are real, everything else is a psyop to prevent you from meeting and speaking with actual people online and not notice that your fellow players are 80% bots

But then I can't blame my teammates when I lose and my ego can't handle me being at fault.

people are always complaining about forced losses

never about forced wins

Winning against someone who can't fight back is much less satisfying than losing against someone you can't hope to win against. When you get your forced loss match, you can at least challenge yourself to see how much you can hurt the giant, you can learn from him, you have the license to play recklessly because that at least gives you a chance to steal the match, and even if you go 1-9 your 1 still feels satisfying as fuck. But when you are that giant, you don't get to do anything, you just swat the fly and take the win with no effort.

It's weird how some people have an almost religious belief in the infallibility of skill based matchmaking.

Easier to accept than "maybe I'm bad" for the average lowest common denominator normalfag

12 deaths

that's not forced 50, that's you being bad.

im not bad it's just the evil algorithm made me loose because Im too good

yes yes good players lose and bad players win

It doesn't matter if they game the system because even if they find some way to whore the metrics all that's happening is they're changing whether they were seen as being carried or not. In a game like Renegade the best way to gain ladder points is to do shitloads of damage to the enemy's buildings, which are the game-winning objectives. The second best way to gain ladder points is to repair the damage of your own buildings, which gives a lot, but not as much as playing on the offensive. Kills and healing (which can't end games by themselves) give significantly less, which is why on the winning team in that screenshot there's such a big point difference between the top 4 players and the ones below them, but the 5th player with 1 kill still gains 91 ladder points compared to the 6th player's 58 who had 6 more kills.
It is workable and it's been done, but it's lost technology when pajeets just want to see "Oh your MMR was 1800 and the enemy's was 1600, you got 20 MMR for a win"

don't worry you can just blame lag or racial balance

The overwhelming majority of people love easy wins because it feeds their ego.
There's a difference between "it isn't perfect" and "the system is explicitly designed to force me to lose because of reasons".

I learned this way back when I was a teen. Pub stomping is fun for maybe a few days and then it gets stale.

You can't host servers easily on console, so everyone uses quickplay.
This infection spread to pc, now everybody wants quickplay and nobody can host anymore.

It's not infallable. But a match where all players are roughly the same skill level is much more likely to result in a close fight than a riggable EOMM match where two gods, two shitters and six average joes are spread into two teams. Even if the gods and shitters somehow end p balanced, both gods can go around ganking weaklings without ever engaging each other, while either of the shitters don't get to play the game, and as a result nobody has fun.

why did community owned and ran servers get replaced with publisher controlled matchmaking? I don't care about ranks or pre-made matchmaking. I don't want to be locked into playing for a set amount of time.
I want to drop in and out of a server at my own leisure and play against anyone

come play smash bros melee on slippi. you won't have a 50/50 winrate then :)

I actually cannot fathom playing multiplayer slop in CY+10
Get a fucking grip on your lives, faggots

and as a result nobody has fun

But players still engage with the game. Very interesting.

50/50 independently per game would be the ideal outcome of skill based mm. that was the thing that failed to engage players. low IQs like yourself don't get enjoyment from a good, even match. you only like it when you win by a landslide and to do so over an entire session. so the algorithm is tweaked to be less skill-based, giving you the potential to meet a string of weaker players, until your rating is so inflated that you're then stuck being matched against much better players. this makes the games feel more streaky, where you win a few games in a row and feel good, but you're not buying anything between games so after a few wins you are cut off and given a losing streak which resets your mmr closer to where it should be and eating those losses provides the same benefit to your opponents, before forcing you out of the queue because you either take a break by browsing the shop or you end for the day and start all over again tomorrow.

engagement is just a nice way of saying you are so lacking in sentience that a marketer has already mapped out your pattern of play and spending and simply calls a function to extract your money and attention in the most optimal manner, the same way a programmer manipulates a machine, or a trainer manipulates an animal. you just call it "forced 50/50".

Implying EOMM isn't in fighting games

why did community owned and ran servers get replaced with publisher controlled matchmaking

because community-owned and ran servers are garbage at providing a balanced challenge, simply because of how few people are in each one and how different their skill levels can be. they are communities to goof around in, not matchmaking.
funneling everyone into global skill-based matchmaking system is the only way to provide close matches with consistently even skill levels. it's not better, it's not worse, it's just a different approach that got more popular for a while, more competitive and less fuck around-y.
but we lost both to corporate greed.

peek out of spawn

get shot

respawn

40 goto 10

very interesting indeed

make damage to structures the game winning metric

support characters climb much slower because of reasons even if they contribute in other ways that aren't raw damage

if you let the other team gain a critical neutral objective (like the dragons or baron in LoL) to take a tower that's worth because the tower is worth more mmr than neutrals even though the buff the other team just gained all but guarantees you lose the match and the tower you destroyed is ultimately meaningless

someone maths that picking a certain character and a certain build and literally suiciding into towers will net you more mmr on average than actually bothering to play for the win

Renegade wasn't remotely as popular as something like LoL which is why the system never really got put to the test, also it's a significantly simpler game in terms of balance and character/class diversity. I'm sure if Renegade had millions of players per month you'd see the system get broken in a million different ways.

It's even funnier when people talk about this with card games while I'm over here on my like 79% MTGA win rate

Losing streaks in a team game have nothing to do with your personal skill. Matchmaking could easily serve you up a win if it wanted to, no matter how bad you are.

while I'm over here on my like 79% MTGA win rate

you either play drafted (chad) or you're a red-deck player (cuck)

You're not customising the system to LoL. They would have different point values for different things because they're different games.

I mean, riot lyte helped invent eomm.

But then it becomes a super overcomplicated mess since the value of things in LoL varies wildly relative to what the rest of your team is doing, what the other team is doing, who's winning, who's losing, what's the state of the map, team composition, etc. and on top of being borderline impossible to balance it also would necessarily enforce a developer mandated "correct" meta which makes people lose their shit almost as badly as the "mandated 50/50" matchmaking.

It's completely possible to measure someone's contribution to a game and scale the MMR appropriately

Not really.
That approach has a huge downside in favouring certain playstyles over others even if they aren't actually better.

I haven't played Renegaed but to give a comparison to on why this approach doesn't generally work.
In the first 2 (IIRC) seasons of the finals a similar system was used, the best way to game that system was also to primarily focus on objectives and gain points for them.
However, that is not strictly the best option at all times because you would often be better off securing the area before doing the objective to prevent it being taken back or being eliminated while taking the objective, meaning focusing the objective (even sucessfully) can very well be the reason for a loss.
Ontop of that you normally only want 1 person to actually do the objective with the rest guarding them, meaning the person who did the objective would be treated better by the system despite them doing nothing exceptional.

tl;dr
Just making best ways to game the system tied to general objective priority doesn't solve the issue.
As often in order to focus a more important objective you need to do the less important ones (IE killing people to prevent recapture) and those decisions are looked less favourably by such a system especially when players take that action to free an ally to focus on the objective.

non w/l related metrics should only be considered when the 'uncertainty' factor of your elo is high (as in, you are a new player or returning from a long break). after 10 games back you should return to just wins and losses determining your rank. anything other than that is absolute retardery as people will be gaming the system to get undeserved rank. if kills get me more rank then i am incentivized to not play support AND to bait my teammates in every fight as long as i don't lose the game for it.

You are just bad. If the 5050 rule existed then nobody would ever left the mid ground. Instead there is always a lot of people on the top, barebone in the middle and a lot on the shit tier.
You are just bad at games.
Also LoL the game where team skill is basically worthless just get a 2 kill ratio on your lane and you automatically win. Cmon man.

Do you prefer SBMM or entirely random MM?

even worse, he's a red deck wins player on bo1

if i'm bad, SBMM. If i'm good, random mm.

the only time you would only want SBMM as a good player is if you are actively trying to practice and improve

only niggercattle plays online multiplayer service slop.

Paid players get put on these as well to try and condition them into spending

multiplayer slop

because that's what you niggers deserve

There IS a forced 50/50
but not for the reason everyone is complaining or what they actually think is the 50/50

all those games tries to have a "balanced" skill level on both sides, but it happens that the range of said balance is hilariously wack
an example would be:
Game where everyone needs to be at lvl 5 skill

expected

Team A

skill 4

skill 5

skill 5

skill 6

Team B

skill 5

skill 5

skill 5

skill 5

But since gathering people with the same level of skills in a certain location at a fast time is unlikely, they all give a major slack on how low/high on the skill ladder it can go, meaning you can have a team where the target is skill 5 with a single person being skill 11 in a team of skill 3 just to "balance" it out, and if the other team has the normal balance, the high skilled player better get the top position or they will suffer on the hands of the retards feeding constantly

Because sociopathic psychologists are in charge of game design now

How do smurfs climb from bronze to GM in a single day if forced 50 exists?

Skill based gaming still exists in multiplayer games, it's just that there's a wider audience so the "professionals" in games where you had "skill based weapons" with fifty miles of splash damage and projectile hitboxes attached get stomped by actually skilled players who know how to aim and now make up the bitter vocal minority constantly bitching and moaning about "da good ol' days".

you stop winning when you get to your skill bracket, not before it

I avoid doing quickplay in Marvel Rivals because of this because I get literal bronze/gold players while my opponents are PC GM's or even Celestials, but now they're adding bots into my Practice vs AI matches so it's just a chore now.

Ranked is easier than QP in Marvel Rivals lmao.

So... That's just SBMM doing its job then.

software, usually
hardware if the pay is good enough
t. knower

doing it very poorly because most often than not the high skilled player would just roflstomp the lower skilled players due how far the skill difference between the players is
see the only way to ever enjoy those games is with a full team of people you know that are at your skill level and even then you can end up cucked by a top player being forced to play on a lower rank

But that player is on your team too.

no friends

Lmao just talk to people lol just tell someone you aren't an incel haha

Number go up > fun game

noobdog cope

b-b-but I did well in this game!

and you were feeding in the previous 3 games, the reason you're stuck in pisslow is that you suck

It fucking sucks dude. I know I'm not that good but matching against a full team of GM's that already have like 1000 hours in this game is not fun. This also applies to events too which is so ass.

One time I made a smurf so I could play with my friends and while I was leveling up so I could unlock ranked I was getting win streaks after win streaks. Meanwhile on my main it's either a 50/50 loss or just a double loss into a bot match lmao. Shit is so ass and I'm glad this game is already dying.

Only like one, which is not enough compared to the other team. Even when I get lucky in ranked I'm probably a Diamond player at best but in quickplay the game keeps on matching me up with fucking GM or Celestials.

Also fuck off with the crossplay I don't feel confident with console GM shitters on my team.

Stop playing competitiveslop

Why did skill based gaming in multiplayer games get replaced by engagement based matchmaking?

not my problem, go play 1vs1/ffa games if you really want.
You fucks just want to be misearable all the time and blame others

This would happen a lot less around the mmr most people are at since there are a lot of people in there, this tends to be a problem only at higher levels of play. The bigger problem is that in games like LoL your skill level is greatly tied to the champion you pick, and the matchmaking has no way of knowing what you'll play ahead of time, so a lot of players who like to believe they're not onetricks will sometimes try to pick/counterpick based on team comp and subsequently get their shit pushed in.

But that's almost never how these forced losses are, at least not for me.
It's always

well this is lost but at least my K:D is 1 for 1 or maybe smth like 1.2

check scoreboard

everyone on my team is 2/10 or something

I do occasionally get pubstomped but most of the losses are just dealing with enemy team that are just decent players while my team has 2-4 clowns

It ties into this pasta:

Eventually you'll realize that marketing isn't trying to sell you shit games, but that shit games sell you marketing, i.e.: pad traffic and engagement -- they are little more than onboarding schemes to consultation rackets, e-grifting parasocialites and digitial daycare-botfarms.
The industry has been captured by PR gremlins. These PR gremlins cultivate an unsustainable economy of lies: they sell problems, rent out solutions (marginally smaller problems) and deceive everyone -- shareholders, developers, customers and players. They don't care about the quality or reception of the product, they don't care about what you believe, love or hate and they don't care to convince you of anything. The more controversy, the better for them.

Their final goal however is to distract and placate you, while high finance (read: their owners, banksters) turns your passions and lifetime into vacuous commodities.

be PR gremlins

gaslight publisher into whipping developers into frenzy to create super-slop

gobble up the majority of the "development" budget, recommend hiring nepotists

proliferate more slop to e-grifting parasocialites to fan the flames; hype a product you know will fail miserably, gaslight customers and shareholders with predatory marketing

reinvest a fraction of your hyper-bloated budget and buy copies through subsidaries and at a discount to gaslight everyone some more, after padding stats shortterm refund to ruin them longterm

simultaneousely shill for and against the product to maximize controversy and thus traffic, engagement and demand of your service and that of your buisness partners, such as consultation rackets

eventually come out of it being the sole profiteer, blaming everyone else

In other words: if you're a shareholder of a publisher or developer studio instead of an investor to a marketing agency, then you are a barely functional lobotomite.

pick early game assassin and go mid

play like a pussy and focus on not dying above all things, maybe get a few kills on the enemy midlaner thanks to piloting a champion that has a massive early game advantage

never ever try to use your early game advantage to influence other lanes

come mid game your advantage vanishes and your team is left to play 4v5 while you hover around the back hoping to get some cheap last hits on champions to pad your KDA with

absolutely never use your superior maneuverability to move around the back and flank enemy damage dealers because you need to save your dashes to protect your KDA

your team gets predictably destroyed

"wow how can people have a negative KDA, I'm always positive no matter what, I guess I'm simply better than everyone"

Being a KDA whore is worse than inting.

Let be honest, OP would never be in the loosing team 80% of the time because he always drag the team down.

But is right.
The point is that now they can control what team is certain to win, which one will likely lose. By timing their microtransaction and cosmetic ads, they can influence ever so slightly broad mass of players and the Whales within them.

Just like F2P games,
If something is Free, it means you are the product. You replace NPC and give a way for the studio to pretend it's all about your skills.

>skill based gaming

Also bad. Random match making and community servers or bust

Skill-based matchmaking does not work with team games at all because someone can make up for someone else's slack.

Not disagreeing.
But I think we no longer have "team play" game at all.
It's been a long time since I've seen a game require actual cooperation beyond kill enemy faster so you can capture the point (or the flag) in the time it gets them to come back.
All characters class are supposed to have the same kill-ratio.

Probably why vehicular game are dead.

You are right about the "fast snowballing" design, but the dynamic team-game cannot NOT naturally average 50/50 by default.
Law of averages doesn't apply here.

Why?
Because a team game should have the team working with any sort of intentional cohesion winning more often.
And it's statistically impossible to accidentally win 50%, if the player is in fact, bad and dragging everyone down.
The only way for a 50/50 to happen is to automatically put players picking up the slack into each team.
And there's a thin line where player(s) who are just better at killing others still make the team win.

Also there's definitely Matchmaking algorithms meant solely to sell you cosmetic if not P2W stuff.

The root cause of every issue plaguing modern video games is the fact the primary target demographic for every video game needs to be people who don’t like video games.

Because sociopathic psychologists are in charge of game design now

Making more money than you'll touch in your life.

Do you understand what average means? It doesn't mean every match is a guaranteed 50/50, but over enough matches your win rate should approach 50% once the system places you where you belong. Sometimes the enemy team will have a GM smurf and you get stomped. Sometimes the smurf will be on your team and you get a free win. Sometimes a guy on your team is playing like shit and drags the enemy team down. Sometimes that guy is on the other team instead. Sometimes your team is all in sync and you get perfect coordination despite being a bunch of randoms, sometimes the other team does. The problem is that people are naturally very selective with what they remember, they remember when they "unfairly" lost but they don't remember the times where they got handed free wins, or they think going 10/0 against someone was all due to their own skill and they carried that game HARD and not the other guy being a turbo shitter who dragged their team into a loss.

damn dude buckley still got it

the problem is the absolute amount of colossal retards that play ranked team games with random people and then shriek like they're being gutted when they receive random results

their insane mental coping mechanisms are a symptom, not the problem

Yes, because it had an entire forest of thing to balance.
Now you need to balance things not only on how well they perform in the actual game, but also how well they perform in MMR rewards.
If gun X is kinda shit but give great MMR reward due to some secondary effect or whatever, then players will play nothing but it. And then cry that gun X is shit and your game is bad.
Basically everything a weapon/perks/powerup/etc does need to also be balanced around it's effect on the score screen, which is pretty much an orthogonal axis of balancing compared to the usual "does is have a use on the battlefield".

Impossible? No.
A fucking pain that is guaranteed to lead to very degenerate and unfun gameplay unless you double the amount of time your team has to spend on balance instead of debugging/new content? Yes.