[saddestcatever]

> matches you with a bunch of players who are far worse than you for a game or two. Then, it matches you with a bunch of players who are far better than you for a game or two

What are the chances this is an 'engagement' hack?

I wonder if players are more likely to continue playing if they have ups and downs.

In a perfect matchmaking system, would players get bored?

I have to wonder if this is intentional, or just the side effect of either perception or an imperfect system.

[milesvp]

Blizzard blogged about this some years ago with regards to their SC2 matchmaking.

They found that their matchmaking was too good, and would cause a lot pf stress as people were constantly feeling pressure to play their best since the matches were so even. This led to very short play sessions as players would feel exhausted from one or two matches. Their solution was to increase the standard deviation of the algorithm, so that you had a better chance of roflstomping your opponent and a similar chance of being stomped. They claimed it led to much longer play times and less player stress.

[schmorptron]

I've seen this sentiment a lot in the Apex Legends community, and without any data to back this up, I think in some cases this is true.

Live Service games' primary interest is to keep you playing for as long as possible so they have as much time as possible to sell you in-game purchases.

It's gonna be really interesting if the suspicion turns out to be true in the next couple of years when we'll maybe get some more concrete info on it.

[filoleg]

>I wonder if players are more likely to continue playing if they have ups and downs.

If the ups and downs were fairly close, then I could see that. But that's not what people have been complaining about with regards to the new CoD game. The issue was that a lot of matches end up being disproportionally one-sided one way or the other.

And that's not fun at all. While an occasional slam-dunk game is fun (or maybe even most slam-dunk games are fun, i don't know), I cannot find anyone who would have an increased desire to play the game after they get absolutely annihilated by a vastly superior team that they cannot do absolutely anything against.

And that's a sign of a bad SBMM system. A "perfect" SBMM system would always put you in matches where you are either slightly better or slightly worse than the other team. Turns out, that's the scenario that optimizes for engagement the most (at least from personal observations across a ton of different video games and real-life competitive sports I participated in).

If I won a game by a tiny margin, I feel proud and exhilarated. If I lost a game by a tiny margin, I feel incentivized to play more, because "only if I did this one small thing differently, we would have won, let's play one more game and see". If I won by a giant margin, it feels good too, so I might as well continue playing more. But if I lost by a giant margin, it drops all desire I had to continue this gaming session, because no amount of incremental improvements to my gameplay I can do within a day that would have let me somehow close the 30-100 point gap in that game (so, in a sense, it feels like i was set up for a game that i stand zero chance of winning, and that's pretty demotivating).

Losing by a tiny bit is a learning moment that makes you feel like you can win if you try a bit better or improve in one specific aspect a little bit. You learn from those kinds of losses, and the feeling of improvement is good. Losing by a giant margin makes you learn nothing. Just like in basketball or chess. Playing against someone who is slightly better than you are is fun. Playing against someone who is a pro (while you are a beginner) isn't fun, because of the sheer width of the skill gap. There is no "victory carrot" hanging in front of you to motivate you to continue playing, because that "victory carrot" is located on the other continent, and you aren't keen on swimming across the pacific ocean in one go.

So, at least in this case, the incentive of the matchmaking system being good aligns with the increased engagement. Or so I believe, based upon my personal observations and anecdata.