An Apex Pro player has revealed the tricks behind SBMM in the popular Battle Royale title Apex Legends.
SBMM(Skill Based Match Making) is currently a controversial topic due to the recent Call of Duty: Cold War Alpha. A lot of players are saying that the first few games on Black Ops Cold War Alpha are fun and enjoyable. However, after playing for a couple of games they started to realize that they were getting hit by SBMM, and the quality of matches dropped significantly. SBMM was even trending on Twitter because of this.
Recently an Apex pro player shared how EA implements their version of SBMM in their games. This process might also be used by game developers other than EA to make players play longer and spend more money. Honestly, it feels like all popular multiplayer games are using this tactic nowadays and that might very well be true.
Read More: Players are furious as SBMM is already killing the fun of Black Ops Cold War
Pro Reveals Secrets Behind SBMM in Apex
An Apex pro player by the name of Bowswer recently shared some behind the scenes of SBMM in the popular Battle Royale game Apex. In his tweets, he explained how SBMM doesn’t match you against players of equal skill level. Instead, it uses a particular system that makes some games easy and some games hard in order to keep players playing longer.
In the Tweet, Bowswer said, “ANYONE who has done their research on SBMM knows that it does NOT match players fairly based on skill. The system rigs your matches to make you win or lose in a particular pattern that is statistically shown to keep you playing more. EA has a paper on it:”.
Let’s say that you are a skilled player and after a few good games “SBMM” decides you should lose your next match. It will pair you with below-average teammates also due for a loss and stronger opponents/stacks to reduce your odds of winning. It is NOT about making the game fair.
The paper also concludes that this form of matchmaking (by rigging games lol) has the highest player retention, followed by random matchmaking and then real skill matchmaking. Which one do you think game publishers are actually implementing? “SBMM” is not what you think.”
Here is a reddit post that explains EA’s SBMM method in bit more detail.
The official thesis paper published by an EA employee is called EOMM: An Engagement Optimized Matchmaking Framework.
If all these things are true then what we have currently in games is not true SBMM rather an addicting system that incentivizes players to spend more time and money on games.
Read More: Ninja Shares his Opinion About SBMM in Games
