Xbox rediscovers social matchmaking. Oh shit, you mean noobs don’t like getting 360 no scoped by some kid when they’re just learning? Bravo Xbox, you figured it out after 15 years of matchmaking.
All I’ve seen them do is continuously push ranked, MLG, clans that practice, and expect people to play every free hour of the day. Now they’re surprised that the only people who want to play their multiplayer are the try-hards.
I work 40+ hours a week. When I’m done I don’t want to log into a game where I get yelled at for letting the team down, or be the obviously worst player in a lobby of pros. We used to have social, and for a few years it was great. There was no need to farm down there, it was just for fucking around. Now in Halo Infinite even the action sack stuff is rankable. Shit sucks for a casual gamer. My favorite franchise, I know everything up and down, have played since CE (and I mean CE and Custom Edition), and I can’t get any joy out of the competitiveness of Infinite.
I’m pretty sure this is why coop shooters are getting more popular.
Is social matchmaking some synonym for skill based matchmaking? Because the latter is what it says they’re implementing, and it really shouldn’t be controversial.
Social playlists were unranked, vs ranked playlists. They generally had no stakes to play, and there were no benefits for players in there except to have fun. You couldn’t boost your skills or anything in socials, the only way to do that was to play the ranked playlists. So for me, it was just a blast playing those. Just a bunch of people who wanted to have fun
So sometime since I last played Call of Duty, they got rid of unranked modes?
not sure about CoD myself, but Halo was my franchise of choice. Over the last couple of games they’ve changed social playlists to still alter your skill, I’m not 100% on the details of how, but essentially it means ranked is where you go to compete, social is where you go to practice for ranked. It’s become extremely frustrating because you have everyone trying way, way too hard in social games, getting angry when things don’t go perfectly, and dropping out of games that aren’t competitive enough leaving us with lopsided teams.
I just wish games had a “Hey, no skills here, just in and have fun, there’s no points or levels, that’s over there” style gaming. And if there is skill based matchmaking in that style, then we shouldn’t know about our level in those games.
I can’t speak to how Halo does it under the hood, but it’s very common to have a separate skill rating for unranked and to just not surface it, which is exactly what you’d want here, since that’s what prevents the brand new player from getting decimated in their early matches. You’re saying that the social playlists affected the same ranking as the competitive modes? That would be strange. In my experience though, a lot of new players bounce off a game when they get matched against people who are only marginally better than they are, which can be a matter of that other player understanding one thing that the loser does not. I’ve seen people call their opponents smurfs, and then when you check the replay, you realize, no, that player really is only a tiny bit better.
Dropped out of online gaming on week two of the small frw games I tried. Not fun being shit.
Amen.
Black Ops 2 had a pretty simple solution. A playlist where half the players on each team are pretty weak bots. I played this mode more than the regular 6v6 MP because it didn’t force everyone to use the same 4 meta guns to do well.
Booty detected
