#genuinely had no idea why they removed sbmm in arrivals

[thefirstknife]

Hot take but I'm enjoying the new matchmaking in Control and anyone who says otherwise is an elitist, I'm gonna die on this hill

I am a huge proponent of skill based matchmaking and hated when they announced its removal (in Arrivals). Crucible matchmaking was miserable for me from then until now, so I'm on board with this absolutely.

Today's TWAB also had some interesting statistics about the first week of skill based matchmaking being in Control:

In the first week of Season of Plunder, 140,000 more hours of Control had been played than in the first week of Season of the Haunted, and we had around an 11% increase in the total number of players playing Control. 

This is self evident, but clearly people play more Crucible (and they play more of it) when they aren't absolutely miserable in it. If Crucible is not geared towards the average player, the player pool will be too low and that is not sustainable for a healthy pvp experience. Average players are by far the biggest population of players.

Overall, our average matchmaking times went up by an average of 5 to 10 seconds. That's a good indication that the matching is generally working but isn't showing our worst cases—the lower population segments (extreme low and high skill). 

For the highest skill band, less than 0.1% of the population, matchmaking times average around 90 seconds during high population times, spiking to just over 200 seconds at low population times. For the lowest skill band, we see matchmaking times between 120 seconds at best and 240 seconds at worst. 

Obviously this increased matchmaking time, but the increase is negligible on average. It gets "high" only for 0.1% of the population on either end of the spectrum which, as frustrating as that may be for the 0.1% of the players, it's not something that should dictate how the other 99.9% play. At worst, the matchmaking time was 4 minutes, for the lowest skill bracket. This is far from a huge disaster people like to make it out to be (I've played games where matchmaking could be 20 minutes on average).

The skill differences we see in Control matches are pretty stark. Without SBMM, only 10% of matches had 600 or less skill difference between the highest and lowest players. With SBMM on, we see that 80% of games have that separation or less.

If you ever think you're making things up or elitists gaslight you, they are wrong. This isn't the first time they showed how much difference there is between skill. Games are now provably and evidently more uniform in terms of who you play with and who you play against. It should be extremely rare to get into a lobby with someone vastly above you or below you in skill. Which is how it should be. Huge skill difference between players in a single lobby has always felt bad in either direction for me: I don't like being stomped and I don't like stomping others. I would rather sit in menus matchmaking for 2 minutes instead of loading into a match that ends just as quickly and that makes me feel miserable.

If your games seem more balanced, it's because they are. If they felt horribly balanced before, it's because they were.

Mercy games are down 4%. Not as much as we had hoped, but it has been shrinking a little day by day. 

Also interesting! They added some extra info about this which is also cool to explore, but basically there is less mercy games and they expect that to go lower still.

As far as score and kill differences, we see a similar set of incremental improvements. Games where the best player had 30+ kills more than the worst player went from 9% of games to 2%. Games where the best player had only 10 to 19 more kills than the worst player went from 35% of games to 55%. 

Another good piece of info that makes me feel less like I've just been insane for 2 years and angry about elitists trying to convince me that I am insane. Clearly I am not (or rather, I am not insane about this at least). I was sick and tired of games like this. Where two people in the lobby on each team are duking it out and I'm basically an NPC on the field with 3 kills because I die as soon as I spawn so the top players can have 57 kills.

We have seen one worrying trend in the data: the percentage of players quitting before the end of the match has risen from 8% to 12% in the last week. This is especially bad with matches designed to be balanced with 12 equally skilled players. We are still investigating to see if this is localized to a specific cohort or playstyle, or if this is a natural player reaction to a new system. This percentage  may reduce over time. Stay tuned!  

Finally, this piece of info. Bungie is obviously still investigating this and the most logical reason for this situation is now that connection based matchmaking is gone, people may be getting disconnected or may be leaving if their match is laggy.

However, my first thought (and one of Bungie's thoughts!) was that people are leaving games because they don't want to bother playing if they can't stomp new lights in Control. I genuinely think this and I will continue to believe that is the primary reason for leavers, due to my extensive experience with other competitive pvp games and modes, until Bungie proves me otherwise. People who are used to getting everything they want and stomping over lower skilled players get VERY upset when that is taken from them and when they have to play against people of their own skill level and be faced with the reality that maybe they just aren't that good and were just shooting fish in a barrel. These people tend to be the most salty leavers I have ever seen in any video game. I do honestly believe this accounts for most people leaving matches.

Got a bit long, but your ask was a nice opportunity to dive into some of this from the TWAB! Hopefully things get better and better as we go forward.