esports and SBMM have done so much damage to the culture of multiplayer games

also the whole ecosystem of YouTube tutorials for how to hyper-optimize your gameplay in any given game - normalizing the idea that there are objectively right and wrong ways to play

@kasdeya agreed! especially because it creates a culture where even those who dont engage with excessive meta-optimization will be shamed for playing "unoptimal" builds/characters/whatever

@kasdeya SBMM is a necessary evil with the lack of community run dedicated servers. true random matchmaking is miserable with a wide enough skill range, especially if one tends to be at the lower end of the range.

so i'd more say that centralized matchmaking has done damage to multiplayer, and SBMM is just treating the symptom.

@ada that’s fair! that’s exactly what I was trying to get at: instead of dedicated servers there’s a matchmaking system, which means that nobody can form a community and everyone is a random every time - which breeds all kinds of isolation and toxicity and is just overall terrible culturally

although also, I think that SBMM might only make sense if a game is designed to be competitive. for example it wouldn’t make sense to have SBMM for Mario Party or (I hope?) Mario Kart - since these games are designed to balance out uneven skill levels automatically

so if a game has matchmaking of any kind and that matchmaking is SBMM then I think that indicates that it’s designed to be competitive while also unintentionally(?) preventing players from forming communities and making friends within the game, and that’s an especially bad sign

@hearts yess I absolutely hate this - and a lot of insecure players will nit-pick others’ choices in order to make themselves feel superior, or do other weird mind games like that, and it’s just extremely bad overall