SBMM was an actual lie?

  • Matched against players who already have the Ghost Curse, hitting every cannon shot from absurd distances, all double gunning not missing shots, all the while no one on my crew is over 20 in either faction??
    How could this have happened if SBMM was actually in place? I see absolutely no reason except they just flat out lied about SBMM being in the game.

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  • it's been a week

    give it time, give it a patch, it'll likely improve in the coming weeks

  • @wolfmanbush Its completely unacceptable that it launched in this state though. The original post doesn't even mention all the other problems that plague this unbalanced muck. Having to wait for upwards of 30 mins in the matchmaking queue, with the cancelling option not even working properly has to rank up there as the worst experience in the game, made worse by loading in a lobby that has 200+ ping, and the enemy ship full of people who have 10k more hours in game that will sink you instantly.

  • @rakash3337 said in SBMM was an actual lie?:

    @wolfmanbush Its completely unacceptable that it launched in this state though. The original post doesn't even mention all the other problems that plague this unbalanced muck. Having to wait for upwards of 30 mins in the matchmaking queue, with the cancelling option not even working properly has to rank up there as the worst experience in the game, made worse by loading in a lobby that has 200+ ping, and the enemy ship full of people who have 10k more hours in game that will sink you instantly.

    I dunno about that, I've played a long time and it's one of their better releases as far as right out the gate goes

    people have been getting a lot of matches in and leveling up

    stuff to work out but I put it around the 3rd or 4th best out-the-gate release they have done as far as overall performance goes.

  • @wolfmanbush "But- But- But its good compared to other updates they've rammed out the door before they were ready, maybe the third or fourth best rushed unfinished update release." I'm trying to take this update on its own merits not compare it to other updates.
    I've only had trouble finding matches on a brig, but the problem is both before finding a match and immediately after. I've only had three impression of this matchmaking over my experience with it.
    Either, you get stuck in the queue for extremely long, which destroys open crews faster than anything else. The only chance you have is cancelling which as many times as it works, also just doesn't work and you get loaded into a match anyway but after another 10 minutes
    2nd option, is you load in after 10 minutes and the crew you're going against is wildly below you're own skill level and they sink easily, which feels cheap for both parties.
    3rd option, loading into a match after 10 minutes and the crew you're up against is wildly above you're skill level and you get rolled into oblivion

  • @rakash3337 said in SBMM was an actual lie?:

    @wolfmanbush "But- But- But its good compared to other updates they've rammed out the door before they were ready, maybe the third or fourth best rushed unfinished update release." I'm trying to take this update on its own merits not compare it to other updates.
    I've only had trouble finding matches on a brig, but the problem is both before finding a match and immediately after. I've only had three impression of this matchmaking over my experience with it.
    Either, you get stuck in the queue for extremely long, which destroys open crews faster than anything else. The only chance you have is cancelling which as many times as it works, also just doesn't work and you get loaded into a match anyway but after another 10 minutes
    2nd option, is you load in after 10 minutes and the crew you're going against is wildly below you're own skill level and they sink easily, which feels cheap for both parties.
    3rd option, loading into a match after 10 minutes and the crew you're up against is wildly above you're skill level and you get rolled into oblivion

    a step in the right direction is better than a step in the wrong direction

    they catch a lot of heat for performance of the game, if they release something that performs better on release day than releases of the past I think it makes sense and is consistent to bring attention to the improvement.

  • @wolfmanbush i agree that this update is in theory a major step in the right direction, but it died at the terrible execution

  • @rakash3337 said in SBMM was an actual lie?:

    @wolfmanbush i agree that this update is in theory a major step in the right direction, but it died at the terrible execution

    how could they work out sbmm before there were matches? people gotta play and get their data collected for the fights.

    Imo it's not realistic to expect sbmm results right away

    my guess is that it'll all work for the season overall, activity will struggle but it always does to some degree

    a few important things happened

    quite a few people that are here enjoy the content to some degree and/or think it's good for the game

    people are generally getting along better during the content which has improved morale around the community

    a lot of content has been consenting combat, which helps the above

    I just flat out think it's the best they have done in some time even with bugs and issues.

  • Well first of all you cannot equate players' levels with the factions and having the curses to their ability, and where they'd fall in sbmm.
    There will be level 1000 curse wearing players that are still only average in skill, and match with new players.
    There will be level 1000 curse wearing players that are bad, and are marked as worse than average or new players in sbmm systems, who will be fighting not only new players, but new players who have lost a lot more than won.
    And there will be new players who wreck them, because they started out already better.
    You can't make any assumptions about player ability based on time investment.

    Besides that, as Ol' Wolfy already pointed out;
    the sbmm is brand new, which means nobody is storted. Nobody has sbmm rankings that actually coorespond to their skill yet. We all started with the system considering us equals, and a lot of time is required for people to deviate up/down out of each other's ranges.

  • I hope that soon I can get matched against people like me. I admit that I'm terrible, like very very bad, and I get steamrolled a lot. I haven't won a single match yet. I need to learn how to fight properly. Until then I calculate that I'll need like 500 matches before I reach level 100, I'm glad that losses will award me XP.

    (If anyone can point me to any guide or tips video, I will really, really appreciate it. Have a great day and a wonderful week, pirates!)

  • @dragotech123 said in SBMM was an actual lie?:

    I hope that soon I can get matched against people like me. I admit that I'm terrible, like very very bad, and I get steamrolled a lot. I haven't won a single match yet. I need to learn how to fight properly. Until then I calculate that I'll need like 500 matches before I reach level 100, I'm glad that losses will award me XP.

    (If anyone can point me to any guide or tips video, I will really, really appreciate it. Have a great day and a wonderful week, pirates!)

    as you are learning the main things are

    don't nose into the broadside of a ship. It's very common for people to turn their ship too much which gives them an angle to hit you and removes your opportunity to hit them

    if you want to practice this without getting boarded you can use fleets/skelly ships as a resource. Practice on getting angles and practice taking pressure from a skelly ship, without the boarding it gives you a chance to work on naval more

    there are a bajillion things about combat and it becomes overwhelming to try to improve dramatically in a short amount of time, it's a slow process

    focus on naval and ladder guarding, situational awareness, it'll give you a better chance than anything else at some wins

    The key to you becoming a strong fighter is to find your strengths and build on them, the more unpredictable you are the more you can use your strengths to your advantage.

    Start off by not nosing their ship, focusing on picking up on noises so you can hear them swimming and boarding.

    then just sail around and build up cannon accuracy and working on keeping your mast up

    all the rest you can practice as you go on down the road.

    1.Don't nose their broad
    2.listen to sounds
    3. try to repair mast before it gets hit twice
    4. practice cannon shots

    Even if you don't win you will still survive longer and will begin to put more pressure

    that will grow to getting a win and in time you can start to incorporate more strategies as you gain more experience.

  • @wolfmanbush Thank you! Thank you very much! I'll start going for ghost ship voyages and skelly ship events to practice. I hope that someday I can get both curses.

  • @dragotech123 said in SBMM was an actual lie?:

    @wolfmanbush Thank you! Thank you very much! I'll start going for ghost ship voyages and skelly ship events to practice. I hope that someday I can get both curses.

    another way you can practice cannon shots is go to a sea fort and let the phantoms come out and you can practice hitting them with cannons, it may help you become more accurate without the pressure of pvp

    sea fort phantoms are also great for practicing with your preference for weapons

    practicing for pvp on pve also lets you get things done, sea forts done, skelly ships sunk and removes all of the pressure from pvp.

    Pvp is second by second decision making, it's intense, it can be stressful, it's chaotic

    Practicing in pvp helps but it's also always different, pve allows turning the basics into second nature which then allows more intense training in pvp later on.

  • @wolfmanbush Thank you very much. I consider myself a PvE player. And I had to go solo slooping the whole time for a lot of reasons. So I've grown paranoid of any other player ship in any server for several months. The times I tried to PvP I got destroyed easily and I couldn't even know how or why I lost. I really appreciate your suggestions, and I'll start using them tomorrow that I will play again. Once again, thank you.

  • @wolfmanbush

    That is great advice about using sea fort phantoms as practice for PvP. Thank you. 👍

  • @dragotech123 said in SBMM was an actual lie?:

    I hope that soon I can get matched against people like me. I admit that I'm terrible, like very very bad, and I get steamrolled a lot. I haven't won a single match yet. I need to learn how to fight properly. Until then I calculate that I'll need like 500 matches before I reach level 100, I'm glad that losses will award me XP.

    (If anyone can point me to any guide or tips video, I will really, really appreciate it. Have a great day and a wonderful week, pirates!)

    PhuzzyBond has some of the best videos I've ever seen on YT for learning the ropes

  • @dragotech123 said in SBMM was an actual lie?:

    @wolfmanbush Thank you very much. I consider myself a PvE player. And I had to go solo slooping the whole time for a lot of reasons. So I've grown paranoid of any other player ship in any server for several months. The times I tried to PvP I got destroyed easily and I couldn't even know how or why I lost. I really appreciate your suggestions, and I'll start using them tomorrow that I will play again. Once again, thank you.

    While you are on your adventures if you end up in a situation where you meet a friendly person/crew and they are getting off the game ask them if they can invite me to their ship so you can practice.

    I'll take over their ship if they are cool with it and we can practice naval so you don't get camped and it will be a more chill scenario to practice pvp in.

  • @wolfmanbush dijo en SBMM was an actual lie?:

    @dragotech123 said in SBMM was an actual lie?:

    @wolfmanbush Thank you very much. I consider myself a PvE player. And I had to go solo slooping the whole time for a lot of reasons. So I've grown paranoid of any other player ship in any server for several months. The times I tried to PvP I got destroyed easily and I couldn't even know how or why I lost. I really appreciate your suggestions, and I'll start using them tomorrow that I will play again. Once again, thank you.

    While you are on your adventures if you end up in a situation where you meet a friendly person/crew and they are getting off the game ask them if they can invite me to their ship so you can practice.

    I'll take over their ship if they are cool with it and we can practice naval so you don't get camped and it will be a more chill scenario to practice pvp in.

    That sounds pretty specific to happen, but not impossible. I a once met a galleon that gave me their supplies because they were going to log off, so it is indeed possible. (You'll probably laugh at my lack of skills because the only time I can kill an enemy player is when they are swimming in the water so I can shoot them with the pistol.)

  • @dragotech123 said in SBMM was an actual lie?:

    @wolfmanbush dijo en SBMM was an actual lie?:

    That sounds pretty specific to happen, but not impossible. I a once met a galleon that gave me their supplies because they were going to log off, so it is indeed possible. (You'll probably laugh at my lack of skills because the only time I can kill an enemy player is when they are swimming in the water so I can shoot them with the pistol.)

    where you are isn't where you are going to be
    it's never about being the best we will ever be it's about being the best we can be in the moment

    There was a time I lost every fight, I lost a lot of loot, I wasn't skilled or experienced

    you'll be alright, how do I know? because you aren't blaming anyone, you aren't making excuses, you want to improve

    that's what gets in the way more often than anything else, ourselves. You aren't getting in your own way so you'll do great.

  • Played season 8 a bit last weekend, but much more before it released. Anyway I found that the sbmm doesn't really work. To prove this, I intentionally tanked matches to see the level of next opponents, and they improved as I lost. Now it seems it's been long enough that the "sorting out" should have occurred, at least to a point.

    The caveat: others players tank L's too, which is possible.

  • @rakash3337 said in SBMM was an actual lie?:

    @wolfmanbush Its completely unacceptable that it launched in this state though. The original post doesn't even mention all the other problems that plague this unbalanced muck. Having to wait for upwards of 30 mins in the matchmaking queue, with the cancelling option not even working properly has to rank up there as the worst experience in the game, made worse by loading in a lobby that has 200+ ping, and the enemy ship full of people who have 10k more hours in game that will sink you instantly.

    You can’t launch something like this in a finished state because you don’t have the data. Wait.

  • SBMM is real, I've no doubt about it. But it isn't working properly.
    Sailing Galleon, there seem to be a smaller players pool to draw from, but we managed to get matched against the same ship 3 times in one evening (we'd lose against them, get another match, then get rematched against them again). That's either indicative of a 4 ships pool (doubtful) or the SBMM thought that we we're of similar skill than the galleon sinking us under 2 min. ;p

  • Not sure what people are whining, they measured skills of winning players in the beginning of Season 8, so its obvious that youll fight better players sometimes.

    Someone that is very good in SoT starts like everyone else so you will match up with them sometimes, simple logic.
    And after a while the scale would feel more balanced as good players will climb in the winning count.

  • @faceyourdemon a dit dans SBMM was an actual lie? :

    its obvious that youll fight better players sometimes.

    Imo the people doubting the existence of the SBMM (at least part of them) do so because they aren't match against better players sometimes, but most of the time.

    On Galley we're most often paired against better players (on EU) for instance. Now I don't complain (I don't really care that much because it's still a lot of fun), but for people that would expect to win around 50% of the time, it can understandably become frustrating.

  • @grog-minto I think that I didnt explained myself well, what I mean is that Rare measured players on victories from the beginning of Season 8.
    So if a veteran started to play in season 8 yesterday, he would be matched against noobs as well.
    But the longer he plays the further he would push himself from them.

    Rare didnt counted victories before this update (I think)

  • and sbmm doesn't mean there won't be stylistically incompatible matches that create fights where people get wrecked.

    For instance at my skill level a lot of fighters are extremely good at tdm and boarding and I'm average at it but we will win against a lot of the same players and lose against the same players.

    So even though we are correctly in the same part of the sbmm there will still be plenty of fights where they get lit up in naval and at any moment I could have them shoot into my crows nest and one blunder me on the way down and just easily camp me to a loss.

    Some fights will look and feel very one sided on either end even though they are accurately being put together. Especially in a game like sea of thieves.

  • @FaceYourDemon Oh no I understood your point, and it's a valid one overall !

    I was just pointing out the fact that for some people veterans are pretty much all that they encounter. For instance, I have a winrate of 33% on Galley (I face the vast majority of the time way better crews than mine, sometimes multiple time the same way better crew) and I didn't notice any significant drop in the quality of my opponents overtime. I played 5 evenings since the release (for around 20h of playtime). I'm not complaining, I'm having fun really. But I can understand why some people have the perception that the SBMM doesn't work properly (because it doesn't yet, and perhaps does need fixing).

  • @grog-minto Then maybe you are not as good as you think 😂 joke

    But I do address it to most of us, were used to opportunistic PvP, but here you are fighting crews that are pledged to PvP

    I think that this update would be a deal breaker for some crews that are divided, either some in the crew are just not very commited to sweaty PvP or bad chemistry in chaos.

    I really disagree with the complaints around this update and im not a PvP fanatic.

  • @faceyourdemon a dit dans SBMM was an actual lie? :

    @grog-minto Then maybe you are not as good as you think 😂 joke

    I know that I'm bad no worries. ;) I used to play each Tuesday in a french Arena league were we were ranked in the bottom 5 out of 25 crews. I have no issue about it. ^^ I don't even have issue with facing way better crews on a regular basis (obviously I used to come back each Tuesday for it).

    But being bad at the game and facing mostly way better players (I've been steamrolled by theJagl1 multiple times for instance, the guy is ranked above 200 in the guardian faction) is specifically what a SBMM should try to avoid. Right now, it doesn't. Maybe it needs more than a week but I would argue that a week should be enough not to have a bottom 25% player face a top 5% player even more so on multiple occasions. Could be an issue specifically for the Galleon queue tho.

    So like I said I'm not complaining. It could stay as is forever and I'd still would queue up happily. But I understand where people complaining about the quality of the SBMM are coming from because even taking its young age into account, something smells a bit fishy. But yeah, I do believe that there is an SBMM at work (it's either that or there isn't much players queueing at all which I find doubtful), I'm just not sure that it will eventually settle as well as people would like.

  • Same thing happened to us today. Lvl 13 and 21 vs lvl 200. Weren’t able to fire any cannonballs as they kept hitting shots across the map.

    I kept an open mind towards “SBMM” but after seeing stuff like this, it might indeed be a lie as OP stated.

  • @brunokuz said in SBMM was an actual lie?:

    Same thing happened to us today. Lvl 13 and 21 vs lvl 200. Weren’t able to fire any cannonballs as they kept hitting shots across the map.

    I kept an open mind towards “SBMM” but after seeing stuff like this, it might indeed be a lie as OP stated.

    They have no incentive to be dishonest on this
    there isn't any evidence to suggest anything of the sort

    taking the fights and winning/losing will help them help you in the near future

    give them time on this, there are likely improvements on the horizon based on feedback as well as sbmm that begins to serve more people

    it'll be alright when they get it worked out

  • According to a Rare CM on discord they never said SBMM was a thing. I believe they said that winners are matched with winners, losers are matched with losers, and the matchmaker is streak based.

  • @Meroviel I think it was you who said this on the discord?

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