Respawn Entertainment Technical Director Samy Duc revealed that changes are finally in the works in the SBMM (Skill-based matchmaking) system of popular team-based battle royale Apex Legends.
One of the most played battle royale titles in the market today, Apex Legends has long been hounded by complaints about its imbalanced matchmaking system in ranked games.
As if getting to the Master and Predator tier is not hard enough, high-ranked players also tend to create new accounts to slay players in low-ranked games.
But that is going to change soon.
“For the first time in a while, Apex put me in such a bad mood today. Constant cheaters who I have been matching for days, pubs with three teams five minutes in, ranked games either six teams zone one or third partied instantly, or pubs with my wife against pred players. Good stuff,” Apex Legends competitive player and streamer Eric “Snip3down” Wrona ranted on Twitter.
“SBMM will change. For the moment it is based on the highest player in the group and it will most likely mutate to something else (surprise surprise) by mid-December or new year. We will communicate more in the New Year about this,” Duc replied.
The unexpected reply from the Apex Legends developer quickly made the rounds on Twitter with players commending Respawn Entertainment for hearing out their grievances.
One of them is Twitch’s most popular streamer Nicholas “NICKMERCS” Kolcheff, who has 6.6 million followers on his channel.
“A lot of people do not like the current Apex (matchmaking) thing they have going so if they are gonna make some changes, good man,” NICKMERCS stated during the stream.
Furthermore, Duc revealed the major flaw that hounded Apex Legends for years.
With each team composed of three players tapping a different role, the game apparently relies on the highest player instead of averaging them.
“Average does not work well enough. People contribution depends on the skill distribution,” Duc explained.
“The easiest solution is just to take max because you can assume, highest skill player has the most impact. We acknowledge those issues and are working on it.”
