Kind of ironic for the meme because cod 4 did have a version of sbmm.
Skill based matchmaking is the worst thing to happen to team based games in my memory. Theoretically it should lead to engaging games but it usually just is a mishmash of the high mmr players being high as a kite and low mmr players that got carried too far.
Just feels like, why try if you’re guaranteed a 50% win rate no matter what? That leads to more friction between the people checking out and playing for fun and people playing to make their mmr bigger.
It used to be fun to see your progression relative to the lobby and how you were improving over time. If it felt too easy you could give yourself a handicap with an off meta gun/strat. If it was hard it felt extra good to have the rare game as a top performer.
And before people say “you just like stomping noobs”, I’ve been on both sides in many games. Floated top 2-3% in Rocket League and hated every minute, been a cellar dweller in some shooters and had hundreds of hours of fun.
Well for one they’re a consumer who paid for a functional game. Nobody expects drivers to break out power tools and mod their car right off the lot.
It’s even more embarrassing when modders do fix it. Some random guy with no source code access manages to fix an issue in 3 weeks that a whole team couldn’t fix in 3 years.
When a dev with game dev experience says something should be easy to fix, it’s under the assumption of a reasonable code base. Most games are built off of common engines and you can sometimes infer how things are likely organized if you track how bugs are introduced, how objects interact, how things are loaded, etc…
When something is a 1 day bugfix under ideal conditions, saying it will take 6+ months is admitting one of:
The codebase is fucked
All resources are going to new features
Something external is slowing it down (palworld lawsuit, company sale, C-suite politics, etc…)
Your current dev team is sub par
Not that any of those is completely undefendable or pure malpractice, but saying it “can’t” be done or blaming complexity is often a cop out.
I agree, real code always has tradeoffs. But there’s a difference between a conceptually simple change taking 3 weeks longer than planned and 6 months. The reality is game code is almost always junk and devs have no incentive to do better.
Getting a feature functional and out for launch day is the priority because you don’t have any cash flow until then. This has been exacerbated with digital distribution encouraging a ship-now-fix-later mentality.
This means game devs don’t generally have experience with large scale, living codebases. Code quality and stability doesn’t bring in any money, customer retention is irrelevant unless you’re making an mmo.
That’s kind of a funny example because, on a quick skim, nothing he did was exceptionally clever or unusual (other than workarounds for not having source code). R* basically paid him 10k for some basic profiling that they never bothered to do.
Steep learning curves angielski
Helldivers 2 and Palworld devs wish players understood that 'easy' additions and updates are sometimes really hard: 'That's half a year's work. That takes six months' (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Lies of P is getting difficulty options to make the Soulslike more accessible (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Gatekeepers in shambles