Skill-based matchmaking isn’t based on skill, and Battlefield 6 needs to be different
By Dave Aubrey
Over the course of my gaming history I’ve put thousands of hours into Apex Legends, hundreds on Call of Duty and Halo, dozens into countless other online shooters, and thousands more into fighting games. It wasn’t always this way, but I adore some light competition against real people. Unfortunately, the only competitive game I’m actually eager to return to in 2025 is Street Fighter 6. In the competitive game community, skill-based matchmaking has become a bit of a punching bag, but neither side of the argument seems to have grasped the bigger picture, and it makes me concerned for the future of Battlefield 6.
As a game player, if you simply intuit what skill-based matchmaking is based on the name, it’s a good thing. Gaming is more mainstream than ever, with more players than ever, and that means the gap in skill is bigger than ever. Somewhere out there is a toddler playing their first ever Fortnite game, and at the same time, there’s a 35-year-old man who has been playing Fortnite since before it had a battle royale mode. These two people should never encounter one another, in an ideal world, and that’s why skill-based matchmaking is good on paper.
If you’re a fighting game player that sees Call of Duty or Apex Legends players complain about skill-based matchmaking, you would rightfully laugh yourself to sleep that night. A win/loss ratio is useless to an online fighter, all that matters is your rank. An intermediate Street Fighter 6 player with a good chunk of ranked games under their belt will inevitably find a few online players that crush them, but will find others they can topple easily in between those even matches. That variability will usually come down to playstyle and mindset more than actual skill, and overall, ranked games in fighting games just work — netcode is usually the bigger problem.
When it comes to games like Call of Duty and Apex Legends, it’s a bit more complicated. For one, fighting games are usually 1v1, short matches that mean there are always people waiting for a new game, even when you set your own matchmaking settings like restricting ping and region — that’s without mentioning that a bad three-minute Street Fighter game is much less frustrating than a bad 20-minute battle royale. It’s not so flexible in these big shooters, and long games with a lot of players result in long matchmaking times that have gotten even longer when ping isn’t the primary priority.
Dedicated players of these games will have noticed the change. I was playing Apex Legends since launch day, and of course I saw matchmaking adjustments as players had their skill data punched into the algorithm, but suddenly the enemy teams that had one scary player disappeared, the teams that didn’t know what they were doing disappeared too, and I started saying to my teammates things like ‘we’ve lost a few in a row, we’ll have a good game soon.’ We call that the Gambler’s fallacy, by the way.
In a 2017 The Conversation article director of Atreyu Games, Joshua Krook, describes several techniques used in the video games industry that originated in the gambling industry, concluding with: “By using the same techniques as casinos, the modern video gaming industry has gone down a dark and morally dubious path.” This might seem like an aside, but it’s an open secret that designers from the gambling industry – such as the people that design slot machine odds – have been employed by large gaming publishers.
Modern day consumers have streaming subscription services, dozens of free-to-play games to download, even more premium games to indulge in, dozens of different battle pass options, DLC and events launching regularly, and so on. Companies aren’t just competing for your money, they’re competing for your attention, because the longer you stay engaged, the more likely you are to see the service as essential and will keep spending money on it. This manipulative, casino-like design is present everywhere now, even in dating apps.
Don’t take my word for it, take the word of EA and the University of California, Los Angeles. A 2017 paper titled ‘EOMM: An Engagement Optimized Matchmaking Framework’ co-created between EA and UCLA, and the abstract reads as follows: “Current matchmaking systems depend on a single core strategy: create fair games at all times. These systems pair similarly skilled players on the assumption that a fair game is best player experience [sic]. We will demonstrate, however, that this intuitive assumption sometimes fails and that matchmaking based on fairness is not optimal for engagement.”
One conclusion you can draw from that is simple; always using 100% of your brain power to play isn’t necessarily fun. Another conclusion is a bit more harrowing; ensuring that you’re having a fair game isn’t the primary concern of modern matchmaking systems.
I spoke with EA’s Apex Legends team in 2020, and the team essentially echoed that priority when questioned, with former Apex Legends game director Chad Grenier saying: “We've done tests where we change the skill-based matchmaking rules, or turn it off in certain areas, certain data centres for a period of time and we collect data, and there's concrete evidence that having skill-based matchmaking in our game makes players play longer, play more, increases retention, increases play hours…” It’s easy to see why that is the case. After all, I was the one saying ‘we’ll have a good game soon.’
I mean, it’s not so bad as long as publishers don’t use matchmaking to psychologically manipulate you into paying more money, right? Ah, well, a 2015 patent from Activision Publishing Inc describes a ‘System and method for driving microtransactions in multiplayer video games’. The abstract describes this patent as: “For instance, the system may match a more expert/marquee player with a junior player to encourage the junior player to make game-related purchases of items possessed/used by the marquee player. A junior player may wish to emulate the marquee player by obtaining weapons or other items used by the marquee player.” Probably completely unrelated to the eternally upset Call of Duty crowd.
A 2016 GDC presentation by Joshua Menke – current Riot Games SBMM designer, formerly Blizzard, Halo, Call of Duty – called ‘Skill, Matchmaking, and Ranking Systems Design’ acknowledges that what the game designer wants isn’t necessarily what’s good for the business. The designer wants to put players into games that are fun with varying intensity, but the business wants to put players into games that maximize the monetary value on each match for every player, and maximize that value over time.
The main point is this: when you enter a large, team-based game as a solo or with a spare slot in your party, you don’t know whether you’re going to be harvesting kills or fed to a grinder. You don’t know if you’re in for an even gunfight or if you’re being used as a microtransaction advert for the newbie in your team. You don’t know if SBMM is engaged, or EOMM, or whatever they want to call it now. Your skill matters less than ever in the wake of these matchmaking algorithms with conflicting priorities.
Which brings us to the topic of the week, Battlefield 6. Charlie Intel reports that EA confirmed Battlefield 6’s matchmaking priorities in a press briefing, with those being ping, player location, server availability, and ‘some skill factor’. What, exactly, ‘some skill factor’ means in the light of all of these patents, papers, and reports remains to be seen, but the fact that BF6 is avoiding goofy crossover skins does give me some hope, at least.
I’ve long since stepped away from the likes of Apex Legends and Call of Duty, and even if they completely revamped the matchmaking algorithms, it’s already far too late to turn me back into a regular player — I haven’t even gone into my problems with SBMM and EOMM when it comes to mixed-skill parties, we could be here all day.
In my ideal world, a ranked mode would be the default, where nothing but skill actually matters, and new players would be funneled into there to play with other new players, and pros can do the same thing. Public lobbies shouldn’t necessarily be a free-for-all with that 35-year-old and the toddler, but it should be an environment where more chaos happens — and you can even include all of your EOMM mechanical guff there. Sadly, ranked mode is seen as an exclusive club that only the best players can jump into. It should be seen as the place to learn the game and improve with people on the same level as you, not a den of hungry lions.
Ultimately, I think publishers like EA and Activision can use whatever kind of matchmaking system they want, but they should have to be transparent with the audience if they’re implementing psychological techniques to have you spend money or remain “engaged”. It’ll never happen. Hopefully Battlefield 6 will still feel great to play after the algorithm has a month or two to sort people into their skill-based placements.
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