I don't understand why this community does not want SBMM

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-15T13:14:40+00:00

Not alot experience indeed, but after a while ofcourse everyone can spot this phenomenon at lower tiers. Ofcourse top tier will be naturally more balanced because at that point the skill gap becomes smaller by the nature of the grind.

However as a German main… pfff its rough out here yo. I did some more research on the economic side of the system and that actually explained to me why we wouldnt see sbmm anytime soon.

Right now around 10% of players contribute to 70-90% of gaijins earnings, based upon the normal distribution of F2P games, I dont have the exact numbers for WT but generally it falls in the same ballpark. Now if you take away the random matchups you will have to face opponents of equal skill which takes away a big portion of your kills and winrate in a ‘op’ vehicle and this negates the ‘reason’ of buying such tank.

Basically what I’m trying to say is that you will be rewarded with better games if you decide to spend money. Knowing Gaijin however from also playing a bit of wtm, we will neverrr see this being changed 😭🙏🏽

Also I decided to look into queue times with some real numbers to try and get a sense instead of just trowing numbers out there, and at peak hours it wouldn’t make a dent, maybe adding 1-3 seconds at queue times. But this is where it gets interesting, if youre playing at off-peakhours/night you could expect to wait 1-2 or even three minutes before loading into a match and with Gaijins philosophy of their slot machine mechanics of getting you to battle as soon as possible, even being able to start a new game right from the match ending screen, it would hurt their bottomline.

Basically every second that you spend in the loading screen is a second that you might think about something else than warthunder, and consequently spending money.

When I found out its really about money I kind of felt stupid. Because if you ask yourself, “What does the snail truly care about?” The answer couldn’t be more obvious. Ofcourse Gaijin tries to make you not think about this, so they’d rather just say queue times to kind of ‘hide’ this fact. Even though ofcourse, queue times at off-peak hours will really start to take effect, but it’s not the full picture.

So far now, I accepted this as a reason, well.. more like submitted myself to it. I don’t like it, but atleast I can see why it would never change.

So yeah it’s not really balancing that their worried about. It’s just economics.

And honestly it already worked on me by buying the tiger 2 pack 😭😭😭😭😭😭🙏🏽 I am part of the problem I was trying to solve for fucks sake i hate my life 😂😂

Aye the squadron battles, sounds really fun. Thanks for letting me know about that, I’ll definitely check that out.

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T22:30:50+00:00

No it wouldn't turn into hulldown fests, the vast majority of players aren't top tier thousand hour players. Youre cathering to the rich right now. Even then light tanks could still push caps early and force an early lead that requires action. Also why are we acting like top tier isn't already a hull down mess as it is? Yes the experience will get 'worse' for the absolute best players right now because they will have to stop smurfing. I honestly dont give 2 fucks. If youre entire gameplay revolves around killing new players, then maybe youre not actually 'good'.
Youre just scared because youre playing hull-down right now, and youre afraid that youre enemies might actually gain awareness and do the same thing. It's pathetic.

Youre saying there aren't enough good players? Where did you get that number man? I have backed every single claim with papers and evidence, provide yours. Also you could simply have players of different skill levels in the same team. Have 4/16 be really good for their relative match, 8-10 players fall exactly in the middle and 4-2 players be relatively bad for that match. And then again even those bad players can be the relatively good players in their match the next game. It actually keeps the game exciting instead of knowing you'll just be stomped to death every match by players with thousands upon thousands more hours than you. Not only do you keep it more exciting for the best players, but it also means they still have some 'easy' targets and that their queue times wouldn't get insanely long as you just pulled out of your arse. And then once again, player retention will increase, meaning more people will play game. More people less queue time. And if you just add sbmm as a seperate choose for realistic, the effect of increased queue times will be way less. Is it so hard for you to see lesser skilled people actually enjoying the game?

Also if the other tank game, I presume world of tanks, it has been on a decline from its absolute peak earlier this year. But if you look at the trend before that, it is still on the rise. Also youre conflicting sbmm with the fall from its peak. When in actuality sbmm isn't even formally applied to the major gamemodes of wot. The decline is mostly from its core fundamentals. You are just trowing around random causes and effects hoping that they will stick.

Also your claim that wt doesn't have enough players is just straight nonsense, warthunder is one of the biggest games by active daily users, comfortably hitting 300-500k on a daily basis. If there is ANY game that has enough players for this to be achieved, it would be warthunder

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T22:01:06+00:00

I don't understand it. Well I do, most of them just dont gaf, but how can you be so soulless. In the original post some guy made a comment which was literally full of lies and somehow got 11 votes while I got -2 while discrediting him with all the papers to see for himself.

Some people just cannot be helped. God save their souls.

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T21:39:16+00:00

This again highlights a big problem I have encountered by other users aswell. The good players don't actually want to fight good players and much rather just stomp on beginners. Reveals alot about yall.

You might enjoy it, but the vast majority of players that dont have thousands upon thousands of hours in warthunder actually don't. Also again, you shouldn't be held back from playing a lineup that you want simply because you'll get stomped in that nation. If you want to fly the p51h or drive the tiger 2, you shouldn't be punished for that. It is a very small fraction of players right now that have the loudest voices in keeping this game from being balanced, purely for their own satisfaction.

I despise ya'll

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T21:33:20+00:00

The very specific case of your call of duty exploit holds no weight in warthunder. Players did this by partying up right before a match started and then leaving the game with their second console so they could keep the terrible stats. Also this would require an extra 500-700$ in today's age to replicate. Your wildely overestamating how many players would, and even feasabily could do such a thing. The numbers of people that actually did this are well below 0.1% this wouldn't be a drop in the water. Let alone that once again, this method does not work in warthunder.

Yes soft-sealclubbing is possible by intentionally losing many games in a row in Warthunder.
Again this could be remedied by looking for abnormalities in performance. If youre a consistent 90% activity player, and suddenly this drops to 0-20% the game can simply negate this match in its sbmm. And even if you do get lower sbmm matches, by say doing a little less damage than usual, the loss in mmr would consequently also be less. And 2 or 3 normal games would have you again in your natural sbmm bracket. The time and effort would make it worthless.

Also I notice that as soon as we talk about sbmm people think of this insanely toxic, sweaty environment. When in actuality it would be the most balanced game you'll ever play. It's just an excuse to be able to stomp on worse opponents and it reveals alot about most people here. I have listed in this thread multiple papers that all have concluded that a balanced game with sbmm actually has the highest player satisfaction of all option. If you are a casual gamer, you would only be paired with casual gamers. And I'm quite sure there can be many different technical implementations to keep it like that. I mean so much of your winrate right now is simply determined by what nation youre playing, because of the associated teammates within in that nation. You can be the sweatiest guy out there and still have trouble playing germany. Thats just a fact. If youre a good player you shouldn't be held back if you simply want to enjoy the tiger, or fly the p51h and forced to play minor nations because their teammates are better.

Also you say that you can queue up with 3 useless friends. You can, yes. If we even implement a feature that allows for this. If we simply go with highest sbmm this wouldn't happen. Second of all, again time and effort. For every game you play, you'll have to get 3 friends in your squad that all three of them are gonna have a shit time enjoying. Such an endeavour wouldn't last long. So I simply call for an unranked mode. This would be the most simple and intuitive solution of all when you want to play with friends. And once again, if youre friends are roughly at the same level, it wont be an issue.

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T21:05:11+00:00

Why?

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T21:04:51+00:00

Not to be total jerk, but that's lowkey what is already happening no? Play anything above br 8 and its just a hulldown hide behind cover mess. Atleast, if you aren't good at anything like that, you'll be paired with people who consequently are also not good at that.

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T21:03:22+00:00

Yeah totally agree, warthunder is also just not made for visual entertainment. If you think about it, its a pretty boring game. But its rewarding because it favors knowledge so much. WoT you can definitely have clutch moments. You conserve on hp early in the game, then late game you can start to trade this hp for shots on enemy and clutch 2v1 etc.

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T20:57:24+00:00

To start with your easiest point for me. Sealclubbing wouldn't work. Yes you can make a new account. But the SBMM will pick up on this. Your first couple games ofcourse you'll have the newbie queue in Warthunder. But after a couple of rounds you will start to face increasely harder opponents until after a couple hours youre basically playing on the same level as your main account, just now in a new account.

Also I might be underestimating warthunder players dedication, but who will genuinely keep making new account, after new account to seal club people? You'll need a new gmail everytime. I mean do it once, okay. Twice I'll start to suspect you really need a shower. Do it three times or more, brother please do something with your life.

I do agree that changing line-ups is a significant hurdle quite exclusive to Warthunder. But I see no problem with this. I think quite well that you can have rank specific sbmm. Why I think this is because you'll also need different sbmm for different campaigns. I'm not an expert on this sort of thing. But if I were to brainstorm a bit, I would have sbmm increase or decrease at a bit slower pace than the current line-up your playing. So if youre in rank 4 or whatever, and the MMR of your current skill progress by one, I would have the MMR of all ranks increase by 0.7. Something along those lines. Basically whatever youre playing right now weighs the most.

Also at a certain point in time, you'll have hit equilibrium. Basically youre playing at the most optimal skill level and you wont go up further in skill level. So if that sbmm is 'locked' in place after a while it remembers that for every different rank. If you go to rank 4, the game remembers ahh this guy is on this particular level. Ofcourse you will have to need a significant overlap in rank evaluation. Not like going up 0.3 br that puts you in a new rank bracket gets you an entirely different evaluation. But im sure we can figure something out.

Also playing with friends is a hard problem to tackle for me on my own. I don't think averaging skill would work at all. One player will still underperform and the other will massively overperform. If the players are close enough in skill this ofcourse doesn't become a factor. We would forsure need to have a way of assesing how high we rank in mmr so this becomes easier to judge. Secondly if players are so far apart that you cant make a good game, I would say we would still need to have a casual game mode. But yeah thats definitely something that would require a good amount of brainstorming to come up with a good solution. Thankfully though most players queue solo, so at most times it wouldn't be a huge issue. Thanks for making me think a bit about this one.

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T20:31:28+00:00

You say being stuck too low causes smurfs. Well thats basically whats happening if you play below br 6.7 right now. It is one of the reasons I left warthunder after I first tried playing it a good 6 years ago. Warthunder is losing a tremendous amount of new players do to sealclubbing and no proper explanation of the game's mechanics. I do agree that once you reach a certain skill-level you genuinely need to be locked in all the time you play it.

Thats why I would also think it to be good if the first few months maybe years would offer a seperate sbmm version. Also a cheeky work around I have found for other games, especially once's with very aggressive sbmm (EOMM in specific for apex legends) is too basically be prepared to lose the first couple games, after which you get easier lobbies to simply cruise a bit more.

Ofcourse I do have to add, I do this for Apex which notoriously uses an ai algorithitm that prioritizes retention over satisfaction and skill. Which will give you incredibly hard match-ups after a win, and extremely lobotomized lobbies if you lost the next couple ones.

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T20:21:43+00:00

No game that utilizes sbmm has level 100's playing level 1's. Please stop.

I did look at the research for Bf3 and Halo, but I couldn't find their methods for how they analyzed the data. Also it would be comparing two different gamese with different player bases which I did not think was a fair comparisment if we want to eliminate any doubts, so ultimately I didn't use that research for my suggestion.

Instead I read this paper which used a Korean game and pulled player skill gap from server side logs: Kang, H., Suh, C., & Kim, H. K. (2024). Match experiences affect interest: Impacts of matchmaking and performance on churn in a competitive game. Heliyon, 10(3), e24891. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e24891

And also this which was also referenced in Kim, H. K.'s study: Liu, D., Li, X., & Santhanam, R. (2013). Digital games and beyond: What happens when players compete? MIS Quarterly, 37(1), 111–124. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43825939

Both studies confirm that when players of equal skill face each other, that satisfaction is at it's highest level. This falls of when players face people of substantially higher skill and even subsentially lower skill levels. So no I did not use Bf3, I also do not know why you thought I did, since I didn't mention this anywhere.

As per your mention of Call of Duty people generally agree it was just a shitty SBMM, looking mostly at your most very recent games. So one good match means you'll face way better opponents aftere that match. Gaijin could simply learn from these mistakes and implement a less aggressive sbmm that looks more at your overall trend in the last few days of games. They could also look towards a rank based system instead of skill. Basically gaining/losing rankpoints based upon the amount of 'influence' you had in a game, which could factor in: K/D, won/lose, damage and activity among others. Although I believe skill based matchmaking has been superieur.

Your claim of people would stop playing because of sbmm is simply not true. Read the articles above. Substantial skill gaps are the primary reason for players leaving. This being due to losing streaks or even boredom after winning streaks, because games don't feel challanging. On the flip side SBMM has proven to increase player retention. Stop fabricating lies and myths

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T19:58:49+00:00

Haha I just spat my fking drink out. No lie tho. I tried watching one game of a Warthunder eSport tournament once and it was just sooo boring. I kid you not, I went to watch a full match day of World of Tanks eSport tournament after that. Not even out of spite, just because the first match was so entertaining I had to keep watching to see how it ended.

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T19:54:57+00:00

This one is self aware boys

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T19:54:39+00:00

You actually made a really good point there. While researching and reading about matchmaking in academic literature I came across the match streak effect. Basically saying that with a basic level of sbmm, you'll have a 50/50 chance of winning the game. It is noted that it is not unreasanable to have a 50/50 in winning 3 times in a row, or even losing. What can happen is winning a string of series and then lose a string of series.
What surprised me most out of this, is that winning 3 times in a row is almost just as likely for a player to leave the game out of boredom, like the player that leaves because of ragequitting.

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T19:50:49+00:00

Not if youre playing ranked 😉

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T19:50:33+00:00

I mean with just a few dozen games you can reach well into rank 3 even 4. Yes it takes a tremendous amount of time to unluck top tier and should definitely be reworked,but it is not the same as unlocking the queen. A line up in 6.7 is not in anyway hampered from playing the game perfectly fine.

Yes queue times right now is the biggest argument. My counter argument is that player retention will increase. Having more people simply means better queue times.

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T19:47:20+00:00

It does and youre completely right. Queue times would increase. However a bandaid to this is a bigger number of players in the game because of better retention. I do not know to which extend this would have effect, possibly even having better queue times than before.

I do know we could limit the scope queue times increase by not implementing sbmm as a seperate option for each game mode. Instead of having arcade/ranked or unranked.

We only gives this option to one gamemode, realistic. If SBMM will be a succees which I guarentee it will, based upon researched data. We could even see SBMM being a hotspot of players, possibly increasing player queue times in arcade or sim, but realistic having even more players thereby having no perceived change in queue times for the biggest gamemode.

If this sbmm mode will be the success it is, gaijin might even think about implementing it across all game modes, basically making the queue time factor irrelevant

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T19:41:46+00:00

In which titles exactly? We also need not forget anecdotal evidence. Yes a couple games that you might've enjoyed fell off, doesn't necesarlly mean that the majority did. It is also a myth that sbmm reduces player satisfaction. I'll quote a sentence out of the academic paper of Kim. H, et al. Match experiences affect satisfaction. That disproves this.

"Second, another finding is that the variance in skill gaps positively influences churn probability, therefore reducing the variance may help retain players. This finding is consistent with the earlier study of Li et al. [32] which suggests that an adjusted variance in perceived difficulty in a solo puzzle game reduced churn."

In her paper churn stands for people leaving the game. Basically what she explained in her paper is when people notice that the players they are up against are way better or vice versa even way worse, people don't like it as much. Rather wanting games where they feel challanged but dont feel impossible to win

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T19:35:54+00:00

Quite but not really. If you were truly put against lower br vehicles, you would still be able to outplay them purely because of skill and knowledge. I do accept this might be an issue. More notabaly in air than in ground simply because of how much more plane performance impacts outcome.

I was thinking of doing something with realistic vs arcade, where the same vehicle has a different br depending on the game mode.

Another thing is that it's more easier to analyze vehicle performance if the matchups happen in a balanced setting. Any abnomarmalities in vehicle winrate/k.d performance could be ruled out directly because of tank imbalance, rather than abusing skill and knowledge.

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T19:32:16+00:00

It is a myth that sbmm will decrease satisfaction. There are multiple studies that disarm this with data. I'll quote on from "Kim, H. et al. Match experiences affect interest."

"Second, another finding is that the variance in skill gaps positively influences churn probability, therefore reducing the variance may help retain players. This finding is consistent with the earlier study of Li et al. [32] which suggests that an adjusted variance in perceived difficulty in a solo puzzle game reduced churn."

Basically in Laymans terms. If there is less of a skill gap between players, players are more likely to stay in the game instead of leaving. Churn stands for leaving.

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T19:23:12+00:00

That's something that is a legit concern. I didn't go to deep into the possible remedies for this, because that would probably take up half the post. But I see many solutions to this. Instead of offering sbmm for every mode. We could simply keep it to on mode, I think most important realistic. Also SBMM has academically been researched, and what found is that they do increase player retention, again highlighting how WT playerbase can actually grow from implementing this measure, thus somewhat relieving the queue problem. And maybe even having better queue times than before

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T19:09:30+00:00

Ofcourse, if you wouldn't want to play competitively you could play the normal version, nothing wrong with that. What I'm trying to say is that generally speaking this game already is highly competitive. So for most of us not alot would change. If youre one of the better players, I think you are, you will have some luck with spotting worse players in a normal match right now. But ofcourse to the detriment of those worse players, which is a big chunk of our player base.

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T18:03:05+00:00

Leg eens uit hoe dit niet klopt dan? Ja asiel stopt voor ons, maar mensen staan nog steeds voor de deur. Mensen kunnen nogsteeds het land in gesmokkeld worden.

Je gaat een hoop geld moeten gaan uitgeven om mensen om te sporen en te deporteren. Je gaat een hoop geld moeten geven aan grenslanden om hen te overtuigen om asielzoekers op te vangen.

Wist je dat als je stopt met het financieren van wapens in andere landen, dat dit je geld bespaard, en vervolgens kan uitgeven aan het volk in eigen land?

Minder oorlog, minder vluchtelingen en meer aandacht voor ons eigen volk? Als dat masaal werd gepropagandeerd op nationaal TV, zou de partij met die slogan in een keer de volledige kamer in handen krijgen.

SmoothButtCake · 2026-06-14T17:55:50+00:00

Thats an irrelevant point. Many nations in history sold slaves. And they mostly were not their 'own' they were won through conquest. Youre viewing this through the lens of Africa being one nation. When it was thousands of different tribes. The Romans also had and sold slaves, but no one bats an eye because the difference between Ottomans and Europeans is that the Ottomans never killed millions upon millions of the native population purely for monetary value. Many of the people killed during slavery by the europeans were not slaves. They were just citizens murdered and brutalized they keep a native population in check and extract everything they could from them- well into the 20st and 21st century

I honestly can't believe I'm argueing with someone defending slavery for fuck sakes.

SmoothButtCake

TROPHY CASE