New Battlefield Game SBMM Code Spotted in Playtests, DICE Dev Explains to “Calm” Players
[summaraize]
While the new Battlefield game doesn’t even have an official title yet, thanks to the ongoing Battlefield Labs playtest, more information about it has come to light. This time, it’s about the dreaded SBMM (Skill-Based Matchmaking).
Important to note that same with any datamined content, whatever data is unearthed can be placeholder or changed entirely when the retail product is released.
It’s also not clear where this applies to, if it’s the base game multiplayer or only for battle royale (which datamine says will be a mode).
Battlefield 2025 SBMM Data Sparks Concern
Based on the findings by “schroomi (from the Battlefield 2043 Discord channel) : “we checked “AutoTest_MatchMakingChecks” and ‘AutoTest_Matchmaking_Flow’ to get an idea of the BF6 match making process:”
Given the topic, loads of players were in an uproar upon hearing this. It’s such a touchy subject that David Sirland, Lead Producer of the game, had to give a statement about it on the Battlefield Labs private Discord server (which was then shared on Reddit):
PSA: 2042 has SBMM according to this definition – this is what I tried to detail above yesterday. It has a factor of skill, its used, but ping and time to game is the TOP priority, and in a 64 player game our want is to spawn a server that starts as soon as possible – thus the skill factor is negligable in terms of sorting into servers. Also with a party that is more or less ignored. Just for clarity – saying SBMM is bad is not really useful. What you really want to say is “Heavy SBMM where skill separation is a priority is bad”.
But that doesn’t make skill as a factor in matchmaking bad wholesale, on the contrary we need a skill value to make balanced teams – no matter the ranges of skills total on a server. It wouldn’t be fun if all high skill players ended up on the same team, would it?
Just to calm this thing down a tad – the fact a skill value is in the matchmaker (it’s been there since we started being able to matchmake BTW) – doesn’t mean we are going with a heavy handed SBMM solution. Quite the opposite, Battlefield is at its best when you play the all out war modes with friends and different types of players – we do not want to limit that.
All of this is also true (skill being important for team balancing) regardless of in which way you join the server For reference, did you feel like the BF labs playtests were heavy handed SBMM? No? then we good. It’s the same matchmaker and settings we’ll use (with tweaks if we find any issues of course)
In case you didn’t know, skill-based matchmaking has always been a thing in multiplayer games. It’s why you don’t always see low-skilled players always matched with someone on a much higher skill level.
Whatever tweaks DICE is doing with matchmaking, we’re far from experiencing it ourselves, as we don’t even know the game’s title or release date. The latest datamine from BF Labs unearthed class specializations, which are coming back from Battlefield 4.
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