Summary
Battlefield Labs has been an interesting experiment for Electronic Arts and Dice. Although the testing playground for the upcoming unnamed Battlefield instalment, henceforth referred to asBattlefield 6, is leakier than a colander; the developers are likely receiving far more feedback than they would during a normal development cycle.
The response to leaks of the extended playtest has beenbroadly positive, with series veterans praising Battlefield 6’s apparent return to the series' gritty roots. However, the ever-contentious topic of skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) recently reared its ugly head.
Skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) is a broad definition of matchmaking systems that attempt to place players of a similar skill level in the same games. A system like this tends to balance out a player’s wins and losses over time. It’s controversial among first-person shooter players who don’t feel they should have to try their hardest to succeed in casual (unranked) lobbies.
SBMM Won’t Be Heavy-Handed
This controversy emerged after a playtest participant data-mined code that refers to a skill-based matchmaking system. The response in the community was negative. The vocal element of the community tends to be against SBMM, despite it being the standard for every other genre.
The outrage prompted a response from David Sirland, a lead producer, on the Battlefield Labs Discord server. Sirland sought to assuage concerns about SBMM, saying that while it will be a factor in matchmaking, it’s going to be a lower priority than ping and the amount of time it takes to create a game.
[Battlefield] 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 aReddit threadon the subject of Sirland’s response, commenters have been praising his articulate explanation of how SBMM will factor into Battlefield 6. Others are asking for a server browser i.e. the ability to browse and join custom games.
Battlefield 6 doesn’t currently have a release date, butrecent commentsfrom Electronic Arts' chief executive officer Andrew Wilson suggests the game may not arrive until 2026 to avoid clashing with the release of Grand Theft Auto 6.
