Apex Legends’ matchmaking has been a significant topic across the battle royale’s last couple of seasons, with the playerbase eager to see it balanced out. Specifically, many players have grown tired of being dropped into lobbies with exceptionally talented opponents, especially in a title that has publicly addressed its skill-based matchmaking more than a lot of its BR counterparts.
Season 16 brought long-awaited matchmaking adjustments, designed to alleviate imbalances and keep games as fair as possible. However, as we approach Season 17 of Apex Legends, players are still struggling with imbalanced matches, being eliminated by players they consider to be far above their level.
Venting their frustrations via the game’s subreddit, one player accused the matchmaking alterations of being a “lie”, saying: “It’s impossible for matchmaking to be this bad by accident, so I assume it’s intentional, but I can’t figure out why they think this is a good idea.”
Responding was Live Ops Technical Designer Aaron Li, who defended the changes and explained that they’re yet to be rolled out fully, which could explain some of the enduring inconsistencies.
“I am assuming you are a high skill player playing in Ranked,” he said. “We are only testing changes on a few selected data centers, and the matchmaking changes (under test) are most obvious at the lower end of the skill distributions, which might explain why you are not noticing the matchmaking updates (under test).”
He also refuted allegations that Apex Legends uses ‘engagement-optimized matchmaking’, often abbreviated to EOMM. This is a system that places less emphasis on typical matchmaking factors (connectivity, fairness, skill-level etc) and instead seeks to keep players playing for as long as possible.
Li simply said: “Apex Legends does NOT use EOMM. * screaming internally *”.
In short, players should remain patient with Apex Legends’ matchmaking for the time being. Respawn are clearly committed to its new matchmaking system and, moving forwards, it should be refined, improved and expanded.
