Apex Legends seem to be getting ready for an interesting update as the company shares details on its matchmaking system. The battle royale's Skill Based Matchmaking (SBMM) mechanism has long been debated, with many gamers urging for changes. Now it looks like Apex Legends fans may be finally getting their wish granted.
Apex Legends has come a long way since its release in 2019 and has grown to be one of the top battle royale titles in gaming today. Throughout its 15 seasons, the game has undergone many changes with new characters, maps, weapons, and interesting cosmetics being added regularly while building on its Titanfall-based lore. Although, these changes don't always work in the game's favor. For example, the developers had to recently roll back an update that accidentally nerfed Horizon's Gravity lift tactical ability. But beyond these typical character changes and bug fixes, Respawn could be prepping up for a massive overhaul of its matchmaking mechanics, a core part of how Apex Legends functions as a battle royale.
In a developer blog post, the company shared a detailed view of how Apex Legends' current matchmaking process works within the game and what players could expect to happen in the near future. Accordingly, Apex Legends will be retiring the SBMM system and will be replacing it with a new version. Here, the system will look to measure skills and create matches based on two goals. The first is to gauge a meaningful measurement of the player's skill where it "must be predictive of their performance." The second goal is "to make the tightest possible matches in a reasonable time frame," according to the company. This means that as opposed to placing players into static buckets and creating a match after it fills 60 players, the game would predict the distribution of incoming players and "dynamically chooses the optimal tradeoff between skill differences and wait time."
The developers have also shared that these systems have already gone live in certain regions and modes for testing purposes following the launch of Season 15, Eclipse. Apex Legends further states that it hopes to phase out the old matchmaking system region by region and that the company will explore possible additional corrections to player skill ratings afterward. News of an update to SBMM has been rumored for a while and one Respawn developer even confirmed matchmaking changes were on the way. In any case, only time will tell how these changes will pan out for millions of players.
Apart from the upcoming matchmaking changes, the company is rumored to be updating another key aspect of the battle royale, its spawning mechanism. Respawn is reportedly looking to make big changes to how players will spawn in the game with the launch of Apex Legends Season 16. Of course, Respawn itself is yet to confirm any such change is in the works. Either way, it's unlikely fans will hear anything official until Apex Legends share details on its next season which will kick off after Eclipse comes to an end on 14 February 2023.
Apex Legends is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: Apex Legends
