Apex Legends player reveals results of SBMM study after 500 matches

November 2022 · 3 minute read

An Apex Legends player decided to conduct a 500 game study on SBMM to see if they could identify any patterns with the matchmaking.

Matchmaking is a heavily discussed topic in Apex Legends as a lot of players feel as if the system doesn’t work as intended and often creates unfair lobbies.

This is a huge problem in Ranked, as the point of the mode is to test out your skills against opponents of a similar level and slowly ascend the tiers.

Unfortunately, very few members of the community understand how SBMM works in Apex Legends, as Respawn hasn’t revealed many details on the system.

So, in hopes of solving that problem, an Apex player decided to conduct a 500 game study and they’ve managed to identify a set of patterns in the matchmaking.

SBMM stands for ‘skill-based matchmaking’.

Apex player conducts 500 match SBMM study

Beginning the study at the start of the Ranked season, Master-level player Istiri7 decided to solo queue 500 Trios matches and record their results. Although this isn’t a huge sample size, Istiri did learn a set of key details on the matchmaking system.

First of all, it looks like SBMM will gift you a streak when you’ve lost a huge amount of matches in a row, as Istiri’s 37 games loss streak was followed by 21 game span with five wins and three top 10 finishes.

However, Istiri also points out that SBMM will “absolutely” punish you when you’re on a hot streak, as their impressive set of wins in a row was followed by 10 matches of troll teammates and 3 stacks with 30-50k kills on each Legend.

Finally, Istiri notes that based on their relative skill level, it never felt like they were given teammates that would hard carry them through a match, so they always felt challenged and like they had to play at their best.

I Solo Q’d 500 Trios to Learn More About Apex SBMM from apexlegends

After listing the key takeaways, Istiri shared some interesting stats that contributed to their overall win rate, including that in 23.8% of their matches, at least one teammate quit while their banner was still active.

With an overall win rate of 11.4%, Istiri found that they won 13.6% of the games where they had no leavers, increasing their chance of victory by 2.2%.

While the sample size of this study definitely isn’t enough to make conclusive claims about SBMM in Apex Legends, it does give us a rough insight into how the system works.

Now, Istiri has plans to record their results from 500 solo queue Duos matches, so it’ll be interesting to see if their results differ.

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