Pure CBMM allows for outliers in matches, essentially making it a guarantee that lobby balancing fails. One really good player gets paired with all the worst players in a lobby, and now those 5 worst players are up against 6 players who are all better than them, and the top player drops 40 kills and still loses. How exactly is that good? Strict SBMM created lag, and it created much harsher penalties for mistakes for higher skilled players without any additional incentive to play. It also made playing with a significantly lesser-skilled friend impossible, as your friend would be up against 6 players who were all better than them. It also forced the meta in higher skilled lobbies, removing variety and casual play in a looter shooter. This was not okay either. We have tried the two extremes, pure CBMM and strict SBMM. Why don't we try something in the middle? Such as: 1. Outlier protection: Top X% can't match bottom X%. Simple, but would protect new players for sure. Tricky part would be on when to decide someone joins the rest of the pool. 2. Team based matchmaking: Teams match teams of the same size and similar skill level. Lobby is then filled by solos that make the average skill of each team similar. Fairly straightforward, and arguably necessary no matter what. 3. [i]Loose[/i] SBMM: A player of skill level 5/10 (10 being the highest) can match anyone from a 4 to a 6, rather than only 5s. (Just an example with arbitrary numbers here. A scale of 1 to 10 is not sophisticated enough to properly rank player skill, so the takeaway from this is the idea and not the actual rank matching.) 4. Iterative Lobby Balancing: If a match is found and a significant outlier exists, the outlier is replaced with another player until the teams with similar skill can be made without outliers. This only works if combined with option 3, otherwise the top and bottom players would never find a match and queue times would be far too long. 5. A combination of the above. I'd personally like to see 2, 3, and 4 implemented. They'd have to be implemented so the search criteria could be adjusted on the fly server side though. Don't want stupid long queue times, but I'll take a longer queue if it means my team isn't completely outmatched. We got options here. This idea that we just HAVE to have one of the extremes is ridiculous. Let me know what you guys think and what other ideas you may have.