The way my friend plays Rainbow Six Siege gets him killed every single time without fail. But following "the meta" is really not fun for him. Instead of being able to find a community where we can play with people who might not be as bad at the game as us but are interested in everyone having fun, he gets thrown into the same generic "Casual" pool as everyone else, including kids who play 24/7 and streamers on smurf accounts building a highlight reel. There's no room for playing around, for trying different things, for just playing unoptimally. If you do anything not in "The meta", then you lose, repeatedly, and then the system forces you against literal children to ensure you win often enough to keep that 50% winrate.
Like I said: In the past I could choose when I wanted to have fun, be lighthearted, and screw around by joining more casual servers. Then if I wanted to be competitive, I could join a more serious server, with more strict rules and systems, and play against both people much better than me, and much worse than me at the same time.
Now you have no choice, because everyone is in the same pool, so if you don't play "the meta" or do something nonstandard to have fun, you will be crushed, and then placed against terrible kids, and then placed against really good kids, over and over again. There's no room for casual gameplay because the "casual" section of matchmaking isn't casual.
The most fun we ever had playing Siege was getting a group of 8 people together to play "custom" games. The variability of skill was a huge and important part of the experience. We knew we had to carefully balance the teams for things to not be absurd, and we knew that playing "the meta" wasn't the best strategy in this case because you couldn't assume your teammates to play like perfect robots, giving you the freedom to try different strategies. This is also why people get so damn angry when you don't follow the meta and play like a perfect robot who has memorized all the strats, because if you don't, your team will most certainly lose. You could enjoy games you were bad at in 2001, because game design wasn't so aggressive about "perfect matchmaking" and "perfect competitiveness". I don't want my fun afternoon game to be a damn esport.
What you really want is win rate distribution over difficulty level.
that's exactly why casual multiplayer lobbies suck, it's a 'Find Now' magic button with no data other than your previous games, rather than a lobby where I , an expert, can join "Experts Lobby #3030", create a small friend network on that server, enjoy repeat sessions, etc.
Yes, they tried to fix the social aspect with friend lists/etc, but they also got rid of the homeopathic solution of user self determination for the sake of making the game more onboard-able for novices and casual players.
I say '... the game' a few times, you can apply these ideas to practically any modern multiplayer game out there nowadays that's even a bit popular.
I hate the games I lose because there is usually (9 times out of 10) nothing I can do to affect the outcome.
I hate the games I win because the win mostly comes down to how bad the other team is, or a superstar on my team, and I was mostly a spectator.
The games I enjoy are where it is a hard fought battle with decent teamwork that pushes me to my limits and beyond, and in those cases I don't care if I win or lose.
I've had 20 game winning streaks, 20 game losing streaks. Between the match making, smurf accounts, and weird balancing issues, it's very hard to know what is dictating the outcome. The psychology is so destructive if you place any value on the outcome.
But overall, it's still possible to have a lot of fun and great matches enough of the time that it is still worth playing.
I'm around low diamond, which is definitely my skill ceiling. It relatively easy for me to assess higher diamonds and masters. It's also easy to asses plat players. Anything below plat looks very similar to me.
Nearly every one of those matches I ended the game with the best stats and still lost horribly.
My favorite though were the team mates that threw at the start of the match or when my team would decide they would rather argue than play the game. Such a toxic experience of a game. Having one amazing match of great fun and teamplay just wasn't worth the 2-5 matches of absolute toxicity.
When playing quickmatch there were certain heroes that you could play and force a win (assuming the map didn't fck you over). For me those heroes were murky and the lost vikings (and usually abathur). My TLV winrate was over 70% because I could just soak and PVE my team to a 2+ level advantage fairly quickly. Murky was a similar experience but I could also assassinate enemy heroes fairly easily.
Sadly those were the only heroes I played that consistently made me feel like I was effecting the outcome of the match. Getting +30 kills as valeera with no deaths and still losing cause you can't get your team to do any objectives is just infuriating..
Winning is generally fun, but the interesting bit about using Fun as a guiding light in matchmaking design is that its a non-zero-sum game. Losing teams can also have fun. Maybe not as often, depending on the game and such, but its definitely a number larger than 50%.
I know this seems reductive and whatever, but I think its a really critical discussion that the gaming industry isn't having. Skill-based matchmaking and ELO are pretty tuned-in to, well, "skill" (whatever that means in modern gaming), such that you're pinned at that 50% rate to the best of the system's ability. Some would argue that this pinning actually results in less fun games, for two extremely valid reasons:
1) If the system is constantly adjusting to keep your win rate at 50%, you never have the opportunity to see yourself improve through the metric of your win rate. This effect is especially pronounced in games like Call of Duty, where the metric we're talking about is really something more like your KDR; if the system is engineered to constantly keep your KDR at 1.0, there's startlingly few metrics to judge your own performance by. Many games have tried to address this through the award of opaque ranks and badges; weirdly, Call of Duty doesn't, but some games do. In other words, your ability to feel like you're getting better is replaced by being told that you're getting better; many would agree that while it can feel good in the moment to get that badge, its less satisfying in the long-run.
2) A perfectly balanced skill-based match making system would reasonably want to keep every player's win-rate at 50%, over a long period of time (or, KDR at 1.0, or in Apex a win rate of 5%, or whatever is balanced for that game). But that isn't necessarily what happens over short periods of time; and players experience games in the moment, players aren't statistical databases of their entire gaming history with some title. Thus its normal to ask not just the win rate, but the standard deviation of that win rate. People play the lottery, and find it fun, for a very real psychological reason: fun can have an outsized impact relative to the odds of some game if the game has an abnormally high/unfair standard deviation of expected success. If you paid $1 for a lottery ticket, and you were guaranteed to the best of the system's ability to win $2 every 2 lottery tickets, no one would have fun playing the lottery (and the system wouldn't make any money, but that's beside the point). Yet; this is how SBMM is quite literally designed; to reduce the standard deviation of your performance as much as possible. Variety is the spice of life, as they say; but the better and more consistent SBMM systems get, the less spice the matches you play tend to have. Put another way; "popping off" for a game is supposed to be a fun, rewarding experience; but players are now universally trained to know that the system will actually punish you for being abnormally good in a match, by placing you against better players next game.
My overall point being: there's a gulf of difference between "players have to have an average aggregate win rate of 50%" and "all players should have an individual win rate of 50%", and systems which try to guarantee the latter can actually be less fun.
I also find it interesting to think about an ELO system which tries to operationalize the concept of Fun, to try and guarantee a Fun game for as many players as possible. What would that look like? Most simplistically, and probably ineffectually: ask players after the match "did you have fun?" A player's performance in the game influences their own skill rating; but a player's response to this question would instead influence every other player's "fun rating"; asserting whether or not the competitors (and teammates) were fun to play with; as well as signaling internal metrics to the development team for tuning of things like map, weapon, and game design.
But for my own psychological health, just telling the matchmaker how I felt about the match would go a long way to taking the bite off a bad experience.
Another lost opportunity due to a corporation being more concerned about the next quarterly reports than anything else..
Sometimes I had more fun losing but those were exceedingly rare cases that generally involved a friend or two in the group.
I still played the game chasing those rare highs where I actually enjoyed the experience. After losing 30something games in row spread out over a week of nightly playing I just rage quit. Even today years later the game's MM still pisses me off. Mostly because I found the game play mechanics to be fun and I miss the experience of the good games.