Apex Legends Player Reveals Solo Q SBMM Pattern Findings in 500-Match Study

With more and more momentum steering toward the upcoming 13th season of the long-beloved battle royale, Apex Legends' skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) system continues to be one of the hotly debated topics in all of gaming.

Although it appears that Respawn Entertainment is gearing up to make its competitive players happy in Season 13, the community continues to question just how the game's seemingly erratic SBMM system works.

Thanks to an Apex player on Reddit, however, appears the community is one step closer to figuring that out after they solo queued 500 unranked trios matches to study the game's skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) system.

On Monday, a Redditor by the username u/istiri7 posted a thread on the r/apexlegends Subreddit titled, "I Solo Q'd 500 Trios to Learn More About Apex SBMM."

In the post, Istiri explained how, as a Master-tier player on Xbox, they've sought to "better understand how Apex match makes solo Q players within the SBMM."

The post lists out the goals Istiri specifically looked to achieve with the 500 unranked, trio games sample size, from understanding what they can normally expect out of their teammates to how the matchmaking creates a team around them based on their skill level.

With plenty of data in numbers, as well as box and violin plots to boot, Istiri then shared their overall learnings.

The first note is that based on their relative skill level, they're generally never going to get teammates that can absolutely carry them to a win.

Next, SBMM will gift players a streak of easier lobbies after they've struggled for a bit. Istiri noted that they had a 37-game losing streak that was immediately followed by a 21-game span with five wins and 10 top-three finishes.

Lastly, "absolutely will punish" players when they're on a good streak. Istiri seemingly had a 15-game span where they won five (33%), averaged 3.4 kills and 1100 damage, then had their next 10 matches filled with pre-made squads and players with thousands of recorded kills per legend.

Istiri also gave some suggestions that Respawn should look to address with pubs.

One is that they loaded into games without at least one teammate 6.6% of the time, which needs to be tuned even lower.

Finally, since their win rate was slightly higher by 2.2% when their teammates didn't quit out, Istiri would like to see Respawn should employ a system to track/punish repeat offenders in pubs, albeit it doesn't have to be as hard as the punishment that ranked has.

Next up, Istiri seemingly plans to study 500 solo-queue duos matches and then solo-queue ranked, which should be definitely interesting to dive into considering the quality of this initial post.

For more on Apex Legends, feel free to check out our April 2022 weapon tier list and legend tier list.