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Skill based matchmaking is a controversial system which aims to put players in games with similarly skilled players, something which Among Us lacks but almost all other multiplayer games have.
This isn’t to say that skill based matchmaking is something that will ever come to Among Us, or that it ever should. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to note how a game like Among Us could incorporate it, what it might look like, and how it would affect the game as a whole.
What is skill based matchmaking and why is it so controversial?
Skill based matchmaking, at its core, is a system which keeps track of each player’s individual skill and aims to create competitive matches where both players or teams have a roughly equivalent skill.
Perhaps the most well known tracking system is called the Elo rating system, developed to rate chess players and estimate how likely a particular chess player is to beat any other player.
This system has been tweaked and adapted for online games and gets applied to almost everything, with most skill based matchmaking systems hoping to give most players a roughly 50% chance of winning any game they play.
Vice recently published an in depth look at where the controversy stems from, but to put it shortly, it is due to a vocal minority of high skilled players upset that they are being matched with other high skilled players.
While their complaints are phrased as not wanting to play with “sweats” all the time, it betrays the fact that these players are just as committed to winning as those they play against.
“When players ask to be put into matches in which they can reliably chill and get 20 kills while only dying 10 times, this inevitably requires someone else to die 20 times. What they're asking for is special treatment. And that's just not fair.” - Steve Rousseau
What would this look like in Among Us?
In order to even implement some kind of Elo ranking system into Among Us, Innersloth would need to have permanent accounts for players. They will also need an actual matchmaking system and a dedicated lobby setting, which the developers would consider the “correct” way to play the game.
Among Us runs into an immediate problem with regards to skill based matchmaking, because of the fact that players can not readily identify what team everyone is on.
Additionally, the teams are not symmetrical, and as a result, could never really be “balanced” in the same way. It would be conceivable for Among Us to rank players as individuals and instead balance each player on an individual level, rather than accounting for their teams.
What this would mean is that every player might have 1600 ELO, rather than both imposters and crewmates as a team having a similar score.
Theoretically, this could all be done, even if it would require drastically overhauling the how Among Us works. Another social deduction game, Town of Salem, actually features a ranked mode and ELO ranking system.
How would this affect Among Us?
Skill based matchmaking in Among Us would naturally result in some significant shifts in how the player base plays the game. At the moment, Among Us is unique in that playgroups can play the game in wildly different ways. For example, one of the most visible rulesets is the one used by multiple content creators.
This rule set features a high task count, low kill cooldown, and low vision for crewmates, all of which gives imposters a significant advantage over crewmates.
However, there is still a sizable population of Among Us players who play with a much lower task count and very high kill cooldown, and may use both visual tasks and confirmed ejects.
Skill based matchmaking would necessitate that the player base comes to some agreement about how to play the game, and any decision made would ultimately alienate a significant portion of the game.
The good and the bad about skill based matchmaking
Skill based matchmaking has the potential to ensure that players are generally playing with players of similar skill, preventing situations where a single player dominates their games by either always taking control as a crew mate, or completely fooling the crew as imposter.
If everyone is roughly equal in skill, they’ll be more inclined to call each other out, and be more mentally invested in the game.
However, it is entirely fair to assert that skill based matchmaking simply isn’t required for some games. This doesn’t mean that good players have a right to ruin the fun of less good players, but that some games are more inherently resistant to the problems of skill gaps.
For example, in Among Us, it’s entirely possible that being too good can ultimately penalize the good players. If a player has a reputation for being a skilled imposter, it’s possible for that player to get accused when no other imposter can be identified, resulting in them getting voted off.
Overall, skill based matchmaking is important for keeping some games alive but would almost certainly never work as intended for Among Us.
Given how different Among Us playgroups play the game with wildly different rulesets and have different ideas about how the game should be played, it’s best to let the game thrive as a party game that gets played with friends on weekends, rather than as another competitive game to grind.
