Soaking this in
If you don't know what this is, here's an explanation: Both Fortnite and Call of Duty employ something called "Skill-Based Matchmaking" (SBMM for short), and it has become the bane of a certain subset of players who very vocally yell about how it is ruining multiplayer games.
In short, the game secretly and quietly keeps track of your "skill level." Even if a game has both ranked and unranked modes, it is always tracking this skill level stat that reports back how quickly and easily you're getting kills. When you connect to a new match, it tries to group you with players near your skill level.
The idea being you start with zero skill stat, and by playing the game well, your skill stat levels up until you eventually plateau and you are forever playing the game with people that are just as good (or bad) as you are, within some level of variance.
This means if you're one of these career streamer guys or a Youtube clip compilation sort of dude (or both), then you very quickly get put into high tier matchmaking pools with all the other career streamers and wannabe esports pros. Hence the very loud, very vocal complaints, because if you're one of those guys, the idea of having a "casual match" goes away. Everybody is always firing on all cylinders and you're expected to do the same in order to keep your rank and not look embarrassing to your captive audience.
So Activision apparently ran an experiment per Charlie Intel (article here) where they reduced SBMM's effectiveness, meaning the big fish pros and the little tadpole casual players were thrown into more games together.
The result was a sharp uptick in players rage quitting matches early, some even quitting the game entirely and never coming back. The report notes that while player retention for players with a high skill rank was improved, they make up such a small percentage of the player base (apparently less than 1%; the article has some grammar problems) that servicing them really doesn't make sense.
As it turns out, low level players don't want to get hopelessly destroyed by wannabe esports pros. And those pros make up such a small percentage of the player base it doesn't make sense to keep feeding them more low level chum, even though they are the hungriest for it. As more and more low level players permanently leave the game due to frustration, it turns into a wasteland where high level players are getting mad at each other until they also get frustrated and leave as well. SBMM ensures long term health for a game's multiplayer ecosystem.
And being a Fortnite player, it's so validating to hear this. "SBMM is ruining multiplayer" was always a narrative coming from streamers and youtubers who were frustrated by having to actually TRY instead of being able to score easy clip compilation fodder on clueless newbies.
Enjoy sticking to your smurf accounts now, I guess.
