"Fix the Matchmaker"

Bronco272, on Jul 08 2021 - 04:39, said: Perhaps the most repeated complaint to Wargaming is to "fix the matchmaker."  Yet, few people ever suggest "how" to do that.  Therefore, let's do some root cause analysis: consider what the main problems in the matchmaker are and propose solutions for said problems.  (And no, I do not expect this thread to go well.)   From what I can tell, the main problem with MM are blowouts.  After all, since 70% to 75% of games are guaranteed wins or losses by virtue of statistics in a "random" battle, many games will end with a 15-3, 15-2, 15-1 win or loss.  It seems the way to resolve this is make every game nominally 50% chance to win for both sides.  What that involves is balancing for player skill in the matchmaker, i.e. skill-based matchmaking.  Yet, whenever SBMM is brought up, it is immediately shot down for various reasons that boil down to "skill difference between teams is not the cause of blowouts."  This typically involves blaming specific vehicles or first-death-disadvantage, yet none of those address the root cause, which is player skill imbalance.  It would be interesting to see what would happen if WG introduced SBMM on a Sandbox server.  Would it actually have an effect, or would blowouts still be just as common?  (I should probably add that I do not want SBMM; I just want to fix blowouts and if SBMM is the solution, then so be it).