Skill based matchmaking advanced warfare

No, you can't outsmart Call Of Duty's skill-based matchmaking by restarting it, Activision reveal

I've always been convinced there's a way to speed up a multiplayer matchmaking system that's appeared to stall. Back in the Xbox era, my friends and I held the X button one time and miraculously found a game in Gears Of War, having waited for ages. We grew superstitious. Later in our Call Of Duty sessions we'd hit matchmaking with reverse psychological techniques, saying stuff like "I bet we WON'T find a match", to in fact, find a match. Well, thanks to an official COD blog post, my heady beliefs have been hit with the equivalent of a precision air strike. Matchmaking cannot be gamed. It is all-seeing and all, sadly, science.

REGISTER TO VIEW

Does everyone just like to complain, or is there something more to the story here? In fact, the system has changed so much over the years that it arguably is a completely different system altogether. Back then, it was simple to get around the SBMM system as you could simply have the lowest-level player of your party host the lobby. The results were night and day, and YouTubers, including myself, were able to pull off high kill, low death games in every single game. In , with the launch of Advanced Warfare, it seemed like the SBMM system leaned more towards the kill-death ratio, rather than just player levels.

REGISTER TO VIEW

If there's a single characteristic you could assign to the current era of Call of Duty , which does not change from game to game, it would be its matchmaking system. This has often been a black box; a topic Activision was never willing to address publically with the wider community, or at more private media events. Over the years, this has created a sort of bro-science aspect to matchmaking, whereby content creators all poured their collective knowledge into not only figuring out how it works, but effectively exploit it to their advantage. This is also why they never shut up about skill-based matchmaking SBMM.

REGISTER TO VIEW

The problem with Call of Duty’s Skill-based Matchmaking

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 reignited the long-smoldering battle over the validity and fairness of skill-based matchmaking, and with frustrations now threatening to boil over, the Call of Duty team says they'll actually tell players what's going on under the hood of ELO and SBMM and MMR and everything else. Just, you know, not today. This involves people working at our Call of Duty studios, our backend services team at Demonware, and other groups like our Player Insights team.

REGISTER TO VIEW

REGISTER TO VIEW