For the first time, Call of Duty has released a statement on the series’ matchmaking system (SBMM) which has been a hot topic in the community for years.
Earlier this week, Insider Gaming reported on how players have been exploiting the SBMM matchmaking for years, especially recently with the use of VPNs.
The statement comes just a week after Sledgehammer Games ignored the countless questions over SBMM in a community QA ‘ask me anything’.
The official statement reads, “We know there is a lot of interest in the matchmaking experience, especially around how skill contributes to how lobbies and matches are put together. Nothing is more important to us than the experience players have with the game, and matchmaking is a big part of that. We’ve been working on our matchmaking system for well over ten years, and we continue to spend a ton of time and energy on improving the matchmaking process. This involves people working at our Call of Duty studios, our backend services teams at Demonware, and other groups like our Player Insights team.”
The statement continues, “It’s a large effort that we’ve worked on for many years, and our approach combines latency, search time, and skill, along with many other factors, to try to find the best match experience for you. Talking about this topic in detail can be hard, and we haven’t spent the time to pull together all of our work to share with you our insights and improvements over the many years. We’re looking forward to doing that in the coming weeks after Season 1 launches, and we’ll also make it a part of our ongoing discussions with the community.”
It’s unclear how Call of Duty aims to put at ease the community, but judging by their official response, it won’t be removed. At first glance, it seems like team will be doubling down on its SBMM system.
What do you think of SBMM in Call of Duty? Do you think it needs to be changed or removed? Let us know in the comments below.
For more of the latest gaming news, you can read about Microsoft’s Game Pass plans to introduce the service on PlayStation and Nintendo.
I don’t know how it is specifically in CoD but ranked games/games with some sort of MMR must have SBMM. I recently played Heroes of the Storm ranked for a few months and got to a reasonably high MMR(Diamond). Then I played unranked for a week with completely random people and stomped them. I had about a 20-25 win streak while the ‘unranked’queue was calibrating my MMR. So having had experience of both systems (SBMM and no SBMM), yes no-SBMM can be fun for a while but you don’t actually improve a lot. A lot of “legends” in the unranked queue simply get stomped the moment they have to play against skilled opponents. It is more sweaty to play against skilled players but if you ever want to be good at the game, you need SBMM. After that if you join random lobbies you’ll find it so much easier to beat whatever it’s thrown against you.
In my opinion the best and most fun for all people is to have ranked queues so newbies don’t get stomped and have a good time against other newbies and the people with more dedication and time can sweat it out and play against one another. In addition we can also have unranked lobbies where people can just relax and not care about MMR and everyone can play with everyone else if they wish. I’d also say throwing newbies in a game with people who have played for 1k-10k hours is simply not fun for these people being 1:20 and just boosting the egos of the other people and I guess many of these folks simply leave the game after a few sessions. It also makes it very hard to invite your friends to try the game if they have to suffer for 50-100 hours and getting stomped until they gradually get better.
Remove it!!!!
Needs to be fixed I’m an older man and can not keep up with the really good players.
I hold my own with the average to good players and enjoy close matches but some of the players on here are well frantic.
I been playing Call of Duty since it was created and never in my life had problems, questions, concerns, or thoughts about SBMM. Just enjoy the game, sheesh. Matchmaking is fine. Just shoot whoever is there. If you think they are cheating quit and start another match. No big deal.
I don’t like this SBMM at all I think I am going to Uninstall the game if nothing will happen with it.