Activision secretly experimented on 50% of Call of Duty players by 'decreasing' skill-based matchmaking, and determined players like SBMM even if they don't know it

If you ever find yourself in the middle of an argument about Call of Duty and want to toss a tank of gasoline on the fire, recite these four letters in order: S-B-M-M. Skill-based matchmaking is the invisible system by which Call of Duty, as well as most modern multiplayer games, match you with similarly-skilled players so that every matchup is as fair as possible.

Sounds like a win-win for all involved, but there's a legitimate argument against a matchmaker that only cares about high competition. A faction of Call of Duty players argue that it's not fun to always have to «sweat» so hard in an FPS that most people play casually, and believe a random matching system could accommodate a wider range of experiences—matches where sometimes you're way better than your opponents, and sometimes you get totally destroyed. Notably, the free-to-play CoD alternative XDefiant has no SBMM.

Activision has historically stayed on the sidelines during these debates, but that changed earlier this year when the publisher finally lifted the veil on how matchmaking works in every modern Call of Duty game, and explaining its reasoning for choosing SBMM. Building on that, today the company published the first of a series of white papers diving deep (and I mean terminology tables and multi-format graphs deep) on matchmaking.

The new paper, a 25-page document titled «The Role of Skill In Matchmaking,» is as impressive as it is jarring. On one hand, it's a little funny that Activision is treating the topic with tact and seriousness, posing such questions as «What is Skill?» and mapping «kills per minute» and «skill buckets» on graphs, when we all know that naysayers will probably just say «SBMM still trash lmao» and move on. But it's also a wild document for a videogame: I don't think we've ever seen a major studio go this in-depth on the intricate criteria and details that its algorithm uses to judge us.

Some of this ground has been covered before. We finally learned for sure back in April