With the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s own Warzone era and all the fun battle royale games out there, we’ve got a ton of patch notes and interesting information. However, there is one point that is controversial for a small part of the community: adjusting the ping threshold in order to limit VPN usage.
There’s a heated debate about why players use VPNs in Call of Duty. It is primarily used in an attempt to move beyond skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) in games to enable easier competition, although international groups of friends also use it to play together. However, it was the first case that drew the ire of Activision Blizzard and led to this adjustment.
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The idea is that by changing the ping threshold, players with higher ping values will be removed from matches in the specific area they are trying to access via the VPN. While a VPN can block the area where you’re actually playing the game, it doesn’t actually shorten the distance the data your game has to send to the Call of Duty servers results in a higher ping.
This way, Activision can essentially catch players using VPNs without having to package Ricochet Anti-Cheat with Call of Duty, using its kernel-level access to scan for such software. This would be another can of worms: Malicious cheating is one thing, but a perfectly legal VPN for use in the real world isn’t one that video game companies really should have any sway over, other than hitting heads in video games thing. However, if you’re using them to solve skill-based matchmaking in games, that’s obviously not what the company wants.
The rebuttal to this is essentially, ‘Anyway, SBMM sucks!’ I want to play simple and fun games without having to try too hard. I just want to turn off my brain and chill! “If you’re a good player, you’re currently matched against players of a similar skill level. That means you won’t run into a lot of ragged players. The thing is, Activision released its own earlier this year Research, looking at how removing SBMM affects the game, shows that player retention rates for less skilled players decreased, while retention rates for good players increased.
In layman’s terms, bad players don’t like it, while really, really good players prefer it. The problem is, most players suck! Most players are complete assholes, man. So the goal with Call of Duty is to make a game that appeals to as many people as possible (and sells content to as many people as possible), without obviously turning off the SBMM switch and calling it a day. If you want it, go play XDefiant! That game turned SBMM off because it was a major marketing move and it was doing great.
Yes, that’s the case. Unless you’re a very good player who wants to avoid skill-based matchmaking, this won’t affect you at all. It might even make your game better.