If you’re unfortunate enough to follow Call of Duty as part of your job, you know that each annual release is an exercise in déjà vu: deja vu. This applies not only to the game itself, but also to its reception by the community.
If it’s a Treyarch game, Nuketown is almost always the first map after release, whereas Shipment is a map that was added to the roster shortly after the release of the Sledgehammer/Infinity Ward game. No matter who the developer is, the build will always be broken. Connection issues always stand out in the first few days, first to shoot, first to die, etc. And, over the past five years or so, you can add skill-based matching to… the list of grievances
It’s all very tiring. Sometimes, however, it can be fun to follow. Now, we’re enjoying an episode of it.
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SBMM, Skill-Based Matchmaking – or as it’s come to be known, Participation-Based Matchmaking – has been at the top of the list of the loudest and most prolific complaints from online Call of Duty players. The idea is that the game assigns each player a hidden skill level that is very sensitive to recent performance. The game then uses this data to pit players against other players of the same level with far greater accuracy and consistency than in the pre-Modern Warfare 2019 era.
I won’t get into the arguments for and against this system, as they have been repeated by both sides, but what’s new this year is that the algorithm has apparently evolved to have a closer impact on player performance. SBMM has long been criticized for the supposedly “manipulative” nature of Call of Duty, where doing well in a few games means your next one will be miserable, and the cycle continues.
Simply put, skill-based damage theory holds that just as a game’s matchmaking is able to use players’ skill levels to create balanced matches, it’s also able to use that same knowledge to… lower your damage – sometimes Even your power aim assist – in real time!
It is said that when the game realizes what you are doing also In the games you participate in, it interferes with your performance in ways that artificially try to reduce your impact on the game. Feelbut not fully quantified.
The idea that Call of Duty was even capable of doing this started out as a joke—a sort of ironic audacity: “What else could they do, weaken my bullets?” Since the release of Black Ops 6, however, It’s starting to gain more and more traction in the community because it’s a serious, viable thing to do, but it makes players worse at the game.
More specifically, players are noticing severe inconsistencies in their connection quality, which affects how often they lag in the game and causes desync issues where bullets don’t do the damage they should, among other things. All of this is despite their average ping to the server being the same in each game.
Just look up the term “skill-based damage” on YouTube and a wealth of opinions will appear from dozens of CoD content creators, including the more analytical and data-driven ones. Of course, the more reasonable among them say there’s no evidence for this, but it’s still a hot enough topic to be taken seriously.
On the Black Ops 6 Reddit subreddit, you’ll find many daily posts and comments discussing the same theories, with some suggesting that packet bursts and other network issues are somehow to blame. only Triggered when a player performs too well. Some even expand the scope to include movement speed, headshot multipliers, and pretty much every other aspect of player performance.
Obviously there is no conclusive evidence This is all true, but it’s especially interesting in Black Ops 6 because the game’s scoreboard shows how much damage each player has done. And, with the addition of Theater Mode, you can easily rewatch past games and compare your performance with data. If Treyarch was actually “fixing” something on the backend, you wouldn’t think it would be so transparent, would you?
One thing everyone keeps bringing up is a 2017 Skylanders patent that suggests the game could modify a player’s accuracy in a race to stay within certain parameters, requiring more skilled players to try harder compensation to maintain accuracy. Never mind the impracticality of actually making this work, the patent is for another game, not Call of Duty. While these players may feel that Activision Blizzard is the embodiment of evil, the company doesn’t employ wizards capable of translating such complex system mechanics between games.
At some point, anyone shouting about the cloud has to realize that Call of Duty multiplayer may no longer be a game designed for them. You’re getting older, man. And slower. deal with it. I don’t think it’s for me either – for completely different reasons – but I get joy from the onlookers pointing out its unchanging nature and moving on.
Maybe it’s time for some louder but worse performers! – Players did the same thing.
