Activision Secretly Turned Off Skill-Based Matchmaking in Call of Duty as an Experiment; Players Hated It

ign.com:

Pop into the Call of Duty subreddit on any given day, and you're almost certainly going to trip over a few people complaining about SBMM, or skill-based matchmaking, and how it's ruining Call of Duty. But according to a recent study by developer Activision, getting rid of SBMM would be far, far worse for the game as a whole, and it's got the data to prove it.

In a 25-page white paper published last week, Activision reveals that it actually conducted an experiment in 2023's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 where it reduced SBMM for some of its players, resulting in more players quitting games or not coming back to the game for more sessions.

Currently, Activision says the way matchmaking works in Call of Duty is by taking into account a number of factors. Top priority is player connection quality and the time it takes to enter a match, but other factors including skill, platform, recent maps and modes, and other things are considered too. And skill itself is a complex equation that takes into account individual match total kills, kill/death ratios, and kills/deaths by enemy ratios (to ensure players can't drop their skill levels on purpose by self-killing). Skill levels are recalculated after every match, and Activision says it's constantly trying to find a happy balance of ensuring players aren't seeing wild swings in where the game thinks they're at, but also to adjust quickly if a player's having an off day or trying out a new loadout. In short, it's skill calculations and matchmaking are finnicky processes, but Activision is doing the best it can.

In the study earlier this year, Activision ran a "deprioritize skill test" where the developers decreased skill's importance in matchmaking in the algorithm, but did not shut it off entirely. It ran the test for 50% of its North American playerbase for a two-week period in early 2024, and the results are... pretty conclusive!

While single-digit percentages might not seem like a lot, given the sheer volume of participants over