While players have been doing their best to enjoy the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War alpha, many fans have been put off by the skill-based matchmaking in the game. While fans were quick to call out how older CoD games did not have the feature, a Black Ops Cold War developer has pointed out that they did indeed have SBMM.
While Black Ops Cold War is different from other games in the franchise in many ways, skill-based matchmaking is apparently not one of them. Treyarch director of technology Martin Donlon replied to a popular tweet from user Astonish Jxck where he lists the original Modern Warfare trilogy and Black Ops 2 as games that do not have skill-based matchmaking. Donlon’s response was a short but interesting, as he replies “they all had SBMM.”
The original tweet makes a solid point that ranked play is designed with fair matches in mind, with players wanting the traditional public matches to be more randomized and allow for the occasional easy match. Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is set to get a mode for competitive play, so less skill-based public matches would not be much of an issue. Fans already need to adjust to the 12v12 vehicle gameplay of Combined Arms, so playing against equally skilled players constantly can get frustrating.
Fans replied to Donlon saying that, while other games may have had SBMM, it was nowhere near as extreme as the SBMM in Modern Warfare or Black Ops Cold War’s Alpha. Donlon acknowledges the fairness of this argument in another tweet, with a second reply to Astonish Jxck. Within the reply, he states that “SBMM is one of the many many tunable parameters in a matchmaking system” and says “it is funny watching people talk about it like it’s a big switch that can only be turned on or off.”
While Donlon knows the system well and his explanation for the many facets of matchmaking make sense, something is clearly going on with the matchmaking system in Black Ops Cold War’s alpha. SBMM was trending on Twitter yesterday, with many players asking for change. The matchmaking, while designed to be fair, has caused just as much frustration as the intentionally overpowered Black Ops Cold War sniper rifles and the durable Black Ops Cold War tanks.
While Donlon sharing that all CoD games have had some form of skill-based matchmaking is interesting, hopefully some changes will be made to Black Ops Cold War’s system soon. As mentioned by Donlon, there are aspects that can be tweaked, so fans may see changes by the time the Black Ops Cold War beta arrives.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War will be available November 13th on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions will also be available.
