Call of Duty Devs Finally Comment on Skill-Based Matchmaking Issues

Skill-Based Matchmaking in Call of Duty has long been the subject of scrutiny and debate within the community, only fueled by the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III on Nov. 10. Now, though, the Call of Duty team has finally acknowledged it.

The news comes from ModernWarzone on X/Twitter, which notes (as we at IGN believe) that this is “possibly the first time they’ve spoken publicly about it.” When reached by IGN, a spokesperson for Activision says it “stems from a live conversation from Call of Duty reps at an event, and accurately describes what was said. We will not be issuing anything further at the time.”

See the lengthy statement below:

“We know there is a lot of interest in the matchmaking experience, especially around how skill contributes to how lobbies and matches are put together. Nothing is more important to us than the experience players have with the game, and matchmaking is a big part of that. We’ve been working on our matchmaking system for well over ten years, and we continue to spend a ton of time and energy on improving the matchmaking process. This involves people working at our Call of Duty studios, our backend services teams at Demonware, and other groups like our Player Insights team. It’s a large effort that we’ve worked on for many years, and our approach combines latency, search time, and skill, along with many other factors, to try to find the best match experience for you. Talking about this topic in detail can be hard, and we haven’t spent the time to pull together all of our work to share with you our insights and improvements over the many years. We’re looking forward to doing that in the coming weeks after Season 1 launches, and we’ll also make it a part of our ongoing discussions with the community.”

This statement is quite a reversal from a little more than a week ago, when Modern Warfare 3 developer Sledgehammer Games held a wide-ranging AMA on Reddit covering just about everything players could want to know about Call of Duty in general and Modern Warfare 3 specifically… except, that is, Skill-Based Matchmaking.

The statement is vague, but any acknowledgement from the team is notable, considering how the systam has long been a point of contention among the Call of Duty community.

Skill-Based Matchmaking (SBMM) is meant to match players with lobbies of similarly skilled players. The issue for many Call of Duty fans is that SBMM is used in both Call of Duty’s Ranked and Casual playlists, while many feel it should only be used for ranked games. Players have long said that the system makes it hard for solo players to find enjoyable matches, and that it makes it hard to find good games while queuing with friends of different skill levels. It’s not uncommon for more skilled players to lose games on purpose so they can be matched against players of lower skill, and SBMM often trends on X/Twitter whenever a new Call of Duty releases.

How much Call of Duty’s various developers choose to reveal about SBMM remains to be seen, but the fact that they’re willing to talk about it at all is substantial, particularly since Modern Warfare 3 is dealing with poor critical reception and a slew of problems that have included spawn issues, hard-to-see cosmetic skins, and movement exploits.