The Great SBMM Debate Infects The ‘Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’ Alpha

Cold War

ATVI

The Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Alpha is drawing to an end today, and there has been one dominant point of contention among players and pros alike during the early test run here.

It’s less about how the game plays with its new guns and skills and maps and such, but rather a familiar debate, Skill-Based Matchmaking (SBMM) versus Connection-based Matchmaking (CBMM).

The idea is that even for this early Alpha test, Call of Duty had turned on SBMM which resulted in a number of players, high profile pros especially, complaining about how matches felt.

SBMM takes into account player skill and tries to match you with other players who are as good or as bad as you. This is supposed to result in more even games and less of one team crushing the other, or getting crushed.

But critics of SBMM say that it makes for too many “sweaty” games when top tier players are matched only against others of similar sky-high skill. The counter to this is CBMM, which prioritizes connection. That means less lag but more potentially uneven teams.

Cold War

ATVI

This topic is contentious not just in Call of Duty, but in pretty much all competitive online multiplayer games. In the Destiny community, we’ve been having this debate for years, which Bungie recently removing SBMM from almost all modes after a lot of pushback from high profile players. During this Cold War debate, I read a pretty fascinating argument against this push for CBMM over SBMM from pro fighting game player TSM Leffen, who frames it as pro streamers who are just looking for easier matches that they can extract more content and highlight reels out of as they stomp on worse players:

“watching people argue that FPS players should in fact, not play people who are as good as them, but people worse than them so they can stroke their ego is so f***ng pathetic.

what’s the joy in beating people up who play once every two weeks if you’re playing this s*** full time

its very obviously that content creators are trying to trick their audience that you should in fact, not be okay with a system that makes for fair matches and it should instead become favor them so they can make content easier.

it’s like watching poor people vote for trump

and yeah, if your game sucks when multiple people are good, then guess what, the game wasn’t great to begin with. just smurf or somes***.

oh and don’t come at me with the “its just casual xD”

even casuals care about even matches.”

But, other players rallied against Leffen, saying that CBMM isn’t as bad as he claims and coming from a fighting game perspective, it’s different. The metaphor was that in team-based shooters CBMM is like a pickup basketball game with players of all skill levels, whereas a fighting game would be more like tennis, a 1v1 where the skill gap is way, way more easily felt.

Destiny

Bungie

At the risk of being crucified by one side or another, I have generally been okay with SBMM in most circumstances, but a recent argument I’ve heard is one I find compelling. That SBMM should be paired with a ranking system so you can at least see where you are in the skill ranks, rather than just playing in hard matches every single game.

I do think content creators are biased toward preferring CBMM over SBMM because I mean, if you’re at the top of the food chain in terms of skill, you would rather be showing off by dominating lower skilled players rather than competing with others also at the extreme top of the game. Like I get the appeal of that, it makes sense, and yet I think there’s something dishonest about the phrasing of “we just want some chill games” that you hear from many creators which really does often just translate to “we want some 40 kill matches on stream to cut together into a YouTube highlight video.” Casual players also want “chill games,” but being destroyed by being at the other end of CBMM does not allow for that. 

We’ll see how things play out when Cold War launches, or in future betas before that, I suppose. But it was the hot topic of the weekend, and a debate that will not be ending across any of these games any time soon.

Update: And here’s Treyarch confirming that all past CODs have SBMM in casual playlists, reinforcing that a lot of this is also kind of just a perception issue:

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