Infinity Ward assured “Call of Duty” fans during “Warzone’s” pre-launch event that there will be no skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) in their battle royale shooter. However, there are players who are noticing otherwise. With that in mind, one YouTuber put it to the test and the results were surprising.
The YouTube channel of TheXclusiveAce recently uploaded a video where he detailed what he did in conducting the test in “Call of Duty: Warzone” and the conclusion that he arrived at. This is to finally answer as to whether or not Infinity Ward’s latest offering has SBMM or not.
The Methodology in his ‘Warzone’ test
According to the YouTuber, he said that he got four “Warzone” accounts with varying skill levels with “CoD” pro Karma (Damon Barlow) as his “high-skill account.” As for the remaining three, he used his own account that he deemed as “well above-average,” an averaged-skilled account from another player, and another account of his (dummy account) that he purposely trash played on to be considered as a below-average player. He also used CoD Tracker’s website completing his methodology.
The results
Further, he explained that he pulled data on the most recent 100 players that he was able to collect data on for each of the “Warzone” accounts. He pointed out that cross-play was switched on during this test and the data that he collected are from solo matches.
XclusiveAce zeroed in on both of the game’s kill-death ratio and score per minute as these according to him would provide him a good indication of the skill level of a player:
K/D vs Enemy K/D AVG
- Optic-Karma-Stan (4.63) v (1.2)
- XclusiveAce (2.06) v (1.18)
- joemontana7rtzip (1.1) v (1.0)
- Xclusive (0.7) v (0.67)
Score Per Minute vs Enemy SPM AVG
- Optic-Karma-Stan (428) v (173)
- XclusiveAce (252) v (170)
- joemontana7rtzip (163) v (140)
- Xclusive (56) v (87)
He even showed histograms for both K/D and SPM and the two sets are pretty much the same as him and Karma got pretty normal distributions.
The joemontana account also got normal distributions, though both the histograms are quite leaning towards the below average side. The dummy (Xclusive) account, on the other hand, has both graphs heavily leaning towards below average.
The YouTuber also pointed out that aside from the data being collected in solos, he also said that he was unable to gather data from “Warzone” players on PC including accounts that changed their name via Activision account.
He also claims to have noticed “a ton of PC players” in both Karma and his lobbies. As for his dummy account, he said that a lot of players that he ran into are free-to-play.
His conclusion
Answering the question as to whether “Call of Duty: Warzone” has SBMM injected to its veins – TheXclusiveAce believes so. He added that it doesn’t look like that it’s just a “protected bracket” for the low-skilled players since he saw some variations between average and above-average players.
Ask ATVI. Never directed into COD from me. Analytics, SB match making, monetization, dedi server coverage, etc all driven from ATVI central tech and production teams. Fustratingly little influence on those corp decisions despite their impact on our games and the COD community.
— Michael Condrey (@MichaelCondrey) March 27, 2020
He also said that it’s “either Infinity Ward straight-up lied” to the participants during “CoD: Warzone’s” pre-launch event or it is possible that the developer really did think that there will be no SBMM and Activision just threw it in the game anyway.
He stated, however, that he’s leaning towards the latter as he referenced a tweet from Michael Condrey that implies that the studios “have almost no input when it comes to SBMM and that’s basically entirely decided by Activision.”