Skill-based matchmaking has grown to become one of the players' complaints in “Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.” It looks like there’s another reason to dislike the feature as well-known “CoD” content creators may have just revealed that the skill level has a direct effect on the game’s online connection.

'Call of Duty' YouTubers ran some tests

“Call of Duty” YouTubers TheXclusiveAce, Drift0r, JGOD, and S0ur recently rolled out the results of their extensive study regarding “Black Ops Cold War’s” SBMM. If the data they’ve shown are anything to go by, it strongly suggests that the in-game feature affects a player’s internet connection during gameplay.

The results of their study have already been uploaded on their respective YT channels. Part of their methodology includes playing “BOCW” with an identical number of games on each account and enabling the crossplay feature (with the exception of Drift0r’s first five games as he played it with the feature disabled as per TheXclusiveAce). That said, the team gathered data for these factors:

  • Matchmaking time
  • Ping to server
  • Lobby kill/death ratio and score per minute (SPM)
  • Past five K/D and SPM

After analyzing the data that they’ve gathered, here’s what they found out:

  • Accounts with higher skill levels took a longer time period for them to find a match, not to mention that they’ve got a higher ping than accounts with lower skill sets.
  • Their ping rose to about 10-25 ms after playing on a high-skill account.
  • “Cold War’s” ping scales off base connection quality (According to Dexerto, if a player has a ping of 10 ms, it will be doubled).
  • Their matchmaking wait time also increased by about 10-25 seconds after playing on a high-skilled account.

The conclusion

This clearly shows that “Black Ops Cold War” does have skill-based matchmaking, not to mention the noticeable trend in which players’ ping is somewhat dependent on their performance.

Dexerto noted that Drift0r was not pleased with what they’ve discovered. Further, he explained that these findings could greatly impact players who have above-average skill levels but with decent connections.

Their thoughts

Drift0r made it clear, though, that he does not want the feature (SBMM) to be out of “Black Ops Cold War” entirely.

He stated that some iterations of the system for normal skill brackets would be okay but suggested not to be as tough as this one.

TheXclusiveAce, on the other hand, mentioned that he too is against this strict SBMM system that he claims to be hidden inside “Call of Duty” public matches. He added that the more skilled a player gets in the game, the more difficult it’s to get behind the scenes without any incentives rewarded to the player.

Just like Drift0r, he also mentioned the worsening ping whenever a player gets good at the game.

For those interested in the data they’ve collected, a link has been posted on their respective “Call of Duty” YouTube channels. Now that it’s out in the open let’s see how Treyarch would respond to this study.
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