Call of Duty’s SBMM debate unfortunately rages on in MW4, and I don’t know what to think or feel anymore

It is 2026 and skill-based matchmaking is still a hot-button issue when it comes to Call of Duty, and other multiplayer games. Yeah, I know.

How should your competitive multiplayer matchmaking be decided? Skill? Ping? A combination of a variety of factors? The debate has gone on for years, especially in CoD for close to a decade now, and it’s still something that’s on the minds of players going forward.

Black Ops 7 has been experimenting with a different style of matchmaking, and Modern Warfare 4 will continue to iterate on it, according to a new series of social media posts from Activision. In the past, there was almost no communication about the subject, so at the very least it’s good to know that it’s willing to be discussed, even if I’m sick of it.

The PS5 ports of Black Ops 1 and Black Ops 2 last month reignited the discussion again, with many feeling those older games had a better matchmaking setup (Activision says “every Call of Duty has had matchmaking that considers skill, including BO1 & BO2“). Meanwhile, BO7 tried out something called Open matchmaking, which used skill a bit less when determining who you’d be matched up with in that specific playlist.

But according to Activision, there’s some big downsides to it as “80 percent of players in BO7 from launch to season four, Open vs. Standard” saw this:

• 32.7 percent higher quit rates
• 14.4 percent fewer kills per minute
• 5.3 percent lower win rates
• 59.2 percent more “Not Fun” ratings

And with the new experimental matchmaking equation in BO7, Activision said “players are sticking around longer and playing more matches.”

“Since season five, quit rates are down across every skill group,” it said. “For more than half of players, they dropped 41 percent. Search times are also down vs. season four Average ping has improved too.”

Activision says that “some of our top players are facing tougher competition” but “they’re quitting less,” but MW4’s beta this weekend will utilize both the new system and the Open system to monitor how things go.

“We’ll keep looking at the data, listening to what players are telling us, and improving,” the company said. “Call of Duty is about having fun and matchmaking exists to support that. Our goal is simple: make every match a good match.”

Honestly, I don’t know what or how to feel anymore. It’s not fun being punished for doing well in a strict SBMM system, but Activision is saying the data is not cut and dry, which makes sense when it comes to dealing with millions of players across a variety of skillsets, regions, connection types, and more.

I thought BO7’s introduction of Open matchmaking last year finally freed us from the discussion, but it’s apparently an ongoing battle. We’ll see how MW4 feels in a few days, I guess.

The post Call of Duty’s SBMM debate unfortunately rages on in MW4, and I don’t know what to think or feel anymore appeared first on Destructoid.