Black Ops Cold War ‘Alpha

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s Alpha is coming to an end today, and there has been a pervasive point of contention between players and pros during the first test here.

It’s less about how you play the game with your new weapons, abilities, and maps and such, but more like a family debate, Skills-Based Matchmaking (SBMM) versus Connection-Based Matchmaking (CBMM).

The idea is that even for this first Alpha test, Call of Duty had activated SBMM, causing a number of gamers, especially high-profile professionals, to complain about how matches felt.

SBMM takes the player’s skill into account and tries to match you up 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 SBMM critics say it makes too many “sweaty” games when pairing top-tier players. only against others of similar very high ability. The opposite of this is CBMM, which prioritizes the connection. That means less lag but potentially more uneven teams.

This topic is controversial not only in Call of Duty, but in almost all competitive online multiplayer games. In the Destiny community, we’ve had this discussion for years, which Bungie recently removed SBMM from almost all modes after much pushback from high-profile gamers. During this Cold War debate, I read a rather fascinating argument against this push from CBMM over SBMM from professional fighting games player TSM Leffen, which frames you as pro streamers looking only for easier matches than they can extract more content from and highlight the reels while trampling on the worst players:

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

What’s the joy in hitting people who play once every two weeks if you play this shit full time?

It’s very obvious that content creators are trying to mislead their audience by telling them that you should in fact not agree to a system that creates fair matches and should instead favor them so that they can facilitate content.

it’s like watching poor people vote for Trump

And yes, if your game sucks when multiple people are good then guess what, the game wasn’t great to start with. just smurf or some ***.

oh and don’t give me the “it’s just casual xD”

even casuals care about uniform matches. “

But, other players rallied against Leffen, saying that CBMM is not as bad as he claims and from a fighting game perspective, it is different. The metaphor was that in team shooter games, CBMM is like a basketball game with players of all skill levels, whereas a fighting game would be more like tennis, a 1v1 where the skills gap is much more easy to feel.

At the risk of being crucified by one side or the other, I’ve generally been fine with SBMM under most circumstances, but a recent argument I’ve heard is one that I find compelling. That SBMM should be combined with a classification system so that it can at least see where you are in the skill ranges, rather than just playing tough matches every game.

I think content creators are predisposed to prefer CBMM over SBMM because I mean, if you are at the top of the food chain in terms of skill, you would rather show off by dominating less skilled players rather than competing with others. also at the extreme top of the game. I like the appeal of that, it makes sense and yet I think there is something dishonest about the phrase “we just want some relaxing games” that you hear from a lot of creators and that often translates to “we want some 40 kills matches on the stream. to cut them together into a featured YouTube video. ” Casual gamers also want “quiet games”, but to be destroyed by being in the game. other CBMM end does not allow that.

We’ll see how things play out when the Cold War launches, or in future beta versions before that I guess. But it was the hot topic of the weekend and a debate that won’t end in any of these games any time soon.

To update: And here is Treyarch confirming that all of the above CODs have SBMM in casual playlists, reinforcing that a lot of this is some kind of perception problem too:

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